That isn’t what they were saying though, the 30% comment wasn’t targeted at Primordial Wave, but at the specc as a whole. Or at least that’s how it reads.
You’re correct in assuming that PWave is dead in m+, although Eye of the Storm is probably a pretty poor talent with how Deeply Rooted Elements works now.
My bad, was a late night, and I am equally frustrated about the PWave changes.
I’d be genuinely interested in the data though, since it doesn’t really match what I’ve seen so far.
I am positive this happened because Ele didnt actually have a dev assigned to it. Ele had very few issues heading into 11.1 ptr since it got a great rework, so the dev working on it was probably working on a diff spec. Then the enh dev made the change to keep prim wave the same across both enh and ele which is why the developer note was literally copy/pasted from enhance even though it made no sense for ele. There are no full ‘class’ developers, enh dev can work on ret pally and frost mage as well while never working on ele.
Thats the only thing that explains what happened here. Prim wave never got buffed a single time for ele and that was the entire point of the change, that it would do the same damage as before but in 1 button press instead of 2. Never got a maelstrom gen increase either to make up for the loss of lava burst gen. There was just no dev looking at it and the enh dev may not have wanted to touch ele past that or maybe wasnt even aware of what it did to ele.
Not an excuse, just a possible explanation. What they did to prim wave for ele was criminal and they should have spent time reverting it or reworking prim wave side of the tree to make this work. Threads were going all throughout ptr.
Literally the entire thing could’ve been fine if they just- didn’t make the ability the same across enh and ele.
Honestly, even with the changes making it kinda smooth with enh, I’m still gonna miss the sheer power trip of comboing into shooting lightning at the entire pack in one wave.
Yeah I despise the changes.
Honestly, I want them to change Primordial wave back to how it was – BEFORE.
It feels like utter garbage now, whereas before it felt like it truly rocked the core vibes of ‘Shaman’ class-fantasy and felt immensely empowering – Not just in the literal sense, but in the emotional sense too, it was such a cool & fun spell … Just doesn’t feel the same anymore 
This!! 
Absolutely —
Percent! 
Right side capstone talents are dead bc of Pwave change!! Awful awful unnecessary change!
It’s kind of a combination of both, primordial wave’s damage ITSELF (the damage primordial wave does in its tool tip) is ~200% of what it was pre-patch, but now it requires an extra GCD to activate, which is a tiny damage reduction. The interactions primordial wave had with everything else and enabled, is what largely reduced the damage of elemental shaman’s kit.
The maelstrom generation, the lava bursts being cast at all targets with flame shock on them, and the haste given from “splintered elements” - now that primordial wave is essentially useless outside of niché scenarios (its looking like it won’t even be used in M+ at this point) and you likely won’t take it in season 2 in lieu of better talent options, which causes you to lose splintered elements, the damage elemental does is going to nose-dive.
Agree with the general assessment there. The Maelstrom generation in particular can really be felt.
But I do think the 30% thing is quite a bit off, considering we do have talents we can pivot into. The math I’ve seen has PWave accounting for roundabout 7% in Single Target scenarios before the patch through additional Maelstrom, Ancestors damage etc.
The pivot into Charged Conduit and the talents affecting elementals for mythic plus will probably make it so the specc is still on the stronger side when it comes to that content, but for raid (especially the upcoming one with a lot of spread cleave), having a button that you wouldn’t ever press if your Hero Talents didnt force you to, feels really bad.
And they definitely need to adress this sooner rather than later.
It’s really not though, you’re essentially going to be casting way less lava bursts, using GCDs to keep flameshock up… casting flameshock once every ~15 seconds adds up over a ~5min fight - roughly 20 GCDs added to the entire rotation, if you assume 1.2sec GCD, that’s 24 seconds of wasted time for something that was already baked into a spell and could’ve been spent casting abilities that hit 5-50x as hard. As well as way less earth shocks/elemental blasts (depending on which you play) & earthquakes and those are some of your hardest hitting abilities. I’d argue that they’re the core aspects of your kit as ele shaman.
I think you’re giving charged conduit more credit than it deserves… charged conduit is a 2.5% damage gain to lightning rod, it makes lightning rod do 12% (12.5% but not shown cuz bliz) instead of the base 10%. It’s not even really worth taking IMO because even IF your lightning bolt/chain lightning hit for 5mil (for arguments sake) that would equate to 500,000 damage from lightning rod baseline and 625,000 with charged conduit.
If I use numbers as a 636ilvl ele shaman, my average lightning bolt non-crit is ~150,000 and my average crit is ~640,000. That means I would gain 15,000 damage from non-crits from lightning rod, and 18,750 damage with charged conduit talented, a 3,750 damage increase.
For crit strikes, on average I would get 64,000 damage per lightning rod, and 80,000 per lightning rod with charged conduit talented, a 16,000 damage increase.
