-Nerfed sustain damage outside of Ascendance via Echo Chamber going from 40% to 20%. The buff to Lightning Bolt (10%) will do absolutely nothing.
-Nerfed Ascendance extremely hard without shifting the damage out of it via buffs to Lightning bolt and Lava burst, or non Asc overloads which will lead to Ascendance feeling like a poor CD and sustain damage being even weaker than before when it already wasn’t strong.
-Pushes Ele away from Mastery and towards Haste, as the build will likely shift to a casted Lava burst build we’ve played before. This feels terrible because we just spent over a month gearing in this season and every ele went for Mastery, meaning now we will very likely have to buy new conq pieces, recraft pieces, and possibly have to catalyze different tier slots. The last piece of conquest most players needed to buy was bought this reset, meaning nobody has the conquest ready to change pieces over right away. This just feels really frusrating.
-Ele mastery is one of the coolest mastery designs in the game both visually and gameplay wise. It makes buttons feel so good to press when you are machine gunning Bolts and Bursts and Blasts. Please stop gutting it every time its strong.
-Ele doesn’t play Stormkeeper in pvp, but now it is likely pushed away from it even further due to PvE nerfs. Arc Discharge going from 2 CLs/Lightning bolts to 1 is a bad gameplay change imo. 2 felt really good and allowed for more instant casts, not a big fan of this change even if Stormbringer hasn’t seen play in pvp. This only makes it even less of a choice.
In fact it’s not 20% nerf. This 40% was out of existing 25% so it buffed Overload damage from 25% to 35%. Now it will be 30% so it’s not as bad as it seems.
Current form of Ascendance is stupid and should be in the game at all. It gives Shadowlands vibes. It should increase your damage but not by 100%.
Arguably you still played Haste. I’ve noticed that only NA players just geared fully into Mastery but EU players stayed with Haste. I’d say that it was predictable that Ascendance cannot stay like this. I also geared Versa/Haste instead.
I mean I get it but at the same time Ele Mastery is “toxic” because it makes you randomly kill people. There was a reason it was reworked and current Ascendance brought it back. It’s looks cool and feel satisfying as long as you’re not on the receiving end of the oneshot.
I agree here. Being forced into playing Stormbringer sucks because it feels meaningless if you play fire build.
Basically what happened is that this rework ended up being downgraded version of pre 11.0.5 Elemental version because we lost Skybreaker’s. With the nerfs current Ascendance will have as much impact as the previous one just our sustain will suffer.
Idk if I agree with ele mastery randomly making you kill people, it adds damage to your spells by just casting another weaker version of whatever you just cast, but most masteries in some way contribute to kills ie we’ve seen with ret before stacking mastery can lead to near 1 shots from spenders (not this patch but its happened before).
I also think a lot of specs have things that can just randomly do a lot of damage either from a buff that procs or 2-3x bites in a row critting, etc. However I think ele mastery can be tuned to a spot where it feels like it contributes actively to sustain damage with slight burst spikes.
I think Ascendance is mostly the problem at the moment and like I said I don’t mind that they nerfed it hard, it was necessary, but what I am afraid of is that no damage was really shifted into sustain or burst outside of asc.
I put some of the blame of a content creator who did a vid showing himself blowing up a bunch of non-geared players. At higher rated & geared matches the dps of ele is not as lethal.
Obviously an influencer did his job of influencing the Dev team. I often questioned why so many players have disdain for this person but I now see it. Trying to persuade a Dev team for one’s own personal bias is petty & toxic.
Damage is easily healable in pvp except when dampening is high but that applies to many dps specs as well. I have no idea how this conclusion for these nerfs were made.
I wouldn’t blame him to be fair. It’s his job and how he earns money for life. I’d rather blame PvE content creators who even though Ele was top tier spec in 11.0.2 cried that they only spam Lightning Bolts and Chain Lightnings.
They are the reason we got this crap rework first. It was meant to change the gameplay and with this tuning incoming the only thing that changes is that I got this useless Stormkeeper that is barely worth pressing unless these Lightning Bolts crit and that we lost uptime on Elementals due to lack of Skybreaker’s.
Current iterration of Ele is just stupid. I played a session yesterday where I killed few people randomly from 50% by simply pressing Earth Shock so it procced Ascendance.
I really don’t understand pve players like this, it’s a scripted boss encounter who cares if someone is doing more damage than you lol. Only place that actually matters is pvp
Your point is valid on creator needing content to make money but my issue is there are so many examples of a class being super strong that this spec is singled out and on low geared players.
To be honest my point is more of a symptom to the root cause and the byproducts of that point (Leadership at the top) have spilled all over the forums and I am guilty of it my self for pointing to the symptom(s).
To be fair I don’t like these clickbait videos either but I don’t blame them. If Blizzard did good job at reworking specs they wouldn’t have too much source to work on. Everyone knew that this rework will be stupid from the first day. Mastery procs dealing 150% damage with the way it scales on Ele and how many % you can get with little investment was just dumb. Everyone knew it will end up with nerf. My sustain was around 600 k pre 11.0.5 now it’s 450 k. After tuning it will be miserable.
Also team getting support… Bro we can blame it on Blizzard/Microsoft rushing the product but is it truely the case. Who in his right mind would decide to rework shaman within such short period of time knowing their lack of skills at tuning. The decision was bad at first. We cannot blame everything on bad management. Microsoft is also the owner of Age of Empires and the things they release recently is actually top quality and polished so I wouldn’t really blame them here.
I mean i like the gameplay its fun I just think with the incoming nerfs ele is going to feel quite bad because ascendance is all ele really has right now. Outside of Asc its damage is not anything amazing and you need to cast quite a bit, the only thing helping outside of pressing ascendance is getting asc procs lol.
And now stormbringer is nerfed because of pve and all of it is applying to pvp so this just hurt our ability to make an alternative build out of it potentially when it wasn’t even being played in pvp.
I think ele outside of asc/asc procs is fun too it just doesn’t do a lot, I wish they would have buffed ele outside of asc somehow instead of just destroying ascendance with nothing to compensate. They actually nerfed ele outside of Ascendance too so…yeah its kinda ridiculous.
They need to buff Flame Shock damage so we can have some passive pressure again and I’d like a choice nod for Stormkeeper for something useful as at the moment I’m not even pressing it because it’s worthless.
It does decent damage if you take Fury of the Storms, I know some r1/top players are liking it after trying it. Its just for sustain outside of burst windows I guess, which is fine but maybe Stormkeeper could have actually been buffed as well to help move some damage out of Ascendance.
I would’ve liked to see: -Echo chamber not nerfed at all
-Stormkeeper buffed a bit (Lighting bolt got a 10% buff which is laughable, could also be buffed a bit more)
-Lava burst/Lava surge LB buffed and ascendance LB could be adjusted to compensate if needed
-Flame shock ticking damage buffed a little
-Primordial Wave Lava bursts buffed a bit
All of this would shift damage out of Ascendance and into things we regularly use or want to use with short cooldowns to help our sustain damage and give us slight burst damage.