It feels like elemental’s rework uplifted a lot of issues but the only remaining one is how stringent it is to play. There’s just no build diversity aside from minor talent swaps and our capstone talents feel awful. I know each patch has a “meta” build for reach spec, however unlike most of them, I know after this season if its only just number tweeks that I’ll be playing Ascedance for the next 10 years because unless it was a negative buff its just the only thing you can take. Usually most specs have 2-3 branches to choose towards the end that really help define your big CD of choice.
Enhancement gets Primal Storm/Ascendance choice with huge capstones that affect them, feral wolves as the 3rd option you normally take with one of the others.
I know a lot of people play BM hunter so as an additional example; Call of the wild, Bestial Wrath, and Bloodshed are their 3 big CDs that get modified depending on the branch.
With elemental its basically Ascendance or nothing, There’s no big cd to modify on left side, all they do is modify finishers slightly, and one of those talents are baked into a hero tree still??? The right side is Primordial wave, but the capstone is a convoluted way of spreading more flame shocks.
I love the big numbers ascendance gives, but its just not my playstyle. I didn’t like it as fire only with DRE procs and I still don’t love having to play around a 3 min CD (esp with pugs early into a season).
Like if we could change erupting lava to “Lava Burst shrapnel’s the enemy spreading your flame shock to 3-4 other targets”, then change LMT to do something like refresh all active Flame Shocks and the next two Lava Bursts hit all enemies with FS active - its probably OP right now since that was S3/4’s set bonus in dragonflight but the playstyle is FUN.
For the left side, something similar to vesper totem would be nice, thematically could be lightning rod totem. Have it place it at our feet, have it absorb X% of our damage done, then fires it at the current target(s) once it reaches whatever threshold. If its on a low enough CD like 20-30 seconds we could have a less CD oriented build on top of or in place of the heavy CD oriented build we run right now.
TLDR; theres not enough diversity in builds. Make FS spread easier, change capstone for primwave to do something useful for primwave and redesign bottom left half of the tree for something less cooldown reliant (less 3 min cd reliant)