Stormbringer Feedback Thread

Classes Shaman
1

Hello all! This is a thread with feedback about recently added Stormbringer hero spec. Here is also a link to Stormbringer tree in alpha for people who have not seen it yet.

The post would be split between each new talent in this hero spec with suggestions for improvement to make it more trackable.

Tempest

Every 400 Maelstrom / 40 Maelstrom Weapon stacks spent replaces your next Lightning Bolt with Tempest.

Tempest

0.2% of base mana 40 yd range

2 sec cast
Requires Shaman

Deal (180% of Spell power) Nature damage to your target, and ((180% of Spell power) * 70 / 100) Nature damage to other enemy targets within 8 yds of your target.

An interesting concept, but it has a lot of issues. Firstly, frequency of its generation and its damage are both too low - you get it very rarely and even when you do - it is just a bit stronger and cleaving Lightning Bolt. Moreover, you need to stack it for a long period of time before you can even use it and many battles can conclude earlier. Secondly, its animation does not fit the name - it is pretty much a lightning strike where name suggests something like a thunderstorm. Thirdly, it having a cast time makes it both much less exciting to use (compared to instantly unleashing lightning strikes on enemies) and much harder to use for Elemental Shamans in PVP, especially with all mobility increases many melee specs would get in TWW. Fourthly, it does not synergize with most effects that synergize with Lightning Bolt like Overloads, Surge of Power etc.
Suggestions:

  1. Reduce its resource requirement to 20-30 MSW stacks / 200-300 Maelstrom. This will allow to get it with less ramp-up, so more likely to get while enemy pack not killed yet.
  2. Add a mechanic similar to Sunfury’s Spellfire Orbs where you “slowly generate storm clouds above you outside of combat over X seconds, enabling usage of Tempest” - this will allow to occasionally have it ready at the beginning of combat and much more useful.
  3. Make it instant cast, at the very least for Elemental Shamans. If it is to become instant in general, it should still be compatible with Maelstrom Weapon stacks for synergy with Enhancement.
  4. Change its animation to creating a thundercloud that emits lightning strikes at each target in area, making name Tempest much more fitting for its effect.
  5. If needed - also increase its damage to make it at the very least stronger than other CD based spells like Lava Burst / Earth Shock (for Ele) or Elemental Blast (for Enhancement).
  6. Make it inherit most synergies with talents and effects that affect Lightning Bolt.

Unlimited Power

Spending Maelstrom or Maelstrom Weapon stacks grants you 3% haste for 15 sec, stacking. Gaining a new stack does not refresh the duration.

Decent effect, but having a static value reduces viability of both Elemental Blast (which is more expensive than Earth Shock) and 10 MSW stack spells (as this haste buff could make 5 MSW stack spending better than less frequent 10 stack spending).
Suggestion: Make it provide 1% Haste for each 20-25 Maelstrom and 2-3 MSW stacks spent instead of current static 3% - this would allow to scale its effect and make it equally efficient for all spenders.

Tempest

Increases the critical strike chance of your Nature damage spells by 10% and the critical strike damage of your Nature spells by 5%.

Decent effect, but has a bit of countersynergy with Enhancement, since both Stormstrike and Windstrike are Physical spells, not Nature. As such - it should affect Physical spells too or even better - make both Stormstrike and Windstrike into Nature spells for better synergies with this tree and other passives. It should also be renamed to prevent confusion with the active ability.

Shocking Grasp

Your Nature damage critical strikes reduce the target’s movement speed by 50% for 3 sec.

Can be useful, but in PVE sometimes its effect can be harmful, especially in Mythic+ and in PVP Ele and Enhancement already have access to AoE snares - for example Earthgrab / Earthbind Totem and Electrified Shocks / Hailstorm Frost Shocks.
Suggestion: Make it a choice node with other mobility / utility option - this would allow to take something else if it is not needed or harmful.

