The following overview was written by our Elemental Shaman guide writer Stormy.
Elemental, like most specializations, is getting “pruned” in World of Warcraft: Midnight. This means a number of abilities, both actives and passives are getting cut to simplify gameplay, making it more accessible to new players and removing the previously expected level of UI customization via addons such as WeakAuras.
Most notably for Elemental: 
Icefury, 
Primordial Wave, 
Liquid Magma Totem, 
Deeply Rooted Elements, 
Stone Bulwark Totem are all gone and you do not need to summon an Elemental manually anymore. Several abilities from the Stormbringer hero talents have also been simplified. Altogether, you will need 5 or 6 fewer binds compared to the current version of Elemental, and will have fewer things you need to track.
Blizzard Gutted the Talent Trees and You’ll Feel It
A lot of talents have disappeared with many new talents replacing them. The trend, however, is simplification, and several active abilities have been removed without being replaced by other actives. Instead, many talents are now back to giving a few stats, while some have become 2-pointers again to pad the class tree. It has made choices simpler and easier to understand, but as is the trend with the Midnight changes, made things less interesting overall.
Fewer Totems, Stronger Interrupts, Better Survivability
In the Class tree, Stone Bulwark Totem and 
Totemic Recall are gone. While the latter wasn’t really used anymore, Stone Bulwark was a very reasonable defensive, despite being on the GCD. We did however gain some passive healing with the new 
Therazane’s Resilience, and some quality of life with Instinctive Imbuements making 
Lightning Shield also apply 
Earth Shield and 
Flametongue Weapon if talented. You still need to press 
Skyfury, but you no longer need to cast 4 or 5 different buffs before being combat-ready! That’s definite progress. Note that 
Thunderstorm isn’t in the class tree anymore because it has become a baseline ability for Elemental Shamans, acquired at level 30, and 
Lightning Lasso became a PvP talent.
A significant change for dungeons is that Wind Shear’s lockout period is now 4 seconds, and the new version of Seasoned Winds, 
Windveil, reduces all spell damage taken by 15% for 12 seconds after interrupting a spell, though it no longer stacks twice. While it does not make you immortal against specific packs anymore, this talent is now a very reliable, powerful damage reduction against most dungeon packs. 
Earth Elemental‘s cooldown and duration have been halved, which will help smooth out Elemental’s survivability, one of its weakest points.
Your Elemental Spec Bar Is About to Shrink a Lot
Specialization talents also saw big changes. We’ll go roughly top to bottom here. First, you only have Fire Elemental now. Storm Elemental is mostly gone, and now only exists through 
Fury of the Storms, which now summons a Storm Elemental instead of a “Greater Lightning Elemental”. Moreover, talenting 
Ascendance, which will never be optional, replaces your Fire Elemental button, so no more having to precast it on pull or to set up your Ascendance. It does mean that if you are not talented into 
First Ascendant, the 2-minutes cooldown version of Ascendance, you’ll lose half your uptime on Fire Elemental, but because it is much weaker than Storm Elemental it does not really matter.
Surge of Power is gone, and instead, we are now offered a flat damage increase to spenders as a choice node with 
Aftershock, which is reasonable and avoids overcapping frustrations. Similarly, 
Master of the Elements can now be swapped out for a flat increase to 
Lava Burst damage. It’s to be determined which are mathematically better but it seems likely that the flat damage increases will be at least reasonably competitive.
Icefury is gone, good night sweet prince. 
Fusion of Elements now triggers from 
Power of the Maelstrom, likely making that talent mandatory. Without Icefury, you might not even need to talent 
Frost Shock anymore, at least for raiding, though you probably still want it as a backup, but it will do very little damage.
Primordial Wave and Liquid Magma Totem are gone, and have been merged into 
Voltaic Blaze, borrowed from Enhancement, which gets the Primordial Wave functionality via its daughter talent 
Purging Flames. Both will almost certainly be mandatory for any situation that’s not pure single-target. Combined with the new 
Flames of the Firelord talent, Flame Shock may deal slightly more damage overall, but unless Blizzard significantly buffs the base spell, it will never become a meaningful part of our damage, even in scenarios where it should be most effective.
