Having had the opportunity to play around with Ele as a spec, I’m finding some things that are disappointing from a design perspective. I’ll preface this by saying that the damage is strong in the pre-patch. I’m not here to advocate for more damage.
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Lightning spells feel lackluster. I know I just said that I’m not going to advocate for damage buffs. This, however, is commentary on why they don’t feel impactful. Because of the change to our Mastery, pulling power out of Overloads and shifting it into a percent damage buff has left Lightning spells in a position that feel like the only reason to press them is the unavailability of any other ability. The resource generation nerf compounds this issue to the point where we’re not taking anything between Power of the Maelstrom through Lightning Rod. That whole column is dead. That doesn’t bode well for Stormbringer. I’m hoping that the talent set isn’t a waste.
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Removed talents: Further Beyond, Primordial Surge, and Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence.
– Further Beyond was a good idea when it was debuted in Dragonflight, solving an issue with an abundance of resource generated during Ascendance. In terms of DPS, the correct course of action was to continue casting as many Lava Bursts as possible. This seems like it’s still true during a time where we can cap our resource half way through the full duration of Ascendance (not DRE). There’s no intuitive indication whether players should waste resource by continuing to chain-cast Lava Burst or waste a portion of Ascendance casting spells that the cooldown doesn’t provide benefit to. Both choices feel wasteful.
– Primordial Surge and Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence being removed hinders the natural cadence in certain situations. As an example, we now have Icefury as a proc. The interaction imposed by Master of the Elements means that the ideal cast sequence would be Lava Burst into Frost Shock. The issue is that we will randomly get Icefury to empower Frost Shock when we have no Lava Burst charges to spend. Yes, there’s a 20 second duration for Icefury’s empowerment, and the recharge rate is only 8 seconds (shortened by Lava Surge procs), but it’s fairly common to receive Icefury on subsequent Lava Bursts, which then gives you up to 4 charges to spend within 20 seconds. That means a 5 second window to get a cast that only naturally recharges every 8.
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Primal Elementalist is an especially weak choice for a capstone. On the surface, an 80% buff to the summoned elemental seems great. But the summon is very weak. The “greater” fire elemental contributes half the damage of Icefury, excluding the empowered frost shocks. A multiplicative 80% bonus to an ability that only contributes 2% of your damage over its active time (and less over time) is a poor investment compared to other capstones considering it falls behind a first tier talent.
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Resource generation being nerfed translates to delays in trying to get AoE damage established. Echoes of Great Sundering requires us to spend 55 or 80 resource before being able to cast an empowered Earthquake. It takes something like 8 casts of Chain Lightning to get the requisite resource to cast an empowered earthquake. And for our trouble, the spender (payoff) is between a third and a quarter of Chain Lightning’s damage with 5 targets present. The builder is worth more than the spender until you meaningfully exceed Chain Lightning’s target cap. Meanwhile, specs that have AoE on demand are outpacing our AoE capabilities in a far shorter period of time. As a result, entire packs of enemies are already dead before we can get our AoE on-line.
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I’ll lead that I only play pvp and use the lava surge pvp talent. I am focusing on a Lightning build with LvB as my filler. My stats are more haste/crit with the obligatory versatility for pvp.
My lightning crits hit much harder than LvB and it looks like lightning builds should be built around crit bc it gets 19% crit just from talents and hero talent.
Casts are really fast. With the talents to reduce casting speed plus our storm elemental make it pretty insane at times.
I also almost always have my pet available to me too and he hits hard.
I realize you’re talking about TWW and haven’t had a chance to play it but if what I’ve experienced in prepatch translates over I’ll be very happy once hero talents are added.
I don’t think Lightning builds are going to be viable or fun to play. They made all the Lightning related talents passives, nerfed Maelstrom generation into the ground, and nerfed Stormkeeper and Surge of Power really hard.
Stormbringer wanting to spend Maelstrom frequently to get Tempests while the lightning focused builds play like stirring molasses is just not going to be a fun time and likely won’t even be viable.
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Not sure what’s driving your disparity in damage between Lightning and Lava Burst. I have the talents that boost nature damage. Baseline, Lightning Bolt’s tooltip says 42k Nature. Realistically, my max LB is 51k and a max crit just shy of 140k. Conversely, my Lava Burst max crit is 156k without Improved Flametongue or a fire elemental active. I imagine you’re getting a boost from the storm elemental being active.
While my numbers above might indicate that LB is pretty close to LvB, I did more total damage with Lava Burst, without my weapon imbue or elemental active, with fewer casts. It’s not a large sample by any means. I only had a couple dozen casts between the two abilities, but LvB was 39% of casts and had 62% of the damage. And this was with Master of the Elements causing LvB to buff LB.
If you want to really get into the details, there’s a nice writeup from Elivrio over on Storm, Earth & Lava that discusses Ele’s flaws in detail. It’s from October, which obviously doesn’t account for the recent talent changes, but there haven’t been any changes to the base spells and the talents that buff them aren’t all that different; they’re just in different locations.
Good points. Here’s what ill say
1: Revert at least partially if not completely the nerfs to maelstrom generation, at the very least for lightning spells.
2: Bring back windspeaker lava resurgence. But tweaked. The tweak would be that after you get the windspeaker buff, your next lava burst does splash damage, generate more maelstrom based on how many target the splash hits, up to 6 targets, and spreads flame shock.
3: Merge storm and fire elemental.
4: Bring back the soulbind that would cast chain lightning after you used earthquake on a % chance, but instead of working with earthquake only, it would work on malestrom spent, this would work better for cleave, would be a small st dps increase, and work just as well for aoe. But it cannot consume stormkeeper. And while you’re at it, bring back high voltage.
5: Liquid magma totem higher up in the tree.
6: In general, capstones are not great. Could use a few changes. But i don’t know exactly what yo point out.
7: Dre works based on ms/msw spent, rather than lava burst casts/stormstrike, don’t know why they are so adamant on this. This is the major reason why you wanna keep spamming lava burst leading to somewhat one dimensional gameplay, especially in aoe.
8: Overloads should be buffed, they simply don’t do enough damage. Which is a problem for surge of power/lightning builds especially.
I was just talking about LB crits are higher. They crit pretty often and I use lava surge pvp talent