Stormbringer Feedback: Elemental

Classes Shaman
1

First of all, Stormbringer looks great. More Lightning is what I’ve been wanting to see for Elemental and Stormbringer certainly delivers. That being said, I have 2 major concerns.

My first concern is the lack of control over Tempest.

I really dislike the idea of not having Tempest on demand. Having to burn through 400 Maelstrom before getting to Tempest is going to create a lot of situations where the enemies are already dead by the time we get to actually cast Tempest.

For this reason I think Tempest would be much better as a separate spell able to store multiple charges or activated by Primordial Wave.

My second issue is the lack of support for Storm Elemental.

I would very much like to make a Lightning build that capitalizes on Storm Elemental, but all the talents that support using an Elemental have far better synergy with Fire Elemental. And if I want to maximize uptime on Storm Elemental I have to spend a LOT of gcds not casting Lightning spells, which defeats the purpose of having the Storm Elemental out in the first place.

I think an adjustment to Stormbreaker’s Fiery Demise could resolve this issue by creating synergy between the Lightning spells and Storm Elemental. The goal would be to allow players to obtain a similar uptime with Storm Elemental as with Fire Elemental without having to sacrifice casts of Lightning spells for the sake of increased uptime on the Elemental.

To that end, I suggest the following:

Stormbreaker’s Elemental Demise - If Fire Elemental is known, Flame Shock has a 50% increased critical strike chance and its damage over time critical strikes reduce the cooldown of Fire Elemental by 1 second.

If Storm Elemental is known, your Lightning spells have a 10% chance to cause your next Lightning spell to gain the benefits of Stormkeeper and your Elemental Overloads reduce the cooldown of Storm Elemental by 1 second.

Overloads reducing the cooldown of Storm Elemental would allow the player to use Surge of Power on Lightning Bolt for the additional overloads. This would allow the player to actually utilize the Storm Elemental for more Lightning spells instead of spending half your time casting Fire spells just to extend the duration of the Storm Elemental.

Additionally, with Primordial Wave serving as the catalyst for Farseer and hopefully being considered as the catalyst for Stormbringer’s Tempest, I would like to see Primordial Wave adjusted to have more synergy with Lightning builds. I suggest the following:

Primordial Wave - Blast your target with a Primordial Wave, dealing Elemental damage, applying Flame Shock, and causing the target to become a Lightning Rod for 3 seconds.

You gain Primal Power, causing your next Lava Burst to hit all targets affected by your Flame Shock for 80% damage or your next Lightning spell to Overload an additional time.

This would allow the player to choose between hurling a bunch of Lava Bursts as it currently does or dishing out a Lightning spell with additional overload to funnel into a Lightning Rod. Casting one or the other consumes the effect, preventing the player from being able to benefit from both.

4 Likes
2

Ele’s go-to design crutch is spell duplication, so please no more.

  • Farseer is just our mastery visualized as grandpa (random chance, duplicates damage as Lava Burst)
  • Mastery duplicates spells (and is a balancing and gearing pain; has to be balanced around the mastery cap)
  • Surge of Power for LB is two extra overloads
  • Stormkeeper gives two more overloads
  • Stormbringer Supercharge is an overload proc FROM an overload proc
  • Power of the Maelstrom is an extra overload

It’s at a silly point; it’s like how Taco Bell has only a handful of ingredients and they just mix them around into different items. That’s ele shaman; you get overloads or a free Lava Burst and nothing else.

I do think Stormy needs a revamp. Especially the Primal form, which will physically hurt you to take and use.

1 Like
3

The last thing we need is both hero specs forcing Primordial Wave.

5 Likes
4

I’m sorry OP, but many people do not like being forced into Primordial Wave. I think it a much better idea to have one tree use it and the other tree not for both ele and enh.

Stormbringer is the obvious tree to have no Primordial Wave interaction.

5

Primordial Wave is awesome. I really don’t understand what people have against an instant-cast extra Flame Shock that causes your next Lava Burst to cleave all targets affected by Flame Shock. You guys remind me of the guy in the Paladin forums complaining about being forced into Wake of Ashes.

I might could understand if Primordial Wave had some lengthy castime, excessive resource cost, or drastically altered your gameplay in some controversial way, but the spell is literally just more power at the cost of a gcd and a single talent point. Sure you can spend more talent points to get more out of it, but even with just the single point it is net profit.

The reason it makes sense as the logical choice for a catalyst for these Hero Talent abilities is the modest cooldown providing a reasonable amount of control amidst the random chance. And by having these hero talents tied into Primordial Wave, you’re getting even more out of that single gcd and single talent point. It’s a win / win in my opinion.

3 Likes
6

Primordial Wave and Wake of Ashes are quite a bit different. Wake is just an attack on a 30 second cd that doesn’t really do much else. PW interacts with your kit and doesn’t play nice with a storm/lightning build.

7

Wake gives you 3 Holy Power to immediately cast Templar’s Verdict or Divine Storm.

Primordial Waves applies another Flame Shock to give you more chances at Lava Surge and makes your next Lava Burst cleave.

And you’re right, it doesn’t do much for Lightning builds, but that’s why I suggested the adjustment to Primordial Wave.

1 Like
9

Have you seen the awful gameplay the Primordial Wave tier bonuses have forced on elemental for 2 seasons now?

