Stormbringer Feedback Thread

Ok? That’s not casting Lightning Bolt in AoE, that’s casting Tempest.

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These hero talents, Stormbringer and Farseer, are just the Ele S2 and S3 tier sets made into hero talents. Feels very bad to make the spec either lightning OR fire, but not both.

However, if that is what they are going to do, then fine… they need to fix the class/spec or these are just dead in the water and dps shaman are once again relegated to crap status.

Fixing Shaman would not be that difficult, but if they don’t do it, it will be another lost expansion for the class.

Class

  1. Add 8% DR to Elemental Orbit if you have Earth Shield applied to yourself.
  2. WF totem removed and changed to Windfury raid buff, 3% haste.

Spec

  1. Make a choice node, where you either get A) Chain Lightning applies Flame Shock to every target hit or B) Chain Lightning chains to every target within reach
  2. Make Earthquake attach to a target and emanate from them.

There you go. Shaman fixed, works fine, would be a viable dps for all content and you could pick either hero talent and function fine.

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Haven’t tested it. But having read it, it seems that with mult mobs you’re casting CL, then you get a tempest proc, which requires you to push your single target button LB. With a single target, otoh, you’re already pushing LB, so you get a Tempest proc and just keep spamming LB except now it has a diff name and a 2 sec hard cast time for a little extra damage. Like I said, this is the one main new thing the spec is getting, and it’s uninspired imho.

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It’s the same button lol. I don’t care if the button chucks out a Lightning Bolt or throws out a Tempest or throws out Liquid Magma - the button is the Lightning Bolt button lol (that’s all I mean by that).

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I think I agree with all of this.

Think you are asking a lot from a hero tree. Those are things resolved in the class and spec trees friend. This is a Stormbringer Feedback Thread after all. :slight_smile:

This feedback is coming from a pve Enhancement PoV.

Overall, I really like it. Tempest should be a fun button to press in all situations. My primary concern would be making sure we are getting enough of them to feel impactful, but Awakening Storms creates a perfect tuning knob to ensure this. A simple adjustment to the ppm would be all it would take. Well played there, devs.

I also very much appreciate that this new ability replaces lightning bolt. I think most of us would agree that enhance does not need any additional buttons.

My secondary concern with it would be its radius. It looks a little small compared to most aoe abilities. Giving it an extra 2 yards would help immensely. Not every aoe pack makes into a nice little bundle.

-Unlimited Power, Tempest the passive, Supercharge, Rolling Thunder, Voltaic Surge, Conductive Energy, and Storm Swell/Arc Discharge are all good stuff. I like them. They manage to bridge the gap of being both passive and meaningful. Well played once again, devs.

All is not perfect, though. And I do have a few things I do not like.

-Shocking Grasp. Best case scenario is that this passive is just useless to me because we already have multiple ways to slow mobs when needed. Worst case is that it can actually cause problems when I don’t want things slowed.

I propose making this a choice node. Choice one would be exactly what is there and choice two would be nature crits increase your speed by 30% for six seconds. Let the player pick.

-Nature’s Protection and Surging Currents are hugely lacking.

Nature’s protection will have a very inconsistent uptime and thus the DR will be very unreliable. It also only works on what you hit- this won’t help us when adds spawn, councils are split, or from environmental damage.

Surging currents sounds good on paper, but in practice healing spells from enhance are incredibly weak unless they are buffed by maelstrom. If they are buffed by maelstrom they are already instant.

I would propose adding a defensive component to lightning shield instead. It would fit the theme and be more reliable. If a flat DR is deemed too strong or too boring, you could have lightning shield put a hot on us or boost our max health. Either would be a nice bonus.

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yeah but we can only go off of what we’re given. There’s been zero communication that a spec or class tree will be changing. The Hero trees seem “open for feedback”…that’s why people are giving it.

If they (the blizz devs) asked for class/spec tree feedback, they’d put it there. But they haven’t. Our communication has largely been one-way for nearly two decades.

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Mostly play Enhancement, so that’s what I’ll be giving feedback on

I’d love a change to the animation, it’s currently pretty lackluster, especially compared to other classes’ new spells and Shaman currently struggles with underwhelming animations (looking at you ascendance model from 2010). Honestly an updated version of druid’s old Hurricane spell with like a few lightning effects would slap so hard. I also really like the idea of storm clouds gathering around you, we definitely could benefit from some sort of visual indicator of where we are stacked currently that doesn’t just copy paste maelstrom stacks for enh.

Also, definitely down for making it synergize with lightning bolt passives, especially Thorim’s Invocation for enh.

Agree that it’s damage needs to be higher than other spenders.

Please for the love of god, make the haste dynamic based on how much maelstrom is used. We currently cast our spenders at 8-10 maelstrom on enhance and the storm build in particular generates a lot of maelstrom, if this doesn’t get changed, spending maelstrom at 6 or above will feel like we wasted stacks.

It’s 2024 can STORMSTRIKE and WINDSTRIKE deal nature damage already, especially if you’re going to add bonus crit chance on nature spells.

