The thing is this and we all know it. Enhancement has way too many buttons to press and in TWW it will be even worse.
The fact that Hailstorm is a thing that gives you stacks to spend in another ability is actually a second resource to manage. And that Icefury buffs it even further is even worse. You need to melee to get 10 stacks, then spend it, then Ice Strike it and then Frost Shock. It’s a very convoluted rotation.
Imagine now that you are gonna have 3 empowered Chain Lightning in the Stormbringer tree. Apart of all the previous things, you are gonna have to have that buff on your mind to build another 30 stacks to maximize its potential, but not waste your empowered Frost Shocks with Ice Strike.
On top of that, trying to mantain your Flame Shock on all targets. And also, probably not waste your Hot Hand procs.
And dont forget your Primordial Wave on all your Flame Shock targets, which need to be maintained at all time.
It’s just too much things to worry about and know what spell is better next according to how many targets are there and what buffs you have going on.
Honestly, I think that Hailstorm + Ice Strike should dissapear from Enhancement entirely and just focus the damage on Chains and Lightning Bolt (and Blast)
Playing Enhancement is becoming a Weak Auras nightmare and a mind calculation on the fly to maximize damage.
Focus the damage back into the melee strikes and their effects where it belongs. We have enough specs that focus big on the building/spending gameplay, let this one go back to what it was in SL where your spenders were good but were just one cog in the Enhancement machine.
The thing is that if you play Storm build with Stormstrike you’ll need a weakaura to track how much Maelstrom you’ve spent to predict when you’re about to hit the 40 MSW spending threshold for Lightning Bolt to convert to Tempest.
Hailstorm has never been an issue for me, its using frost shock after a spender its an extremely low offender as far as im concerned, im far more bothered by unempowered frost shocks, rotating lightning bolt and elemental blast and crash lightning in the single target rotations.
The biggest offender imo is flame shock, its a waste of a keybind, either make lava lash apply it baseline or make it aoe and an actual part of the rotation.
Frost strike has a decently long cd so you only empower every other frost shock
Flame shock, frost shock and Froststrike ontop of everything else is too much. Ideally i would prefer if Primordial wave disappeared as well. The spec is just so bloated and it doesn’t need to be. I miss when stormstrike was their big damage ability, it felt nice to use.
I dont, back then you had 100 damage sources and only 2 buttons.
Id like the talent trees in general to offer more active and passive options and more fleshed out branches, but your asking for a literal 2 button rotation. No thanks.
I think you’re putting to much focus on it. You get your stacks from spending Maelstrom (MSW) on your spells which tou’ll naturally get your stacks while you doing the rotation especially during Wolves - Pwave windows from the haste amp by casting Pwave Lightingbolt, and dumping your Elemental Blasts. Outside of those windows you can just spend MSW naturally to avoid overcapping and you will likely get high stacks. If you’re not, then you either might be spending enough or overcapping on MSW.
Also you obvious will wanna Ice Strike in Frost Shock but since Frost Shock’s CD is shorter you’ll just send it provided you got stacks since Hailstorm’s making Frost Shock cleave and increased damage per stack is completely independent from Ice Strike. Ice Strike just adds another damage amp on to it. So you pretty much send it Frost Shock on CD so long as it’s got a good amount of stacks, doesn’t need to be 10. Obviously use judgement like spending MSW if can to get to 10 or hold off on using Frost Shock to use with Ice Strike for like adds and what not.
Basically you don’t have to focus too much about it unless you’re trying to do cutting edge content or actively trying to parse. Provide your just spending MSW and hitting melees it will kinda just flow together.
