Lava burst is one of the most reliable sources of dopamine that any video has ever provided. I love lava burst, my allegiance is to lava burst. That said, my dearly beloved meatball has fallen on hard times, and there is much to say about the set up of the elemental talent tree cordoning off fire and nature, or the occasional over reliance a la season 3 and 4 of dragonflight, but I want to address two points: Crit scaling, and stormbringer
Crit Scaling: In the latter seasons of dragonflight when our gameplay was dominated by lava burst, crit became a nearly useless stat, because lvb is a guaranteed crit. Similar abilities exist, and similar problems have been adressed, in this very expansion:
- Paladins for instance had a talent guaranteeing crits on Hammer of Wrath, and this talent, and surely others (I’m not a paladin scientist) led to ret paladin not scaling with secondary stats well. This was remedied by making the talent buff Hammer of Wrath, so that it may still benefit from crit.
- Chaos bolt is a guaranteed crit, but does bonus damage for critting. I am not a warlock scientist, I think destro still has crit scaling problems, but chaos bolt and lvb share the core functionality of crit chance, increasing crit damage, because the spell is a guaranteed critial strike
- Havoc dhs have a talent which adds universal crit scaling damage based on critical strike chance, a passive which is pretty delicious, and serves to make crit a bit more juicy for the spec.
- The kicker, Ascendance. Ascendance as a cooldown has a plethora of issues, for me, mostly visual. It does however increase lvb damage by your critical strike. This has not historically been enough to make crit good for the fire build, but at least it exists.
Lava Burst Crit Scaling should be practically baseline. This passive should be glued to lvb like chaos bolt, or should be a routing passive near the top of the tree. This could even serve as a tuning knob for fire builds, if the crit scaling isnt 1:1. It is awful when an ordinarily cool secondary stat has almost no synergy with a core part of your class. For the love of god, let Lava Burst be a powerful ability again. (while not part of my tangent, ideally one not spammed like late dragonflight, kinda kills the vibe)
My secondary tangent, Thundering Blast. What is thundering blast you might ask? Well, in Star Wars the old republic, the devs behind the game had the bright idea to yoink Cataclysm class design for a number of their specs. Lightning sorcerer, essentially a reskin of ele shaman, has in place of Lava Burst, Thundering Blast (which coincidentally has crit damage scaling baked in). You put a dot on a target, cast your spell, it crits. Big dopamine. I bring this up to ask again for a similar ability in the stormbringer tree. I am not a big fan of tempest (or the spammy nature of its gameplay), and the general sequestering of lvb to be an activator for primordialy anomaly. A number of issues sideline lava burst, but changing it to a nature spell, big lighting boom, tempest, a… thundering blast, whatever, would go a long way to activating one of the best aspects of ele shaman.