The stockholm with pwave is strong.
Honestly they can make any other ability spread it. A lot of classes can do that. Why is everyone so beholden to pwave so hard? The excuse i always get is another flameshock. On a 45 second CD. You have to spread what little flameshocks you can and then hit pwave so you can get multi shot lava burst but its this huge set up for what payoff when other classes seem to just spread all their damage for less setup?
Personally, I’m not. I’d gladly play storm. But DRE AND DOOMWINDS need big reworks to make it feel more rewarding.
But I also feel like for those who like P Wave that is one mechanic change that would make it feel really fluid/ smooth. It also could fit in nicely for a fire nova build to hit a pwave lightning bolt and a fire nova as a fun clapper combo in cleave.
IMO I’d almost rather pwave removed and be sundering that applies flameshock to all targets hit and then have the following lightning bolt strike all targets. But that’s because sundering is an iconic ability. But I could care less either way as I don’t prefer p wave and come tww I won’t talent it any longer.
We’re beholden to it because we don’t have great options. That’s it. If I had a comparable option that didn’t feel like I was nerfing myself, I wouldn’t take Primordial Wave ever.
I know because blizz beat it into every shaman. Hence the Stockholm. We are badly abused class. I will always point out the legion to bfa. They forgot us for a whole patch. They only realized it close to 8.1 and they held onto the fix to add bulk to 8.1.
Neglected and abused and we hold onto every scrap. I refuse to use pwave so I don’t even bother with higher content to save people the headache of dealing with me.
Elemental’s version of Pwave is garbage but Pwave literally defined Enhance damage profile in raid and was the thing keeping it afloat in M+. And for Enhance its less about it applying Flameshock, it’s more so the Lightning Bolt cleave and the associated talents.
Only I hate that is because the best version of Sundering we had was in Season 1 when it was literally just used as stop. IMO nothing should be tied to sundering and it should be baseline as an AoE stop/neat little uncapped cone that it is. We had a lot of M+ viability in Season 1 because of that and lost it in Season 2 because we had to use it as a Damage CD, and Season 3 because we couldn’t take it.
Yea. But that mechanic should be baked into existing things and not another button.
You know chi wave for monk is being changed to be a passive for rising sun kick. So it goes off when you use that.
EDIT: Yea sundering. I have to get it so I can use Feral Lunge to get into the thick of it. The talent tree kind of pigeonholes us into abilities we barely use and or stop using cause of the nerf to them.
I still like it because there are times where you want to hold stuff, you don’t want stuff just firing willy nilly. Part of the reason people hate Pwave is they just Pwave + LB right off the bat and end up losing alot of value instead of thinking how to use it. In mythic and most M+ pulls if you’re just firing stuff off without thinking its going to suck. Mythic Sark in season 2 you’d cast Pwave on yourself during the intermission around 2:05 -2:08, come up and hit sark with Wolves, Elemental Blast, Ice Strike, sit for a second and Flameshock the mythic add into Lava Lash > Lightning Bolt, Frost Shock when the adds came up for crazy burst damage to then continue funneling more damage into either Sark or the Mythic add.
That said, there’s way to smooth it out and if they did those things then people would enjoy given alot of people just hate it because it’s entirely due to how flame shock spreads. If Flameshock spread didn’t have weird Z-axis issues, as small of a range, or it was easier to get 6 Flameshock out without needing alot of GCDs then alot of gripes about it go away.
It’s why I was a big “ignore storm” rant for a long while because again, if they narrow their focus, they can implement alot of solutions to a build that make it smoother and easier to play while retaining its identity.
Agree totally. The clunky gameplay loop surrounding pwave in aoe is 100% why I dislike it. If it was more streamlined and more user friendly I think it would be much better received by the masses.
Wasn’t enhance significantly better in Season 2 with the storm build? Enhance really fell off a cliff in M+ in Season 3/4 when tier set forced the PWave build.
Season 2 didn’t make storm better in M+, everyone still played Elementalist. In raid, storm was played in ST bosses and elementalist in 2 targets or more. A tier set forced the PWave build wasn’t the reason that Enhancement fell off a cliff, a big pull galore meta with a bad survivability was a major reason.
In Season 2 (Mythic mind you) on pure single target fights (Kazara, Amalgamation Chamber, Rashok, Magmorax) you played Storm since it edged out on average over Elementalist. Elementalist you played on any fight that had adds or could leverage funnel (Assult, Experiments, Zskarn, Echo, Sark). Fights you were playing Storm on Enahance were middle of the pack in general (and getting beat out by Elemental) whereas fights you were playing Elementalist Enahance were fairing much better with Enhance being crazy on Echo and Sark being pretty much top 3 dps on those fights for the entire patch; This is both in terms of degenerate parsing (aka padding the hell out of adds) AND ethical damage on progression because of the funnel/single target prio damage you got on P2 and P3 for both of those fights. To put it into context, Enhance was a common Aug target on P2 Sark and not a bad option on P3.
So excluding Rashok, Storm was played on pretty easy fights. Elementalist meanwhile was one of the best specs for the 2 end bosses of that tier.
We fell off a cliff because we had nothing done to our defenses whereas classes that already were pretty tanky also got buffed all to hell (DH and Ret). If anything the Season 3 bonus is probably the best one for M+ because it means you can burst on every single pull in a key. Season 2 felt way worse for us because it killed a lot of our single-target damage potential due to you needing to take Sundering for the tier bonus by dropping Elemental Blast to do so. The Storm builds for M+ during Season 2 were hot garbage, being inconsistent damage because of DRE and losing so much single target and low target cleave damage that it negated good mass AoE with Doomwinds + Crash Lightning it could do. Even on Fort, bosses will still take up a portion of the time you spend in a key so being able to do single-target damage in your M+ spec is still really important. We also lost one of our biggest assets from Season 1 for keys in Sundering being able to use as a stop since Season 2 we had to use it as a CD and in Season 3/4 the talent tree setup prevents you from taking it.
Edit: Another thing to consider going into Season 3 is while we’re able to use Pwave way more often, they also adjusted how the haste buff worked. It went from 10% per target hit up to 60% hitting 6 targets to where gives you 20% for hitting one target and then every additional one gives you 4% for a total of 40% at six targets hit which is a whole PI. It made it way more powerful on a single target for sure but the funnel/power we get from it is also lessened on a per usage basis. and it’s counterbalanced by the extra nature wolf and shorted CD from the tier set but going into the War Within, we’re going to lose that aspect and essentially be left with a version that is worse in cleave compared to how it used to be in the first 2 seasons.