When are we getting the Feral Spirits fix?

Classes Shaman
1

We got this blue post 3 weeks ago, saying that Feral Spirits is weak and the talented version is not interacting as intended. We get 1 Major DPS ability unless we talent into another. And it is currently garbage. The stacks it generates speed up our rotation very slightly for 15 seconds giving a total of 6 maelstrom weapon stacks. At best it gives us 2 LB/CL casts a bit faster. So in testing that is a negligible gain over 2 minutes.

If we are not going to get a damage buff out of this ability it could at least give us 1 Stack per 1.5 seconds to net us a total of 10 stacks. It would be a good opener ability to get us rolling. The Talented version currently has 1 Good wolf(frost) 1 mediocre Wolf(lightning) and 1 terrible wolf(Fire). If you get 2 Fire wolves it was almost a waste of a GCD seeing as all you will gain is a passive increase to maelstrom weapon stacks. The frost gives a noticeable DPS gain, getting 2 is very powerful. Getting a lightning wolf is good if we get SS procs. if not it does significantly less than frost. Fire needs to interact with something other than Lava Lash due to it’s long cooldown we might not even get in 1 depending on rotation. Hitting lava lash instead of SS is a DPS loss even if there are 2 Fire wolves up. Possibly make Flame shock hit an additional 2 targets per fire wolf up.

Blizzard
Feral Spirits are a bit weak right now, and the talented version has some issues where the different elemental wolves don’t interact with some abilities that they should be.

1 Like
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Going to have to give you some clarifications here.

Lightning Puppy also affects Windfury damage, while still mostly inconsequential, its there and could be very meaningful if Forceful Winds gets buffed. Also the Lightning Puppy buffs are multiplicative, so if you get 2 of them its an 82% damage increase to the abilities, not 70%.

Fire Puppy is the 35% Lava Lash dot AND 20% all Fire damage. So its buffing Flame Shock, Fire Nova, Sundering, Elemental Blast, and Flametongue as well. With the Fire damage and the dot, Lava Lash is getting a 62% damage buff from 1 puppy.

Main problem is the baseline weakness of Lava Lash. With about 50% mastery and Hot Hand up Lava Lash will do similar damage to a Stormbringer Stormstrike.

Now that the clarifications are over. Yes, they do need to follow through and iterate on Elemental Spirits, especially since they also buffed Ascendance.

It would be nice if each of the dogs had a kind of baseline extra damage they give similar to the current Frost Puppy, but with different flavors. Like have the fire puppies proc be a stacking dot, and the lightning puppy cause a delayed burst after 5 seconds where additional applications increase the damage but not reset the duration.

Then the Lightning puppies need to affect affect Crash Lightning with the 35% damage buff. Then it also needs to have some effect on LB, CL, and EB, maybe increase their damage by a smaller amount, but also cause them to refund 1 or 2 maelstrom per puppy.

For the Frost Puppies, since there are fewer frost abilities, maybe increase all frost damage by like 40% including the Icy Edge damage proc they currently have. And an additional effect that increases the slow of Frost Shock by say 15% per puppy so its an 80% slow with 2 puppies.

3 Likes
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Give us all three pups for 30 seconds, then tune as needed.

1 Like
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I think we can at least expect to see more elemental based abilities getting some interaction with Elemental Spirits such as Crash Lightning, Hailstorm/Frost Shock, Fire Nova, Ice Strike, etc. which is probably what they had in mind when they said certain abilities were not interacting as intended.

As you said, Lava Lash feels so under-tuned at the moment that I doubt even a 100% fire damage bonus for this duration would be extremely noticeable unless you defer player agency and try to line it up with a random hot hand trigger.

Fire Nova is in an even worse state relative to Hailstorm as well with the difficulty spreading more than 3 shocks and actually requiring 5 just to break even with Hailstorm.

Ultimately, it’s all damage in the end, but flavor maters. Maybe after the base abilities get tuned, we can consider if a flat damage bonus is sufficient or if more creative measures are needed. I could definitely see one of each of the add-ons like the following in addition to variations of the current effects however:

  • Guarantee 1 elemental type associated with choice of level 35 talent
  • Lightning Options:
    • X% chance per wolf of generating an extra Maelstrom Weapon stack each time you gain a stack of Maelstrom Weapon
    • X% chance per wolf to refund a stack of Maelstrom Weapon for each spent
  • Fire Options
    • Trigger smaller Fire Novas on Lava Lash / summon
    • Reduced cooldown on fire abilities
  • Frost Options
    • Increased critical chance of Frost effects (moderate increase for other types)
    • Increased damage taken from all sources while affected by Frost Shock