Since the latest update my Lightning Storm damage has decreased by 50%. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate that they changed Shepherds aspect because I no longer have to have 3 pet skills on my skill bar but increasing Lightning Storm damage 85% is not enough to offset the 180% damage increase removed from the Shepherds aspect.
We need to have Lightning Storm damage massively buffed like landslide was buffed or making a specific aspect to increase Lightning Storm damage perhaps something along the lines of getting 25% increased damage per charge of lightning Storm.
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What have you tried replacing the weapon and ring aspect with? I was running lightning storm for most this season on Druid, also Clarity can now be had on amulets. I will have to test myself later, but wondering what you had tried already
Also Landslide didn’t get the buff that was initially in the patch notes, it’s not 280%, it’s only 140%, so I am not even sure if each landslide even increased in damage or if the whole bonus comes from the extra landslide pillars.
Landslide got a massive increase in damage. My build was built for lightning storm and on live I was easily critting for 1,700,000 or so. I then took this build to the test server and I was lucky to crit for 700,000. So then I took the same build and dropped all my pets skills and picked up landslide. I added natural balance to my 2hander and crashstone aspect to my amulet and then added aftershock to a ring. I then picked up natures fury in the skill tree to trigger free skills.
Now the only reason to have lightning storm is to trigger free land slides and to give landslide 90% increased crit damage. Because with these changes landslide EASILY crits 2 million per landslide and it easily hits an NPC 4 or more times. Hell I have seen it crit for over 9,000,000 on one hit and my paragon board isn’t even optimized for an Earth build.
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Either Blizzard doesn’t do any math at all or they try to force you into flavor of the month builds on purpose.
Although the latter would mean they did some math, which I highly doubt they do.
Yeah, the 85% increase isn’t enough to make up for it, but you now have skill points free, and a 2hand + ring type legendary aspects open. Hopefully we can more than make up that 50% damage loss with all that.
I will be testing switching over to my lightning storm build tonight, I also want to see how attack speed works with it now.
I am more worried about the cap on thrunderstruck
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It’s the kind of dumb thing Blizzard does. They changed Shepherd and accounted for it.
Then they also nerfed Thunderstruck and didn’t do anything do compensate.
Glad somebody is testing Druid lightning build. A personal favorite. Not sounding good with the Thunderstruck nerf. Was hoping there was something unannounced to replace the damage upgrade, but apparently not.
I must say the changes so that attack speed effects channeling it does work well, I want to get an amulet with Envenom AND Clarity, then not having to stop to cast ravens and poison. Also using dancing bolts along with faster channeling feels real good.
Before I was generally doing around 3M per strike before, would go as low as 1.5 and as high as 9 depending on what is active. Dancing bolts are around 1.5-2.5m.
My quick test on PTR where I haven’t fully switched things to what could be the best setup, but I am hitting for around 2M per strike, dancing bolts are the same damage, but I am also have 80%ish attack speed bonus, which also means 80% more charged bolts. I could see this being nice to farming things that aren’t bosses.
That said, vs Bosses it was much weaker, but I may try moving things around to see if there is something I could do about that. Vs bosses we need something like those gloves for cataclysm, where lightning strikes and dancing bolts all hit the boss.
One of the issues of Lightning Storm is that the tempering for a weapon is worthless. Extending the duration makes the skill even worse, because we want to drop the stacks before boss fights. I think Blizzard should give us a proper tempering like “chance to strike twice” or “chance to chain to the nearest enemy”.
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Gotta use the new Cataclysm Gloves to get that 80% multiplier! 