You just need to stack shock effectivness for lots of bonus damage.
Ah yes, let me just quickly grab all those shock effectiveness nodes on my fire-damage caster so I can improve its damage. Without investment, you're looking at a 18.75% more multi from shock. Might be slightly more, depending on what the small ascendancy node leading up to Shaper of Storms grants. I fail to see how this is more damage bonus than Trickster, which has flat 20% more/50% increase DoT damage, or Chieftain which gets 20% more from Ash and another 25% Fire DoT multi. And shock without investment lasts a whole of 2 seconds (not a big deal with stormbrand applying EE but still).
This elementalist rework is the same shitty rework as the last time. Its not an Elementalist Ascendancy, it's a Shock ascendancy. The only way to actively gain more damage from Elementalist, is by boosting your shock effectiveness. Great.
The Problem with Elementalist is that the good nodes are hidden behind shitty ones, and that you simply don't get the same bonuses other ascendancies do with your 8 points. Ailment immunity costs you 4 points and requires constant golem maintenance. The golem respawn after death is useless, as losing your golems and ailment immunity due to your golems dying for 4 seconds will kill you on any fight, esp someone like Sirus who just melts golems thanks to corrupted blood. It is also the only actually useful defensive node, although the new primal aegis is somewhat decent (still doesn't do shit against non-hit based damage). Most builds will be unable to afford Shaper of Winter, making you lose the perma-chill you had with the old Beacon of Ruin.
Ultimately Elementalist still struggles to define itself as a pure damaging caster, and instead relies on ailments and exposure to improve its damage, while other ascendancies gain pure damage bonuses. Having conditional damage increases has always been a complaint, exemplified by the old Pendulum of Destruction being considered the worst ascendancy node in the game. Now they just shifted it towards needing ways to apply exposure and shock, as well as convergence only proccing every 8 seconds. Why cant they just give direct damage improvements, same as almost every single other ascendancy? It's supposed to be THE spellcaster archetype and ascendancy, yet it is continuously beaten by Chieftain for Firedamage, Inquisitor/Assassin for Critdamage, Occultist for Cold damage or Trickster for DoT damage. Nothing about the new Elementalist will change this. The only thing the new elementalist makes me wanna do is chill mobs with the new 40% action speed modifier, which is pretty damn amazing.