Erupting Lava, 
Flux Melting and 
Magma Chamber are gone. No one will notice, as they were never viable. People will, however, notice that Deeply Rooted Elements, Icefury, and Primordial Wave + Liquid Magma Totem are all gone. That was a signature Elemental ability and while its highs will be missed, it hopefully means the baseline of Elemental will be tuned higher to make up for it. Similarly, Ascendance itself has been significantly nerfed with its increase to overload damage cut in half (from 150% to 75%). This is basically nerfing the effect of the cooldown by a third, but Ascendance used to be of the strongest cooldowns in the game. Unfortunately, it remains a 3-minute cooldown baseline, putting it in an awkward spot. Coupled with Deeply Rooted Elements’ disappearing, it may be time to be use First Ascendant in most situations, losing 3 seconds of Ascendance and 20% Haste from 
Preeminence, further dropping the power of our signature cooldown. Elemental will still have nowhere near the very flat damage profile it had before the 11.0.5 rework, but it is now average at best in the burst department.
The hyped “Apex” talents are very powerful albeit unexciting from a gameplay perspective, they mostly just lock Elemental further into hoarding Mastery and making Critical Strike more valuable. They will be absolutely mandatory in every circumstance.
Farseer Got Simpler, Stormbringer Unpredictable
Primordial Wave being gone, Stormkeeper has now replaced it as your first way of summoning Ancestors. You still need 
Nature’s Swiftness to make 
Ancestral Swiftness useful. Because it is a longer cooldown. Ancestors now last 8 seconds instead of 6. With 
Routine Communication also working with Flame Shock and Voltaic Blaze, and 
Offering from Beyond now reducing the cooldown of Stormkeeper, we can expect a largely similar ancestor uptime compared to The War Within before we got the extra ancestor from the Season 3 Tier Set. This means Ancestors will be a large part of our damage, but will not be our first source of damage anymore, which felt a bit odd.
Beyond that, Farseer does not really change, despite a further emphasis on Lava Burst. With the Liquid Magma Totem shenanigans being gone, Farseer is back to being the pretty boring flat damage increase it was in most of The War Within, though it is worth noting that there will be some level of RNG with how quickly we will recover our Stormkeeper cooldown.
Stormbringer on the other hand got significant changes. With addons, notably WeakAuras, being removed, a lot needed to change, as Stormbringer really wanted you to track a bunch of different things in order to play around it properly.
Tempest no longer procs based on total Maelstrom spent, and now has a chance to occur for each Maelstrom spent. Awakening Storms no longer provides an alternate way to trigger Tempest, and instead simply doubles the chance for Tempest to occur from spending Maelstrom. A significant addition of RNG in an expansion where much RNG gets removed, and it will hurt high end shamans who were playing around the predictable-ish tempests from before a little, but it was the price to pay for getting rid of addons. Overall, a very reasonable change.
Rolling Thunder also gets reworked, no more ticking timer to get an additional charge of Stormkeeper, it now reduces the cooldown of Stormkeeper by 15 seconds. Note that this means you could get Stormkeeper down to a 30 second cd if you talent Herald of the Storms. 
Arc Discharge was buggy and required tracking, so they simply changed it to instead make Tempest grant a charge of Stormkeeper. Much simpler.
Worth noting that a small part of the Season 3 set bonus is now baked into Stormbringer, with Ascendance granting a Tempest proc, but with the removal of Deeply Rooted Elements that is not that big.
Elemental’s Rotation Is Simpler, But Is That a Good Thing?
Deeply Rooted Elements gone, Icefury gone, Primordial Wave and Liquid Magma Totem gone, Aftershock/Master of the Elements optional and possibly suboptimal compared to flat damage talents, most of the “advanced tech” to use Stormbringer is gone… Overall, this significant pruning leads Elemental to feeling much more like the specialization it was several expansions ago, for better or worse.
Depending on talent selection, Elemental’s rotational complexity will be either extremely simple, or “only” fairly simple, especially in comparison to the current one. This has the usual good and bad consequences. The specialization becomes much more accessible and new player friendly, but it loses most of its skill ceiling and interest for higher-end players, and veteran elementals will be fairly torn overall with the state of the specialization.
Primordial Wave and Liquid Magma Totem being merged into Voltaic Blaze is solid pruning, especially as Voltaic Blaze also replaces Flame Shock. This feels fairly smooth, though with Flame Shock doing very little damage on its own, it mostly exists to enable Purging Flames, much like Primordial Wave only existed to proc Splintered Elements, extra Lava Bursts, and an Ancestor for Farseer.
Icefury was always controversial and went through several iterations, but most Elemental thought the last iteration was very good, mainly because it had already strreamlined it to one button, Icefury replacing Frost Shock when it procs. This was a pretty elegant solution, but apparently was not enough for Blizzard. I personally will miss it greatly, as it was not mandatory to use it well for most Elemental in most situations, but it added great fun and skill expression for more advanced players.
