Is this being changed because we are going to generate more maelstrom with the changes? Both these talents are pretty important for elementalist. Why are they nerfing them like that? What’s the point in the 6/10 maelstrom generated by P-wave instead of the 10/10? Maybe there’s a case for lowering uptime on the Feral spirits, but the further P-wave nerfs???!?!?
It seems like they are pushing the storm build now by lowering the cooldown of Ascendance to 2 mins with minimal other nerfs. Don’t see how improvement to Totemic hero talents would make me want to play elementalist now.
Currently it perform good in PvP , not broken , but good. i can compete against fury and feral and busted class currently since last patch.
I’m able to be in the 150-200million damage per BG on ENH.
Yes they nerf Witch Doctor Ancestry … but i think the talent with wolf procs isn’t bad … at least from a PvP perspective it remove 1 GDC to cast and we still can get wolfs , YES it stays RNG … but we’re ENH … it’s all about RNG.
Ascendance 2 minutes is really huge again… from a PvP perspective.
I was able to hit 1 million DPS per second on the meter during ascendance window on Single Target PvP Dummy , and that’s outside of what counterstrike totem can do in a fight.
I been playing a lot of Totemic Recall for Counterstrike Totem to get 2X counterstrike Totem Up. its 200% damage reflected , and with Totemic Surge is up every 39 sec,
BG/Arena whatever i do currently 2x counterstrike totem most of the time its with tempest in the DPS chart.
I am dead certain that the point of both these nerfs is to bring Stormbringer in line with where they want Feral Spirit’s CDR to be due to Stormbringer being absolutely awash in MSW flow due to Static Accumulation.
The problem there, of course, is that Witch Doctor’s Ancestry is a universal talent that every Enhancement build takes, and Primordial Wave is already a shell of its former self not run by Stormbringer. They are nerfing around the actual culprit – Static Accumulation – in a way that disproportionately impacts all non-Stormbringer shaman in the course of bringing Stormbringer down.
This is a none issue for stormbringer elementalist as we dont go any further down the tree than PW.
I don’t know what they could do to make totemic competitive but it would have to be OP to compensate for dragging that clunky totem around.
As far as the witch doctor change, I’m currently in no short supply of mw stacks so wolves is up all the time. As our gear scales up it would very easily get to a point where wolves were not just up 100% of the time, but there could be multiple stacks of them up regularly.
I think this is probably it. The issue is some of us aren’t playing with stormbringer or Static Accumulation. So then they just further gimped P-wave. They’re trying to bring it into balance I think, but causing issues for other builds in the process. That 6/10 P-wave definitely negatively effects the flow of that build.
Well…they could make you not drag a clunky totem around, no? It’s a poor design in modern WoW. Maybe in the classic days, when there wasn’t as much mobility in the game. Trying to drag that thing around against ranged dps like mage is an exercise in futility.
I’m not trying to be rude or even sound rude when I say this, however-
Then it is still a none issue. You are already playing the spec incorrectly, it isn’t going to hamper your performance anymore than you already are by not using the “right” talents.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved being able to fire off PW and have instant 10 stack MSW, and it was weird at first with this new build. But once you get used to it, there is no shortage of MSW charges. You waste so many just because you can’t press everything all at once. We have so much of it, we don’t even wait until 8-10 stack anymore, we just go when we get 5, everything over that is a bonus.
I want to know what the correct way is. What am I missing and can you point me in that direction?
I haven’t heard this. I fire off 5 stacks sometimes and it just doesn’t do enough damage. Maybe if it crits. Is this just for elementalist(firing on 5 stacks)? How would this work with storm build, running legacy of the frost witch? Not that you take the primal maelstrom talent with that, but 5 stacks on storm as well or are you just talking about elementalist???
It’s not about a shortage of stacks often times, it’s finding it hard to consistently close the gap on ranged specs like frost mage and bm hunter. Having that 10 stacks allows you to open up on them. And if you’re running stormreaver, you have a heal in the back pocket as you attempt to close the gap and are getting blasted. It may not be the “correct” technical part of the rotation, but it’s kinda crafty and effective. I’m not just talking about arena play, but world pvp and bg’s.
But mainly, you take ascendance and its follow up points for the buff to lightning spells and the maelstrom return. You only take PW but not the following points.
Again, this is in reference to elementalist strombringer. I don’t play totemic or stormbringer storm spec.
Quick edit. I don’t use eleblast in single target. These guides say it is the spell to take, however I find it clunky, upon further sims, I actually lose 7k dps by switching to eleblast over tempest strikes. So I’ll keep tempest.
It’s the opposite I think, we are being pushed very heavily into Elementalist. I see storm build as pretty much dead at this point as far as competitiveness in M+/AOE. In those scenarios Stormbringer Elementalist just dominates it by a large amount in sims. The one kinda viable aoe storm build was Totemic and the upcoming changes that no longer exists. The only viable storm build is single target, so for those raid bosses with no or very very few adds it will make an appearance but nowhere else. The only big storm changes that would help was doomwinds AOE and maybe the new wolf one. Since storm would go alpha you would always get the wolf you want, if you can stack enough of them it might give it enough of a boost to close the gap, but that’s a very big gap.
Elementalist Stormbringer, at least it’s current form, is not drastically impacted by most of the changes. It doesn’t use ice strike/hailstorm so no issues there. It doesn’t take anything below Primordial wave so those changes don’t impact it. The biggest impact is going to be the change to Thorims Invocation, so it loses 20% off LB/CL, but reducing Ascendance cooldown by 1/3rd is a pretty big boost that might make up for it. The WDA nerf impacts all builds and we will just end up picking whichever statistically gives us the most MSW gen and damage.
Elementalist Totemic, the PWave change definitely impacts it. I think you’re going to see Pwave dropped and ascendance picked up. The biggest boost I’m seeing is the new sundering talent and reactivity. Those will definitely boost it’s AOE, but not sure it will be enough to make up the massive gap to stormbringer elementalist.
My concern at this point is that things are not well balanced and the hero talents are making Blizzards proclivity to nerf/buff the wrong thing even worse. Like Stormbringer Elementalist being OP and Blizzard nerfs Stormbringer even though stormbringer storm wasn’t OP. Likewise them nerfing a spec thing due to Stormbringer but that spec thing wasn’t OP with Totemic. I think a very real fear at this point is ending up with only 1 viable build. Currently it’s elementalist and the question is if it will be Stormbringer or Totemic. My bet is on totemic as I think stormbringer is going to get a nerf into the ground.
My comments are in regards to pve, I haven’t touched pvp as enhance yet this expac. I’ve done maybe 6 bgs, all as resto, because if I’m going to be under geared, I might as well heal instead of just being cannon fodder.
I haven’t even looked at pvp builds yet honestly, but I can see how the PW msw nerf would be bad.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I meant away from the elementalist build that I was playing, at least that’s what I was calling it. I use the build mostly that goes down to primal maelstrom and splintered elements and then takes feral spirits as well. Along with the totemic hero talents. I hate how they try and steer you towards a certain build. Like what they do with the tier set bonus’s as well. Where either the 2 or 4 piece tier bonus all but forces you into the build if you want to benefit from it.
I don’t feel like they should have touched Primal maelstrom from 10/10 to 6/10. They’re ensuring that nobody is even going to go down that side of the talent tree as P-wave is even more mangled now.
I think they’re nerfing the wrong thing in an attempt to “balance” the different builds. You touched on it here as well:
There’s also this from a poster above, which also points at the issue as well: