Hidden potential in Fury if Air

Classes Shaman
1

I’ve been testing a couple of builds recently to try to open up some variation between the two standard builds that rely heavily on RNG (SS spam and PP lavalash) only to realize that most of the builds outside said standard are very underwhelming. I’ve tried to incorporate fury of air into a build and it’s nothing more than very underwhelming.

As it stands, fury of air is no more than a mediocre means of dumping excess maelstrom in an AoE environment that is paled with Sundering by a very large margin in both pve and pvp. Fury of Air is a very niche talent that has the potential to be much greater than it currently is.

My suggestions to adjust the talent to make it somewhat viable are as follows:

REMOVE the slow and increase the maelstrom cost from 3 to 5 active and 3 or 4/s for upkeep. Allow power to be shifted towards other aspects to make this ability more meaningful. Frostbrand and earthbind are already have more than enough soft cc that do the job much better.

•Shift the power from soft cc to increased flat damage, making the ability a reliable and consistent form of damage, something Enhancement desperately needs.

•Give the ability a stacking debuff on nearby enemies that increases the damage done up to a cap

•Add an AoE burst to nearby enemies when using storm strike

•Grant a stacking haste buff up to a cap, based upon the number times the ability has struck a target

Overall I believe this ability should reward the shaman for consistent upkeep and target application or that it should receive a flat damage buff in replacement for removing the slow.

2 Likes
2

If you run Lucid minor with FoA it’s an almost permanent (~92%+ uptime) versatility buff from the maelstrom refunding it does passively.

This is also, in fact, viable in some current situations over sundering.

If they wanted it to be good as-is it just needs tuning. On a feely-craft side of things, it would be interesting if FoA tacked on some sort of electrifying cloud aspect if you had it active and use crash lightning.

3

Imagine if you could stack fury of air having multiple instances of the buff active at once, with each press creating it’s own self contained buff, that will cancel based on you having 3 maelstrom for each individually active buff. A stacking version would feel too bursty on your maelstrom and would cancel if you needed 15, but only had 14 maelstrom for example, but if you could activate individually maintained stacks it would give you short windows to build maelstrom before every single stack was lost. this would be an interesting ramping/mindful source of increasing dps and trying to maintain maelstrom generation. it’s all gone in shadowlands though :frowning:

1 Like
4

Honestly I’m just enjoying the fact that FoA is viable at all with Lucid minor, this will go away in SL and we’ll all be using sunder all the time again.

5

Fire nova and frost shotgun is on the same row as sundering i think. There’s decent choices