Thank you for sharing this. So the highest DPS Elemental Sims are currently pointing to Farseer and only casting Lightning Bolt? No lava bursts, no icefury, no elemental blast, not even a flame shock?
Just Lightning Bolt, Primordial Wave on CD, Lava Burst after Primordial Wave, summon Storm Elemental on CD and use Stormkeeper for more Lightning Bolts?
Jesus.
Basically. You want to sync SK and still do the SK + SoP combo after doing Pwave + Ancestral Spirit into Lava Burst since Grandpas cast every time you do. It’s very dulled down and on the same level of Season 3/4 meatball spam.
Stormbringer Lighting Builds have a bit more meat on the bones but still alot of Chain Lightning + Earthquake spam broken up by LMT and Pwave.
Don’t you just want to cast SK asap to benefit from the FoL cdr, or do we pool our MS to do the combo in anticipation of SK coming up again?
AoE yeah, but single target you should naturally have enough for every SK window and Ideally it should be synced with every AS+Pwave window. If you get it desynced then yeah you just fire it on CD provided you’ve pooled enough. But doing Keys as long as you pool at the end of a pack you should be fine.
For FOL maybe they change the talent where it adds a nature CDR to Surge of Power or function the same way but keep it separate from Surge.
Or even make it where if we weave we get the reduction with each cast. So back to back LBs would not give your CDR but using any other attack spell then LB would cause the CDR. Make the CDR 2 secs instead of one so we don’t fully lose the benefit of it.
This in effect would bring in the benefit of using Lb after LvB or ES, both of which currently offer a bonus for casting LB/CL right after.
FoL is fine, provided there is an intensive to spend. That incentive shouldn’t be explicitly tied to FoL because we don’t want to load so much power into a talent. If, down the road, they nerf the amount of CDR given without compensating in other spots, then the lighting again falls apart. Meanwhile, if our spenders are just good on their own, it becomes much easier to fine-tune the spec. There are already incentives to weave within the talent tree seen in MotE, Storm Frenzy, Rod, and SoP; the issue is that the damage output of using those spells to facilitate that is lower compared to the benefit spamming Lighting Bolt to get CDR on SK, Pwave, AS, and Storm Ele. If you’re spending more and weaving, you’re not getting as much CDR, so it balances out, provided the damage is made up by the spenders and weave facilitating abilities.
FoL in its current state is fine on its own, it’s just the rest of the kit is too weak, causing Lighting Bolt spam to be the most optimal form of gameplay. If they find the spec is too powerful after buffing Earth Shock/Elemental Blast and Lava Burst, you have Lighting Bolt/Chainlightning as a tuning knob to adjust the damage output, which is a good thing.
Having a simple tuning knob is something Ele needs, as seen with Fire builds where the only way to nerf them is to nerf multiple abilities, which led to this current situation. House of cards balancing is the thing to avoid.
It’s in a really bad state. The DPS is good but the gameplay is terrible.
I think they should aim for all builds to be weaver/all elements. A lightning build would take SK, Storm Ele, and spend SoP on LB. A fire build goes fire Ele, spends SoP on LvB. Etc. So the builds are closer together with more minor differences. This is how Enh is done.
Two totally different builds is not possible to balance.
I don’t know.
I found a build I like that uses a small mix and works well as it pumps atm.
Will wait until release if it stays the same.
Until then I will wait.