Thing is that if Ice Strike and Hailstorm went away Enhancement (Elementalist) would not have been as strong as it since that’s what lets us cleave with single target builds and not lose too much single target in AoE builds, a reason it was always better in M+ compared to Strom. Ice Strike and Frost Shock + Hailstorm is probably Elementalist build’s largest source of MSW generation (outside CDs) when paired with Swirling Maelstrom and Elemental Assault talents generates 3 MSW from the 2 GCDs of Ice Strike > Frost Shock + 2<= Hailstorms stacks (2 form Ice Strike and 1 from Swirling) in 2 GCDs. Frost Shock with 2+ Hailstorm Stacks will generate MSW regardless if it was primed or not. Elemental Assault + Ice Strike + Swirling also important for Storm since its your back up if Stormstrike goes on CD and does’t reset from spending MSW you’re literally standing there doing nothing.
It sucks how that every class needs weakauras to be good since the game is built around. For Enhance it does a good amount of buttons and a lot of priorities for how to use the abilities but for the most part you don’t need to over complicated it. Get familiar with and try and follow it as best you can but if you try to 4-D chess or follow it ridgedly you’ll end up messing more. It’s why I’ll drop Lashing Flames and put it in Swirling so I can just focus on the actual dungeon.
Nah it still stupid important. Their are so many raid fights and some M+ Boss spawn so far a part from each other you either have to hold Pwave and Wolves until they’re close enough to Lava Lash and if they move just a bit and it doesn’t spread you SOL.
Nah it still stupid important. Their are so many raid fights and some M+ Boss spawn so far a part from each other you either have to hold Pwave and Wolves until they’re close enough to Lava Lash and if they move just a bit and it doesn’t spread you SOL.
I agree with most of whats said in this thread. I have said for a while now enhance is to cluttered and its getting bad. I dont want weakauras to track 10 maelstrom stacks and ice stacks and whatever else they plan to make us track next. I wanna use my enhanced melee strikes and hear the thunder crash down on my enemies thats where its at brother.
That would be cool though that might be fun and Blizzard hates fun. Though I did make a cook about having Pwave apply Flameshock to the target and 5 other targets around it so you’d be able to just do Pwave > Wolves > LB on an AoE pack. I’d still want Flame Shock cause again there’s time when you do need it.
That would be cool though that might be fun and Blizzard hates fun. Though I did make a cook about having Pwave apply Flameshock to the target and 5 other targets around it so you’d be able to just do Pwave > Wolves > LB on an AoE pack. I’d still want Flame Shock cause again there’s time where you do need it.
Nothings wrong with Storm. It was moreso related to this:
Storm build + Stormbringer Hero Talent gameplay loop wants to you spend Maelstrom at a somewhat reasonable pace and not overlap which is contrasted from its current version where you only want to hit Stormstrike so you let it overlap and only spend to reset Storm Strike. Lightning Bolt converts to Tempest after spending 40 Maelstrom (and from other stuff) and you basically want to get as many Tempest casts so you’ll want to avoid overcapping Maelstrom. So pretty much you have to have something to track it or you basically lose all damage from it.
They really need to add in some way to track Maelstrom in-game because it was night and day trying to play with one vs without one during raid testing on beta. But it doesn’t personally bother me too much.
Ideally, Ice Strike is done away with and Frost Shock is buffed by 75-100% to have it baked in baseline, Hailstorm is not at all a problem on its own and is actually fun to play with.
Man, I love the way current enhancement plays. If they start pruning stuff I might just quit it unless the storm build gets more fun (which it might be, I don’t have the beta).
I love the triple element hotkeys of stormstrike, Ice strike, and lava lash. Hailstorm is a fun mechanic to me as well, I love those meaty frost shock cleaves. Crash lightning is also so cool and adds a fun cleave mechanic.
If button bloat really is an issue for enhance (which I don’t necessarily agree with), my first two choices would be to make ele blast replace lightning bolt entirely instead of needing two keys, and to prune sundering. Sundering is just another button we hit once in awhile because it does slightly more damage than other buttons. The aoe cc is nice but enhance already has a ton of that. Third option to reduce a hotkey would be pruning flame Shock from the rotation and just have lava lash apply it and spread it.
