So what exactly is the point of Lava Lash?

Classes Shaman
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So what exactly is the point of Lava Lash?

Even in BfA where it was a spender, at half the damage of Stormstrike and a higher cost, it was still basically just a Maelstrom dump to avoid capping resources or propped up by hot hand if you chose it.

I see it featured prominently in the specialization selection screen depicting iconic core abilities for Enhancement, but even lightning bolt has more relevance than Lava Lash at the moment.

To me, the Flametongue and Lashing Flames interactions are extremely shallow and ironically just serve to highlight how little relevance Lava Lash has on its own; a core ability shouldn’t have to be propped up by talents or essentially passive cosmetic buffs to be considered relevant.

It’s greatest contribution is now just being a button to push when nothing else is available; too bad it now also has nearly twice the cooldown of Stormstrike and generally fails at that role too.

As much as I wouldn’t mind just trading Fire Nova for a strong MSW enhanced Earthquake / magma field in place its place for higher sustained damage over Hailstorm, I think Fire Nova is here to stay, and it’s beyond painful to see the lack of synergy and missed opportunity with Lava Lash.

Why not a bit of both though?

  • Lava Lash to create a Consecration like field of magma baseline where Flame Shocks tick harder
    • Adds interaction with other core abilities with more visual synergy than a passive single target damage buff in Lashing Flames while still requiring manual application of Flame Shock
  • Hot Hand to function similar to the BfA version by procing at a rate comparable to Ice Strike’s CD, resetting or adding a single charge to Lava Lash, and causing Flame Shock to spread to one nearby target on your next enhanced Lava Lash
    • Moderate throughput and convenience talent provides a passive middle ground between the active Ice Strike and random Stormflurry without artificially over spreading Flame Shock
  • Fire Nova treats up to 3 enemies in the field as if having Flame Shock (damage or target scaling to be tuned as needed)
    • Talents build on already attractive / streamlined core mechanics making it similar to MSW spender / Frost Shock -> Lava Lash / Fire Nova
  • Lashing Flames to be replaced by Echo of the Elements to add a second charge to Stormstrike and Lava Lash
    • Addresses multiple ability shortcomings by adding rotation flexibility, repositioning the field, and late random proc protection

While we are talking about the “feels bad” effect of random CD resets on single charge abilities, I feel like Ice Strike should come with a second charge to both shocks as well since you are effectively wasting a portion of the main point of the ability if you do not immediately use a shock. As it is, you lose a GCD worth anyways; hardly the efficiency you would expect of a CD management playstyle. It’s also a reasonable “quick start” alternative to Hot Hand for a fire build.

Even though it’s starting to get a little off topic now, it is worth mentioning an Echo of Elements ability on the first row would induce some power creep in the other two abilities in order to remain competitive. This is an issue Elemental is dealing with currently, but let’s be honest, all of the current abilities on this row are kind of boring.

  • Forceful Winds acting as a controlled, but reasonable, Windfury burst on a moderate CD, potentially with an execute or MSW generation component (or both with the MSW generation at over 90%?), would really make people think twice about defaulting to Echo of the Elements.
  • Having Elemental Blast enhance your next elemental ability would make it almost a drop in replacement for lightning bolt and higher throughput during endurance fights.

TL;DR: let’s give Lava Lash some love and deserve that class ability highlight.

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In a nutshell?

It was designed as a way to push Enhancement away from 2h weapons.

In Classic, once you got Windfury, Flametongue became a thing of the past. 2h damage was spikey and bursty, unwielding and unpredictable, which made trouble for PvE.

So by adding dual-wielding, and an off-hand attack (Lava Lash), Blizzard solved two issues:

  1. Flametongue became relevant again, as they baked in lava lash doing more damage when it was active
  2. Damage could be evened out to make a sustainable PvE rotation that wasn’t subject to the unpredictability of Windfury’s rng
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I don’t have a problem with dual wielding though literally ripping an ability in two and putting half it’s power in a passive buff is pretty superficial interaction to me. Lava Lash just doesn’t feel interesting at all in its current form.

What you describe may be accurate but sounds like a chicken or egg scenario: do we have Lava Lash because we dual wield now or dual wield because we have Lava Lash? The answer to the latter is a firm ‘no’ as even if Lava Lash was removed completely, we still can’t Stormstrike with a 2H and Windfury damage is currently poo. Either way, if that’s the extent of Lava Lash’s interaction with the toolkit, that’s pretty sad.

