Introduction
My name is Raime, I’ve been playing almost exclusively Elemental Shaman for well over a decade, the majority of that time with my guild Halcyon until after Sanctum of Domination where I decided to join Method and be part of the Race to World First. This will be my guide to Elemental Shaman for Dragonflight.
Elemental Shaman offers an extremely versatile toolkit that can cover most scenarios and situations and has an enormous amount of utility at its disposal.
The downside is however that it’s historically rarely been the best at anything and the unique utility is rather niche and seldomly gets used in raids. Combined with the fact that they’re one of the few dps specializations that doesn’t bring any meaningful raid buff means that Elemental is still facing an uphill battle at the mercy of Blizzard’s tuning team. However it’s a battle it’s way better equipped to deal with than in the past couple of expansions.
First impressions of Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight
Elemental is one of the few DPS specs that has talents which completely alter one's playstyle and therefore has many different damage profiles and vastly different rotations between the different builds. This offers greater variety in gameplay in a single spec between patches than most other classes get throughout an expansion.
What has changed
Patch 10.2.5 Changes
Elemental received no changes for patch 10.2.5.
Patch 10.2 Changes
Another patch that brings very little changes to Elemental, and this time it’s mostly nerfs.
- Mana Spring nerfed from 150 to 100 mana per Lava Burst
- Splintered Elements now gives 20% Haste for the primary target and an additional 4% after that for a maximum of 40%, down from 60%.
- Further Beyond can no longer extend Ascendance infinitely, now capped at 100% extension of the original duration.
- Elemental Blast can now pandemic, which means it can extend a buff to 130% of the base duration. It still however prioritizes granting a new buff rather than extending an active one.