As for secondary stats, it’s hard to determine exactly how stat priority will change until we fully implement all the Midnight changes in Simulationcraft, though I expect Critical Strike will not be at the bottom for single-target anymore now that Lava Burst damage scales with Critical Strike chance. Mastery will likely remain top dog, and I expect Haste to remain second best.
Is Elemental Still Viable in Midnight?
It is too early to have a good idea where Elemental sits in the overall class balance, but overall most classes got “nerfed”. Fewer abilities, fewer buttons, less crazy combos, less burst. Elemental definitely got all of that, but it started from a pretty strong place, so it is unlikely to be terrible unless something goes very wrong with the initial tuning.
On paper, Elemental lost a lot of burst, a significant amount of mobility and lost an active defensive in return for some hybrid healing, though it should have better survivability in dungeons. It should remain excellent in Mythic+, though it is hard to overstate how much of our damage was lost with the loss of Deeply Rooted Elements. Anyone who’s played with an Elemental knows how key it was to our damage (and accidentally pulling aggro by proccing it immediately).
In raids the added quality of life from having fewer buttons and things to precast is nice, but the loss of mobility from not having Icefury will feel pretty bad, and I worry our rotation will be pretty boring both from a gameplay perspective, and a profile one, having lost most of our interesting spikes. Elemental still hasn’t gained much unique raid utility, although Therazane’s Resilience brings a very reasonable amount of healing over time to yourself and an allied target, and we still have Stormfury, one of the best raid buffs in the game. Part of Elemental’s viability will depend on whether Enhancement will be rising back after a somewhat painful previous tier.
I expect Elemental Shamans will still have no issue getting invites but having not been meta in Mythic+ last season, they definitely will not be this time, unless their damage is ridiculous.
Did Blizzard Go Too Far With Elemental’s Pruning?
Some of the changes are objectively good. The Stormbringer are just much more practical than the previous version and do not require tracking 5 different things. Primordial Wave and Liquid Magma Totem were clunky spells with bugs and bad feedback, Voltaic Blaze being brought to Elemental solves the problem while reducing the button bloat Blizzard is looking to solve. The Imbued Implements class talent reduces the amount of buttons you need to press before/between pulls, and Flametongue Weapon only existing when the talent is taken is good because it regularly confused new players. Ascendance casting your Fire Elemental also helps with this.
Some of the changes are disappointing and feel lazy. Many nodes being replaced by generic stat or damage increases, and the addition of 2-point nodes in the class tree feels like the developers were out of ideas and/or time and just padded the tree. In general, the existence of the Class and Specialization tree feel much less justified than before, with at least 80% of the talents in each tree being mandatory must pick in every situation, which begs the question of why even have these trees. If the goal is to attract new & casual players, surely not having these big intimidating talent trees will help ? But some people have decided that the WoW population loved these trees so I guess there we are.
Some changes worry. Personally, I thought they did a great job with the latest iteration of Icefury and a recent poll found most Elemental players agreed, though quite a few people never liked it in any of its forms. Losing Deeply Rooted Elements is similar. Its early versions were more frustrating than anything, but it has grown on most people since the rework, and now felt like a key part of Elemental’s identity, and while it brought frustration when it didn’t proc when you wanted, it also brought anticipation and an adrenaline spike when it procced which in my opinion made it worth it.
Some opportunities were missed. Farseer is most likely further entrenched as “the single-target hero talent”, with Stormbringer remaining “the Mythic+ hero talent”, barring extremely heavy AoE raid encounters. Some of the pruned talents like Erupting Lava or Magma Chamber could have been interesting with the renewed focus on Flame Shock and Lava Burst, which is a little puzzling. Waiting for multiple “being worked on” talents, only to see them turn into “3% Haste” or “3% Intellect,” was frustrating.
Between Ascendance being vastly nerfed, Deeply Rooted Elements disappearing, crazy Stormbringer combos being gone and with the loss of a very powerful tier set for both hero talents, I worry that playing Elemental will be very boring for anyone but very new players. Smoothing out the kinks was fine, but while this pruning is far from the most extreme compared to some other specializations, it feels like too much, particularly until we can get access to new tier sets.
I’m not particularly worried about Elemental’s viability, but I worry that many diehard Elemental players like me, instead of prevailing despite the odds as they did before, will simply not have enough fun to keep playing in the long term. I acknowledge however that not all players value high engagement and a level of complexity, especially people for whom Elemental is just one Alt among several/many.