Supercharge

Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning have a 35% chance to refund 3 Maelstrom Weapon stacks or 50% chance to cause an additional Elemental Overload when Elemental Shaman’s Mastery is triggered.

Decent effect, but Elemental’s version is heavily tied to Mastery value (as it triggers off Overloads), making non-Mastery Stormbringer builds less viable. Consider just providing a static X% chance to cause an additional Elemental Overload for Lightning spells that is not tied to getting an overload already to address that.

Storm Swell or Arc Discharge

When Tempest only strikes a single target, gain 3 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon / 30 Maelstrom

or

When Tempest strikes more than one target, your next 3 Chain Lightning spells are instant cast and deal 75% increased damage.

This choice makes sense, but is too conditional - there can be a situation where you take single-target effect and unlucky add spawn makes you lose the effect entirely and vice versa - you try to use it for AoE effect and all but 1 enemy get out of its area (which is not visible btw) and you lose the effect entirely too. It could be improved.
Suggestion: Make this effect just a choice node between Tempest generating X additional Maelstrom / MSW stacks or Tempest making next X Lightning Bolts or Chain Lightnings instant cast and deal X% increased damage no matter the target count. This will allow Stormbringers to pick between additional resource generation and mobility no matter the target count and help make this tree more viable for PVP (as currently it does not seem to be viable much, at least for Elemental Shamans).

Rolling Thunder

Elemental
Gain one stack of Stormkeeper every 50 sec

Enhancement
Tempest summons a Nature Feral Spirit for until canceled

Decent effect, but could use improvements for Elemental. 50 seconds is a period that is badly compatible with other Elemental’s CDs and should be changed to 30-45 seconds, which would align better and improve the synergies. Since it is also just 1 stack of Stormkeeper and Stormkeeper is already nerfed in PVP, I’m not sure that it still needs a 100% period increase in PVP, which might be lower or removed entirely.

Voltaic Surge

Crash Lightning, Chain Lightning, and Earthquake damage increased by 15%.

Decent AoE boosting node that can be tuned if needed, no suggestions here.

Conductive Energy

Gain the effects of the Lightning Rod talent:

Lightning Rod

Tempest, Earth Shock, Elemental Blast, Earthquake / Lightning Bolt, Elemental Blast and Chain Lightning make your target a Lightning Rod for 8 sec. Lightning Rods take 20% of all damage you deal with Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning.

Decent effect for Enhancement, but does not seem much for Ele, since it just adds 1 additional enabler for Lightning Rod. As such, Conductive Energy should make Lightning Rod applied to multiple targets of Tempest to make it have significant value for Ele or some additional boost for Elemental Shamans.

Nature’s Protection or Surging Currents

Targets struck by your Tempest deal 10% less damage to you for 6 sec.

or

After using Tempest, your next Chain Heal, or Healing Surge will be instant cast and consume no Mana.

Decent choice node, but could use improvements for better value and compatibility. Nature’s Protection should apply an undispellable buff to Shaman instead of a debuff to enemies hit - this will make it have good value no matter how many enemies are there and whether all of them were hit by Tempest. Surging Currents affected healing spells should not consume MSW stacks, so that they are more compatible with Enhancement’s playstyle and Stormweaver PVP talent.

Awakening Storms

Stormstrike, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning have a chance to strike your target for (50% of Spell power) Nature damage. Every 3 times this occurs, your next Lightning Bolt is replaced by Tempest.

Decent effect, but being a capstone talent it could use some additional boost over just adding a charge of Tempest. For example, it could also create a small tornado around current target (or last target hit by mentioned abilities) when Tempest from it is generated, dealing AoE damage over time to target and other enemies in area. This would both make it more fitting for a capstone talent and fulfill desires of many Shamans to have access to a tornado-like effect in this hero specialization.

This sums up my feedback about Stormbringer. If somebody has access to alpha - you can post link to this thread in official Shaman feedback thread there for better visibility. You can also add your own feedback about Stormbringer to the thread and thank you for reading!

