On the surface the changes seem mixed between nerfs and buffs, but the changes don’t make any sense. For example with the nerf to Fire/Storm elemental durations, there is no way Primal Elementalist or Everlasting Elements will ever be used. And if you are going to remove Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise are you going to change Surge of Power Lava Burst back to 6 seconds? If the elementals duration is nerfed and there is no real way to reduce the cooldown why would anyone waste a talent point on Primal Elementalist and make the elemental a pet?
We are getting Earthshatter increasing the damage of Earth Shock and Earthquake by 8% and increases the stat bonuses granted by Elemental Blast by 25% and better maelstrom generation for more Earth Shocks and Earthquakes which feels like a pretty nice buff. So again I think the changes are a mixed bag at the moment.
It just really feels like these changes are dumb and uncalled for. Not to mention having to forget the last 3 weeks of playstyle and figure out what the new meta is going to be.
I really feel like Blizzard owes us an explanation for these changes.
The only thing i really liked was the ascendance rework, but aside that, everything else was neutral or bad.
They also seem to be waging war against ms generation, which is really stupid at this point, who was complaining about too much maelstrom? If anything people wanted a bit more. Where do they get the ideas for these changes.
I do like majority of the changes to the elemental shaman tree, but it is a bummer to lose out on skybreaker fiery demise. Dont see much of a use for fire elemental now with that talent no longer existing.
Oh and flash of lightning losing out on its 1s CDR per bolt cast is a yikes. But what makes the least sense to me is on top of removing those talents that reduce the CDR of the elementals they also reduced their base duration by a whopping 10s, that I don’t understand at all.
Im not usually one to play PTR so I will have to see changes when they hit live.
That said, from a PvE perspective something is desperately needed to change the rotation. Spamming LB almost entirely for ST just for CDR is an awful playstyle imo.
I will admit I’m a bit of a mastery lover so I am partial to what these changes appear to be. I do agree that it can be quite the shakeup if we got these build changes sooner rather than later though. And even if they do come in a few months time, if the Raid is still active (which I don’t know since we are on an “accelerated” expansion release), then we will be required to completely re-gear and relearn during the tier.
Regardless though, I think it’s healthier for Ele to get a very different design choice than the current CDR Lightning spam for both our hero talent choices. We need a change, because trading out red spam for blue spam didn’t change all that much.
It’s a massive nerf simply the basis that you are going to lose significant amounts of survivability from losing CDR on your defensives. Ele is going to go from like a B tier to F tier survivability literally overnight when the patch drops. CDR was, for the first time in over a decade, actually putting the spec on a level playing field with classes like mage and warlock. defensively… and that’s all going away. Survivability is really what matters these days, timing keys is usually a matter of staying alive as opposed to hitting a DPS check, which is why Aug/Mage is always meta.
The damage side of things is probably more of a wash, you’re just going to see a different damage profile. The new Ascendant has absurd burst AoE damage potential, but we lose a lot of moment to moment sustain. As a result we’ll end up with a damage profile that looks a little like a Fire Mage (except more AoE focused). If we can get full value out of our ascendance (high lvl keys, big pulls around CDs) we’ll do extremely good damage, if your pugging mid to low level keys (ie <=10) you’re almost certainly going to underperform because the pulls won’t be big enough and stuff will die way too fast to get good value, in which case you’d have likely done better with our current sustain damage CDR build.
I’ll be honest though, it’s a massive change to drop on a class midseason. And having played it on the PTR I think it’s going to cause a whole lot of sour grapes when people go from machine gunning chain lightning and having really good defensive uptime one day to feeling like your casting in molasses and spamming your defensives only to find out you’re not even halfway into your CD being over.
I dont think they considered survivability as an issue in pve.
Lava burst is gutted in pvp and some of the lightning was nerfed.
In the storm bringer tree 5% mitigation wsa nerfed as well.
Kind of hard to gauge how it will do as at first sight it looks bad but if the talents are moved into an order that works then maybe it will be ok. I haven’t seen the tree yet.
Once it is seen one can better assess if it this as bad as it looks. I am just as guilty as being a bit reactive to this but will wait and see. I do have some progress with an alternate build that hits just as hard but it needs some refining.