Liquid Magma totem gets most of it’s value from not just placing it, but resetting it’s cooldown using Totemic Recall + Call of the elements. If you don’t take totemic recall, Liquid magma totem has no way of reducing the cooldown and will do half that much damage over the course of a dungeon or raid. Looking at logs, it’s safe to say that LMT does about 5-8% of your damage but that’s only when you take your class tree capstone of totemic recall to essentially give you another charge.
This seems like a very weak capstone unless they dramatically increase the damage that Liquid Magma Totem outputs or gives it a better effect like spreading flame shock to more than just 3 targets. Maybe they can give it 2 charges on a 30 second CD? Due to it’s spell effect this will only be used in AoE anyway so with it being so costly to get to and doing almost no damage, it feels very bad if we were forced into talenting into this to get our flame shocks spread. It also feels bad without LMT because then we are forced into always taking surge of power and using flame shock after our spenders to apply 2 flame shocks max at a time and then primordial wave another target.
Flame shock is far less important for elemental than vt is for shadow.
Flame shock spread is for funnel damage which i believe is intentionally constrained (though blizz should embrace it) while vt is 100% of shadow priests aoe.
If elemental doesnt have lmt it has chain lightning and earthquake to spam.
If shadow doesnt have shadow crash up it does literally zero aoe damage, at best its 8 consecutive vt casts and a few single target spells.
mmm theyre pretty comparable, i play both ele and shadow. spamming cl and eq wud be no damage in our current build. Maybe its fair that lifting the flameshock cap wud give us too much lava burst proc damage but the disparity in spreading it doesnt make sense
I don’t know how much you play shaman, but elemental shaman isn’t really a funnel spec like you mention, at least with Fire builds. I know they are making changes to it, but currently, FS is exactly the source of your damage because you need to put out up to 6 flame shocks as fast as possible to be able to put out damage that much faster. If we don’t spread and refresh FS and it falls off, then our Lava bursts do not crit and do not cleave. The comparison so Shadow Crash is fair because it works in a similar way with Psychic Link and Apparitions.
Chain lightning and earthquake don’t do enough damage by themselves to replace the lava burst cleave. The numbers right now in the Beta are definitely getting nerfed, it’s just a matter of time.
The reason that shamans want an easier way to spread and maintain flame shock is because they want to have a fire build. You know, the fire build that Blizzard mentioned in the Blue post that should be there with the nature build and hybrid build they mentioned with the shaman changes?
Sure, we could spam chain lightning and earthquake, but that would be a nature build, not a fire build, and we aren’t talking about nature builds. Farseer is intended to be more Fire because of it’s interactions with things like Primordial Wave and giving us a 3rd charge of Lava Burst. Stormbringer is the nature build focusing on lightning bolt and chain lightning.
Your post suggest that we don’t need flame shock because we have alternatives, but the whole point is for us to be able to use Farseer in a fire build which doesn’t work with Chain Lightning and EQ.
Right fair enough, i honestly stayed away from the fire build because it looked degenerate gameplaywise where you press one button as much as humanly possible, and im commenting more on its intended design rather than what it has become.
Even still shadow has zero other options, shamans have a fallback option, if shadow crash was 1 minute the spec literally wouldnt function in aoe, its the difference between optimal and functional. even if CL and EQ are garbage damage for fire they still exist, shadow only has halo on a 1min CD and its considered utility.
Anyway id be interested in blizz working flameshock naturally into aoe without the mess it currently is so im not entirely against any functional changes for the fire build, but rather criticism of shadows aoe. Shadow needs its aoe reworked regardless of whether its good or not but this is the shaman thread.
What ability makes lava burst cleave? i thought it was just primordial wave and deeply rooted elements?
Considering it’s a capstone now, it definitely needs to be 30 sec cooldown baseline, with maybe a follow up talent to increase its damage vs a single target?
This also brings me back to a point I was making the other day when discussing bulwark totem. Totemic recall needs to go. I admit it’s a fun spell but as long as it exists, they will have to balance ALL other totems around it existing. I would rather it be gone, we free up a much needed hotkey, and totems can be a little more powerful as well.
Primordial wave makes your Lava burst cleave. Deeply Rooted Elements activation throws out 1 cleave to all targets with Flame Shock, and Ascendance also throws out Lava Burst to all targets with Flame shock.
The changes shown in the blue post are also removing the talents that gave Primordial Wave so much Cooldown reduction, so instead of it being a 45 second cooldown, it felt like a 15 second cooldown.
We are also losing Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence which grants a free instant lava surge proc when you hit any spender, so the rotation of S4 in Dragonflight doesn’t exist in the current Beta version of TWW.
At this point just bake it into primordial wave and make them the same button: primordial totem, drop a totem that spreads flameshock to many targets, empower lava burst to hit all flameshock targets. Would actually feel pretty good to press.
Agree with this. Its extremely clunky and limits totems far more than it empowers them and its awful needing to sacrifice utility for throughput.