5 Likes
2

All feedback from an Elemental perspective

Point 1

For Elemental, Tempest needs to be able to have two charges.

The reason being

  • if your rotation is say CL > EQ
  • and your CL procs Tempest (Awakening Storms)
  • then your next EQ (remember we’re hitting this global quickly) puts you over 400 Maelstrom spent
  • you’re going to immediately just lose a Tempest charge.

Otherwise, the amount of weakaura tracking required is literally tripled…and the “smartness” of those weakauras has to be basically done entirely through somewhat-advanced LUA code including:

  • predictive maelstrom spent
  • some variable that is counting your Awakening Storm procs
  • both in separate places on the UI

And if you don’t use these weakauras, you just risk overwriting some number of your Tempests and flat out losing one of them.

If Tempest can just stack to two - it’s just one additional weakaura showing when the Tempest buff is present and the number of its charges - no complicated or predictive LUA code, no custom variables, just straight buff tracking.

Remember, we already need to track 50s Stormkeeper procs again

Point 2

Maybe when Tempest procs - your Chain Lightning button should just fire off your Tempest as well.

It will feel awkward to have to switch to hitting LB in AOE situations. I get it - but I was a fan of actually getting rid of CL originally and making LB cleave. ie. If it hits more than one target, you gain 4 Maelstrom per target hit…and if it hits one target, you gain 8 Maelstrom. Basically one spell that acts like both depending on the target count.

In either event, I do think CL “becoming Tempest” along with LB makes some sense…it’s just one less button to hit for us age-challenged, hurting-wrist players.

Point 3

An un-skippable 50% slow makes Ele not get invites for Sanguine weeks

Maybe Sanguine is going away, and maybe it isn’t. But we can’t even opt to not take that talent - so in the current form, it’s a detriment in some cases.

3 Likes
3

That’s a positive imo. Elemental Blast being an always take talent for elemental kind of sucks. Why even have Earth Shock at that point if we never actually use it? Plus the rotation just feels better with Earth Shock in it rather than Elemental Blast. And lastly, having Earth Shock in the rotation rounds out using at least 1 spell of each element.

1 Like
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I can agree, but that issue should be addressed with spenders themselves and not require to take a specific hero specialization for addressing. For example, maybe ES and EB should just become a choice node and provide similar dps with different pros and cons - ES providing more mobility and EB providing its additional secondary stat boost.

5

Also, are we the only class that had to create our own thread for Hero Tree Feedback, as opposed to being given a Blue Post asking for it?

4 Likes
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There are no official feedback threads for all hero classes released in alpha and later. That is why this thread was created to begin with.

1 Like
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stormbringer is a enhance spec, many of the node interact with enhance but not ele.
Maybe ele will be gd 10 yrs later

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Just in case - link shows Enhance version of Stormbringer, Ele has its own that interacts with Ele abilities. Ele interactions are shown in separate talents description in the post.

Will provide separate link for Ele to avoid further confusion.

1 Like
9

For Enhance :
1.Thorim’s Invocation interact with Unlimited power
2.Conductive Energy interact with Pwave : instant 5 Lightning rod
(yes NYI so i might be wrong)-> interact with Arc discharge
3.Supercharge : more maelstrom weapon-> more tempest-> interact with storm swell-> more tempest ->interact with the whole tempest hero talent tree

For ele

  1. none
  2. none
  3. maybe superchage and surge of power.

Nice job blizzard

1 Like
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Currently it seems Pwave has zero interaction with Tempest as Enhance.

But I do agree Ele needs more.

11

Conductive energy let enhance get Lightning rod apply by lightning bolt, in the tooltip. And Pwave send 5 lightning bolt. what are you talking about?

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Sorry I completely miss read everything, it’s late here :sweat_smile:.

But I’m sure things are going to change, it’s also hard to gauge if conductive energy for enhance is going to work as you’ve mentioned, it’s odd they kept it NYI for Alpha.

