This really needs to be addressed. Ignoring damage values, the gameplay of it is god awful. As others mentioned its a huge loss of maelstrom generation which helps get the rotation going in AoE since hitting 3 targets is often more than enough to use a spender so we’re not just spamming Chain Lighting forever at the start of packs. And enough has been said how awful it feels losing a means to apply a Flame Shock outside of DRE procs, Ascendance, manual application, and LMT.
I also have major gripes with this change regarding the single target rotation and flame shock management. As now on live, its absolute miniscule gain to maintain 100% uptime on Flame Shock in single target scenarios and you can simply let it fall off your target and wait until Pwave to apply it instead of manually hitting Flame Shock. In fact, even you consume an Icefury proc, you’d just cast Lava Burst even if the target does not have Flame Shock to consume the fire portion of Fusion of Elements. This is because all the hooks into Lava Burst have been severely reduced (Maelstrom granted from Searing Flames and Lava Surge procs) that it falling off and avoiding casting Lava Burst for 12 seconds (outside of triggering Fusion of Elements) is better than manually casting Flame Shock to get 12 seconds of Flame Shock before it gets reapplied by Pwave because there are other GCDs more beneficial, including an Icefury empowered Frost Shock.
With this change, we now need to waste a GCD on Flame Shock before Pwave. Even you were to only use Flame Shock just for Pwave and then let it fall off until your next Pwave, this with us using a significantly low impact button that does little damage for the press and generates a tiny amount of maelstrom. If you wish to maintain 100% uptime on Flame Shock on live, you simply need to hit Flame Shock at the very least when theres is 12 seconds left on your dot to minimize the impact of using that GCD for Flame Shock, or in other words 1 additional GCD per Pwave cycle. With the PTR version, you’re now adding 2 additional GCDs to every Pwave cycle.
Additionally this makes LMT needed to be taken on fights where previously we would be able to devote a talent point to somewhere else. Fights such as Mythic Queen and Mythic Court are examples where you would want to get out multiple Flameshocks but you don’t need LMT. Mythic Queen P2 for example, the first platform has 2 targets that must die; if you don’t plan on using Ascendance at that particular spot, you can still get two flame shocks out easily by Flame Shocking one target then using Pwave on the other and go into your rotation with gaining a bump in maelstrom and 14% haste from hitting two targets. With this change as it works on PTR, you would need to Flame Shock one target then wait for Flame Shock’s CD (5ish seconds depending on haste) to apply it to the other target before consuming Pwave (meaning delaying Ancestors for Farseer) or take LMT and then do 2 whole GCDs (Flame Shock and then LMT) if LMT is not able to hit both.
For a fight like Silken Court, you simple just need to apply Flame Shock to one boss, then Pwave the other to setup for burst. With the PTR version, you would need to pre apply your Flame Shocks so they are active when you hit Pwave which adds more things to track on a pretty complicated fight or use LMT which would only be applicable when they are stacked, which there are a large number of times when they are not (phase 1 during jumps, p2 and 3 due to Skeinspinner jumping around).
This also has some impact on the rotation related to how we would want to sequence our CDs effectively. Going into our second Ascendance playing Farseer in a fight, ideally you’d want to cast Storm Ele > Stormkeeper > Pwave (Ancestral Swiftness as well) > Ascendance > Lava Burst. However given that PTR version does its affect when you press Pwave, you would need to do something like Storm Ele > Stormkeeper > Ascendance > Pwave (Ancestral Swiftness) > Lava Burst which eats up a GCD in our Ascendance window since Pwave does not overload and gains no benefit from Ascendance overload buffs.
This change is so confusing because as people said, this only seeks to make Pwave more complicated and cumbersome to use effectively. It additionally impacts other gameplay aspects outside of Pwave. They really need to revert Pwave to its current functionality or make it a choice node between how it works on live or the PTR version if a player would rather opt for that version. This really puts nasty mark on 11.1 Elemental which outside of this is really enjoyable change (not that it wouldn’t from some changes here or there). Please re-consider this change and revert it before next season.