Welcome to Skill Capped’s Overview of the Best Talents for Elemental Shaman in PvP in Dragonflight 10.2.6
In this article, we will go over the biggest change that came with Dragonflight – talent system. We will cover the best talents for Elemental Shaman in PvP, including the Class tree, the Spec tree, as well as PvP talents themselves.
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Table of Contents
Elemental Shaman Talents Overview
Since the talent system received a huge revamp going into Dragonflight, we will cover both the class and the spec tree. They both have some mandatory and some optional talents.
Shaman Class Talents
The Shaman class tree includes some hardlocked choices, including Earth Shield and the new Elemental Orbit talent, which allows you to have two shields on at once. When combined with the Unleash Shield PvP talent, this enables you to both knock and root an enemy target, which is much needed against melee.
Right next to it we have both Healing Stream Totem and Swirling Currents. Along with Earth Shield, Healing Stream Totem represents the vast majority of your healing, making these combined talents essential for your survivability inside of arena.
As far as dual-talent choices are concerned, we’ve made Planes Traveler default, since it always has value. You could swap this for Astral Bulwark against Ret Paladins for instance. This is because their Avenging Wrath is on a 1-minute cooldown, which means it won’t directly line up with Astral Shift when Planes Traveler is selected. Therefore, you can safely trade Avenging Wrath into every other Wings CD, and have a more powerful wall with Astral Bulwark.
On the right side of the tree you might be surprised to see Greater Purge as the default choice. This is because you are relatively GCD capped as a Shaman and have very limited opportunities to spam dispel. This simply gives you more value on a filler ability that you won’t frequently press. The only time you might consider playing normal Purge is into Preservation Evokers in order to remove Nullifying Shroud, but this is a very niche use case.
We’ve also selected Earth Grab Totem as the default pick in its dual talent slot. This gives us a very reliable AoE root effect, which is enormously valuable for dealing with enemy melee. When this is combined with Gust of Wind, it allows us a fighting chance at dealing with the mobility creep in recent expansions.
There are three flexible points on the tree Elemental Warding, Cleanse Spirit and Stoneskin Totem. On their surface, these might seem like high impact abilities, but one or both can be dropped for more specialized utility options. These include Cleanse Spirit whenever your team needs a Curse dispel, Elemental Warding if you want maximum spell damage reduction, Stoneskin Totem when fighting a heavy physical damage team like Jungle, Poison Cleansing Totem when up against Assassination Rogues, and even Capacitor Totem if your team lacks a stun effect. Lastly, you could consider dropping Ancestral Guidance and Spiritwalker’s Grace for Totemic Recall and Call of the Elements. This could be done when against melee cleaves in order to reset the CD of Static Field Totem.
Elemental Spec Talents
The standard build is heavily invested in maximizing Maelstrom generation through Flame Shock, which subsequently helps funnel damage into bursty damage waves.
Lower down on the tree we will pick up Surge of Power, Deeply Rooted Elements, and Primal Elementalist in order to reach the endcap of Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence.
In the middle of the tree we will be picking up Primordial Wave, which directly interacts with the encap, Splintered Elements, to give us a periodic Haste increase of up to 60%.
Elemental Shaman PvP Talents
Most PvP talents are situational, even including Grounding Totem in matchups where you will get no value with this ability. If there are no spells to actively immune, which is sometimes the case into melee cleaves, you can generally play without this talent.
Against melee cleaves, you might instead want to play with a combination of Static Field Totem and Unleash Shield. This will give you two different displacement effects you can use to kite.
A sort of neutral option as an alternative talent is Skyfury Totem. This can be powerful for dealing massive burst damage, but is somewhat unreliable due to the limited HP on the Totem, which makes it easy to counter. This makes it better at lower MMR, where enemy players are less likely to kill it. You can play this at higher ratings too, but might only get value against spell cleaves, who are less likely to attack it.
Burrow is a new addition to 10.1. This is a solid defensive option into Rogue + Mage and where you are likely to be the kill target especially Melee Cleaves as that tends to be Shaman’s weak point.
Finally, when fighting double caster you would want to play with Seasoned Winds.
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