I’m assuming further adjustment are going to happen. To be honest especially for Ele’s sake and gameplay Tempest becomes instant cast. It feels so clunky as Ele seeing it have a cast time.

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My feedback for elemental shaman is YAWN. 2 sec hard cast spell that auto casts after using a certain amount of resource is boring gameplay. Then the spell itself is boring: it’s just more lightning bolt (with I think less synergies) that does a little aoe if other mobs are nearby (and begs the question why you’d be casting lightning bolt in the first place with multiple mobs)?

Why not make tempest interesting? Like have it summon a couple of tornadoes that move around the battlefield for a few seconds? Or summon little earth elementals throwing stones, or water elementals sprouting vortexes (models are all int he game already). Or summon a electrical field that does a periodic shock stun, or a water puddle that does elemental dot damage? Or just about anything other than a wee bit more lightning bolt. Endless possibilities that are more interesting than … more lightning bolt.

And that cast time … I can’t wait to lock into that animation. Smh.

As for the other Stormbringer talents, there seems to be nothing new, just little buffs to the old stuff.

The whole effort feels uninspired, esp in comparison to what other classes received.

6 Likes
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I’ve played elemental shaman for a while and I’m glad they made a lightning based hero talent tree for us. Thematically it’s great, and I hope that tempest has a neat visual to it, and I’m sending prayers to the thunder gods I can play around with it. I tend to try all the classes out but Shaman has my card for this expansion cycle.

Going talent by talent on what I play and do with my shaman currently.

Spending Maelstrom or Maelstrom Weapon stacks grants you 3% haste for 15 sec, stacking. Gaining a new stack does not refresh the duration.

I never complain about more haste with elemental, very rarely does that end badly for us other than having to avoid capping on maelstrom a lot. We have so much maelstrom I kinda wish tempest would burn a portion of it to boost it’s damage. Or make it so, tempest doesn’t’ generate it but causes more damage because of it.

Tempest

Increases the critical strike chance of your Nature damage spells by 10% and the critical strike damage of your Nature spells by 5%.

For elemental, nothing to complain about here, more crit with nature spells just makes chain lightning feel even better when it pops off.

** Shocking Grasp

Your Nature damage critical strikes reduce the target’s movement speed by 50% for 3 sec.**

A double edged sword honestly, and in a world where sanguine still exists or fights where the tank needs to position adds quickly in raids, this might be a problem if we can’t choose to opt out of that interaction.

Supercharge

Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning have a 35% chance to refund 3 Maelstrom Weapon stacks or 50% chance to cause an additional Elemental Overload when Elemental Shaman’s Mastery is triggered.

For elemental this just makes getting that 84% mastery even more important so we can just keep rolling spells into spells, which I’m not mad about, having your spells keep duplicating like a torrent of elements feels great.

Storm Swell or Arc Discharge

When Tempest only strikes a single target, gain 3 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon / 30 Maelstrom

or

When Tempest strikes more than one target, your next 3 Chain Lightning spells are instant cast and deal 75% increased damage.

This almost feels like this spell should just be one thing instead of a split node, if you’re going to add a split node, maybe make it so we can get a lightning version of Ascendance maybe? It feels like we’re gonna need to toggle that node almost every other fight in the raiding world. In mythic plus you’ll basically just take Arc Discharge for the abundance of chain lightnings and call it a day. Honestly if anything, because of how often raids have some kind of mechanic you can hit outside of the raid boss, we’ll probably never use Storm swell for the single target bump very often. Makes me think it needs more bamph to make it more appealing for priority damage. Honestly, with elemental blast and currently, I’m constantly drowning in maelstrom as a resource. If it made it so tempest hit X amount higher in conjunction with generating more maelstrom it would feel like a better node choice.