Delete that garbage spell, please.

4 Likes
10

Im absolutely lost for words, that it took this long to release this dumpster fire of hero talents! FIRST! the defensive talents can be compleatly scraped! We need a hard cast defensive that we can use when we actually ned it! 2nd, tempest is worthless! By the time it goes off we will be getting stomped in dps by everyother dps in the game, or everthing will already be dead and it wont hit anyting! as usual! No ty! Third! For the love of all things shaman! Ditch the peee wave! It was a bad talent in shadowlands, it has been bad in DF, and we dont want it! I love, at least for Ele that its a lightning build, but it sucks for enhancement that you are keyholeing them into playing a storm build! There was so much potential for stormbringer, but it feels like yall didnt even think it over. Feels last minute rushed! I really hope stormbringer gets scraped and completely redone!

11

Super disappointed to see that the complete and utter lack of synergy for Storm Elemental continues.

I can be a Stormbringer and I can summon a greater Storm Elemental, but I have to choose between letting the Storm Elemental fizzle out or spending all my time casting Fire spells to keep it alive.

What even is this design?

12

Huh? I’m confused… my storm elemental has around 80-90% uptime and I’m not casting fire spells like that…. I use FS crits and LB casts to reduce the CD. It hits like a truck now too after the recent buffs to it.

Talents can make it last 20% longer and gives us a baby version when it expires and that one also lasts 20% longer. So we get the LB cast time reduction for both pets.

We can get another storm dude when we use Stormkeeper. I hope we get it with the hero talent every 50secs too.

So, I’m confused by your post.

13

ignore the Cdr on Surge of power hell stormbringer can use aftershock

more Earth shocks = more maelstrom spent = more tempest

(more tempest + earth shocks that means more lightning rods too, on other targets or uptime on ST )

14

You just use lightning and it’s CDR will cause it to have extremely high uptime. It’s quite good.

15

In a single target fight I have to use all my Surges of Power on Lava Burst for the cooldown reduction instead of Lightning Bolt.

In AoE I have to use all my Surges of Power on Flame Shock and Lava Burst because both of these reduce the cooldown of Storm Elemental because they haven’t bothered to implement any sort of design to allow Lightning spells to reduce the cooldown of Storm Elemental.

So if I’m playing Fire Elemental, everything is working together like a well-oiled machine. By bringing the Fire Elemental out, Flame Shocks last longer and tick faster to give you more cooldown reduction, more Maelstrom, and more Lava Burst procs to give you more cooldown reduction and more Maelstrom. You also get to run around while doing all this because your Lava Bursts become instant cast. And if I run Farseer, Lava Bursts provide even more cooldown reduction by having a chance to summon an Ancestor which will reduce the cooldown when they are summoned and have a chance to summon another Ancestor when they expire.

If I’m playing Storm Elemental, I can gradually reduce the cast time of my Lightning spells if I keep casting Lightning spells, but I’m constantly having to stop casting Lightning spells because the Fire spells not only deal more damage but also are the only means to reduce the cooldown of Storm Elemental. There’s just no synergy whatsoever.

1 Like
16

Plus FS crits :slight_smile:

17

WRT: Synergy
I definitely agree that Fire Elemental feels a lot better with regards to the CDR from Skybreaker’s Demise. Having those long lasting Flame just works wonders.
Storm Elemental’s synergy however is with Flash Of Lightning. You’re supposed to be zapping and zapping hard.
IDK, probably could be a subject for analysis, with initial indicators saying something to support the idea that “Chain Lightning’s contribution to CDR through FoL should be per target in order to match the effective CDR and damage contribution of the relative CDR of Flame shocks through SkyD in AoE situations”

WRT: CDR
You can’t get everything, there’s always an optimization goal, and usually that’s towards more damage rather than solely reducing cooldowns. CDR feels more like a bonus reward that smooths out a rotation to match the encounters. In many ways, we can boil down a cooldown from treating it like a 2 minute CD for big pulls only to treating it more like a 1.5 or even 1 minute cooldown that is just about every other pull.

WRT: Surge of Power
With the change to the cooldown of LMT, I think a number of those surges of power in AoE can probably be replaced instead by the GCD of a LMT

18

2 things reduce storm elemental FS crits with talents and LB. I have 80-90% uptime of pet without casting LvB. I use LvB when I want to buff ES or Stormkeeper.

I pvp and use lava surge talent so there’s that. If I were pve I’d just wait for instant LvB and cast to buff other spells. I am full lightning and passive dmg build.

19

Damage is a matter of tuning and can always be adjusted once the design of the gameplay is sorted out. If you read my suggestions in the original post I am trying to have the mechanics adjusted to improve gameplay such that Storm Elemental feels like more than an afterthought tacked onto the talents that improve Fire Elemental.

The fact that this hasn’t happened as we head into an expansion that introduces a Hero Talent Tree where we can specialize as a Stormbringer is absolutely mind-blowing.

20

Sorry. Am I missing something?

Are we pretending that Flash of Lightning does not exist?

1 Like
21

And how inferior is Flash of Lightning for Storm Elemental compared to the following?

Fire Elemental + Surge of Power + Flame Shock / Lava Burst + Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise + Ascendance + Deeply Rooted Elements + Farseer’s Routine Communication + Offering From Beyond + Ancient Fellowship