With the remove of control of lava pvp talent. We are giving up the increased tick rate on flame shock entirely. Which is an incredibly big deal for pvp.
They put the dispell protection baseline but overlooked the second part. The entire spec in arena is built on flameshock.
Secondly, the stormkeeper nerfs. ~15% net damage nerf is a lot (I realize we will get it for free every 40 seconds with tier set) coupled with less overloads from surge of power is a huge deal. And makes the rotation more painful and you will need master of the elements to not lose dps. Currently you can:
charge stormkeeper > lava burst (master of elements proc) > earthshock into stormkeeper stack one
After the change you’ll be losing damage and required to lavaburst again after the earthshock to get another master of the elements (for optimal, not game breaking but feels very bad)
Secondly, earthshock is losing a lot of damage, losing the tierset bonus is a big deal. Currently the ability doesn’t hit particularly hard to being with. But you press the button a ton and you get to spread surge of power flame shocks (nerfed in 10.1 tick rate) and spam procs of lava burst.
Feels like we’re losing a lot of killing power. Stormkeeper and earthshock is typically your killing blows. And they’re both nerfed by a lot. You can do 40k dps and if nothing dies it doesn’t matter.
Secondly the dev team, has invested a lot development time into making a hardcast lavaburst spec viable in pvp. This is completely useless for arena. You will not cast any with a jungle or tsg or any melee cleave Zugging you.
Don’t make ele only viable in caster cleave dampeners.
Also why are they buffing Ele survivability vs casters (seasoned winds) I promise you Ele does need help living against casters. It needs help getting W keyd by melee cleaves and rogues. I understand we get burrow. But how about we make earth grab 30 seconds again?
Im afraid that a big damage reduction in killing power abilities and reduced flame shock tick rate, will make ele like wod s3! Really good
But nothing dies so it doesn’t actually matter
Part of me says they should keep both talents but make them exclusive to each other, ie you could either take Control or Volcanic but not both. This would reflect the dual playstyles that Elemental enjoys outside of PvP.
Considering how much and how often they have to tweak, add, drop, adjust, and just generally change PvP abilities, they could spin off an entire expansion focused on PvP with fully fleshed out talent trees with all the abilities that have been pruned so far.
Agree. Also it’s a little annoying that you essentially have no flex talents. You’re mandatory grounding, burrow (currently control of lava), then sky fury (or shield mastery).
Woulda really like them to make one talent called totem lord or something. And selecting it just unlocks a package of totems, skyfury, grounding, static field.
Then you could actually pick one of these niche flavor talents
I agree with this statement - volcanic surge needs to cause lava burst to hit like wrath lava burst in s5 with no resilience for it to be worth anything in retail’s meta. That’s a bit of a reflection on the retail meta overall - so much micro cc, lockdown, etc. making casting itself not a worthwhile tradeoff for the risks it entails.
As for the other concerns, I think a lot of it depends. There’s a few options in terms of builds going forward. The stormkeeper nerfs smart quite a bit, but the damage increases we see elsewhere (to normalize from the crit dmg change) seem to be keeping our damage pretty solid.
Doing some testing on ptr, I was lucky to get a few games this weekend, and it felt like ele was still slapping, that includes into duels. Burrow is quite game changing, IF you can preemptively use it. That’s a big if, and we still get chunked down in stuns.
As for utility, if we were able to get static + unleash + burrow we’d be nigh impossible for melee to damage.
If rot comps miraculously make a comeback, ele will be pumping in 10.1. Otherwise, I think we need an MS like a warrior to turn our damage into kill pressure, but that’s the same for anything that’s not a warrior, dk or hunter in 10.1 most likely.
Side note - the MotE proc gets used on the earth shock before utilizing stormkeeper stack #1, so you lose the 20% damage anyway to gain Surge of Power. More testing needed here with details to see if it’s worth the one extra overload from Surge, or if MotE for flat 20% is better (Surge still seems miles better), but the earth shock dmg is being nerfed without current tier.
Try it with volcanic surge and the talent from
The primordial wave tree that buffs lavaburst damage by 25%every 3 seconds after you use primordial wave. And with wind speakers lava resurgence.
And tell me
If you can
Lay someone’s soul to waste in 2 spells
The talent that makes Earth shock 50 maelstrom needs to be a choice node. Option 2 makes it cost 60 (or 70?) and hit harder.
Having the option to self tune our spender costs would make balancing Maelstrom generation way easier patch to patch, tier set to tier set, and at various secondary stat levels.
Instead of a fixed point we would have a short scale we could self manage via the talent to make it easier to tune.
Choice 1) keeps current maelstrom reduction and values just like live
Choice 2) cuts all maelstrom generation by 66%, earthshock is guaranteed to do 15-20% of casters healthpool as damage and cannot crit.
I also had a crazy idea that would be ultra fun. Remove lava burst from surge of power abilities, make the CD reduction apart of the fire ele talent baseline.
And earth shock to surge of power. So when you cast earthshock, your next earthshock within 15 seconds turns into elemental blast