Ele Primordial Wave is not worth taking and is bad

Classes Shaman
1

This change is just utterly useless and makes the spec 100% less fun to play. It was so satisfying to see lava burst cast multiple times to every target affected by flame shock…

I was maining Elemental shaman for the entirety of Season 1, and now I’m pretty sure I’ll probably just go resto and make him my 3rd/4th alt and barely touch him.

I’m certain there’s some desire by devs to make you take liquid magma totem or something and force you to use it to apply multiple flame shocks, but outside of that, flame shock being on a base 6 second CD and not having primordial wave apply flame shock or, fire lava bursts at those affected by flame shock, makes this insanely clunky and just undesirable to play.

There’s no real incentive to even take the primordial wave talent at this point(or play elemental at all), because even “Splintered Elements” haste doesn’t make up for the loss of applying flame shock and sending lava burst toward all enemies affected by flame shock. In order to be even ON PAR with the previous build, the haste benefit from “Splintered Elements” would have to be at least 20% base and 10% per target.

Almost nothing was done to make up for this change and massive damage loss. Making primordial wave hit for 100% more is laughable, as it still hits like a wet noodle and does nothing but give you a guaranteed free lava burst, that ONLY hits 1 target.

On top of all that, lighting bolt was given a travel time? For what? A prettier animation? No thanks. I’ll take the old animation over travel time any day of the week. Has nobody on the dev team ever actually SEEN lightning? Why does chain lightning remain instantaneous if lightning bolt has a travel time? Is there no consistent thought process here? Or is it just “hurrrr braindead changes cuz we need some kind of filler changes for elemental shaman” because literally anyone who plays elemental shaman would rather NOTHING have been changed in lieu of what we received with this patch.

I think the main goal here is to drive people to play enhancement… and I don’t want to play enhancement, even if you made it do 10x the dps of elemental, I wouldn’t play it. I don’t like playing melee. If I wanted to play melee? I’d make a character that’s specifically melee.

If you wanted to nuke Elemental Shamans into the ground? You could’ve just removed Elemental as a spec, or made shamans have a tank spec like people are asking for (not me, I think tank shaman is silly) - that would’ve been preferable to what we currently have. As it is right now? It’s not worth playing until the primordial wave changes are reverted, or re-worked.

Did none of you learn from the mistakes made in BFA? Where completely nuking certain classes/specs lead to people jumping ship from WoW?

I guarantee, unless there are changes made, elemental shaman will be the LEAST PLAYED spec for the entirety of season 2.

16 Likes
2

I really wish they hadn’t touched elemental, it felt SO good with the old primordial wave.
PLEASE if they do nothing else, revert the primordial wave change (at least ele’s, it seems like it was good for enh)
I don’t get why they changed lightning bolt, and I don’t understand why we lost ancestral guidance.

9 Likes
3

Agree on all of this. I forgot to include ancestral guidance though…

They took away ancestral guidance because it was near-useless in resto spec as people were using it in conjunction with ascendance.

They claim they want to pull back on passive healing in lieu of intentional use of GCDs, and that would be cool and all, if healing surge actually healed for more as elemental… and there’s literally no real point in casting it on anyone else in a party/group unless its a dire emergency. I’ve done that maybe 2 times in M+ for the entirety of the season. Even when I was using ancestral guidance during M+ or raids, It wouldn’t do THAT much healing that it was some sort of “crutch” - it was just a nice little filler for high aoe-damage phases, like 2nd boss in The Dawnbreaker to kind of help out your healer a little bit. Anyone in appropriate level gear for the M+ they’re doing doesn’t actually NEED a shaman using ancestral guidance during those phases, but it’s a nice thing to have.

I feel like they watched those youtube videos of people clearing M+ 15-20’s and made the changes based on that style of play… when maybe 1% of players actually do that with shamans.

1 Like
4

new lightning bolt animation is awesome and way more like the old one which also had a travel time

I’m glad they nerfed the meta stuff cuz I want fotm rerollings off my class now now now

1 Like
5

The old one didn’t have travel time, unless you’re talking about years and years ago…

They didn’t just “nerfed the meta stuff” - they completely gutted elemental. You’re going to see ~30% damage decrease. People are going to FOTM regardless of what happens, they always do and have for the past 20+ years I’ve been playing video games.

Completely dumpstering a spec because of that isn’t justifiable and never will be.

The only thing that’s going to happen here is those FOTM people are going to swap to enhance, as it received some decent buffs, when it was already doing pretty well.

6

Ele wasn’t dumpstered but it should be emphasized at how bad this change was in a qol standpoint. I don’t care if elemental is doing 150% damage in the and new primordial wave is one shotting raid bosses I hate new primordial wave just off of how it feels to play. This means I now hate farseer which was not true a few days ago, or months ago even. As far as damage goes it looks like ele will be just fine, if its brought up outside of shaman spaces people will cry about how we’re meta and don’t have a right to complain, but the change to primordial wave for ele in particular was a change of the worst kind. It outright made the spec worse to play with 0 benefit, a waste of work on blizzards end and a waste of time on the players end.

I don’t even care about the loss of AG in comparison. I liked primordial wave and felt the ability was basically in its ideal state after the most recent lava burst proc change to it. I haven’t been as annoyed by a change since the last time the removed mind sear.

2 Likes
7

WHAT?!

Omg, dont get me started on this

8

Interesting. You got any data on that? Or are you just making stuff up?

