Primordial Wave change - Ele feedback

-Make Primordial Wave able to overload/work with ele mastery. This way it feels as cool as pressing Lava burst with Prim wave. Seeing a ton of Lava bursts flying out from regular lava bursts and overloaded lava bursts feels so good, this needs to do the same thing.

-Increase Maelstrom generation from Primordial Wave to match what we typically get from current Primordial Wave. Right now Prim wave is a great way to keep up with the flow of Maelstrom gen because it generates so much. Currently on 3 targets, no ascendance used or searing flames talented, it generates around 38 for me, fluctuating slightly based on overloads.
If Prim wave is left with its current generation after the 11.1 change, it would only generate 9. If you buff Prim Wave generation to 8 and allow it to overload, it should do the same thing as right now which is what we need.

I think this change can work out really well, but requires a bit more attention to make it as useful and fun as current Primordial Wave is with lava burst. I dont mind Prim wave being its own ability not tied to pressing Lava burst after or prepping lava burst, its visually cool, but again needs some more attention for ele.

Edit: I’m under the assumption the new Primordial Wave will still apply flame shock and give a lava surge proc. Do not get rid of that from Primordial Wave please, the Lava surge proc especially feels great even without Prim wave cleaving Lava Bursts, it is nice to have an instant Lava burst right after.

3 Likes

With this iteration of primordial wave ele shaman is going to need another way to apply flame shock to replace the loss of old primordial wave. I also fundamentally dislike how this ability is apparently meant to replace a combo of primordial wave->lava burst with a new one of basic flameshock->primordial wave. Naturally it will feel better with ascendance but prim wave has a much shorter cd with ascendance you are going to end up having to natty flame shock to enable it and at that point its just worse than what its replacing. To the point where if this change goes through I kinda hope primordial wave isn’t a meta talent so I can play stormbringer and ignore the new one despite really liking the old one.

That is without going into the myriad of other issues of no mastery scaling, no ascendance scaling, no maelstrom generation.

Wait why do you think we need another way to apply FS in practice? I assume the only thing that they are changing about prim wave is that it no longer cleaves lava burst and instead just cleaves itself, but still applies flame shock and gives you a lava surge proc. If it doesnt do that, its a very bad change, but I assume it still does? No reason it shouldnt. The lava surge proc feels so good, there is no reason to get rid of that.

They could also just make it so magma totem applies more than 3 flame shocks. Applying natty flame shocks isnt bad though if you take Erupting Lava and Flames of the Cauldron like we do in pvp. Makes it so flame shocks last longer, do more damage and also has a reduced cooldown (4.5s cd).

Thats another thing though, we lose Erupting lava damage from this change in pvp as well but it wont take away time from all of your flame shocks now as well, but that might be a bit of a decent dmg loss.

The tooltip doesn’t mention applying Flame shock anymore so it’s assumed it no longer does that. Liquid magma totem only applying to 3 means we are forced into tab target flame shock application for 3 targets or up to 6 if LMT is on CD or you don’t want to take it. Tab target application gameplay is awful and doing it every single pack is just excruciating even more so when you need to kick an important ability. Enhancement has a bunch of ways of spreading Flame shock so it’s super easy for them, but for us all we have is LMT. We need more ways to spread FS without having to individually target mobs in a pack. LMT could apply to 6 or at least 5 targets instead of 3 would be great and lowering it’s cooldown so we aren’t left with times where we are without it.

I like the idea of Primordial wave cutting out the clunky step if it just essentially being a damage buff, but tying it to flame shock when we don’t have a bunch of ways of applying it like Enhancement is bad. It basically forces you into LMT, which just further reduces any choice in the spec tree.

It no longer applies flame shock, functions like fire nova for enh where you can’t even cast it without flame shocks up, and no longer gives the proc. Or at least that was my read.