So, just tried this on beta.
Baseline feral spirit is +30% physical. +15% for each wolf.
Elemental spirit is 2 wolves each with 1 random element - frost, fire or nature, for +15 each. The wf/ss damage is gone.
So, e.g., with elemental spirit you could get one nature wolf and one frost wolf for +15% nature and +15% frost damage. Seems like a downgrade from base feral spirit…
The wf/ss damage is gone.
That’s pretty disappointing. It’s the one thing that was keeping me optimistic about the changes to Elemental Spirits. Frost and Nature damage are such a low part of our single target damage, and in AoE you’d never pass up Alpha Wolf for the chance at Frost damage to try and hit the mega Hailstorm.
The way I am seeing the Alpha Wolf talent is that it has zero impact on elemental damage. So there is no synergy between Hailstorm, Frost Damage, and Alpha Wolf and no mega Hailstorm from that.
To get a large Hailstorm, one needs Elemental Spirits.
You misunderstand what I meant. To put it differently–Alpha Wolves are a guaranteed AoE effect for your dps cooldown that will always be chosen over the chance at getting 1+ ice wolves to stack its damage increase with Ice Strike for a big Hailstorm.
The randomness in throughput will prohibit Elemental Sprits’ usefulness in AoE, given its competition, and the recent changes make it a nerf to the single target throughput on the cooldown, unless you’re a Lava Lash build that happens to roll fire wolves.
In sims at least the new Elemental Spirits is slightly better than physical Feral Spirits for an elemental-focused build (1-2% dps), primarily because no matter what you roll it’s going to buff Elemental Blast, but yeah, it could use a bit more in order to solidify its single target niche vs. Alpha Wolves which is clearly designed to win out in AOE.
in short, the new version is a down grade in single OR AOE. Very disappointing.
Not if you are going for a Mastery build and most fo your damage is from Lava Lash, Flame Shock, Frost Shock and Lightning abilities.
Normal wolves wopuld improve the Enhancement build we used in season 1 and 2, which was mostly physical and the top damage abilities were Windfury, Stromstrike and auto attacks.
Elemental wolves would improve the season 3 and 4 build, which was around Lava Lash, Flame Shock, Elemental Blast and Frost Shock.
This makes total sense to me. Who needs a nature wolf which increases physical damage when you are gonna spam Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt and other elemental abilities anyway?
You can have 30% damage buff for sure saving 1 talent point by not using Elemental Spirits. And you can pick Alpha Wolf for AoE and increase you damage always by 30% instead of only 15% if you got lucky to get 1 lightning wolf and another that maybe does nothing for your physical build.
frost wolf does next to nothing. Frostshock + ice strike is no more than 15% of overall dmg.
a 15%~30% dmg buff to 0.15 of your dmg, makes perfect sense to you?
Ohh btw, you’re also losing 30% physical dmg because you speced into Elemental spirits.
That still makes any sense to you?
The old version frost wolf will actually be quite good due to the frost dmg on each windfury attack during DW. but too bad they scratched that.
What are you talking about?
If you use an AoE build based on Mastery and Elemental Spirits, 90% of your damage is gonna be elemental. Hailstorm is gonna be one of your most damaging abilities. At that point, is doesnt matter that much which wolves appear, any of them is gonna greatly increase the damage you are doing for that build.
And I repeat, if you go with full Critical + Haste (like we all did in seasons 1 and 2) 70% of your damage is gonna be physical, and for that matter your 30% buff for that type of damage is gonna suit you a lot better.
There is no build in which 50% of your damage is gonna be physical and 50% is gonna be elemental. You dont need wolves to increase both kinds of damage. The tree is clear in that.
show me a M+ log where elemental dmg is 90%.
I’d love to see it.
Actual % is more so ~25% physical (keep in mind WF is going to be much higher overall % in 10.0)
Rest is about 60% fire (20%LL, 20%Fire nova, 20% FS), 15% nature (CL + Crash)
If you spec Hailstorm, it’s ~15% frost shock.
Doesn’t take a genius to figure out, nature/frost wolves provide LESS benefit compare to the regular feral spirits.
= You spent a talent so you can RNG for a DPS loss.
Any player that understands basic logic would know this is a design failure.
