I don’t think players fully grasp how big of a nerf the PW change was and why it can’t be fixed with a simple 10% buff here and a 20% buff there. I said a couple weeks ago that the PW change would make playing Ele useless in PvP.
PW in PvP was used for a lot of reasons and the change to PW has cascading effects that are really starting to show themselves. First PW was used for damage, it applied FS and primed your next LB to hit multiple targets. Each target hit had a chance to overload. In Solo Shuffle you FS all 3 players, then cast PW, and then cast LB you would hit your target with LB generating 8 maelstrom and then you would hit all 3 targets with a LB generating 24 maelstrom and any overload in this process would generate 2 maelstrom. Every PW would generate 40-50 maelstrom which would lead to more ES. More ES for Farseer would lead to more Ascendance Procs, more Aftershocks, and more Mountains Will Fall. More ES for Stormbringer would lead to more Surge of Power Lightning Bolt overloads and more Lightning Rods.
The new PW generates 3 maelstrom and 8 maelstrom from your Lava Surge proc and an additional 2 if it overloads. You can’t go from 80-100 maelstrom per min (2 PW) to 19-23 and not see a significant damage loss.
The old PW did a decent amount of damage by casting multiple LB that could overload and trigger Erupting Lava damage if you were using that talent. The new PW only casts 1 LB and does no real damage. You lose about 2-4 million damage per PW just in the change.
The new PW cannot be cast on its own, which means you can’t cast it every 30 seconds making full use of Elemental Equilibrium and Totem of Wrath. In a 2–3-minute Shuffle round missing out on 1 rotation of either of these could be the difference between a win and a loss. When you are struggling to drop someone, and you don’t have that extra 10% damage or 15% crit bonus you lose the game of inches.
The nerf of PW was more significant than I think players realize. This is not going to be fixed with “tuning” if it doesn’t get reverted back to what it was Ele is dead in PvP for a long time. Prob until they do another rework. Maybe that’s the goal piss people off by nuking the spec only to revitalize it in the next expansion.