I hope CL hits enemies around caster not just in front of caster.
Im playing pvp in high latency (130~180ms) and its almost impossible to hit 2 targets in pvp situation as everyone moves so busy.
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I play the same ms and this has never been an issue
It’s not even worth taking in pvp in my opinion. Especially since they nerfed the range. You’re better off taking hailstorm
i tried a build similar to yours…hard disagree
no flurry no frostwitch 2/2 is gg
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Ice strike hailstorm hits as much as a 10 stack LB and cleaves (it’s like 100% buffed in pvp). It’s useful in single and aoe situations. It’s another hard hitting ranged option that slows and generates maelstrom (if specced). It’s gives u way more freedom to do dmg from range and kite. If ur playing stormbringer, you’re already incentivized to throw out as many spenders as possible and with hailstorm you’re rewarded even more for it. It’s flows really well into the play style.
Crash lightning is basically melee range, does mostly negligible pad dmg, and is useless in single target unless specced into the talent. The only upsides I can see would be spreading windfury and maybe a bit better maelstrom generation.
In a typ bgb, frost shock and tempest are usually fighting for my #1 dmg spot. If I run crash, it maybe will break top 10. Windfury will be a little higher but it’s mostly still padding and negligible compared to the direct impact dmg frost shock does with hailstorm.
You’ll see in 11.1 once hailstorm becomes more accessible.
In arenas, crash is even more useless and I’ll drop voltaic blaze for flurry. But similarly, I feel like flurry is a low impact, passive talent that I wish would go baseline or replaced with something more interesting. It’ll help with windfury dmg and maelstrom generation but again it’s almost negligible. Blindfolded idk if u could really tell the difference btw running it or not. We’re doing fine generating maelstrom and windfury is nerfed in PvP anyways.
can’t speak for bgb cause I don’t queue that.
arena tho…I’ve been running a crash build with success, I might give hailstorm another try without volt for flurry tho
What value do u get from it in arena if u aren’t playing against a pet class? Do u run the single target talent? I actually haven’t tested that much so honestly I could be wrong but to me, it just isn’t consistent enough, AOE or single target, to justify it.
I only play it for the ss dmg buff, which is negligible but still gives 450k ss hits
almost every single match is a pet class in this meta, whether it be lock, mage, ww, hunter or balance there is no shortage of pets infesting my arenas.
I’ve never considered really changing it because it’s serving me well
People do not run crash Lightning for the damage from crash lightning itself. They run it for the increased Stormstrike damage you get from the node right under it, you get 25% increased stormstrike damage per target hit up to 6 targets. This leads to a pretty big ST increase overall, even if you can only hit 1-2 targets, but in a lot of cases you can hit 3+ esp vs pet specs and in blitz you can hit 3-4+ reliably. If you look at the leaderboard for Blitz/rbgs, no Stormbringer build plays Hailstorm for a reason. Same for arena.
Hailstorm definitely does more damage than Crash lightning in terms of the initial hit of Crash and the aoe, but the Stormstrike buff is quite big. You also have to take 2 talent points you will never really use to get hailstorm right now, which includes giving up a big buff to Stormstrike. Hailstorm is fantastic though, and its a massive buff we get to take it next patch without losing anything.
edit: you could give up tempest strikes, crashing storms and voltaic blaze in order to grab hailstorm without losing a whole lot, while still keeping crash lightning and converging storms (st increase to stormstrike) but idk if that’d be worth it. you could also give up flurry instead of tempest strikes but idk if thats better to do.
edit 2: forgot to mention, converging storms also buffs windstrike in ascendance too, so if you hit 2-3 targets with crash lightning before hitting ascend your first windstrike hits extremely hard and you can do it again towards the end of ascendance.
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I was the top stormbringer in bgb for a while, I know.
Converging is nerfed in PvP but ya that’s pretty much the only form of crash that I find viable. Even then, a naked flame shock spread out preforms any dmg from crash and the SS amp is situational and still requires u to be in melee range which can be difficult for enh. Hailstorm is consistent, ranged, slows, and does significant impactful dmg.
Next patch I’ll probably drop lava lash and flame shock spread for crash and converging. And might even drop pwave since chain will spread lightning rod. Plus they said they revamped the visuals for it and specifically said in the developer notes that it’s really cool which I’ve never seen them do so I’m excited.
Come back to this thread after 11.1 and let me know what ur opinion is. I’ll be surprised if u still say crash > hailstorm. I think once you play and get used with it I think you’ll see that’s it basically the 3rd most powerful thing in our arsenal. Excited to see more enh shamans play with it.
post 11.1, yeah sure, right now though, i just tried it for 10 shuffles and it is pretty bad.
