Companion Strike doesn't seem to scale very well. Base damage on an unbuffed air elemental was 479 magic damage. When using empowerment, at 164 int, it was hitting for 533. This is 3.2 damage per 1 mana on a 10 second cooldown, and 3.5 damage per 1 mana when empowered.
All pets have the same base int.
Elemental Empowerment is very good. At 164 int and 27 wis, it is healing for 95 HP per tic. The damage increase is noticeable. Finding wisdom items to increase this HOT is probably the way to go.
Elemental Resurgence - The cooldown on this ability is too long. 30 minutes to resummon a pet that's not even free, and still costs a malachite component? If this is supposed to stick on the bar, it's taking up pretty limited space just for the chance you need to resummon your pet in an emergency, and you can't even do it with 0 mana. If it didn't cost a malachite, it could at least be cantriped and used for a corpse run, but it's also just easy to get a malachite from the bank if necessary. With 33 days played and the amount of dungeoning in Fallen Watch and raid target killing, the amount of times I wished for an ability like this is very low. If my pet is dead, it is usually because things are already unrecoverable and a free pet summon won't be saving anyone OR it is because I positioned my pet badly, and I can simply resummon at my leisure anyway.
This ability needs to do more for a 30 minute cooldown.
Bug : Currently, even though it says your spell costs 50% less mana, you still cannot cast to resummon your pet unless you have the full 720 mana, making it kind of useless as an emergency spell.
Elemental Spellshield Good change.
Speedy Companion Can't use it in a dungeon or indoors? But its on a pet.... The main reason to have speed on your pet anyway is just so it can get in there and do damage faster, or to make up for poor pathing on a running mob. Nobody is kiting anything with a pet, especially when the owner themselves doesn't have speed. Let it work anywhere.
Fount of Mana Good change, looks the bug where it was giving 1 less mana per tic was also fixed too.
Elemental weapon summons As already reported, I don't know what's going on here with different weapons at different levels. Currently there's no reason to ever use the swords again, as the earth mallet is just always better. I'm not a fan of these weapons anyway. They should have interesting proc effects, or have damage scaling off of a stat or something. These are just completely uninteresting design.
Elemental Blast With 164 int at 60 it's hitting for 358 damage twice. It doesn't seem like the effect always lands, and from my initial testing, it seems like the additional effect has a pretty high resist rate, something like 40-50% on light blues. That's not good.
Currently, fire does Searing Wound, a burn which seems to do nothing at all. Given that the fire elemental aura is completely outclassed by every other aura, and the fire elemental itself doesn't really do anything special or noteworthy, that burn would have to do significant damage or have a significant effect to ever justify using it FOR ANY REASON over the air elemental or the water elemental.
Earth does Encumbering Weight, which reduces movement speed and seems to last about 12 seconds, but I couldn't get the exact timer on it. Again, because the earth elemental aura doesn't do anything significant, and because the snare doesn't last very long, and the earth elemental already has an instant cast 30 second root, there's almost no reason to ever use this snare. Many classes in the game already have root, including paladin. With the old version of the spell, you could land a 30 second snare on a target and it had some use cases for soloing, because it was instant. Now with a cast time, I don't see this getting much use for kiting stuff, and it's certainly not going to be used for runners. I will continue to advocate for the earth elemental aura to do everything it currently does, but higher numbers, and to add in a group health regen, so that it can help increase the survability of tanks or help being in "the tank group" in a raid.
Water has an attack speed slow called Numbing Chill. No idea on the value, but that makes water a contender to be used over the air elemental now, plus the mana regen stacking. I still don't think the mana regen is very good value wise, I would like to see it increased to 10 max at level 60, or if kept at 6, have an extra effect like increasing INT and WIS on the party, or adding on to total mana pool (+100?), but it is what it is.
Air has Static Shock, which is a casting speed reduction. It's probably the least useful out of the bunch, because again it only seems to last about 12 seconds, and the spell you'd be using to apply it has a 3.5 second cast time, so it's not like you could use it in a pinch to slow spell casting when a dangerous cast starts. Because of the resist rate and unreliability of applying the effect, it's kind of whatever as a secondary effect. But hey, the air elemental aura is still good like before.
Final Thoughts
Overall, you've undoubtedly added to the solo capability of the class, and you've increased the value of the pet significantly, but I'm still unhappy with the rework in its total because several things remain pointless to use and seem like wasted design space, as well as several things are still broken. Maybe getting a few buffs is enough for many people to be happy, but I would rather the class have a full list of options and to be able to use the entirety of the class, instead of the same ones as before yet again. But it is a step in the right direction.
