The Historical Precedent for an Elemental Raid Buff (2024)

Table of Contents

• Vanilla WoW
• The Burning Crusade
• Wrath of the Lich King
• Cataclysm
• Mists of Pandaria
• Warlords of Draenor
• Legion and Beyond

Lucenia, also known as Lucy, is a 15-year veteran of Elemental Shaman currently Cutting-Edge raiding in <Noted> on her Shaman Lucellis-Dragonmaw (US). She streams mythic raiding, mythic+, and PTR/beta testing content at https://twitch.tv/Lucenia.She also produces sims, guides, and other content for Elemental Shaman in Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery.

Greetings fellow Shamans,

It’s no question that one of the most controversial - and often memed about - aspects of Elemental Shaman in retail World of Warcraft is its lack of a raid buff or unique raid utility.With the recent addition of a Hunter’s Mark raid buff and the potential for Restoration Shamans to provide powerful utility with their Totemic hero tree in combination with Ancestral Vigor Elemental now stands as the lone specialization that lacks a raid buff or unique utility.Today I’ll be discussing Elemental’s long history as a raid buff provider in order to show how - for much of the game’s life - we were an important and often required member of a raid team.

At its inception Shaman was a Horde-only hybrid class intended to bring a mix of damage, healing, and utility to a group.Shamans provided buffs in the form of totems represented by the 4 major Elements - Earth, Fire, Water, and Air.They could have 1 totem of each element active, and totem buffs didn’t stack if multiple Shamans used the same totem.These buffs only applied to party members however, so many groups opted to bring multiple shamans per raid in order to buff multiple parties of players.I’ve included only the totems that provided what were considered useful buffs, and only at their highest-rank values.

The Burning Crusade doubled down on Shaman raid utility, retaining all of the original buff totems from Vanilla while adding two new powerful buff options, with Totem of Wrath given to Elemental as a new capstone ability, and Unleashed Rage given to Enhancement.In addition, Shamans were given a new keynote ability - Bloodlust for Horde, and Heroism for Alliance.The original iteration of Bloodlust and Heroism applied only to the Shaman’s party and didn’t cause the Sated debuff, so it could be chain cast by multiple shamans on the same group of players.As a result, most raids stacked 4-5 Shamans whose primary responsibility was maintaining totem buffs and providing lust to the strongest DPS group.Despite low damage numbers, Elemental was considered an essential part of any raid team in order to buff a group of caster DPS.

As the only Shaman option for Alliance players, Draenei Shamans also provided Heroic Presence to their party.While this wasn’t a Shaman-only ability, most Alliance players already had established characters and didn’t want to re-roll, so Shamans frequently filled the role as the provider of this buff in their party.

Wrath of the Lich King overhauled many classes and specs, bringing new abilities, better balance, and overall more-streamlined gameplay compared to its predecessors.In order to promote greater group diversity, most buffs were changed from party to raid-wide and many new versions of the same buffs were added that allowed multiple classes and/or specs to provide it.Shaman remained the sole provider of Heroism/Bloodlust which now also applied to the entire raid at the cost of causing the Sated debuff.As a result it was still considered mandatory to have at least one Shaman in any raid group.Wrath also brought a plethora of improvements to Elemental and Shaman as a whole, improving our damage to make us more competitive and providing new buffs, including a new Elemental-only raid buff, Elemental Oath.

With the onslaught of Deathwing, Blizzard realized that the number of unique raid buffs had gotten out of control, opting to drastically reduce the number of buffs but allowing most buffs to be brought in some form by two or more different specs and/or classes.It was at this point that many consider Elemental at its prime in terms of raid utility.While we had many buff options in the past, the changes in Cataclysm made us the greatest buff provider with up to a whopping 7 raid buffs that could be active at once including Bloodlust and Heroism.Totem of Wrath was changed to Totemic Wrath, allowing Elemental Shamans to provide another powerful Spell Power buff without sacrificing fire totem damage, while Restoration received Ancestral Healing to increase their healing targets’ max HP by up to 10%.Heroism/Bloodlust-type effects were also given to both Mages (Time Warp) and Hunters (Primal Rage) for the first time, removing one of Shaman’s niche roles in a raid group for the first time.

Mists of Pandaria is the expansion where we started to see a decline in Shaman raid utility, with Elemental and Restoration hit particularly hard.Mists brought with it a massive pruning of Shaman totems that had historically provided a number of buffs to raids.Totems like Strength of Earth Totem, Windfury Totem, and Wrath of Air Totem were removed entirely, while other like Healing Stream Totem were nerfed to only heal one party/raid member at a time and on a shorter duration with a cooldown.Despite this however, things weren’t all bad.Shamans still retained several raid buffs at this point while also gaining a powerful new raid healing cooldown, Ancestral Guidance.In its original incarnation, Ancestral Guidance healed all nearby allies for 40% of all direct damage/healing dealt split between them (later changed to 40% of damage and 60% of healing), similar to Vampiric Embrace and a far cry from what we have today.

