That’d make more sense. That or doing closer around/when 11.0.7 comes out.
Changes to live servers can happen at any time without affecting in-progress tournament realms.
If they havent compensation buffed ele single target, then they are happy with it being trash tier. At least enhance is strong right now.
So where the are the new update to Ele’s ST?
Soon ™
Farseer buffs & PvP Adjustments.
I’m glad they are upping Farseer across abilities. I was kind of hoping they’d also improve the Elemental Blast that occurs when they decide to leave though. Last time I looked, the Ancestor’s EB hits for the same amount as a Lava Burst.
The PvP changes are different. Looks like less damage from Primordial Wave burst and Earthshocks, but more damage in the sustain.
Resto’s Offensive kit got a 30% increase to Lava Burst
I don’t want to play farseer again until they give some cdr back to it. Its not a number issue its just knowing I’m playing a less fun version of it.
Heed My Call vs Routine Communication? 5% was too low but 8% might be noticeable?
Well, that’s interesting. They’re doing a massive balance tuning pass the reset directly after the MDI Finals. That’s crazy. That thing I said would happen actually happened. Wild.
- Farseer: Chain Lightning damage from Ancestors increased by 30%.
- Farseer: Lava Burst damage from Ancestors increased by 15%.
- Farseer: Latent Wisdom now increases Ancestor spell damage by 25% (was 20%).
- Farseer: Routine Communication now has an 8% chance to trigger (was 5%).
- Farseer: Maelstrom Supremacy now increases the damage Earth Shock, Elemental, Blast, and Earthquake by 15% (was 8%).
The way it looks on paper, I guess they’re making Farseer for pure single-target damage, and Stombringer will be for cleave/AoE/M+. It will be a noticeable increase on Sikran and Nexus Princess, and you’d probably be perfectly fine playing Farseer on Ulgrax, Bloodbound, and Rash if you want to focus on pure boss damage. Ovinax stay Stormbringer.
Mythic Court and Queen, my gut says Stormbringer might be the play unless Farseer’s Ascendance burst is significantly more potent than Stormbringer. Even with the buffs to their spells, Granpa still needs work. They don’t scale with any of our secondaries except the flat damage from our Mastery, Haste indirectly, and Vers. The spells they cast also don’t interact with pretty much most of our targets as well. Grandpa’s Chainlighting also only hits 3 targets as well. AND none of their spells overload. Farseer scales like butts still.
So it’s good that Farseer got some buffs. Still, unless it pulls ahead on some cleave fights, these changes allow us to play a pure single-target build on Sikran and Nexus Princess to do better single-target damage and absolutely nothing for the weak single-target damage we have outside of Ascendance when playing Stormbringer in cleave fights or M+, where single-target damage is still essential. Instead of buffing Maelstrom Supremacy in the Farseer Tree, they could buff Earth Shock and Elemental Blast to strengthen the whole of the spec, not a single hero talent. But it’s still good to see Farseer not forgotten.
As you say, just with Farseer so ele single target damage is still god awful in keys and their “massive balance tuning” changes are not good enough. I’m fine with there being a hero talent build that is naturally stronger in ST or AOE, but the core spec should be at least sufficiently strong in both AoE and ST.
What’s not ok is doing augvoker levels of single target damage as a baseline.
Have you been to Sweden lately?
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That does nothing lol
Before we were one of the few classes that could play both hero talent trees in most content. Blizzard decided 100% that is not allowed, gutted our defensives and made one of the hero talents useless. Now our ST is terrible and we are a boring 3 minute burst class Just a disaster of class balancing.
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The other thing that would help beyond just tuning numbers on farseer aoe would be letting their chain lightnings not be capped at 3
PvP changes look good imo. The pve changes apply to pvp too which is very nice seeing as we already play farseer. Routine communication got stronger, it might be potentially worthwhile to play Latent Wisdom now, and a 7% buff to Maelstrom supremacy is great. On top of lava burst getting buffed by 15% and lightning bolt getting another 10% buff, i think it offsets the cleave nerf from prim wave and the earth shock nerf I think, earth shock nerf is essentially only 8% since maelstrom supremacy got buffed. Our ST is going up either way which is really nice, I think ele will be less gimmicky with ES one shots but have better direct ST with Lava bursts. Wonder if it will make flux melting worth playing.
In a way, they did what many people complained about for the last month: that Ele was at the bottom of Sikran and Nexus Princess, aka the Single Target fights. Sim wise with overrides to guesstimate what it will look like without changing around a lot of talents this is what it looks like:
1 - Stormbringer + ES = 1.290 mil
2 - Stormbringer + EB = 1.306 mil
3 - Farseer override + Wisdom + Routine + ES = 1.375 mil
4 - Farseer override + Fellowship + Routine + ES = 1.394 mil
1st: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/8MurHTVnaTfSVSxiqCSpBJ
2nd: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/xrUYo93Mb7hBPs6hUYiHSa
3rd: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/s2B9RbjRcJgVP9pYfEmoqx
4th: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/6y1H7En4uZUT2RCfTc2o84
So, based on this, we’re getting roughly a 6.77% ST gain from the current Stormbinger single-target build playing Farseer with Fellowship and Routine, which will put us about middle of the pack on Nexus Princess and about upper middle/lower top on Sikran since we prefer 3:30-4:30 kill time ranges because of 2nd Ascendance with Spymaster looking at 95th percentile parses. Honestly, I’m down for playing Farseer again for Princess since 4 seconds longer SWG is clutch during intermissions, and a stronger and shorter CD on Nature’s Protection makes it less scary if you end up with back-to-back Queen’s Banes. I also imagine playing Farseer on Ulgrax, Bloodbound, and Rash is fine if you don’t care about parsing via add damage.
