"There's definitely a bit of a fog of war as the combat team calls it"This will go down as another poor answer. We have been beta testing and warning about some classes being too strong others being way way too low, and nothing is done.Waiting for raid? Why dont you take as a baseline the classes that clear mythic +12 to +15 keys on time on beta? why do classes have to wait for the bloody first week of raiding?
Let's say there are roughly two kinds of optimization:1. The "minmax everything" approach: follow the Meta in everything, i.e. selecting THE "optimal" class, THE optimal spec, THE optimal talents, THE optimal covenant + Soulbind, etc.2. The "make your choices, then optimize" approach. Select the class, spec, talents, Covenant, Soulbind etc. that YOU prefer for your playstyle - and then optimize to get the best possible result out of these choices.And if you know a handful of halfway decent people to play WoW with, taking the second approach will not ever create problems for you. Enjoy the game. Relax. Have fun.
bro the meta should perform between %5 to %15 better than the low performing ones.mages and warlocks TOTALLY outgun elemental shamans. that has nothing to do with meta.both in raids and dungeons in beta and live my favorite spec can't compete with mages and warlocks.it's been 4 years blizzard. 4 years since you ruined elemental shaman:1) removed our totem system which means our utility has been super low in groups.( if you consider 'tremor totem' and 'slow totem' and a 'spamming purge' utility) basically a resto shaman brings all the utility you can get from the whole class. there's no need for elemental shamans. no buff totems. nothing. There's nothing that a shaman brings into the groups that other classes can't. Many Classes have purge. Many have AoE slow. we barely expirience fights or dungeons that have a lot of fear mechanics. but paladins and warriors know what to do about that. so again, no big win for tremor. it's 6 seconds uptime for 54seconds downtime. not even always uptime. also when DHs can give you darkness and 5% magic damage and mages can give you intellect "All the Time", why bring elemental shamans who have a "chance" to knock down enemies that are standing in Earthquake?Imagine their cast getting cancelled due to the knockdown. they'll just stand up and keep casting the same ability again. because it wasn't interrupted. What use does that have?"Talk about tuning"2) survivability: we get one shotted when fire mages and rogues have cheat-death and locks have more stamina passively also they have soul leech. DKs have spammable instant heals and frost mages have 2x immunites. Paladins and Hunters have both. elemental shaman has to stop their damage and start casting healing surge. "Tuning 100"3) low AoE damage: earthquake damage is so close to lavaburst damage. meaning in a 5 mob pack, earth quake deals so little damage. "enjoying what you play"4) we have to push many GCDs in order to use our cooldowns whereas destro locks just use their infernal and dark souls: instability. Frost mages just use Icy Veins. retri paladins just use wings and shield of vengeance. etc.5) every pet class has control over their pets as baseline. we don't have that. we have to sacrifice Icefury to have control over our pet. Otherwise my earth elemental will run around wildly hitting whatever I hit. Moreover I have to sacrifice Icefury so I can add an AoE ability to my 2.5 minutes cooldown pet. just for one ability. One ability. that's how poor we are in terms of AoE damage. we have to sacrifice so much for so little. Make Primal elementalist baseline please.6) Stat Weights: our highest damage on single target is Lava Burst and our best stat in stat weights is Critical chance; whereas Lava Burst always hits critical damage if you have flame shock active on your target. So critical chance doesn't help with Lava Burst's damage. We have to gain versatility for 2 reasons. Survivability issues and Lava Burst damage.then there is Crit that increases the damage of all of our other abilities.haste is for funneling situations so we have to also get thatour mastery is useless. literally useless.we have to raise 3 secondary stats which means none of them will ever reach to a point to satisfy our needs due to the scaling.nowIn comparison with destro warlocks. Through out BFA, As the Heart of Azeroth got stronger. Every player got mastery haste and critical chance from their necklace.Desto warlock's mastery increases all damage done and reduces all damage taken. which means damage increase to all abilities including chaos bolt.Then critical chance increases the damage of their chaos bolt further even though it always hits for critical amounts. It scales with Crit, Mastery, and versatility. also haste reduces the cast time.so even though they only focused on their haste, they passively were gaining a damage increase on their biggest damage dealing ability. they just had to focus on their Haste. they didn't have to set their other stats to a certain percentage. the percentages that elemental shamans need and will never reach. The Heart of Azeroth passively gave huge damage buff to them. it even increased their survivability ( mastery ).Also their versa would get fixed with Conflict and Strife and Vision of Perfection(passive) and Lucid Dreams.Very solid stat gain for them. Could you say the same for elemental shamans?Is that really tuned? be honest.Please make Lava Burst always deal critical damage even without flame shock active in order to deal critical hits. Also make it's damage scale with critical chance ( just like Chaos Bolt) . you already nerfed flame shock's uptime from 24s to 18s. you already reduced Lava Surge's proc chance from 15% to 10%. So at least remove Flame Shock's cooldown. or add another charge to it.Give us a cool defensive system. Our defensives are as useful as a paper mache bomb shelter. make them better or give us immunities. Skyfury totem baseline please. grounding totem baseline please. it's not that hard or that big. they are fun tools.Skyfury Totem = mages' Rune of Power but it buffs everyone.Grounding Totem = a tool used to dodge a directed spell.we have 3 single target generators and 1 spender. Our generators deal more damage than the spender. So what's the point in using Earth Shock?we have one AoE spender and one AoE genereator. in necrotic/sanguine weeks where tank has to either kite the adds or move them from pools, our earthquake damage output is gone. either make it deal all of it's damage instantly instead of 6 seconds or make it in a way that we cast it on a certain target and the Earth Quake moves as that target moves.the list goes on Ion. Everyone wants Stormkeeper, Echo of the Elements, Primal Elementalist and Spirit Wolf as baseline. not in talents.Also change Spirit Wolf in a way so as soon as we use Ghost Wolf we get that 20% speed and 20% damage reduction. otherwise we have to wait 4 seconds for 5% per sec damage reduction. which means 4 seconds downtime for our DPS. it all makes sense Ion. Yes it's min maxing but it's not top 100 guilds type of min maxing. We deserve a little love after all we have suffered through these years from your nerfs and ability removals from elemental shamans.I hope you read this.
I'm still chuckling over that bit about class buffs being impactful.
What a joke of a post this is. What actually happens is blizzard tells you not to worry about the meta at the fail time after time of doing anything about the meta. But once again people like yourself cast blame on the players and not blizzard.
"Ion thinks that when players are forming groups, they're using adherence to the meta as a way to judge someone and infer many things about you."Well yeah, that's what your lot started on Elitist Jerks a decade ago, don't blame the players for something literally you engineered.
It doesnt matter what camp you sit in when it comes to META game play, Its always been apart of all games since games were introduced, But Blizzard doubled down on competitive game play by adding Arena World Championships, Timed content, MDI tournaments, live Raid races (think back to Cata and Mop) and then to say its the players mentality when they min/max and get competitive is the biggest cop out. As always they are right and everyone else is wrong.Mop had the most balanced Arena ever in the history of Wow, funny that, i sometimes wonder if the real problem is that classes just dont have enough base toolkits.