I’ve seen screens from PTR - it deals 200 k after changes. So it feels way worse.
You will rather play Farseer. Stormbringer is good to mess around in BGs not in arenas.
I don’t like it as it makes me play Mastery instead of Haste and Ele with long globals feels miserable.
So as I said we are back to the entry point. From 25% Overloads back to 65% overloads with the talent.
In PvP there is literally 0 Flexibility. Stormkeeper makes you take Power of the Maelstrom, Echo Chamber and Ascendance. Earthshatter is a must due to set bonus. So there isn’t much choice. In M+ maybe.
3 min. CDs are usually bad in PvP because most of def CDs are shorter CD so it’s rather meh once people start pressing their buttons.
That’s exactly the point. Why did you make the first rework to then go back to the entry point. I liked the fact that we have to hardcast more and use other spells like Icefury more as Ele. Windspeaker’s gone and mastery gone means that there are no longer random kills by Ele because he was lucky and DRE procced with a mastery proc but I see we are back to the same place.
I don’t believe Affliction will stay in the current state. You don’t have to be genius to figure out that Chaos Bolt hitting for 700-800 k and instant Shadow Bolt for Soul Harvester for 1 mln+ aren’t right (I’ve seen 1,7 mln already) considering one spec has dispel protection and other doesn’t. There is 0 chance that Affliction won’t get nerfs when the season starts. I expect people to roll Hellcaller after.
The CDR from spamming lightning has been the first time in decades I’ve played elemental shaman and didn’t feel like I was playing handicapped version of mage. It actually brought defensive and mobility CDs in line with mage specs. It put into clarity how badly all shaman defensives need to have their CDs drastically reduced.
When that’s gone Elemental will just go back to being a bargain bin mage with
F tier defensives and much worse mobility.
It’s also shifting huge amounts of consistent damage into a 2 minute CD, something that is almost always punishing because pug groups don’t pull around CDs. If you don’t get good value out of your Ascendance your damage is going to crater.
Furthermore it’s basically relegated our elementals to being low uptime buff bots for our Ascendance window, which feels bad. If that’s what we’re doing just get rid of all the now useless elemental nodes and just bake it right into Ascendance.
I will miss skybreaker fiery demise, always find ele shaman’s interaction with its summoned elementals unique among other classes more dedicated to pets. It feels like you are invoking them by appealing. Spread fire around to get the fire elemental out quicker, spam lightning more to get the storm elemental out quicker, I like that dynamic alot.
Maybe we will see it return as a nerfed form? Or maybe they can revert some of the CDR nerfs they gave to surge of power and Farseer.
For pvp on ptr dueling someone in conquest gear, I was testing the burstiness with the farseer spec. Using fire ele - storm keeper - prim wave - frost shock - blood lust + trinket + lvb - ascendance - lb - ns +lvb - lb - es - lvb spam I would kill the guy and be at 1.3-1.4 mil dps by the time he died. Sounds good, but on live using volcanic surge pvp talent and in honor gear I literally do the same dps during the same burst window.
It wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t great considering it’s the same dmg as current honor gear, but I will say ascendance feels kind of bad to use because there’s a cd on lava burst during it unlike live where you can just spam it for the duration… There are times where you literally can’t cast it for like 4 seconds during ascendance so you basically have to chain lightning or something else. Kind of a dumb change.
It’s all pve changes of course. The goal appears to have been to mix up the lightning vs. fire structure of the tree to muddy the waters a bit. Also, set up abilities to be more M+ friendly by default regardless of the build chosen. Things like icefury cleaving is a good indicator of this.
Ele was absolutely pumping in M+ anyway, so this just feels like mostly flavor and QoL changes there. The PvP stuff is very much not even thought about.
I can see a lava / lightning hybrid build working somewhat well. I’m pretty cynical about the whole thing and can see ele just falling off substantially. Resto is stupid strong in pvp at least.
I think they allocated more damage into Elementals and frost shock which is boring af. Take all of that and dump it into Lava Burst Es LB.
But also ascendance didn’t really buff up damage that much anyway in terms of per lava burst, and with the pvp nerfs it makes mastery deal 52% of overload damage but in ascendance you’re getting 2 overloads per proc.
Overall it’s a buff to lava burst if lava burst alone is tuned nicely, but Id rather them lessen the nerf is pvp and keep the elemental and frost shock buff.
And storm keeper trying to be forced on us can f right off. I don’t want to cast a gimmick CD in pvp
My sentiments exactly. The current lava burst tuning, especially with us being limited to max 3x charges (with lower lava surge proc) feels meh. Not bad, not great, just meh.
I think they’re trying to get back to the start of DF playstyle where everyone ran stormkeeper + lava burst. The thing about this in DF s1 - depending on if the shaman had power of the maelstrom procs: it would absolutely obliterate you on a 1 min cd. With all the nerfs to stormkeeper damage, hp buffs, etc. now it feels like a predictable thing where every weakaura will set off an airhorn and it’ll only hit for 20-30% of hp. Stormkeeper being a terrifying/lethal cd is nice, bring it back if they go this route.