Rolling Thunder

Elemental
Gain one stack of Stormkeeper every 50 sec

Enhancement
Tempest summons a Nature Feral Spirit for until canceled

For elemental, we have a lot of ways to get charges of stormkeeper currently and we like gaining it, but honestly, 30 seconds or so would make it feel smoother. Right now, we’re currently an interesting spec where we get several mini cooldowns every 30 seconds with the lava burst build. Perhaps making stormkeeper feel like a stronger button to press but make it come back less frequently and the timer on this would feel better.

Voltaic Surge

Crash Lightning, Chain Lightning, and Earthquake damage increased by 15%.

Nothing but love here honestly.

Conductive Energy

Gain the effects of the Lightning Rod talent:

Lightning Rod

Tempest, Earth Shock, Elemental Blast, Earthquake / Lightning Bolt, Elemental Blast and Chain Lightning make your target a Lightning Rod for 8 sec. Lightning Rods take 20% of all damage you deal with Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning.

Being able to spread lightning rod is going to send a damage nuclear on trach packs in higher level keys, currently our damage can sometimes start to fall off with more targets so getting this as an increase to that should help a ton.

Nature’s Protection or Surging Currents

Targets struck by your Tempest deal 10% less damage to you for 6 sec.

or

After using Tempest, your next Chain Heal, or Healing Surge will be instant cast and consume no Mana.

I think in my case with raiding, I’ll probably always take nature’s protection to reduce boss damage if it aoes out constantly. I’d like to think I would use a free chain heal or healing surge after tempest but with our healers and myself only stepping in as a backup healer, I’d rather reserve most GCDs for more damage unless the uptime on this buff lasts a good while.

If it’s something you have to weave in within 10 seconds or something like that, I can see it being very under utilized, whereas if it holds until you use it, I could see it gaining more traction to help pinch heal during transitions, heavy movement or a pinch heal.

Awakening Storms

Stormstrike, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning have a chance to strike your target for (50% of Spell power) Nature damage. Every 3 times this occurs, your next Lightning Bolt is replaced by Tempest.

This capstone kind of feels like another version of our mastery, which I’m not mad about, but it would be nice to see it visually more exciting. For example, when druids lost hurricane I thought that was sad, but getting some kind of visual of clouds rolling in and dropping lightning would be amazing visually and possibly with gameplay as well. I would actually love the option to replace earthquake with a more lighting based spell essentially like call lightning or something along those lines.

Anyways. Super excited for these hero talents and hoping we’ll get to see it soon and find out more about it. I don’t know as much about enhancement but for elemental this is basically exactly what I was hoping would come to be.

15

I’ll probably still spec into Stormbringer over Farseer on my Ele Shaman, but I’m not thrilled with either option. How exactly does this hero spec celebrate us being the only lightning caster? Having increases to spell damage, crit, haste etc are great and all, but those could just be regular talents. Nothing here makes me think hero spec as we’ve gotten with other classes. More storm elementals or lightning strikes from above would be cool. They could also let us cast Lightning Bolt while moving again. There’s a lot of options other than one spell every so often. I do like the instant CL procs though.

7 Likes
16

Remove this talent and give us some form of mobility that is consistent - in pvp enhance is one of the most immobile specs there is. This is boring and generic give some cool mobility and the tree is pretty solid.

Also if they do keep this talent at least add lightning bolt to it as a single target enhancement.

1 Like
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My only feedback until I get to test it, is to make Tempest more impactful. It should hit harder since you spend your time chasing it’s procs, and make it look better. Give us a actual Tempest or storm to bring. Voidweaver Priest, Deathbringer Frost DK, ALL of mage’s stuff, the visuals are amazing, don’t let us down with this, we already have to put up with Ascension looking like dog doo.

2 Likes
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Although great feedback so far, elemental and other specs big problems still have not been addressed: lack of defensives and no class raid buff

4 Likes
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You wouldn’t and nothing in the hero talents suggest you would.

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Except that LB turns into Tempest lol - so you literally will be hitting that button against multiple mobs.