You are upset that Lava Lash has “zero interaction” baseline, but it has an interaction with flametongue, crash lightning, and can proc stormbringer/maelstrom weapons regardless how passive and boring it is. Stormstrike is in the same boat, and has “zero interaction baseline” in that regards because it has the same interactions. It too requires talents to do anything of real interest (if you call guaranteeing a Maelstrom Weapon charge, higher damage, and a chance to essentially be its own version of Windfury interesting).
Lava Lash is underwhelming because its a band-aid fix meant to lock us into dual-wielding by being an off-hand attack (further compounded by Stormstrikes change to require one handed weapons, as people were STILL forgoing lava lash to 2h prior to when SS was changed) and too keep flametongue relevant to the kit (which again at this point is pointless interaction due to imbues requiring specific weapon hands).
I’d honestly rather see Lava Lash and dual-wield removed entirely and rework Windfury to be a 1h+shield dps spec so at least we’d get shield armor to bump our survivability.
A lot of us would like to see many things.
The reality of it is Lava Lash is here to stay — as an off-hand weapon attack that makes flametongue relevant to the kit instead of just being replaced with Windfury — and serves as a tuning knob separate from stormstrike/stormbringer procs/windfury.
TBC moved us to dual-wielding, with the intention of running Windfury / Flametongue, but people still 2h’d and did well — people ran windfury/windfury and did well. Because the players wanted to play a certain way that Blizzard did not want them to. Lava Lash came in to solve that, by doing weak damage and requiring flametongue to be meaningful.
It didn’t stop people from doing Windfury/Windfury, but the damage from Windfury / Flametongue parsed much higher (I believe due to the addition of an internal windfury cooldown to prevent both hands proccing at the same time/right after each other/etc.) This too backfired however, because flametongue added spellpower, and Enhancement shaman had a talent mental quickness that converted Spellpower into AGI (or something similar) which meant that running a spellpower weapon mainhand, then double flametongue for their spellpower bonuses significantly outparsed the intended Windfury / Flametongue. The solution to this was getting rid of mental quickness, and just making Enh run on attack power with spells taking a coefficient of the atk pwer to boost their damage…rather than working from spellpower stats.
It’s very possible that they never figured out how to split flametongue weapon into 2 version (one that gave spellpower, and one that didn’t), which is why we are seeing just the non-spellpower version return now. (Enhance still uses spells so even without mental quickness, Enhance’s spells would benefit from spellpower stat )
This is the reality of the situation regardless whether anyone agrees with it or not. It will still hit like a truck with Hot Hands, and 50% crit soulbind…which just falls back to relying on outside systems to make kits feel complete (which is also garbage).
Hot Hands procs currently boost Lava Lash to near top priority in the damage rotation if you are running it — and will certainly be the case once it has a 50%+ crit rate.