Really not in the mood to test the elementals and what not, but based off previous meters, their damage is negligible compared to the amount of damage you’d get from using more earth shocks/elemental blasts & earthquakes on top of the haste gain from splintered elements.
I guess we’ll just have to see what happens. As of right now, my shaman is going to be a dedicated healer with no dps spec, and my 4th alt. I have literally ZERO inclination to play him as dps this season with this god-awful change.
I mean we have the sims for the upcoming season. And the numbers aren’t amazing, but not terrible either. Losing 30% damage would mean we’d be quite literally below tanks. Which isn’t the case.
Partly because our upcoming 2-set bonus is actually, really, really strong and one of the reasons why elementals gain huge value once you have it, since they’re gonna be active 90% of the time. In raids that is. Damage of our elementals has so far been fairly lackluster mostly because we’re not actively talenting into the talents that make them more powerful and because the uptime is mostly average. Which, again, will change once you have 2-set.
For m+, Charged conduit has a few more interactions than you give it credit here. For one, you can have more than one Lightning Rod active at a time, and Conduit increasing the duration makes that even more so the case. There’s also Tempest applying and working with Lightning Rod.
Brother, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree here…
I’m honestly not going to rehash all of the math I’ve spent hours doing for yours or anyone else’s benefit, I’m not sure where you’re getting the 90% active time on elementals from, but I’m gonna press “X for doubt” - considering how strong and broken that would be - I’d assume ~25-35% uptime on tier bonus, as with mostly everything blizzard does involving procs.
Again, we’ll see what happens. Until then, I’m just over it and shelving the possibility of dps shaman PROBABLY until next xpac/season when bliz pulls their heads out of their rectums.
Like I said, we have the simulations and that is also the result of playing the specc on the PTR.
The sims are also public information, so it’s not exactly a secret what stuff like elemental uptime will look like.
Where? I’d love to see these.
go to your local classcord? and ask for it?? heck even sim craft rn i think its updated
Links aren’t allowed apparently, but as someone else has already said, class discords can usually point you in the right direction
simulationcraft org/reports/TWW2_Raid.html
so ya 93 uptime on storm elly. thats actually kinda insane with farseer
Not buying it lol… that’d be broken, I’m going to assume this is a bug and will be corrected in the future. There’s no point in coding a 93% uptime over just giving us a 100% uptime elemental pet (like hunters where they could copy/paste most of the coding from and do less coding) with slightly less damage.
Regardless of any of that, the change to primordial wave needs fixed. I really don’t care outside of that.
its not broken, tcers dont make sims with bugs in mind. this is the average possible uptime of having elemental elly up. alot of tiersets makes your “burst button” into consistency uptime buffs as a way for interaction and coolness factor
its supposed to make tiersets cool. if you make it 100% basline then that would be kinda lame from a tierset design standpoint.
idk, everytime i peak into the forums here or in reddit. theres alot of people who hated pwave. blizzard often caters to their biggest base aka casuals. im not a shammy person to discuss if this change is good or bad. nor do i care. i just want to say that sims are accurate most of the time.
The damage nerf from the PW change is substantial. Its not just a change in how the spec plays, but a pretty big nerf.
For this scenario I will use rough numbers but you will get the idea. With the old PW you could pop Ascendance and put FS on 6 different targets, then you would hit your main target with PW, and finally you would cast a Lava Burst at your target which would trigger 6 more Lava Bursts at 85% damage. With the new PW you could pop Ascendance and put FS on 6 different targets, then you would hit those 6 targets with PW, and finally hit your main target with a Lava Burst (No extras).
So how much of a nerf is this. Lets say the old PW hit for 50k and the new one hits for 100k and lets say Lava Burst hits for 600k and the 85% hit for 510k
The old PW would do (50k + 600K + (6 * 510k)) = ~3.7 Mil and that doesn’t include maelstrom generation or Erupting Lava damage.
The new PW would do ((6 * 100k) + 600k) = 1.2 Mil and no real maelstrom generated and no real Erupting Lava damage.
With a 30 sec cooldown its a really big nerf.
In solo shuffles I am consistantly coming in last in damage and by a bunch. I just played one where the top damage was a Frost DK who did 450 mil and I did 250 mil. With the old PW there is no way I would almost be doubled by a Frost DK.
This change will make Ele virtually unplayable in both PvP and PvE. Its huge and the fact Blizz hasn’t said boo about it is laughable at best.
To put this into perspective:
As Farseer, you reduce the cooldown of your elemental every time your spawn an Ancestor.
In practice, this pushes the cooldown from 150 seconds to roughly 90 seconds.
Now the tier set makes it so that you have a random chance to summon an elemental, and you also spawn one when you press Ascendance or your procc Deeply Rooted Elements. If you already have an elemental out when you would spawn one, it gets extended in its duration. Which comes out at a bit over 90% uptime.
This also isn’t the first time Ele Shaman had a tier set that made elementals basically be up permanently, so there is precedent for it.
Totally agree on PWave though.