I can’t help that this is the drunken master trope.
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But they don’t drink to mitigate damage, they mitigate it before drinking by passively having shuffle / increasing it with martial arts 
They used to. But people whined about having to press ironskin brew.
It does on paper, but, outside of the rare KC charge delayed in order to buff the 2nd to next GCD, you don’t use those synergies to accomplish any more than would be done individually.
It’s not A → B = distinct permutation with a distinct result, as would be the case in a fully leveraged “combo” such that you essentially have more actions than buttons far above and beyond the degree to which that is true of most specs’ builds, but simply a rarely relevant conditional that may cause a skill to appear twice on one’s generalized APL. That’s better than nothing, but it’s also barely above the bare minimum and accomplished by nearly every spec.
- (Not that Gizolfi’s spitballs accomplished anything like that, either, though that’s understandable as they were spitballs and actually creating branching interesting paths that significantly recombine and multibly leverage a build’s base skills is… really friggin hard to do.)
which I don’t see as a bad thing at all. offering a nice speed up to an already intuitive rotation is fine by me. only thing I’d really add is some sort of interaction with serpent sting so it’s not just boring damage
You say that, but if you weren’t writing guides I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t find that intuitive.
“your generator makes your spenders do more damage” is pretty intuitive to me tbh, even more so than the old tip. what do you reckon is confusing?
You’re not really getting a speed-up, though. If not for the CDR, you’d just have a shorter cooldown, such as at its average frequency in the given skill’s output category.
What the CDR gives you is just mild variance, greater Haste scaling (so long as both the CD-reduced and CD-reducing skills’ CDs themselves scale with Haste, too; else it’s likely a wash), and much greater uptime dependence (read also as: that much less ppgcd bonus regenerated during downtime).
That’s, in the whole, a slight bonus, imo, especially where it offers more interesting constraints, but it’s not offering the acceleration; it already cost most of your typical gains as its buy-in, so to speak, with the “benefit” bringing you back to the norm.
That does seem the most obviously lackluster bit atm, yeah. Especially since, being applied by Raptor (or worse, MB) now, you can’t exactly hold Focus anyways to them play around RS in that previous manner.
Though, for my part, there already seem to be some low hanging fruit: Just reallow manual Serpent Sting, increase its direct damage, decrease the duration over which it deals that damage, increase its damage generally but remove the direct portion from Viper’s, allow Hydra’s separately from Viper’s, and bring back real Wildfire Infusions in greatly empowered form as a capstone trio (“Every third grenade…”).
Grenade juggler resetting explosive shot is dumb. Just make it reset wfb and balance the damage accordingly. Get rid of explosive shot. “Grenade Juggler- WFB has a chance to give you more WFB” is intuitive to me.
That’s just an example.
Edit: Id like to clarify, when I say “intuitive” I mean “doesn’t require explanation; instinctive. I can use my intuition to determine how it should be used based on what it is”.
Shield block and shield wall are pretty intuitive abilities. Saying that using shield block can make your next shield slam cost no rage and reset the cooldown on shield slam is a natural interaction between those abilities. It’s “intuitive-adjacent”. Requires a little explanation but not much. I feel like (and I may change my mind- I have already gotten somewhat more comfortable with the spec after all) if “intuitiveness” is a scale, SV is not very close to the “completely intuitive” side of that scale. The interactions between abilities don’t seem to make narrative sense, unless you remove the theme of those abilities and say this is Builder A and this is Spender A and this is CD A-1 and this is CD A-2 which has interaction with both Builder and spender A which also, builder A can reset itself and then it becomes like a CD A-3 but not if you’ll overcap resource 2…
That seems like the other end of the scale which I will call “convoluted”.
As a visual aid for how the spec feels to me, see below:
Intuitive |<<<<<<<<<<>>SV>>>>>| Convoluted
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This would fit pretty awkward in an already nearly full GCD gameplay loop imo.
I don’t know if an RNG bomb every 3 bombs would be good rotationally either. It’s one thing when it’s a negligible effect that you get every bomb, but I can’t imagine it’d feel good at all to hold such an impactful bomb if you couldn’t throw it.
i’d rather just WFI come back as a completely passive binary choice node.
nearly every spec in the game functions like this though? for example the prot warrior you brought up. why does devastator reset your shield slam cd? etc
Again, you’re welcome to spec into Viper’s.
No RNG. 3 nodes, 1 for each of the bombs, each individually very powerful, on a shared button separate from regular bombs but on a shared CD. With one node, every 2 bombs prep an Infusion (1 in 3 are infused). If you have 2 nodes, still every 2 bombs (including infused ones) prep an Infusion (giving you 2/3rds infusions). With all 3, they’re all automatically infused, and they replace Wildfire Bomb atop having the separate Infusions button, offering two choices simultaneously.
Seems a decent compromise.
I think that’s true to some extent which is why I suggested a scale as opposed to a binary yes/no.
Some specs and classes feel more intuitive than others.
Specifically for devastate/devastator, having an attack (as a shield specialist) that sets up your shield slam) seems intuitive. Making your auto-attacks just be that attack is even more intuitive. I’ve never had to question why I would want to take that. What’s not intuitive is why one wouldn’t want it except maybe for people who remember spamming it and just feel better having devastate to spam.
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I don’t think this is a productive discussion tbh you seem interested in dismissing any sort of narrative reason for SV’s loop and very willing to make up any for every other spec 
Yeah, I thought it was unproductive when I said it didn’t feel intuitive and you asked me what wasnt intuitive, as though my feelings were up for debate (or suggesting you don’t know what intuitive means).
Mad respect for you as an expert player but that doesn’t change my intuition about the spec.
No, I asked because I wasn’t seeing how it wasn’t intuitive and was just trying to learn. Nothing much else to it
Well, intuitiveness is an admittedly wishy-washy metric which depends heavily on the subjective experience of the person whose intuition is being leveraged so it’s really a matter of individual perspective. I’m not trying to say youre wrong. It may feel intuitive for you. From my perspective it’s not intuitive and I need people like you to explain it to me, which is not my favorite activity.
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overall i’d say sv won bigly with this patch. feels great having a competitive option with wild spirits 2.0
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