With the changes made in patch 11.0.5 to increase the effectiveness of several Elemental talents and cooldowns such as Ascendance, the Lightning Rod talent greatly overperformed. With a hotfix that went live a little while ago:
Elemental
Lightning Rod now transfers 10% of all lightning damage dealt to Lightning Rod targets (was 20%).
This reduction should significantly reduce its effectiveness in AoE damage situations, and less so when fighting a single target.
This change may require Shamans who were online and using the Stormbringer hero talent tree to either log out and back in or swap to the Totemic hero talent tree and back to the Stormbringer hero talent tree for their Conductive Energy hero talent to properly work.
Can you shed some light on the reasoning for the removal of the Glyph of Ascendance from the Warlords of Draenor expansion? And why it has not been added back to the game despite it being a popular request?
Ok great, it was fun while it lasted I guess. Now can you also look at Sunfury Arcane because the exact same reasoning should apply there too but in reverse. In trying to balance it and bring it more in line with other specs you completely butchered it instead and it went from being top tier both mechanically and in terms of output to thrash tier.
I am sorry to say but this whole “balancing” patch was a complete disaster and I hope some lessons were learned about implementing these last minute untested changes at the eleventh hour…
WoW: The Nerfs Within. Have you been enjoying that class you just invested several weeks farming hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of runed crests before you have to farm hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gilded crests? Well, we just nerfed it and your enjoyment of the game significantly. But stay subscribed?
I never quite understand the process of nerfing, as in this case, “We are nerfing the AOE, by nerfing an ability that also generates single target damage.”
What!? would EQ not just bet the choice!?
Maybe if developers offered a bit more insight into their reasoning, nerfs and buffs wouldn’t feel so ham-fisted.
Which is good considering the number of substantially and spec breaking alternatives they could do like nerfing spenders, nerfing generators, gutting our mastery, gutting overloads, nuking ascendance out of orbit.
Lighting Rod is honestly the best path since it is the least disruptive yet impactful method by which to bring down Ele damage in AoE but also address some of its single target strength. Not that theres other things they could lightly adjust as well. You also have to think about Farseer since if you nerf something that affects both hero talents then the whole of the spec ends up worse down the line.
fair enough, my thought was more along target capping lightning rod (no more than 2-3 active) as I think that the top 1% have gotten us nerfed in this case, which would be the type of transparency I want, not that you aren’t correct about this question being answered well in this case. I’m just dirty about past things around that kind of communication.
That is a substantially more invasive change that flat out kill the talent completely and would be even more damaging to spec, especially for Stormbringer.
Not really. Lighting Rod is actually a stupid high source of damage outside of your CDs in keys. Chain Lighting and and EQ are going to dominate it but again, you have to be careful with nerfing and adjusting certain things in a tool kit. If anything this is more of a nerf to high skill players rather than to the average player. If you weren’t already meticulously tab targeting your Earth Shocks, Tempest, and EQ to spread it on as many targets as possible, then this nerf impacts you less compared to those who were doing that already.
Also consider that Lighting Rod was doing so strong that people were opting to play Charged Conduit on pure single target fights like Sikren and Princess versus something more single target focused like Thunderstrike Ward because it gave them near 100% uptime even playing Elemental Blast versus Earth Shock.
Ele will still be broken. Now instead of 5 Million damage parses it will be 4-4.5 million and they’ll still be twice the damage of everything else. Go and look at M+ runs or Ulgrax damage breakdowns. This is just nerfing a small part of the problem and is akin to a slap on the wrist at most.
I just reread the Hotfix now, yea that LR nerf is crazy. A 50% nerf (20—->10)? Not saying it isn’t warranted but that is a heafty slash. I’m more concerned about the future of potentially being driven into DRE procs deciding everything again or becoming a 3 minute spec with lower damage outside CDs.
Again, warranted nerf but I really don’t want to be driven into a corner with Ascendance in the future. Hope it’s something Blizzard is watching out for personally.
Going to need you to point me to these 5m parses because the absolute best on warcraft logs right now is like 2.3m on mythic Ulgrax that I could find, which isn’t exactly doing double the damage of everyone considering there are multiple classes putting up 1.8-2m parses. Even in M+ they aren’t parsing 5 mill over the run, ~2m which given the top specs were ~1.8m last week isn’t really insane. OP? Yes, but this nerf really does cover it. Lightning Rod is ~20% of our damage so nerfing it by 50% nerfs our damage by 10%, bringing that 2m down to 1.8m.
People need to understand this damage is very much tied to a single 2-3min cooldown and outside that cooldown the damage drop off is VERY dramatic and the spec feels like sludge. So they will see a 26mill burst/5m avg on a single pack and miss the next few packs where they are parsing 700k-1.5m avg.
Keep in mind that I HATE Ascendance and doubly hate having our DPS tied to a 2-3min cooldown with it feeling really bad in-between. I would love nothing more than to see ascendance nerfed into the ground as long as our damage elsewhere is buffed. What I don’t want to see is a knee jerk nerfing that cripples ascendance with no buffs elsewhere and then the spec is done until rework 3 or 4 in patch 11.2.5 or even the next expansion.
So lets see how the LR shakes out and maybe Blizzard will come up with better nerfs/buffs that evens the spec out so we aren’t forced into Ascendance.
Its the rank 1 parse on Ultrax not just for Ele Shamans but for Allstars as well. The 5 mil is mostly wow head pointing out the burst potential on adds.
One of the better nerfs we could have asked for. We probs need more and I really hope it comes to echos that talent is awful
To play with and needlessly complicated, having to tab target your earth shocks. It’s also an aoe specific talent so our cleave in a more st oriented setup wouldn’t be hit as hard
But there was ZERO changes to anything happening in PvP right now. Shamans are pumping out lava burst machine guns and 1 shotting people ontop of 2.5m earthshocks.
Arcane is far from trash tier haha. Players that have a clue what they are doing are still performing quite well and in aoe and in ST they are still right there along with the rest, they just don’t spike to Jupiter in damage and then come back down. I see Arcane sitting at 1.2 to 1.3m in single target damage which, in heroic gear so 619, is still good. If you are having issues, you aren’t doing something correctly
