Elemental Shaman: time the burst or build a resource? And where did those Enhancement talents go?

"Shaman is dead as it stands," Aenalass wrote on the EU forums on 1 November, and others said much the same about DPS Shaman that day, including Zekla. Underneath the complaint are two quite different ideas of what Elemental should become, and one question Blizzard's own preview already half answers.

Time the burst, or build a resource

Xyder wants the old shape back with better numbers. Make Lava Burst always crit, they argue, since it depends on Flame Shock and timing. Raise the coefficients of Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and Lava Burst. They describe the result as the burst window they value: "Lava burst cirt into instant chain lightning hit into instant Shock." And they don't want Fulmination added: "Don't need to bring in all the fulmination nonsense."

Aenalass wants precisely that nonsense. In their version, Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning generate Lightning Shield charges, up to three, and Shocks spend them, returning mana for each charge, with a Lightning Strike when you unleash all three. They see the same idea working for Enhancement, built through Lightning Bolt and Stormstrike.

So one player wants existing spells tuned until a timed sequence feels good, and the other wants a new buildup and payoff, partly because Lightning Shield in their view does nothing useful right now. These are proposals. Neither the guaranteed crit nor the charges are in anything we can point to, the numbers are the authors' own, and we aren't deciding which would perform better.

Where did the Enhancement talents go?

The second argument is about bookkeeping. "where is my baseline shield specialization," Potatomilk asked on 1 November, in a list that also demands baseline weapon damage and totem bonuses. They say that, apart from Totemic Mastery and two-handed axes and maces, talents removed from the tree didn't really become baseline.

Part of that has a dated answer. Blizzard's 7 October class preview lists the talents leaving Enhancement's tree in two separate groups. Shield Specialization is under "Removed talents". Enhancing Totems, Two-Handed Axes and Maces, Weapon Mastery and Improved Weapon Totems are under "Talents Moved to Baseline". So Shield Specialization was described as removed, not moved, and the same preview warns that abilities and talents "may continue to evolve throughout the beta test".

The rest stays open. Potatomilk also compares totem values, saying their Strength and Agility totems and Windfury Totem now come out lower than the old talents would suggest. Those are their figures. Nobody here has shown a tooltip or named a build, so we can't say whether a bonus went missing, a value was rebalanced, or something is simply wrong. That's the question worth putting to Blizzard: not whether Shaman is dead, but which of those totem numbers are intended.