Anyone else feel this way? Fire Nova feels totally useless without a way to spread flame shock. Hailstorm is clearly the superior choice here 100% of the time. Without something like lava lash spreading flame shock, or maybe an ability replacing stormkeeper because it’s just inferior, something like “fire bomb” on a 30 second cooldown does like 150 damage to all targets in a given area and applies flame shock to everything.
I mean something like that would be cool but as it stands it feels like fire nova is just useless. Thoughts?
Agreed, Fire Nova feels worthless. The solution imo would be to include Flame Shock spreading in the talent. Either have Fire Nova give us back old Lava Lash spreading Flame Shock, or something new like Fire Nova applies Flame Shock to secondary targets hit with the explosion.
The problem with putting Flame Shock spread on a different talent tier is that you end up with two talents that are only picked together (See: Boulderfist/Landslide in BfA).
Yeah I appreciate them giving us different playstyles with hailstorm and nova, but without an ability to spread flame shock fire nova is actually useless. Hate to see it.
If they’re not going to allow us to spread flame shock easy, they should make fire nova cast on yourself as well as flame shock targets. At least then it’ll ramp the damage up a bit.
Until they make Fire Shock be spread by Lava Lash, they should remove Fire Nova. The set-up and maintenance Fire Nova requires for the pay-off is not fun.
Flame Shock spreading went a long way in making WoD Fire Nova fun to use.
I wouldn’t say that it’s Fire Nova being useless… it’s just a victim of what it’s up against. Namely, Hailstorm. Hailstorm is simply better in every conceivable way possible. That doesn’t make Fire Nova bad per se, it just means it isn’t as good as Hailstorm.
Yeah, not only is there no way to spread Flame Shock onto different enemies (without, you know, manually applying the debuff onto them), but Echoes is gone as well. So we’re stuck waiting for the Fire Nova cooldown, while - with Hailstorm - we can spam our AoE pretty much whenever after maelstrom procs. Which, ironically, means that Hailstorm is a bit closer to the old Echoes AoE spamfest playstyle we had from WoD than this current iteration of Fire Nova is.
So I don’t think that spreading Flame Shock would be enough to make Fire Nova competitive with Hailstorm, either mathematically or enjoyably. Blizzard should also consider maybe having the cooldown of Fire Nova reset every so often (or perhaps based on a condition) in order to emulate that old Echoes playstyle that many people, such as myself, enjoyed so much.
Unless, of course, you didn’t enjoy Echoes. In which case, iunno, just buff the damage or something.
I think Fire Nova, overall, is best off being left behind at this point. Crash Lightning gives a more interesting rotation to play with, and it really seems as though they don’t want to bring back Flame Shock being spread.
I like the Feral Spirits talent conceptually and for the high level of uptime it gives with the Legendary in SL, but if they aren’t going to make Feral Spirits an actual damage CD, they can remove it at this point.
Oh if feral spirits were actually good like it used to be, then I wouldn’t mind the talent. However sinces the doggies are trash, it makes the talent worse.
The whole fire-nova thing was always a bit weird. It was a tool in the kit for a while and we used it, but very not-a-shaman feel to it. On top of that, it’s part of the system of misdirection and nerfs to our core attacks. Fire nova does not need to be great again.
I kind of wish they’d just keep it simple and bring back fire nova totem. Drop a totem, get a big honkin’ AoE explosion 3 seconds later. Or Magma totem which was basically Shaman Consecrate. I agree Fire Nova feels awkward and finnicky to use.
A part of me wants to please go back to WoD cheese that was standing at the gy respawn across the map and still popping 2 week long duration Flame Shock debuff Fire Nova peeps at 100 yards out on people trying to cap the flag in EotS RBGs.
A part of me is also glad its gone…but it was super lol.
I still remember my rot team after the first game
“How the F$#^ is an enhancement shaman at the top damage meter?”
“Because Blizzard doesn’t know how to properly design my spec!” - Me
I wouldn’t mind either of those, since it would give Enhance an actual Fire Totem to use (without being in PvP/Warmode). Preferably base, but even as a talent works.
Actually, maybe just Magma so that it doesn’t feel like we have to drop Fire Nova on cooldown for a ST DPS boost.
This is sad to hear, I’m leveling a shammy right now, hit level 40 and started looking for the ability that would let me spread lava lash; was super bummed to not find it.