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We have Lava Lash to make Flametongue Relevant. Same reason we have dual-wielding. It could have very well been that they decided to push dual-wielding first in order to get windfury and flametongue, and then designed lava lash as an off-hand attack to compliment…or vice versa.

It’s main purpose is to keep flametongue weapon imbue relevant.

This was the decision they made moving from Classic into TBC into WotLK.

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Lava Lash wasn’t even added until Wrath, mate.

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The irony here is that your statements imply the fluff unpruned abilities take precedence over function and synergy when I believe their official stance is that that are just for RP reasons and minor utility.

Maybe it was like that before, but I don’t think that’s grounds for accepting it in the modern state of the game. If it’s a dead ability, cut it out or make it relevant; not this half dead thing we currently have.

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Right…after an expansion of people trying to do dual Windfury instead of the intended Windfury / Flametongue for dual-wielding.

Forgive me for not remembering the exact specifics of 12+ years ago.

Lava Lash was added to keep flametongue relevant.

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I’ve long been a proponent of untying it from off-hand and making it just a melee spell ability. That way it can be used with a 2h, dual-wielding, or a shield.

But again, it keeps flametongue weapon imbue relevant (even moreso as we see flametongue return with off-hand only for enhance, no spellpower buff (making it utter garbage for resto/ele unprune) and lava lash doing bonus dmg for having it on).

It also gives them a tuning knob that entirely sidesteps any windfury burst/chain proc issues that could arise if they pushed further into Windfury. Primal Primer was solid damage in BFA PvP, so much so that it got nerfed.

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To be honest, I don’t have a problem with Flametongue. It’s a core shaman ability rather than enhancement so a spellpower buff for ele / resto makes sense.

My main point / opinion was the current state of Lava Lash is a tragedy, and citing the history of Flametongue interaction doesn’t really shed any light on reasons why that should still be the case.

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You’re asking what its purpose is though…which is to keep flametongue relevant.

If we don’t dual-wield, we don’t need flametongue.

Even if we dual-wield, we were trying to use double windfury.

Lava Lash was added to force our hand into running flametongue so the ability hit harder. That is the point of Lava Lash. It was primarily a tuning knob to avoid double windfury imbues.

In current WoW, its just there because its legacy at this point. It serves as a damage tuning knob that sidesteps Stormstrike and Windfury, while still working with our Mastery (Fire Damage). It keeps flametongue relevant still, but flametongue would be relevant simply due to imbue weapon restrictions.

The Hot Hand rework is essentially trying to replicate the Primal Primer azerite trait (just as Primal Primer was trying to iterate on the legacy of Searing Flame stacks from Searing Totem). It can still make for a meaty hit with the talent, especially with soulbind conduits that add up to 50% crit chance.

The reason its the case, in my opinion, is that Blizzard want to do as little as possible as they can regarding Windfury. Its why it only does about 2% of our overall damage. Tuning Flametongue and Lava Lash doesn’t run into the burst/spike/chainproc issues that historically plagued Windfury. Since they seem apprehensive to buff Windfury, most likely due to band-aids that never actually fixed the core issues with the ability, Lava Lash is where they tune…to offer an alternative to Stormstriking.

Edit: It was very possible at points in BFA for Lava Lash to outdmg Stormstrikes (it was nerfed when it did). It looks like with conduits, and proper tuning, that might be a possibility once again in Shadowlands…yet to be determined.

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I get your point, but can’t say I agree. What would you say would happen if they:

  • Leave Windfury as a main hand only enchant
  • Bake the 100% bonus back into Lava Lash
  • Make Flametongue only a flat damage (for early leveling) and spellpower enchant?

Functionally, the damage is no different from what we have now, but Flametongue is now obsolete from Enhancement; i.e. Lava Lash / Flametongue / dual wielding / double windfury just seems like an artificially constructed kludge. No matter how you look at it currently, we can’t Stormstrike with a 2H and Windfury is main hand only.

Worst case, you have one less buff to maintain on your offhand. The above is no different in my mind from the current iteration of Lava Lash / Flametongue leaving it with basically no core toolkit interaction beyond semantics. My opinion is a core ability should not be considered dead weight if you don’t choose certain talent / conduits / legendaries.

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They are artificially constructed kludge. This is the type of nonsense we end up with when Blizzard decided rather than fixing issues at the core of the spec, to band-aid for 10+ years.

I’m not justifying that I enjoy the way lava lash currently is, or defending it. I am just being objective about what its purpose is.

I also imagine that they have difficulty with changing weapon imbues based on spec, which is why we haven’t seen spellpower return to Enh. At one point in WotLK running double Flametongue with a spellpower main-hand was significantly stronger than the intended way of playing.

