Just kidding! That. Looks. Freaking. Amazing. Please ignore anyone who seriously tries to scream about the graphic or it’s travel time, or uses hackneyed round about excuses to ask for it to be reverted. It’s a major improvement over the original.
Still because I am aware that there exist players who would complain about ANYTHING just for the sake of complaining, I made this thread mainly to poke fun at the players who gripe and whine over what are ‘clearly’ massive improvements and try to hold the game hostage over ‘nostalgia’.
I’ll even go one step further and beg you to please update Chain Lightning next and ignore everyone with rose-tinted goggles who calls it ‘iconic’ or fine as is or tries to leverage game buffs by whining about travel time. All of these complaints are honestly not valid. They can use a Glyph if Blizzard feels it’s meritted IMHO. Still, regarding the Lightning Bolt spell animation update? I’ll be the first to offer my praise. Really well done work Blizzard! Your Art Dept. killed it and the Artists who redesigned it is incredibly talented.
Not related to the above, but I’d also suggest and ask humbly for a few updates to Monk’s Crackling Jade Lightning and Warlock Destruction spells, such as Incinerate. All of these are really showing their age. Incinerate honestly looks like a popcorn firework and not like actual fire.
I like new lightning bolt more than old lightning JPG but I like chain lightning as is. Not sure what it would need. It looks better than the lightning bolt on live and when you get all the mastery procs going out, it really is nice looking.
Joke’s on you, Blizzard won’t add a glyph because they sniff their own farts and think they smell great. They have big “don’t you have phones?” energy. Especially since the new animation introduces a damage delay, while the original animation is instant.
Im honestly too the point after the ascension models and now lightning bolt to start telling warlocks to stop requesting graphic changes. If this is what we can expect, mere copy/pastes and color changes, its scary to thing what they will give them for shadowbolt.
or instead, try to help give feedback to improve the spell so it can look better, or ask for a glyph, there’s literally better ways to handle this situation than to “revert” things, I literally hate the lightning bolt we have now and honestly, I wish they never reverted the 7.3 version, can’t tell you how much I cringe watching the BFA Shaman Npc’s being able to cast this spell.
Yup. That’s exactly how I feel, coupled with a healthy dose of scorn. What was your point again?
The reason I feel so is simple enough. This was the exact same logic someone on Barthilas (could name em but won’t) used when Chain Lightning got a beautiful visual upgrade, as they made well over 50+ threads on the subject. “Nuu my Chain Lightning nostalgia! Blizz ur evil. <Insert random player’s insane conspiracy theory here and countless other drivel>.” and so on and so forth. All in all a whole bunch of other whinefesting.
Frankly I don’t know how Blizzard handles it so well. So you’ll have to forgive me if I nor the other Shaman players are not in a giving vein, or feeling very tolerant of people who want to hold our spell graphics hostage this time around simply for the sake of ‘their nostalgia’. Blizzard made something beautiful. Some of us appreciate the effort and laud them for it. Others like to trash them for it and insinuate that they can do nothing right.
I’ll be the former rather than the latter, as well as joke about those who behave so.
It’s a pretty different situation from the 7.3 stuff, but I highly doubt blizzard reverted all of those new animations due to “someone from barthilas” making posts about it lmao. Don’t forget they had a new consecration animation too, insanely beautiful widely loved by the paladin community (no posts asking for blizz to revert it at the time) and it didn’t make it through the PTR either. Paladins still talk about it to this day because consecration is insanely outdated.
Its likely something happened with these animations that messed with performance or something, blizzard normally doesn’t change art stuff based on feedback (ie look at tier sets, they -never- change them despite being one of the first things in ptr or beta to get feedback visually). The only instance we have seen from them responding to feedback about visuals for classes was recently with the Ascendance forms, and their response was to make the old one a glyph, and add 2 new forms instead of 1. So it’s pretty clear they probably would’ve done that if complaints were the reason behind those animations not making it.
Some of them also did make it through, ele blast and lava burst specifically. But those were more subtle which is why this leads me to believe it was a performance issue thing. Lightning bolt, Chain Lightning and Consecration all had huge and heavy visual improvements in 7.3 ptr, none of them made it through, but smaller visual improvements did. That says a lot about what happened.
And the reason this is different from 7.3 is that some of the complaints are about the travel time of the new lightning bolt. That directly affects a hero trees performance, which is really odd. I like the animation myself, feels like Zeus throwing a lightning spear, but the travel time sucks and wish it would not have that.
The new effect is too floaty. And, as many farseer mains have pointed out, giving it travel time kneecaps their ability to reliably trigger ancestor spells, because the ancestor doesn’t track spell casts- only spell hits.
I don’t despise this new visual, but getting on your knees for Blizzard and putting your fingers in your ears is just plain asinine.
The criticism I saw much of for 7.3 was that it looked too much like Diablo 3- and classic players whined on and on about how muh nostalgia was being taken away. Just as poor an argument now as it was then, making lightning bolt function like it does in classic makes the spell just plain terrible.
You want a tiny spark with travel time? Classic is right there.
While I think the lightning sparks during cast are beautiful, I feel the projectile does not feel like a lightning bolt. More like a lightning arrow, or lightning hadouken. Would be cool if it traveled alongside a bolt linking shaman and target.