The orcish invasion from Draenor brought with it significant ability pruning throughout WoW.I remember this being quite controversial at the time, with many feeling classes were losing key parts of their class identity as iconic abilities that had been around for years were removed left and right.Along the same vein, Blizzard continued to drastically simplify raid buffs and debuffs.Elemental Oath and Unleashed Rage were removed and the effects merged into Grace of Air.Burning Wrath was similarly removed without a replacement, and the +bonus HP effect of Ancestral Vigor (renamed Purification) was removed as well.

All specializations provide some common buffs and debuffs.These are important to the game because they encourage cooperation, make you stronger when you work together with others, and promote Raid composition diversity.However, we saw room to revise these buffs and debuffs.We also spread around some of the harder-to-find Raid buffs/debuffs, especially for specializations that brought relatively few.Source

The invasion of The Burning Legion brought about the great raid buff purge.This decision was relatively popular at the time, as both players and Blizzard alike took a strong stance in favor of “Bring the player, not the class/spec”.Classic raid buffs like Druid’s Mark of the Wild, Priest’s Power Word: Fortitude, Warrior’s Commanding Shout, etc. were either removed or reworked into cooldowns or effects that applied to only a few players at a time.Blizzard quickly backtracked on the anti-raid buff sentiment in Battle for Azeroth, bringing back some classic buffs like Warrior’s Battle Shout and Power Word: Fortitude, and adding new debuffs such as Monk’s Mystic Touch and Demon Hunter’s Chaos Brand.Not all buffs returned - such as Mark of the Wild which would have to wait until Dragonflight, but in Shadowlands we very quickly saw a return to having mandatory raid spots filled by specs with raid buffs or utility so powerful it was deemed mandatory.In Shadowlands Death Knights received Abomination Limb and we started to see them become mandatory in order to provide grips on the inevitable 1-2 bosses per raid tier where they made a fight significantly easier.Dragonflight then doubled down by adding Evokers.With powerful group utility like Time Spiral and later the controversial Augmentation spec; often considered mandatory for the highest-end content, Evokers once again added to the list of “mandatory” raid spots.Finally in 10.2 after much outcry over their lack of raid utility, Hunters received a buff to Hunter’s Mark that caused it to increase damage by 5% on a target when above 80% health.

For Shamans, Restoration’s Ancestral Vigor actually made its return in Legion, bucking the trend at the time.Elemental Shamans also received Skyfury Totem as a PVP talent in Legion, while melee players’ beloved Windfury Totem also made a return in Shadowlands along with fairly significant batch of Enhancement changes.Shamans also received Wind Rush Totem in Legion.This new utility spell provided a movement speed buff to the group similar to Druid’s Stampeding Roar but with positional limitations.In Dragonflight we once again received Mana Spring (first as a totem, then as a buff), but its effectiveness was severely dampened to the point where most don’t consider it a valuable.Less notably, Dragonflight brought back several other totems with minor usefulness: Tremor Totem, Stoneskin Totem, Tranquil Air Totem (mainly a PVP ability), and Poison Cleansing Totem.We also saw several changes to Ancestral Guidance - which was at first a powerful group heal, especially in AOE situations - but it was heavily nerfed in 10.1.5 and left a shell of its former self.

Going into The War Within, we now live in a world where “open” or “flex” raid spots are few and far between.Most groups are lucky to have 1-2 open spots at this point, so fitting in an Elemental Shaman - who provides redundant raid utility and no explicit raid buff - is usually a tough decision to make.In a recent Wowhead interview, WoW’s Game Director Ion Hazzikostas had this to say when asked about the situation:

Q: Raid Buffs incentivizes class diversity and the feeling of being more powerful when you are in a group. We’ve seen more classes get raid buffs in Dragonflight with Paladin getting a second and Hunter’s Mark, leaving just DK and Shaman. Is there a reason that these classes don’t bring anything specific buff to the raid?

A: Ultimately our goal is broad spec representation and class representation across the different roles. I think we’re hesitant to add still more raid buffs that might risk feeling redundant and yet another thing to manage or that might too heavily force less choice in composition forming. Ideally though, if you’re a PUG leader, if you’re putting a raid or Mythic raid group, you should want one of every class and then once you have that covered, you should look at who’s available and how you want to fill out the rest of your roster based on your people and the content that you’re facing.

We need to look at diversity and want to make sure that classes like Shaman and Death Knight are bringing tools to the raid that make them valued members of a raid group or valued in dungeon groups. That’s not to completely close the door on a new raid buff ever coming to them, but our hope continues to be to use the other knobs that the team has at its disposal to get them to a place where they feel equally valuable without just needing a raid buff.

As of the time of writing this we’re still waiting to see what the future will hold.Only time will tell what will happen with Shaman utility, and whether Elemental in particular will be able to remain competitive enough to be brought in most raid groups.