I pitched something similar in the past so this works for me as well; basically a cross between Discipline’s Purge the Wicked and Contemptuous Homily Azerite or Shadow’s Void Bolt or simply a variation on Elemental’s Surge of Power. It’s not like there isn’t precedence for Flame Shock spread in Enhancement’s history, but it definitely can’t be allowed to spread uncontrolled.
Ever since Fire Nova came out, I’m sure we’ve all recognized the elephant in the room; I just hope they don’t cop out and drop the max number of flame shocks triggered by Fire Nova to 3 and tell us that’s manageable via manual casts.
I think given the hard cap on Hailstorm (shock damage x6), soft capping each Fire Nova press is reasonable with big falloff at 6+ targets.
I think the setup and sustain required for Fire Nova should reward higher total damage in longer fights (but Hailstorm being the burst priority talent and extra utility from the slow).
The problem now is it’s hard to prioritize Fire Nova over even your basic Thunder Crash, let alone added power from competing talents like Hailstorm.
Fire Nova is hard capped to erupt at most 6 shocks. There’s no real pathway to achieve that many DoTs rolling without Ice Strike and even then, the third cooldown timer starts to get messy, let alone being a 100% harder activation at 4GCDs than 2 – Flame Shock, Ice Strike, Flame Shock, Fire Nova vs MW’ed Lightning Bolt, Frost Shock.
Having up 2 Flame Shocks and complicating the rotation with Lava Lash presses right before should reward more Fire Nova eruptions, without granting too much power thanks to the multiDoT spread… Hence, the above suggestion of a 3s spread solely for hitting Fire Nova. Plus, since smaller pack sizes will be preferred with the AoE caps in place, it will be even harder to achieve situational use of the current Fire Nova.
I don’t think this is quite right, though I think you had this in mind when you stated it falls off after 6+. It could very well be made to hard cap at 6 though. Per the existing tooltip:
Erupt a burst of fiery damage from all targets affected by your Flame Shock, dealing (25% of Attack power) Fire damage to up to 6 targets within 8 yds of your Flame Shock targets.
Key word being ‘all’. This means the total enemy damage of Fire Nova scales by n^2 up to 6 targets then targets hit by individual novas are capped at 6 instead of scaling linearly up to a max of 6 like Hailstorm. So if they are equal in terms of effort and damage at 3 (per Lava Lash helper), 6 targets (i.e. about 2-3 additional manual Flame Shocks maintained) is 2x more damage than hailstorm overall. They could shift the breakpoint between the two abilities up to 4 and it would be a bit more reasonable. FS -> 6s -> FS -> LL (+2 FS) -> FN to compare to build 5 MSW (~10s) -> Frost Shock is pretty reasonable IMO.
You could squeeze in a 5th or 6th FS (with Ice Strike) depending on haste in time for the next FN, but the damage would only be about 50% more instead of 100% more relative to Hailstorm.
If the break even point was at 5 targets, it would be only 20% more than Hailstorm; a reasonable, but clearly AoE only, ability where LL would have to apply +3 temporary FS, and the number of FS sources probably would need to be capped to 6.
2-3 extra manual flame shocks if targets present themselves is not particularly hard so it is sensitive to tuning, but I do agree Fire Nova should have a relatively similar output and ease of use vs Hailstorm with less damage at 1-2 targets and a higher potential if you want to micromanage dots in larger packs. The only way to really get above 3 however is with something like a Lava Lash helper.
Yes - this is what I meant too. Maybe “hard cap” was incorrect and should have said “mixed cap” since eruptions are hard capped but target cleaving is root scaling (soft cap).
Include cooldown timers for your function on differential DPS. Also, may want to map a probability array alongside number of targets and see how adjusting the “mob density” changes your output performance.
Fire Nova is reliant on more targets to perform/scale, where Hailstorm just “gets it” and cleaves. Right now, the setup on the “more targets” is far too taxing for the overall encounter design direction (smaller AoE).
I would like to see lava lash become enhancement’s version of lava burst, as mentioned before. I think enhance should also get lava surge procs that resets the cooldown on lava lash and increases its damage or makes it crit. Or maybe lava surge procs make lava lash splash flame shock to nearby targets for like 2 to 3 seconds so that it could have better interaction with fire nova.
Lava Lash spreads Flame Shock for 3 seconds on 2 nearby targets as mentioned
Hot Hand and Primal Lava Actuators swapped (base Lava Lash CD increased to balance)
Seems silly to me to wait 50 levels and a legendary to get that sort of entwined interaction; people might actually like Lava Lash as early as level 25. At that point, Fire Nova is just along for the ride.
I mean, I did say in the post you replied something core. And in my previous post Primal lava actuators to be core instead of a legendary.
I remember that change. Can’t remember when it happened exactly but I know it wasn’t when they first put in Mental quickness. I remember the first ‘nerf’ they did because of us being a battle-mage was during black temple. There was a build we were able to do due to them not making a spell-casting dagger main hand only. So we did full SP gear with double spell casting daggers with double flametongue imbues. The first nerf was to just make all spellcaster weapons main-hand only. The second nerf down the line was blocking SP from outside sources other than mental quickness.
Yeah I agree basically. Primal Lava Actuators is a fitting and more predictable complement to Stormstrike’s Stormbringer. The more I think about it, the more I’d like to see it in place of Hot Hand; I could imagine actually having a lot of fun leveling with that and Lava Lash rather than the random procs of Hot Hand.
A. Now reach Elemental Fury as Enh.
B. Flametongue now gave SP, so you could put it on both your weaps.
C. You could equip a SP dagger.
D. People were one shotting players with Chain Lightnings for 20k at time when healthpools were still pretty low.
I think Chain lightning was nerfed as well not sure I just know that its use died out for ST after the nerf. It was okay though because watching people flee in terror from my little blue derp ball that was Lightning bolt only to die horribly was fantastic.
I actually had to look it up cause I was curious and I could have sworn I grabbed some Int mail in wrath when it was such an upgrade (like an epic vs a blue).
The SP no longer from other sources actually came in Cataclysm. Like the end of cata.
I personally see shamans as the master of elements so having a bit of each is not a bad thing. Replacing Lava Lash with something like a wind(physical) strike that fans flames to nearby enemies could work, but making it wind/physical does remove interaction with mastery.
Lightning (nature) doesn’t quite interact with Flame shock thematically and steps on Stormstrike’s toes a bit so that would be another feature creep to address. I’d settle for a glyph of white fire while they actually get something functional / streamlined in the first place.
Just a random thought, but what if they took lava lash and made the ability use sunder (tuning required obviously) making it aoe and ST viable, and free up a talent slot for something new. I have not put any thought into this, literally just popped in my head and sounded like a good talking point
Imagine for a moment Blizzard had a creative bone in their body when it came to class design for shamans and did the following:
Lava Lash - baseline cleaves Flame Shock to 2 additional targets (this would be proper unpruning)
Searing Totem - REWORKED - 1.5 min cooldown
Summon a searing totem that launches rays of searing fire at your flame shock targets as long as they are within 40 yards of the totem, dealing X fire damage every 1 sec for 10 seconds.
Searing Totem reworked to be an actual dps cooldown, removing its health so it can’t be stomped, iterating on totems for class design into the active category, and ultimately bringing back a fire totem to the dps specs (This cooldown could also work for Elemental).
