Hey all, so I’ve heard many people talking about how they’re really hopeful for the changes coming to ele in 8.1. As such, I wanted to start a thread and discuss what kinds of things people are looking for - what is it that you feel the current Elemental is missing?

Just to start it off, here’s my own list of changes I’d like to see. Note that I don’t think current ele really needs a massive redesign, just some fine tuning to make it as fun as it has been in the past.

Core Rotation
Just for a quick summary of what I’d like to see with the core rotation is: Make Lava Burst a fundamental part of the Ele toolkit – move echo baseline and make LvB directly interact with other abilities in your rotation. Additionally, add Lava Burst into the AoE rotation to create some more interesting gameplay.

1) Echo of the Elements going baseline: Lava Burst is one of the most iconic abilities of the spec (the only thing that could really compete with it is Chain Lightning). Pretty much all of my suggestions here will be focused around Lava Burst, and as such I think it is really time to make the ability have the modern design that having two stacks of an ability gives.

2) Master of the Elements going baseline and fire spells added (nature, frost, or fire): This would introduce the idea of “lava burst weaving”. That is, we’ll want to try our best to cast lava burst before every high priority spell (earthquake, earth shock, flame shock). Obviously, that won’t always be possible, but it would introduce some high-level gameplay for stronger players to min-max.
Master of the Elements would be very similar in design to the old Elemental Focus, but would some distinct advantages:

• You only gain one stack instead of two – forcing the player to really think about what the best spell to buff would be whenever LvB is up.
• You gain the buff on-cast, instead of on-hit. With a lot of our highest priority spells being instant casted, this is an important difference that improves playability.

Note: There’s also currently a bug with MotE where it does not work with Earthquake, despite it being a Nature school spell.

3) Introduce Lava Burst to the AoE rotation: Our current AoE rotation is a very dull build/spend rotation between CL and EQ – losing Lightning Rod removed an interesting proc that I think needs to be compensated for. Introducing Lava Burst to AoE would add a ton of new mechanics to play around, by bringing them over from single target. We’d get to play with lava surge procs, get to weave with master of the elements, and mastery scaling would benefit from adding a new builder that could scale in a more linear fashion (compared to Chain Lightning, where you get a new overload chance with each new target).
To do this, I’d suggest something like the following: Lava Burst explodes upon hitting its target, hitting all nearby targets for 60%(?) damage and maelstrom gain.

4) Remove the Flame Shock Dependency for LvB's Guaranteed Crit: Flame Shock is already plenty high priority to stand on its own, between the damage and it triggering lava surge. Removing the crit allows us to Lava Burst targets that do not have flame shock on them, which would help the spec feel better when swapping targets. We’d then be able to decide whether or not to apply this DoT based on how long we expect the target to live, instead of it acting as a barrier for even casting LvB (e.g. if the target will survive about 5 seconds, it probably isn’t worth it, but if it will survive closer to 12 opening with a flame shock would be great – because flame shock already is a good ability).
This was already a change we had expected to get in BfA, because it was there for almost the entirety of beta. It feels good to have, and hopefully we can get it reintroduced.