9

ill will enjoy being the only special snowflake ele doing low damage like i have for 90% of wows lifespan thank you

10

Pretty straight forward, assuming you have 6 targets with Flame Shock on them you would Primordial your target for about 100k and then hit all 6 targets with a 600k Lava Burst. So 100k + (6 x 600k) = 3.7 mil. The new Primordial will hit all 6 targets for about 200k and then your target with a Lava Burst for 600k. So (6 x 200k) + 600k = 1.8 mil. Every 30 you will literally do less than 50% of the damage you use to do.

This to me isn’t the worst part though, the new Primordial just plays like crap. The design is so bad it probably isn’t worth doing anymore. I can see most pvp people just specing into Echo of the Elementals, Primal Elementalist, and Eye of the Storm.

3 Likes
11

I agree. They should revert these changes. Rotation feels clunky and unattractive… And give us AG back! The healing totem does like nothing!

3 Likes
12

Ok, I just tried Primordial Storm for Enhancement for the first time, and I am sorry it is just repulsive how Ele got treated this patch compared to Enhance.

If you havent yet I encourage you to see Pwave talents for Enhance my fellow Ele mains. Not only does it baseline do 6x the damage, Primordial Storm talent is soooooo cool, and it AoEs (5 target mainly). It is CRIMINAL what has been done, not only to make Enhance have a much more fleshed out Pwave concept but to all make Ele’s significantly worse.

I don’t think I will hard swap to Enhance but I certainly don’t like what I am seeing, it may just be a single talent but the difference in care for each spec is staggering. A tuning pass on Pwave for Ele specifically is most definitely required. Pwave will have to do 10x the damage to justify its clunky design, and thats not even mentioning Enhance will always be able to Flame Shock spread and get more damage easily than Ele can HOPE for.

4 Likes
13

I think the funniest part is that primordial storm for enh is good enough to use as is and people will want to use it, while for ele we have an entire hero talent tree stapled to our newly gutted primordial wave and we’ll be forced to use it just to make use of the hero talent that enables us to do single target damage.

2 Likes
14

Just played a couple Solo Shuffles the dps nerf is insane. This is really bad I don’t see us being competitive at all.

2 Likes
15

Revert Pwave or buff the hell out of it!!! Save Elemental Shaman!!!

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16

I’m convinced that whoever made this change only plays enh and not ele because no ele player would agree to make the rotation more clunky.

Same issue with AG. Removing it and giving us a tiny totem buff is a terrible compensation and needs to be addressed asap.

They listened to MM hunters about their pets. I hope they do the same with us.

Revert it all blizz!!

4 Likes
17

Been PvPing for the last couple of hours it is so bad. In shuffles I just had a Feral do 550 mil for all the rounds while I did 250 mil. Not even half of his damage and my rotation / talents are the same as pre 11.1.

Just unsubscribed this is such crap it isn’t worth playing. I don’t see them reverting it back. We would need some serious damage increases to compensate for the nerf and I don’t see that happening either. The spec is dead in both pvp and pve.

1 Like
18

I love when people on the forums get snarky, as if I’m just pulling numbers out of the nether, lmao… Not even dignifying you with a response.

Yea, basically, Enhance gets insta-cast healing surges that heal for more. AG isn’t AS useful for them, it was useful, don’t get me wrong, just not as much so.

1 Like
19

Its not just the talent Primordial Storm, even they though the literally designed it so it works with pretty much any hero talent/spec talent combo. They also changed Molten Assault to make Lava Lash spread to 5 targets instead of 4 to account for Pwave not applying it. They removed Primal Maelstrom to fit Primordial Storm and baked it into Pwave it self. For Stormbringer they made it so Pwave also applies Lightning Rod so it still had that niche for Ele.

For Resto they removed it and then reworked them to account for it.

They straight up ignored Ele and the changes outside of the visuals (which I’m going to assume the balancing team are not involved) and the 400% buff to HST (lol). All other changes are essentially mirrors of the other specs. Reading the patch notes and thinking how Ele was literally bugged for all of raid tests across builds shows that. It clicked after I was seeing so many new people come into Earthshrine asking if Pwave is bugged and then seeing that the note saying Pwave is disabled or enabled based on if you have Flameshocks on targets or not is only under the Enhance section but not the Ele section.

We literally need the same level of changes that Enhance regarding Pwave, not just a tuning pass. Pwave doing more damage does nothing to fix the Maelstrom generation loss, it does nothing to fix how our CDs will desync from Ascendance due to how our openers work now, it does nothing to the number of piss GCDs we will need to spend on Flame Shock management, it does nothing to fix the fact that this ruined what 2 target and spread cleave we had left unless we talent out of something to take LMT, it does nothing to make it viable to play in Stormbringer as an alternative for those who do not wish to play EotGS, it does nothing to help make Farseer much more viable in AoE and M+. It’s not just the damage, it was what it’s fundamentally did to our gameplay.

And if Enhance can get 1/4 of their rework dedicated to specifically to Pwave then I think we could get that to instead of just increasing a number.

4 Likes
20

O agree on all of that, though I haven’t tried Resto yet so was not sure how it worked there.

It’s just absurd that Pwave, a talent that is a bit hit or miss for players, was overhauled so disproportionately well not just in damage but also new and improved ability for one spec, yet at the same time it was made actively worse in terms of functionality and damage for another.

The problems you explained, and ring true, all compound from the pain points, some existing for multiple expansions. I don’t think we will see a dramatic shift, but I do feel like a Pwave change, revert and/or buff is more in the cards for Ele in the near future.