Well there's not exactly a shaman profession available over there, so I have to look elsewhere. As for why I'm looking at this and not something else, it just feels like a better fit. There's no healer profession, so that's out. I could go dual-wield melee as a warrior or a rogue, but both of those are all physical combat. I'm a shaman and maintaining that tie with the elements is important to us, so the only real option available is elementalist. That being said, it's not as big of a stretch as you might think. I have been known to dabble as elemental dps from time to time, so I'm familiar with being a caster. At least I know how to use more than one element...
How dare you! I'll have you know that I've had plenty of experience with other specs.
Okay, that's enough from both of you. You're not spending this whole post bickering. Mal, let's hear why you're looking at the elementalist.
Certainly. As you know I'm an experienced mage in Azeroth. I've spent my whole life practicing with the elements and the arcane, using them to freeze, incinerate, or blast my foes. Given all of that experience with being a cloth-wearing wielder of the elements, I feel that it's an obvious choice that I should be the one to discuss this new profession.
That establishes why both of you are interested, so now let's get into the details. Weapons have seemed like a good place to start with the other posts, so let's have Mal talk about the elementalist's weapon selection given that he's familiar with the mage offerings.
The weapon offerings for the elementalist would feel very familiar to a mage looking at the profession. Staves are the only two-handed weapon available and those are primarily an AoE weapon, offering such skills as Meteor Shower and Chain Lightning. For main hand weapons, elementalists cannot wield swords like mages in Azeroth, but we gain the ability to wield scepters. These provide a variety of medium range spells both single and multiple target, such as Phoenix and Shatterstone. There's also daggers for the main hand and those are mostly close range attacks (e.g. Dragon's Claw) as well as many of our self-defense techniques (e.g. Shocking Aura).
Little more impressive than making a glowy red patch on the ground, huh?
For off-hand weapons, the elementalist can choose an additional dagger if they want more supportive abilities such as Fire Shield or Geyser. Alternatively they can use a focus like the ones we had in Azeroth. Rather than merely providing raw spell power though, these give access to powerful close range abilities like Flamewall or Lightning Field. In addition to merely being strong point blank techniques, these are also typically used for setting up cross-profession combinations. Have you addressed those yet, sir?
Sigh... no. That's another one to add to the pile. Back on task though. It sounds like you've got quite a few options there. Not only do you have all those weapons to choose from for your combat sets, but it sounded like you have spells from all four elements to choose from on each weapon as well. So how exactly are those elements mixed up amongst the weapons? Is it like one skill of each element or are there some that are heavy towards a specific one?
I'll take this one. It's actually neither. For each weapon, we basically have four sets of the five skills - one for each element. The elementalist can attune himself to an element and that switches out his skills. The attunements give the caster some passive bonuses and the skills tend to have a general theme to them. Water for example can heal your allies passively and the skills focus more on slowing foes and providing additional healing, whereas fire is heavy burning and AoE damage and causes fire damage to anyone that touches you. Air's a lot of lightning damage and blinding attacks in addition to shocking nearby opponents, and earth provides the caster with more passive defenses and lots of skills to protect themselves and their teammates. As such, an elementalist basically has four weapons for each weapon they own.
You have no idea how hard it is to resist using every electricity pun I know here
Nice, so in combat you essentially have eight different skill sets you can flip between with your second weapon?
Unfortunately no. We can change attunements, but we cannot change weapons while in combat. If you start combat with a staff, you're stuck with it until everything's dead. On the plus side though, switching attunements basically serves the job of switching weapons anyways. You might not have the perfect weapon available at all time, like if you start at range and everything's closed to melee, but you'll be able to find skills within the four attunements to accomplish the task just fine.
Hmm, not fond of being restricted to just one weapon at a time, but that's the warrior in me talking. Still seems like you'll have options in a fight, so I guess it all works out. Let's move on to some of the stuff that makes the elementalist different from the mage and shaman. Mal, you're up.
There's a few areas, though the attunements that my shaman "colleague" mentioned are the primary difference. Another area would be the use of glyphs. These are temporary enhancements the elementalist can use to augment their abilities. They can be simple bonuses like the Glyph of Elemental Power (simply makes all of your attacks critical hits for 10 seconds) or they can be a little more imaginative like the Glyph of Elemental Storage (allows you to store a skill from your current attunement for use while in a different attunement).
Signets are another difference between elementalists and mages, but those have been covered in the other profession posts. I can give a few examples, but there's not really anything new to discuss there.
Ah, forgot about conjuration for a second there! While elementalists may not be the "vending machines" that many consider us mages to be, they do have some ability to conjure for others. Rather than being limited to food and drink however, these conjurations serve a combat purpose. Each element has a different conjure spell that can be used to create elemental environmental weapons such as the ones you discussed last week. For scenarios where you're placed up against a foe with an elemental weakness, either natural or caused by someone in the party, equipping everyone with an elementally attuned weapon could significantly increase your damage output.
The last major difference that I can think of would be in area of effect spells.
What is there to be different? I think I only ever saw you two cast a couple different types of AoE. Mages summoned it on one spot or did that Arcane Explosion thing. Maybe once or twice you guys used a cone attack. Shamans dropped a totem to make it pulse fire, then they dropped Chain Lightning on things. What exactly is different?
Well, all of those things are still available. We just have more options for them. I know I certainly would; Fire Nova just hit whatever was around my Flame Shock target and Chain Lightning would hit whatever it felt like hitting in the area. I suppose they did get Earthquake, but that was while I was running around as enhancement.
The shaman is correct about the expanded options. Bear in mind that while mages may have had all of those different types of AoE available to us, the options in each category were limited. Point blank was Arcane only unless you dropped one of the channeled spells on your head. Targeted area and frontal cone had two choices, but they suffered from the other problem mages had: our spec limited our options. If you were arcane, then you really only wanted to use Arcane Explosion. Frost mages preferred Blizzard and Fire mages just used Flamestrike. Well, technically just Blast Wave since Improved Flamestrike made using the actual Flamestrike spell meaningless unless you were desperate to conserve mana. Regardless, as much as the shaman will make jokes at my expense over this functional restriction, it was one built of class restraints over personal preference. When your fire spells hit 40-50% harder than anything else, then it's hard to justify using those spells.
With the elementalist however, our area spell selection is expanded to all four elements. The bulk of these being staff spells as I addressed earlier, but there are a smattering of other AoE spells amongst the other weapons. In addition with the trait system we read about, we'll be able to work on all of our attunements at once, rather than being forced to use merely one or two elements due to a lack of talent points.
Ixnay on the aits-tray. Still digging stuff up for that post.
Ah yes, sorry about that. That about sums up the elementalist, I think. Anything else to contribute, Daikaja?
Nah, I think we got it. Only elementalist stuff left to cover really is the cross-profession skills and the traits and it sounds like the boss is gonna be writing up that stuff.
Yeah, I'll be taking care of that stuff, though anything you guys can dig up will be appreciated. Won't be until after I get back though.
Off on your own research trip?
Something like that.
Do try and "research" something other than the bottom of a beer mug.
I make no promises. See you guys in a couple weeks!
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