I liked it better without the CD (Flame shock). Also bring back Gust of Wind! Who is the Shaman class designer? Do they even play the class?
15 Likes
The wave of the future is to give us a way to spread Flame Shock. Having to start packs by casting it individually on every mob would feel terrible.
7 Likes
The devs haven’t played their game since mist
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FS does a vast majority of our dmg. To remove the CD or make it spread easier will require them to greatly reduce the dmg FS does in ST and up to 2-3 targets. and when being trained in PVP you would be doing absolutely crap dmg because the only dmg rolling is Earthen spike and you spamming FS t=with reduced dmg.
Even if they didnt reduce the dmg of FS ticks you would have to lose dmg else where which would bring us back to limp noodle casted spells.
Even with all f this said there is changes in SL that will allow you to spread and extend the duration of FS which will create a ton of specific gameplay scenarios.
FS is fine the way it is because:
FS does great dmg
increases the complexity of the spec. There are plenty of brain dead specs you can already play and top meters.
4 Likes
I greatly despise when pve is balanced with pvp in mind. Why they can’t calculate damage on a player vs a non-player seems silly?
I’m fine with the Flame Shock damage being reduced as long as it goes back to having no cd. There can be other ways to balance this for pvp.
I want to say there was old tier sets that would spread Flame Shock and/or renew it when the target was hit with Lava Burst. I liked that.
2 Likes
I’m really liking the discussion around surge of power and stormkeeper right now on Alpha for this exact reason. I don’t have much experience with SoP to know how it’ll feel during SK downtime though. The only time I’ve gotten to use it was mythic Orgozoa.
Flame Shock has not been the majority of our damage until BFA and possibly Legion. Its not why people leveled an ELE. I am totally fine with Flame Shock being 5th or 6th in our damage meters with how much our spec is tied to it. For PvP, you dont even cast anymore. You purge instead of Frost Shock and spam Lava Surge Procs.
I would be 100% in favor of a redistribution of our damage into LvB removing from Flame Shock. Which if this occurred, you can then remove the CD of Flame Shock.
6 Likes
It’s not PVE vs pvp the same issue happens in both when tab dotting becomes a balance issue. Just look at the current raid tier with number of adds.
People would literally be crying that if they wanted to play a dot class they would play aff lock.
Except they would not buff LvB dmg because the more FS out the more procs you would get. They would just throttle the proc % and tou would be stuck with the same number or lava surges and still having to hard cast.
Their design concept (whether we like it or not) is as a turreted hard casting elements wielder.
2 Likes
Not in PvP its not. ELE shamans only cast Healing Surge and Hex if played correctly. Other than that everything is instant. I would be 100% ok with them throttling the number of Lava Surge procs if they buffed LvB damage.
They would have to do one or the other to compensate, buff LvB and nerf Lava Surge or keep Lava Surge as is and have LvB still hit for 5% HP wet noodle like it does now. Without buffing, it would be a hard flat nerf that would make the spec almost unplayable when 20+% currently comes from Flame Shock.
I would say FS is fine with his current design, if surge of power had better FS spreading and work with earthquake instead of just earthshock, i would be happy and have more fun with that talent.
Also bring back gust of wind
2 Likes
Yeah, it really feels bad with SoP not working with Earthquake and only proc’ing off of Earth Shock. Especially in a situation where you are trying to spread Flame Shock with Surge generally entails AoS situations which would be better to cast Earthquake instead.
The longer I looked at the Surge of power talent the more I wonder to myself if it’s intentional as a way to limit AoE damage or if it’s simply an oversight that SoP doesn’t proc off Earthquake…
yes, please remove the cooldown for flameshock. balance what needs balancing some other way. it’s about how it feels, and when flameshock has a cooldown, it feels worse.
2 Likes
I believe all classes have some sort of dot or passive effect from a spell/ability that has no cd, and puts a dot on a target. Balance Druids and Affliction locks have 2 or more with no cd. Elemental shaman has 1 dot with a cd.
People will cry no matter what, but I don’t see them crying over any other class’s dots.
If they don’t remove the CD, like it was for the majority of WoW, then they should so something like if Lava Burst hits a target with Flame Shock it spreads Flame Shock to all nearby targets within X amount of yards. Maybe a talent or passive ability.
Another class’s design is completely irrelevant in most cases, and it holds true in this case.
If they do this, then they’ll have to reduce the proc rate for Lava Surge, or nerf it so it only procs based on a single Flame Shock at a time.
Regardless, why can’t Ele be unique? Is the only reason because you don’t like having to remember to press your DoT ability every ~6 seconds on new mobs? You mentioned other DoT classes, maybe you’d prefer to play one of those if you like the playstyle of cycling through targets and casting DoTs with no CD.
1 Like
It is completely relevant in this case. See Madalynn’s comment. You can’t compare a dot class to an Elemental Shaman’s 1 dot. That’s just dumb. 1 dot and it’s on a cd, well that’s even more stupid.
I’ve played Elemental Shaman as my main since BC. The Flame Shock off CD had to deal with mobility. If there are multiple targets then the rotation feels much smoother and better knowing I can FS a target, and use my LB proc instead of having to wait 6 seconds (and possibly losing the proc) to cast FS on a new target.
Idk it just feels like fs needs a way of being spread quickly to many targets in the aoe scenarios though. for 2-3 targets, its present design is fine, but when doing the chain lightning and earthquake rotation it feels out of place beyond one target, and actually tends to be a dps loss due to the time you could have spent chaining and quaking. scale the numbers accordingly and maybe have lava burst spread flame shock to any targets within x yards that are affected by earthquake. the idea being to chain a few times, maybe 1 with stormkeeper, then drop a quake have an already flameshocked target and if u get a lava surge proc, its worth using, esp with mark of the elements
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Cooldown is fine. They just need to make Lava Lash spread it again.
Fun fact Flame shock could not crit until a glyph was added in Wrath that let it crit!
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it would be better for them to take it off the gcd that the other shocks will be on.
2 Likes
But this very thing is what makes ele challenging and fun. At what point do you stop spreading FS and just spam CL EQ. Or do you throw is FS at the end of CL casts to get MotE procs to buff CL and EQ?
I agree having FS spammable or an option to just spread it to all targets would be great dmg and stupid easy.
It’s like the other “improvements” people come up with for ele. Like just have CL be the only aoe and hit all targets and always overload.
However I dont want a stupid easy 3 button DMG spammer. If I did I would play literally any other class.