Shocking grasp is going to feel like you’re inting your team, especially during sanguine weeks. An uncontrollable slow at 50% is not a great design as this could mess up with mob positioning, grouping, or moving when you’re not even trying to slow. I’d much rather have a second defensive talent, as we already have enough cc and stops in our kit and severely lack survivability.

also agree that for Storm Swell, it shouldn’t matter if Tempest hits multiple. there is very rarely a pure single target fight, a lot of bosses have some sort of add.

I don’t really know how to feel about lightning rod, maybe attaching it to stormstrike or crash lightning for enhancement. Enh is only going to proc it off of Tempest, LB and CB (all of our maelstrom spenders), and it only buffs LB and CL. With Lightning Rod only lasting 8s, it means you have 8s to generate another 8+ maelstrom to even get its benefit because you’re never going to hard cast LB or CL as enh like you would on ele.

I’m worried about Nature’s Protection because mechanics aren’t always tied to a specific enemy and we’re also one of if not the squishiest class in the game (which is weird, because we have the 2nd most durable armor type) and quite a few other classes got much better DRs in their trees. Would love something better and feel like out of all the classes, we kinda deserve it.

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For once in your life Blizzard, boost shamans defensively.

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I’m not going to repeat a lot of the details that the first few posts have noted.

My biggest concern is that this tree gives us zero mobility increases, and the defensive nodes are very poor.

I am okay with semi-boring passive increases. At the end of the day crit and haste do make combat fun especially at the start of an expansion. But the visual on tempest is very bland. Considering this is the storm tree and tempest is the main focus, I was hoping for a more impressive visual.

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For enhance I’d rather stormstrike became tempest instead of lightning bolt and crash lightning got empowered since it’s the melee spec, but maybe it will feel ok to play. We haven’t seen Totemic yet but I’d guess Stormbringer - storm build, Totemic - elemental build. My big concern is will this tree just mean you’ll be ignoring frost shock, lava lash, ice strike, elemental blast, doom winds completely?

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A Stormbringer build won’t use elemental blast, but those other abilities are all part of it. Lava lash is used to maintain and spread flame shock, Doomwinds is a key cooldown, ice strike is a mainhand attack to use during Doomwinds and an extra main hand attack to use when everthing else is on cooldown, and frost shock is also a filler with a ranged component.

People act like storm is a 1 button build, but it really isn’t. Storm just favors stormstrike and views IS and LL as filler. Elementalist favors lava lash and ice strike while viewing SS as a filler.

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Piggy-backing off of this - for Ele , it may feel better for Lava Burst to become Tempest.

Yeah warrior gets crazy stuff like proccing 1 second bladestorm or becoming a better lightning enhancement shaman than an enhancement shaman…. Their stormstrike damage actually ignores armor lmfao.

It’s nice and simple and works okay for enhance but in terms of cool factor it’s absolutely just laughably thrown together.

is stombringer still forced to use lava burst?

yes? then why?

It depends on if Tempest interacts with Surge of Power or not. I assume it has to because otherwise it’d be strictly worse than Lightning Bolt in single target and that’d suck.

If it works with Surge of Power it should replace Lightning Bolt, if it doesn’t then replacing Lava Burst makes more sense.

It isn’t forced to at all. Many storm players take it just to have an extra tool, but it isn’t strictly required. It becomes more situational as opposed to rotational.

For Ele shaman, it’s probably no different than a return to classical shaman.
Performance will be very sensitive to maelstrom generation because it is entirely worthwhile when using maelstrom.
This fundamentally suggests that there will be a very large performance difference between situations using CL and EQ and ST dps situations.
I think this is enough if dev wants to make this talent an AoE monster for m+.
In the end, Blizzard is not willing to solve the problems of ele, but rather is maximizing the advantages of each talent to the extreme.
I don’t know how this is going to turn out. But if there’s a battle to deal with different situations, this has been why ele has been bad. If there’s a situation like this, ele seems to be useless as a whole.
Will it get any better if shaman talent improve? Well, it remains to be seen. First of all, the mechanisms that have been revealed are going toward completely different values in each talent. So ele will have more extreme choices depending on the situation than it is now.

Looking at ele builds with this and it fits even worse than Farseer does. There are literally just not enough talents to take to make dealing solely Nature damage feasible.

  • Mountains Will Fall will help Earthquake, which is what you’ll have to be hitting in AoE to blow off excess Maelstrom, but that’s the only capstone talent that really benefits this.
  • Still need to make sure you absolutely never take Ascendance or DRE; that baby procs, Lava Beam will suck even more than now. This means a chunk of our talent tree will be actively avoided and useless.
  • Doubles down on spenders not being the main source of damage; they are there to exhaust Maelstrom, not really do damage.
  • Builds would probably involve Icefury and Electrified Shocks, which are both very not fun and feel terrible to press. And even then, they might be taken just to ensure you spend all your points.
  • This really really makes sure you hit Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning as much and as fast as you can.
  • Getting real sick of getting absolutely zero more utility or defensives. It feels intentional now.

Why do all our builds turn into “hit one spell as fast as you can so it can deal 50% of all your damage”?

This is visually cooler than Farseer (more lightning is always better than summoning dead grandpa to cast two spells and then peace out), but I hate to say that Farseer might actually work better. Not a great place to be.

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