Shaman are a hot mess…so much so that they can’t even properly design them in other games. Hearthstone had to have a shaman card removed because it created an infinite damage loop.

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Yeah, it is what it is at the moment, but I hope that doesn’t mean we should continue to settle.

Regarding Flametongue for Elemental or Resto, I suspect they could do the usual by making it also main hand only and drive the spellpower contribution for enhance into the ground via an aura.

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I think we expect too much of the current design team. I feel as though more eyebrows should have been raised when it was said that they had to bring Holinka back to unprune things.

Was the current dev team incapable of re-instating those previous designs? And if so, why? Why did they need to pull someone who was moved to a different game, back to WoW, just to re-add old things? Just seems so strange that the current devs couldn’t have done the job…

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Nah.

Lava Lash was added so Enhance had more buttons to press and a more active priority list, because it’s like 4 buttons in BC and everyone got more involved rotations going into Wrath.

It has Flametongue interaction not to keep FT “relevant” but because they made the decision that they were unhappy with double WF and adding said damage boost is a way to softly force you into using it. WoW didn’t have that many truly forced choices like not being allowed to double WF.

I guarantee you Windfury was the driving factor in making that change.
You made a conclusion and then worked backwards from there.

Anyways Lava Lash is fine and it’s an active button to hit and everyone on this subforum is stupid and should just drop the spec because all they do is get mad about how everything doesn’t do 900 different things at once.
It’s perfectly okay to have damage buttons that are simply “this does damage, hit it on cooldown or else you’re a poor performer”

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Anyways Lava Lash is fine and it’s an active button to hit and everyone on this subforum is stupid and should just drop the spec because all they do is get mad about how everything doesn’t do 900 different things at once.
It’s perfectly okay to have damage buttons that are simply “this does damage, hit it on cooldown or else you’re a poor performer”

:smile:
That’s a semi reasonable stance, but there are other issues, particularly Fire Nova, that need to be addressed in some fashion and the lack of any real interaction with Lava Lash seems like the obvious choice.

You say you should “press this ability on cooldown or else you are a poor performer”, but I think that’s the wrong way to look at things. It should be “press this ability on cooldown because it maximizes your effectiveness”. I can’t get the sense of the latter in the current incarnation as performance is only apparent when you review damage meters rather than through interactions with the toolkit.

If they intend to make Lava Lash Primal Strike 2.0, they should just remove the CD and tune it appropriately. Otherwise, I feel like there’s room for improvement over this quasi filler ability we currently have; it doesn’t build rage, combo points, chi, fury, focus, holy power, runic power, insanity, solar power, icicles, arcane charge, soul shards, or maelstrom. With the exception of Fire Mages (which have other ways of forcing followup crits after a random fireball crit), I just listed every other DPS spec in WoW that has some form of guaranteed builder tied to it’s lowest priority ability on at most a relatively short CD. Since we moved off that template and our builder is tied to random weapon hits, Lava Lash is left looking pretty lost / ineffective to me.

Best I can tell, in true shaman fashion, it’s currently the worst hybrid; a melee version of something like fireball with a CD and only a ~25% chance of building 20% towards our resource spenders (aka flexible filler). Like you said, you just hit it because pressing the non-gray button is what shamans are about now apparently.

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If you read my posts, I point out that Windfury was the driving factor.

Lava Lash certainly adds to the rotation, but it was also a way to force people off Windfury/Windfury while keeping Flametongue Relevant.

Making it an off-hand only attack also helped to offset the people still attemping to 2H pvp in TBC.

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So, Legion Rockbiter.

The thing everyone hated so much they took Boulderfist the entire expansion and Blizzard eventually removed in favor for baseline Boulderfist in BFA.

That’s what should happen? A re-do of the last 5 years?

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I’m calling a spade a spade at the moment. If anything, its worse than BFA rockbiter as you can’t press it when you have nothing else to press. Hardly what I’d hope for it, but just illustrating it’s not that far off as is.

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That’s the point, mate. It isn’t meant to be the “press it when you have nothing left” button. Enhance isn’t even really meant to have one of those period. The lowest priority skill isn’t filler. There’s gonna be a final button in the priority list but it isn’t some spammable filler, by design.

It’s not a bad thing to have an empty GCD or two every so often.
It means that pressing something like Purge isn’t unrecoverable.

Literally, that’s like a huge part of the point in changing Enhance back to what it was prior to Legion. To NOT have a zero CD filler like that.

Did everything but the last two expansions vanish from everyone’s heads or something? I know WoD kinda sucked but goodness.

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