It doesn’t do much dmg for a 1 minute CD. It’s somehow even more disappointing than Mindgames.
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its purpose is the cdr, which is very strong
Yeah the damage is just gravy. They could probably make it zero damage and it would still be taken for the cdr.
Of course Shifting Power is all about the CDR but it could still do a more respectable amount of damage given its lengthy cooldown. Same thing with Arcane Surge’s damage.
We’re a pure DPS class and our major cooldowns that have a direct damage component should feel strong not just because of a buff or other ancillary benefit they provide but also because they hit like a truck.
I really don’t understand where the reluctance to make these spells stronger comes from. They have long cooldowns so even if they did a ton of damage it probably wouldn’t even be a 2-3% overall DPS increase. As it is, on use trinkets do way more damage and that just doesn’t seem right.
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I doubt anyone would be opposed to them making it stronger and I wasn’t suggesting that zeroing out the damage is a good idea. Just illustrating that people don’t take that spell for the damage.
The 1 min cooldown is based on the CDR component of the spell too by the way, because it in turn affects every other spell with a cooldown. If they buffed the damage of SP you can’t assume the cooldown would remain at 1 min. As Manather points out, it’s quite a strong spell as it is.
I meant Blizzard’s reluctance. Players not wanting it I can’t even fathom, lol.
And as far as SP is concerned, I would personally prefer to see it redesigned as a proper AoE spell. Lower the cooldown, increase the damage, remove the CDR component. For Arcane it just adds to the bloat and feels like yet another glorified on use trinket-like ability (in the vein of Azshara’s trinket from BfA), same as Evocation with Siphon Storm. Enough with those already! Frost can definitely use another strong AoE ability because their AoE kit is lacking. Fire… well Fire will be hurt by it because 99.9% of its DPS is tied to Combustion and lowering its cooldown or increasing its uptime but in my opinion that’s just flawed design and the damage profile could definitely stand to be diversified. Also Fire AoE isn’t that great either.
The stupidest thing about both of those spells is they are both (now) arcane damage and yet not scaled by Arcane’s mastery.
If it does too much damage, we’ll wind up in situations where we’ll feel the need to hold off on the CDR aspect of it to get more damage out of AoE pulls. Negligible damage means we don’t need to worry much about that.
Personally I’d rather just remove the spell. An ability that reduces the cooldown of all spells is akin to just reducing those cooldowns baseline but with extra steps. A lot of us already complain about button bloat, so why give us those extra steps?
Right. The spell would be fulfilling two separate needs that wouldn’t always be in alignment.
Yeah, can’t argue with this. But considering they just gave the spell a visual and spell school update this seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. Probably the biggest reason it does damage at all is because if it didn’t the next logical question is what you just asked: why the extra step?
I actually think that Shifting Power doing negligible damage is for the best. No need to stand in melee to make the most out of it and syncing with extra damage phases or cooldowns for AoE.
I completely agree that a spell which lowers the cooldowns of other spells is pointless. That’s why I suggested that it should be turned into an AoE spell so we don’t have to worry about it outside of those situations when we’re already in melee range because of AE anyway. I don’t think removing it altogether is in the cards given that they just devoted resources to giving it a facelift and dragged it into DF from SL. Also, I really like the new version, it looks cool.