Primordial Wave has always been a little awkward to use, needing up to 4 different button presses before you actually get the effect off (Flame Shock, Lava Lash to spread, Primordial Wave itself, Lightning Bolt to actually proc it), and it’s only become moreso in the new talent trees as Lightning Bolt otherwise drops in priority behind Elemental Blast.
Primordial Wave’s current functionality is an artifact of the Covenant system needing to blunt force class abilities into more-or-less working across all specs of the same class without significantly changing what they do, but migrating to the spec trees is an opportunity to rework such spells to fit better into those individual specs’ kits and flow. Instead of casting Flame Shock and setting up a buff for Lightning Bolt to consume, cut out the middle man and just have Primordial Wave itself fire a Lightning Bolt at all our Shocked targets (Flame AND/OR Frost Shocked) as if cast at 5 MSW.
Feral Spirits, between Witch Doctor’s Wolf Bones and the added 15% Physical/20% Elemental damage buffs while active effects, feels disturbingly like it’s moving away from being a burst CD, and toward being a maintenance buff. Currently, I can maintain upwards of 40-50% uptime on wolves with WDWB, and while that’s likely to drop off as we get into DF proper and haste levels drop to early expac levels, sooner or later we’re going to climb back up to this point, and I’d rather see this planned ahead for now.
The damage amplification effects being on Feral/Elemental Spirits also creates a misleading impression of the spec’s build goals, making the physical vs. elemental damage choice seem like a preference at the end of the building process, rather than a build-defining trait you need to be selecting toward from the top of the tree.
I suggest cutting the damage amplification effect from Feral Spirits, and cutting Elemental Spirits entirely. Moving WDWB to the end choice node with Alpha Wolf and buffing Alpha Wolf to apply to single target attacks as well as cleaves would then turn it into a choice between higher uptime or bigger burst, and some new talent could take WDWB’s place in the intermediary node.
The physical/elemental damage amplification effects could then be moved to some earlier talent, making the importance of that choice much clearer from the start of the build process. My suggestion there would be combining Elemental Weapons and Legacy of the Frost Witch into a choice node in the 9-20 tier, then change Elemental Weapons from a flat 10% element buff to making your special attacks apply larger amplification effects to their relevant elements (Stormstrike/Crash Lightning = Nature, Lava Lash = Fire, Ice Strike = Frost).
Ice Strike, Hailstorm, and Frost Shock have very unintuitive interactions. By itself, Frost Shock is a low priority filler in our rotation, possibly even our lowest priority depending on build. Ice Strike and Hailstorm both serve to raise its priority by buffing its damage, which is straightforward on paper, but runs into a problem in practice: Ice Strike and Hailstorm don’t line up reliably, or even predictably. The apparent ideal is to hold Frost Shock for both buffs to be in effect simultaneously, but Ice Strike is on a set CD with no reductions or resets, while Hailstorm is at the mercy of heavily randomized MSW generation. Trying to line up all three can create deadtime where we’re holding Frost Shock or Ice Strike, waiting for MSW stacks… but is that even the right move? Should we be Frost Shocking anytime we have one or the other buff up without even trying to align them because the dead GCDs outweigh the doubled buffs? It’s incredibly unclear without resorting to guides or parse analysis to tell what the optimal way to use these effects together is.
The easiest solution here would be making Ice Strike’s buff to Frost Shock be a duration buff instead of a next-cast buff. This would give more flexibility to its interaction with Hailstorm, as we could cast an available Frost Shock on its normal priority if MSW isn’t fully stacked yet without worrying about losing the buff synergy.
Another option would simply be having Ice Strike do something other than buff Frost Shock, which between itself, Hailstorm, and Ele’s Ice Fury spell, seems to be your only idea for increasing water’s presence in our offensive kits. Maybe Ice Strike could make our next Stormstrike echo for frost damage, or turn Windfury damage into frost for a while. Maybe reverse their interactions, so every time Frost Shock deals damage, it stacks your next Ice Strike’s damage.
Whatever you do, also take another pass at Ice Strike’s gamefeel. It doesn’t appear to have any special animation of its own, and its sound effect is very subtle and hard to catch, making the attack feel very underwhelming and hard to tell if it even went off without looking at the bar icon.
Hot Hand and Ashen Catalyst are two talents that do the same thing: makes Lava Lash hit harder, and more often. The principal difference is that one does the job in random bursts, while the other does it in sustained stacks. These talents should not exist independently of each other, let alone with one as the prerequisite to the other. These talents should either be a choice node, letting the player choose between random burst and reliable sustain, or else one should apply to Lava Lash, and the other to something else; maybe Ice Strike.
Feral Lunge and Ancestral Wolf Affinity/Refreshing Waters are still utility effects that should be in the class tree, not the spec tree. Failing that, at minimum, they need to be relocated within the spec tree. Other dps with utility talents in their spec trees usually have those utility talents placed such that they are mandatory for the player to pick at least one up in order to progress to later tiers or down certain branches, and have the point costs of throughput talents down those branches adjusted to accommodate for this. But Feral Lunge is right in the middle of a path cluster that makes it entirely avoidable, and AWA/RW is a straight up dead end. If these talents aren’t going to be migrated to the class tree, they need to be on paths that make them mandatory to progress down branches that account for the burned points on utility. Feral Lunge, for example, could take that vacated intermediary space in the Feral Spirit line.
Windfury Totem. How many times can this be repeated? This thing is the only group buff in the game that:
- has to be talented into
- has grouping requirements
- has a 2 minute duration instead of 60
- has positional requirements
- has such a specific benefit as “melee only”
- has such a specific benefit that different classes and specs even within that specific role receive highly unequal benefits from it
Please, just make this a 5% Attack Speed aura active whenever we have Windfury Weapon applied to ourselves.
Ascendance remains an absolutely hideous skull-faced monstrosity based on a bunch of doomsday lunatics we wiped out a decade ago, not to mention male-only. This is not what we should be turning into to express that we have achieved the pinnacle of shamanistic power and oneness with the elements. At minimum, please give us a glyph to turn into, I dunno, a generic elemental, or even just steal monk’s Storm, Earth, and Fire form. Just anything other than elemental Skeletor.