Can’t do m+ on the beta and it won’t quite be 90%, but here are some heroic dungeon logs from wordup:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/WvHCDGyzR9dm8raL#boss=-3&difficulty=0&type=damage-done&source=7
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/cjLdA9fDBn6NyX78#boss=-3&difficulty=0&type=damage-done&source=9
Both are about ~84% elemental damage.
Here’s a level 60 log against a pack of 5 target dummies with Alpha Wolf (so physical damage is boosted):
(~74% elemental damage)
You can’t really go full physical yet since Unruly Winds and Doom Winds are bugged and don’t do anything.
But yeah you can get pure frost to like 20-25% of your damage if you want, and none of these logs included elemental blast (which scales off of any combination of wolves, including frost). In the Alpha Wolf log by comparison, physical abilities (i.e. not autoattacks which don’t benefit from the physical multipliers) are like ~18% of your output (but again, this can go higher once the windfury talents are fixed - perhaps up to ~35% total with a dedicated build).
Point is it’s not a stretch to very roughly approximate the physical, frost, fire, and nature buffs as at least ballpark equivalent (if anything, the nature one is the strongest wolf generally, with frost/fire/physical vying for 2nd place depending on talent build, and all of them could be considered vaguely equivalent generally, though you might be able to push fire up to 1st place if you go all-in on it).
That still doesn’t put Elemental Spirits in a great spot, obviously, but there are at least ways to fix it (they could easily dial up the % modifiers on elemental spirits, or they could give them secondary effects).
You cant do the math with the current spec and try to translate it to the 10.0 spec. It doesnt work that way.
Mainly because if in 10.0 you go for the elemental side of the tree you wont even take Windfury Weapon. Or you can take it to fish some extra MW Stacks but not take Unruly Winds or Forceful Winds at all. So yeah, your physical damage is gonna be lower. And your elemental damage is gonna be a bigger part because there’s talents for that like Elemental Weapons, Improved Lightning Bolt and Crashing Storms, all talents that are for sure picks if you are going that path.
In that scenario, why would you need a Lightning Wolf that increases your physical damage instead of your nature damage?
THAT makes no sense.
I have to disagree with you, while testing on the ptr my frost shock does like 20k per target on 5 targets with both frost wolves on. I would say that its kinda useless if you are going for fire nova though. So the best solution is to have somehow of control on your wolves.
However if you are going for a mastery build any way, most of you would go for ice strike since it generates a lot of MSW. So theres a use for the frost wolves.
sigh… Investing 1 talent point into Elemental Spirits, so you can
give up 15% physical dmg on 25~30% of your dmg (WF, melee, SS, wolf melee)
for a 15% frost dmg buff on 15~25% of your dmg (frost shock + ice strike)
is considered “useful” by you?
Cuz it is a pretty bad outcome for using this talent point.
Why are you trying to theorycraft before tuning?
In DF elemental damage could be a very large part of the breakdown and physical very low. We don’t know yet. They could also just be putting the 15% as a placeholder and will tune it accordingly, we don’t know yet.
All you needed to say was “this seems low, perhaps Blizz could take a second look” rather than calling a bunch of people out. You could very possibly be wrong and the talent could end up being very powerful.
cuz i actually raid Mythic, and cares about dps, duh.
If you mythic raid you should know better than to complain about tuning in beta
This is one of the few times Bliz actually reads feedbacks.
It is the prime time to complain about tuning.
First week of heroic raid is when you complain about tuning, not in beta when they’re not even thinking about it.
Right now all they care about is mechanical issues and how the spec/tree feels and flows
You guys ever encounter that situation where someone is such a massive dink that even though you agree with them, you don’t want to say so?
Well regardless, I am inclined to agree that this talent should be altered. Regardless of the tuning, a direct damage type amplification swap off of physical and onto elemental has potential to actually lower a player’s dps versus not having spent the talent point at all. Talents that have the potential to actually lower your damage depending on your build should not exist. They are noob traps: talents that appear good on the surface, but which require fairly advanced understanding of the class and game mechanics to comprehend that you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot.
A lower-info player should be able to look at Feral Spirits’ talent line and say, “I like wolves, so I’mma click all the buttons that buff them,” and not have their performance go down from not having spent that point at all.
Combine that with existing frustrations with the talent being pure RNG as to whether it’ll give you your best element, and this talent seems like it’s prime for redesign anyway.