I’m not saying crash>hailstorm to be clear. I’m saying going for hailstorm is very costly right now because we have to take lava lash and molten assault, and we will very rarely press lava lash so its kind of 2 dead talents for Stormbringer just to get to hailstorm, and thats not the best use of our talent points really. I have tested Hailstorm and Crash on 3 targets, and Hailstorm does more damage than crash every time, but that is not counting the ST buff to stormstrike which again is pretty big if you use it right. Being in melee range is not really uncommon, you just use it any time you are able to and get a big buff to windstrike in ascend or stormstrike out of ascend. If I didnt have to take 2 dead talents to get to Hailstorm, I would do it over Crash right now, but its just such an expensive investment of points.
Next patch we get hailstorm basically for free, I am immediately taking it. I absolutely love Hailstorm and am very sad we cant really get to it without wasting talent points right now, so that is a huge change.
In terms of dropping pwave, I actually think we may end up picking it up potentially, at least for arena. Really just depends on how much dmg it does, but it generates 5 maelstrom baseline in 11.1, and it also aoe applies lightning rod too. If it does a lot of damage, it may be worth dropping 1 point in Legacy of the frost witch since they buffed the first point to 15%. Not sure if that will be worth tho, again depends on the damage pwave actually does.
Edit: Actually maybe dropping the 3 Crash talents to pick up Hailstorm is worth it even right now idk. I just tried it and hailstorm is doing 4-4.5% of my damage, I’m just not sure if crash makes up for that or not with converging storms. It requires a bit more attention and definitely more globals since you ideally wanna buff as many as possible with ice strike. I also completely forgot to take the fire/frost dmg increase in the class tree
Like i said, i tried it and found it to be pretty bad. It slows down your damage without any increase. Fs just doesn’t do damage, even though i only used it with 10 stack/ice strike.
Could just be that 2500mmr shuffle healers are too good, but idk, it felt really bad and collectively I lost 300 rating testing hailstorm/fs build a across 3 toons yesterday.
I could see some value in drooling blitz mid fights, or turbo 3s with the aoe slow spam, otherwise, no way.
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You don’t think it was good in comparison to crash globals? Ice strike was hitting 250kish non crit for me and right after was 700kish frost shock non crit, that’s a lot of damage in 2 globals compared to crash. Not counting the frost shock aoe. Crash was hitting for like 70k ish non crit initial hit, and the aoe from hitting storm strike (assuming you hit 2 targets) does minimal damage and also requires people to be in front of you so if people move from being stacked in front the aoe from storm strike just loses value. Also converging storms is 10% in pvp, I somehow did not realize that, not nearly as good as I thought since we very rarely get 3+ stacks unless it’s vs demo or bm.
I was doing something like 10 stacks of weapon>spend>ice strike>frost shock>spam stormstrike typically, sometimes I would use the ice strike before spending in order to build that last stack or two though. It did a lot of damage. It didn’t feel like I lost any real globals for it, mostly just crash lightning globals because ice strike has a similar cd. I never did this inside of ascendance, only outside of ascendance.
I also did end up using lava lash sometimes (very rarely) to build weapon stacks if stormstrike was on cd and I had like 6 stacks of weapon. It felt like more reliable generation honestly.
Idk I’m only 2300 mmr on my enh but I tested games back to back with crash talents vs these talents and I kind of ended up liking these better. I definitely did more damage with them
Were you running it with elem spirits or no?
I chose not to
I guess I’ll give it a try again and chalk the losses up to lobby rng/bad me
Nah no elemental spirits, can’t really spare the point plus I still press stormstrike a ton so the extra phys benefit is still good from regular wolves.
I did make sure to always spend Maelstrom Wep before I used 10 stack Hailstorm so it’s buffed by Legacy of the Frost witch. I think it’s totally fine to spend 10 stacks of weapon even if you already have a 10 stack of hailstorm if you don’t have legacy of the frost witch up. Also tried to use ice strike after spending as much as possible so it was also buffed, but like I said before sometimes I needed to use it to build so in that case I’d use it as my last builder before spending so the ice strike buff wouldn’t run out. But always used 10 stack hailstorm with ice strike buff and legacy of the frost witch up and it was hitting very hard.
hailstorm either follows a 10 stack weapon or a Frost Witch buffed ice strike, 2 globals for near a mil or over a mil every single time. I haven’t seen value from Crash like that at all to be honest, it hits for nothing including the aoe. And the stormstrike buff is low value at 10% per stack.