Really not a big fan of them prepping Ele like this for the expansion, then completely changing it.
It wasn’t perfect, but talents complimented each other and there was a flow. Now they seem to be undoing that? And not really replacing it with a new, better flow, from what is shown so far.
FoL, Unrelenting Calamity and Skybreaker changes makes me want to hit my head against a wall.
Actually being able to solo stuff and have cooldowns up FEELS REALLY GOOD. Having to WAIT to play the game, does not.
Wait why lower lava burst procs? Are you just meaning lower stats (haste) at the start of an expansion?
Idk, it looks cool, I like Lightning but I’m tired of the bloating too.
Fire Ele
Flame shock(s)
PW
Hex Healer
Storm keeper
Dump storm keeper 1
And 2
Ascendance
Frost shock
Lava Burst
That’s not including if you get cc’d, kicked or if you get los’d, or need to root or pop a defensive in between all of that.
10 globals before you get to play the game instead of button mashing. It’s not like they’re all so strong you don’t need to line them up every time.
And my understanding of their balance is…
If you can easily obtain a talent like storm keeper frost shock buff it will absolutely mean they have to tune something down to balance it and that will most likely be lava burst, the whole reason I’ve like Ele.
So imagine just for the sake of illustration Lava Burst hits for 10k baseline, there’s the Frost Shock talent so now that 10k has to come down some, primordial wave knock the baseline lava burst down so more, fire element is buffed now knock it down some more… The idea of modifiers just keeps going and now base lava burst does nothing. You essentially waiting for all the awkward CDs to line up to have your full “10k” lava burst. Inflation, the value of something must go down when value with something else is added.
And like I said I’m not for 10x1.5 (I know with no haste, can but regardless haste isn’t going to make it 5 seconds) around 15 seconds of globals.
Was going to make ele my main, but had a feeling it was playing to good to be true at the end of the last exp. So I held off. Seems I made the right play to go fury
Look, I’m a huge fan of Lightning, and I believe it will be possible to play a Lightning-focused build without casting Lava Burst, except when Ascendance procs. The Weaver remains viable, but honestly, the build that’s dead is Fire, and you can see that because now even the Fire build has to spam a lot of Lightning.
Gotta say, I’m pretty disappointed. For many, many years I’ve tried not to take the stance of “Blizzard hates shamans”, but it sure does feel that way.
They really roped me in and got my money with “shamans are fun now” just to release this garbage patch notes a few days later. It’s why i stopped buying/supporting blizzard games years ago. “Give war within a chance” they said. nope. i’m out again. truly trash class design.
Remove all the dungeons/raids too at this point and just create a box with 1000 mobs that you zone into so you can face roll your keyboard with no cc or thought because that’s all the game is now anyway.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but at first glance (since the PTR isn’t up yet), it seems much better compared to the first rework released in beta. I think the main issue, and I’m speaking about Ele Stormbringer, is that the Maelstrom generation feels slower. They removed a talent I liked that generated 30 Maelstrom, which wasn’t bad, but the replacement talent isn’t too bad either.
I think I’ll go full Lightning with Ice Fury, which still generates Maelstrom. I’ll spam Shocks in AoE; otherwise, I don’t really care
I talked to Swapxy he is also sceptical and not happy with the new direction. Actually I don’t know many who are. There are some guys inhaling copium heavily saying it will be all good but I don’t see it. Elemental will suffer because of the button bloat. Just count CDs. Ascendance, Stormkeeper, Fire/Storm Ele, Primordial Wave, Ancestral Swiftness, Totem of Wrath. It’s mental how many of them there are.
Well, after 4 hours of testing, I have to say the idea is nice, but it doesn’t work well, and I’m disappointed. The combinations seem many, but the result is always the same—very inconsistent, and it doesn’t flow. It’s not fluid at all; now it feels more like a class that has to wait for those minutes for Ascendance and the elemental pet. Outside of that, it performs poorly.
The problem is that aside from the pet and Ascendance, everything we have is based on percentage procs and luck, making the rotation unpredictable.
Because things depend on luck, they don’t align with the best moments.
Ascendance does decent damage if you cast Tempest and proc mastery or have Tempest Keeper, but there’s no guarantee you’ll have them.
Elemental deeply rooted in 5 minutes: If everything goes well, you’ll proc it twice, but like above, it has the same problem, and it lasts so little that you might not be ready to set up your combo.
Tempest in retail procs at about 10%, but now on the PTR, it’s down to 5-6%.
f before we were a class that had cooldowns spread throughout the entire combat, now we just have our specific moments, and outside of that, it’s pure sluggishness and yawns.
Slow very slow malestorm generation…its a nightmare