Farseer will never be good in M+ or large cleave fights, not just because their Chain Lighting is capped at 3, but they scale terribly with our stats and talents, with some talents in our tree they just flat out don’t benefit from them. We’re a spec that prioritizes mastery, and the only benefit they gain is just from the flat damage amp since they don’t overload; haste indirectly scales with them since you can fit more spells in your window, but fundamentally, Crit overtakes Haste in terms of benefit when it comes to AoE which grandpas Crit scaling in AoE is mediocre and non-existent in single target since LvB is 100% crit. They pretty much only scale with Vers, which is our worst stat.
Talent-wise, Crit modifier talents like Nature’s Fury, Elemental Fury, Primordial Fury, and FoL don’t benefit Grandpa. MotE, Aftershock, and SoP don’t interact with them at all. Anything talent related to Overloads (like our major cooldown) is irrelevant to their damage profile, which is an issue since our AoE profile is very much made up of the damage done by our Overloads. Routine Communication also loses value the more you use Maelstrom Spenders since its proc chance is based on generators, and a large portion of our AoE damage profile is made up of EQ, even more so if you’re playing Echos; that also means every Aftershock refund fundamentally works against Routine Communication. Ascendance and DRE do nothing for Grandpas other than 20% haste, which is not super impactful.
Until they fix these issues, Farseer is likely to struggle in AoE compared to Stormbringer without help from overpowered talent interactions like FoL, some form of borrowed power like a tier set, or just absurdly buffing grandpas to the point of absurdity.
I hoped they would do that: buff some of our single target spells baseline like Lighting Bolt, Earth Shock, and Elemental Blast. I don’t think our Single Target, specifically in keys, is awful (though it’s not the best), but my concern is the single target damage we do on Cleave fights like Court and Queen. Court, especially since while you need cleave because those adds eat people alive if they are up for too long, your single target damage is infinitely more important because of the damage amps.
Saving this for a future season/tier set, to refer back to later…
Ruined your cherry picked statement for you. But reading this made me think, I really hope they don’t try to band-aid it’s AoE problems just by slapping a tier set bonus that will eventually go way. These are glaring issues with Farseer’s fundamental design that really need to be addressed at some point.
What would solve its issues in aoe? Removing or raising the gramps target cap or maybe allowing them to benefit from mastery via overloading?
Or maybe its better to just keep buffing farseer ST allowing for both hero talents to be played one in ST situations and one in aoe situations while allowing both of them to be played for cleave (possibly by buffing CL more for ancestors and upping the target cap from 3 to 5 or so)?
It’s actually the opposite. Our single target is very powerful in keys as most boss fights are 3 min or less, and we have at least one ascendance for all of them at a minimum. Long form single target is when we suffer the most. The short boss fights in keys make us a bit too strong quite frankly
I’m gonna disagree with this (a little) only because - that’s how 3 min CD classes are. Once every 3 minutes, they’re very powerful. That’s why blizz has largely moved away from 3 min CD classes though. I mean I’m not complaining, because I’m timing 12’s, 13’s and the top damage (in a lot of cases), interrupts (sometimes dispels) in the group, and it feels great…but realistically, I just know (from doing enough dungeons) when to use my cooldown(s) to get that maximum effect and help the group the most.
Look at a normal pug group in a 12. I get beat a lot, in overall, by a lot of classes. But get a tank in a coordinated group that actually pulls around that 3-min-CD…and ele appears absolutely broken. Real world, it’s just not like that though. 3 min CD’s are just weird if nothing else.
That said, I was pushing 3500 in seasons when ele was trash tier as well.
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I’d say them increasing the target count to 5 and letting them benefit from mastery would be the go too. It seems really weird to have a Hero talent that doesn’t scale with out best stat while there is one that scale pretty damn well with it in addition to our other stats. Especially considering that we might hit a point like in DF Season 3 where you could stack Mastery to the point to have basically 100% Overload chance. At 634 ilvl unbuffed I have roughly a 62% chance for my spells to Overload so it may be feasible provided no Mastery changes occur.
They kinda are doing that but the issue still comes up when you have raid fights which favor specs that are able to do sufficient damage at multiple target counts since “cleave” is actually includes a wide variety of different damage profiles (2 to X target cleave, Priority damage, burst AoE, funnel). Outside of the pure single target fights (Sikran and Nexus Princess) and Ovinax (basically full AoE for us), 5/8 of the fights in the raid has a focus on single target damage and cleave. Court and Queen require different cleave profiles depending on the phase of the fight and Court massively benefits being able to do burst Single Target for the damage amps but queen might be worth to play Farseer depending on your comp and damage.
Them segregating the Hero talents to be significantly better in ST vs AoE over the other means the tuning knobs become the hero talents themselves to adjust one without affecting the other. For example if Farseer is optimally better than Stormbringer in single target but they want to buff Stormbringer’s single target damage, they would have to target Stormbringer talent nodes; they can’t buff base spec abilities like Lightning Bolt or Lava Burst because that would make Farseer stronger too. If Stormbringer is better at AoE/Cleave, the only way they can buff Farseer AoE/Cleave is buffing Grandpa’s CL because buffing pretty much anything else make would substantially benefit Stormbringer more. It’s probably the reason they chose to buff Farseer instead of the base kit and I for one am not too pleased about it despite welcoming some love to Grandpas.
I’m also unsure if they stated how they plan to handle tier sets going forward but going off of how the DF Season 2 sets were more rotationally impactful than the DF Season 1 sets and their fixation with centering them around specific talents, there’s a chance we get a tier set bonus that massively benefits one hero talent over the other.
Not to say I’m opposed to one hero talent having a bit of an advantage over the other in one area or another, but it’s not good if the difference in power is super drastic.
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What class is beating you in a 12 on single target? The lower the key is the shorter the fight. It’s an even bigger impact.