I made some weakauras to track Hailstorm stacks and ice strike buff to frost shock, helping a lot at least while I get used to it. Didn’t track frost witch since it’ll always be up for Hailstorm if I do the above ‘rotation’. Essentially crash lightning globals are just replaced by Ice Strike, only extra global is the hailstorm frost shock, but I was only using it after ice strike so every 13ish seconds.
we’ve got another 11.0.5 hailstorm believer, love to see it
regardless of dmg, having a guaranteed follow up to maelstrom is invaluable. If you have maelstrom u have hailstorm. This with all the other tools in our kit makes it so we can do a lot of our dmg from range (one of the key selling points for totemic). This way if ur kiting or being kited, you dont really miss out on too much dmg or uptime.
If you get lucky with procs, you can do as much pressure from range as most casters.
LB → ice strike hailstorm → LB reset → fill up 2 globals (drop a totem, voltaic blaze, feral spirits, etc.) → hailstorm
I’ve been asking for hailstrom to be more accessible since the beginning of DF so im just happy we’re finally getting that. We’re all gonna be eating good with it. The AG and ride the lightning changes on the other hand…
some tips
- if u know u need to kite away, try to get an ice strike in before so u have the buff in the chamber
- even a naked hailstrom can be valuable. If ur at range and have nothing else, it still hits for like 300-400k, its better than just waddling
- in aoe situations, i will always try to use my hailstorm before using another maelstrom spender. even without ice strike if ur hitting 5 targets thats ~1.5 million dmg which still outpreforms everything other than tempest.
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yea i think u might have cooked honestly. i am kind of assuming a lot of the very high rated players (not many) just haven’t tried this because it is a pretty safe assumption that picking up 2 lava lash talents isn’t worthwhile but I’ve been trying this out a lot and I really cannot see crash lightning giving me the same value as Hailstorm is.
Especially with Crash being a frontal in melee, and requiring 2 targets in order to even get the aoe benefit for stormstrike which does minimal damage anyway. The thing for me was converging storms being 10% instead of 25%, no idea how I missed that but thats a big nerf to that talent and what changed my mind a bit.
Even if you hit 3 targets every single time with Crash though (does not happen often in arena unless vs bm or demo) it still doesn’t do as much as one 10 stack hailstorm buffed by ice strike and frost witch. that is including the 30% extra dmg to the next stormstrike.
Not to mention that Hailstorm just adds to kill pressure. I was getting 950k normal hits and a little over 1mil crits with it, and that is following some big damage from 10 stack tempest or lightning bolt. And you still get Stormstrikes in that frost witch window too, usually 2-3 for me. Next patch the 8 second duration will be so good for this as well. On top of this being your slow is pretty huge.
I’m definitely leaning towards this being better. I’m not an insane player by any means, Furious is better than me for sure so I still want to hear his opinion on it but what I’m seeing just makes sense. Its a little harder to play than crash but still easy. And we get another huge hitting ranged ability.
Not like this matters too much anyway though since next patch we get Crash talents+Hailstorm lol, but yeah for now I am playing this.
edit: Also not to mention, disarm effects stormbringer enh a lot since it really hurts ascendance and doom winds, so having a huge frost shock in the chamber can help keep damage going even when disarmed.
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Have you tried it more at all? Now that I’ve gotten used to it a bit, frost shock is consistently 5%-6% of my damage, even when there are no pets and its just cleaving 1 other person. Hitting for 900k-1.1mil normal hits, crits are high too. Ice strike also does some damage, hitting for 430kish crits and 300k normal hits. Ice strike and frost shock combined are like 7-8% of my damage pretty often its kind of insane.
Damage breakdown is like Windfury attack>Windstrike>Tempest>Stormstrike>Lightning Bolt>Stormblast>Frost Shock>Windstrike off hand>etc pretty consistently.
I am convinced that is better than Crash for sure now. Crash is in no way doing a total of 5-6% of my damage (which doesnt include ice strike) in any of the games I was playing with it, even counting the 10%+ to next Stormstrike. AoE applying a 60% 8 sec duration slow is huge benefit too. Curious if you’ve done more with it.
Hopefully in 11.1 they actually make Crash damage meaningful. I would love to see Crash damage below WF, SS, Tempest, LB, CL. It should be above everything else. Make the button feel good to press.
I mean they are wasting their time changing the animation of it if the button itself feels like trash trash to press, which it currently does.
Yay I’m actively pressing a rotational button to buff a different rotational button… Whoo hoo 
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