I do not understand the appeal of fulmination? Ele is still a builder spender, but instead of building a bar, your building stacks. However, now 1) lava burst doesnt contribute to building of resources (its just a separate system that’s there for some reason), and 1) your recourses are tied to rng. The core of elemental shaman makes it seem like we are a electric mage who has lava burst tacked on just to add some more buttons to press.
If the answer is to just make lava burst grant fulmination, then there is absolutely no difference between maelstrom and fulmination besides the fact that with maelstrom you were guaranteed to get some every cast.
I get that the one benefit is you can cast earth shock with any amount of stacks when in BFA you have to have a minimum amount of stacks, meaning earth shock just replaces frost shock while moving (BTW frost shock on live deals 45% of spell power and earth shock on alpha deals 42% of spell power so its not even a dps increase)
Two possible solutions I can think of are a) make master of the elements baseline, to make there actually a reason to press lava burst besides it being a ‘glowing button’. B) Cause your lava burst to guarantee your next lighting bolt grants a stack of fulmination or your next chain lighting grants a stack of seismic thunder
2 side notes about fulmination:
Fire elemental no longer interacts with our fire spell, but instead gives us more lightning stacks, which does not make a lot of sense.
Ice fury is now very boring as it does not give us any more resources (when on live it gives us and overabundance of resources)
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Ya I kinda agree with you. All I can think of is maybe they wanted to let Lava Burst hit harder but they couldn’t justify that on top of it generating Maelsteom so they took that away? And maybe taking Maelstrom away from LB just screwed the whole maelsteom generation balance up so they thought it was easier to scrap it? It seemed cool at first but I really dont see it as a hugely meaningful change. That being said, I love that EQ is now Spamable and not locked behind Maelstrom. Sometimes if the pack is real big you just want to skip Chain Lightning and its 5target cap.
There’s a big difference. All of the classes are builder/spender, but the maelstorm bar made that too obvious.
So, now, less people will complain.
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Fulmination feels like a worse variation of maelstrom.
There needs to be more interaction between lavaburst and other abilities.
I disagree with your first sentence, but agree with the second.
The example above would work well, such as lava burst making your next LB to be a 100% fulmination. Things like that, even small amounts of synergy and reducing RNG, that would be great.
That said, it’s still better than the current system because it separates earthquake from earth shock which is fantastic.
And realistically it would feel strange to have a builder bar for a single ability.
My big wish is that they would put more effort into talents. We have so many storm effects and such. That they could easily make shaman a very diverse class, focusing more on lava burst, or focusing more on lightning/storms.
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Fulmination: LB has a 50% chance to give you a stack that will eventually allow you to use your spender.
MS: LB, Flameshock, Lavaburst, etc all give a set amount.
I realize that. That’s why I said I disagree that it’s a worse version, but o do agree it needs more interaction.
I have only played Ele during BFA, so I do not know the ins and outs of the spec 100%. Why is separating earth shock from earthquake such a big deal? You do not want to earth shock in a aoe situation and don’t want to earthquake in a single target situation anyways.
Also with fulmination, you cannot even spam earthquake since it is now on a 3 sec cast time, unbuffed (which is a long time…)
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Because your single target and AOE doesn’t compete. Earthquake’s cast is reduced by Chain Lightning, and if you had fulmination stacks ready for a priority target, that’s just fine, you wouldn’t lose that build up by switching to AOE.
Secondly, in PVP, it means we can at least try to fish out stealth classes which isn’t really a viable option right now.
I don’t see a meaningful difference. It was already pretty easy to switch back and fourth between aoe and single target without any punishment. Start building maelstrom with whichever builder is appropriate for the amount of enemies, switch to the other if the amount you’re fighting changes and then use whichever spender is appropriate for the ammount of enemies. Isn’t decoupling them like this more frusterating than before?
That said, I do really like that you can just spam EQ with a cast bar if there are 6+ enemies. They didn’t need to get rid of maelstrom to do this though. Coulda made it so maelsteom just made it instant cast but with insufficient maelsteom it had a cast time
I laughed and appreciate the thought.
There’s more subtlety than that, but yes, everything “builds something” and “spends something”. Holy Power seems to be the first domino that fell, mimicking the rogue Combo Points model.
The core though is slightly different. Builder-spender direct design forced developers into a box where they have to think of the mechanic. Flip side, players do their best to gear out of the resource as a priority, so they can finally play the game. One can look to tanks and haste stacking to get 100% uptime on defensives for the idea.
When building and spending supports gameplay, it’s a fantastic addition. When gameplay devolves into building and spending, the game begins to feel more like a chore than fun.
Your earth shock has talents that can buff various other spells. So you’d want to weave it in, but it requires 6 stacks of fulimination to receive those affects. Decoupling allows you to have more complex interplay between spells.
It also assists with funnelling a single priority target, which is something shaman excel at.
It also gives you something with some kick to use during movement without resorting to frost shock.
6 stacks of fulmination is basically the same thing as 60 maelstrom is it not? You are going to be casting the same amount of earth shocks meaning surge of power isn’t getting buffed
I’d say this change actually hurts our funneling. You cannot use chain lightning on big packs to generate maelstrom for earthshocks anymore. Also you cant put a bunch of flameshocks, spam lava burst and then cast earthquake or earthshock anymore. In order to cast earthshock you need to cast lightning bolt, which is the ability we want to cast least to begin with
As I mentioned in the OP, a no fulmination earthshock (45% SP) will hit just as hard as a frost shock on live (42% SP), so spamming earthshock on the alpha is the same exact thing as spamming frost shock. I would say this is actually worse since when you are trying to bank fulmination stacks you deal less damage while moving
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