They changed it from applying flame shock and then your lava burst splits amongst flame shocked enemies (so fun!) to… splitting primordial wave amongst everything with flame shock ???
It seems like a small change, but MAN OH MAN does it feel NOT FUN.
I don’t want my primordial waves to split between flame shocked enemies. I want my lava bursts to.
Like… ???
Yeah, it’s truly terrible. Literally no one asked for this and yet it’s a “fix.” It’s meant to fix a problem that doesn’t exist and instead creates a new one. I don’t think I could have designed this as poorly as it turned out if I tried.
So I’m not the only one that hates it LOL thank goodness
Sidenote, excellent name.
Additionally-
Now my Ele shaman has only ONE ability to quickly tag quest mobs with - Flame shock! It used to be flame shock and primordial wave.
You really gonna force me to resort to speccing into frost shock? Oh nuh-uh
Agreed, this change is absolutely, horrendously awful and I hope they revert it ASAP
I dont know what blizzard was thinking with this change. Didnt prim wave give us the ability to hit all targets that had FS with LB? Which means up to 6 guaranteed crits + any overloads that might happen. Now we get a useless spell that does nothing and it doesnt crit or make our next lava burst hit multi targets? Wtf blizz. Revert this change pls or i cant play my favorite spec in the game.
It was changed overall because it was an extra button/step that really didn’t need to exist for the average player. You said it yourself, you’re not pushing primordial wave for it’s damage, your pushing it for Lava bursts. So it can be “streamlined” to just a single button push to accomplish the same effect, or it could have except Blizzard did what Blizzard does and implemented it incredibly poorly to put it politely.
If you REALLY want to feel frustrated with how poorly they balance, then look at the fact that Ascendance and Primordial wave are on the same talent tier. Ascendance has a vastly better opening almost cloned effect to primordial wave pre-nerf and then everything that comes after. Sure Primordial wave is 30s cooldown, but with how clunky it is now is it even worth casting?
Blizzard doesn’t understand that Elemental and Enhancement play drastically different. We’ve seen it time and time again where they make a change to a shared spell/talent for one spec and it’s horrible on the other. In this case they assumed you have plenty of ways to apply flame shock so removing flame shock wasn’t an issue, except Ele doesn’t have good ways of applying it to groups that aren’t cooldown intensive and super clunky. So the change makes using primordial wave super clunky since they never addressed ele’s lack of spreading Flame shock easily. Enhance on the other hand can spread flame shock easily multiple ways so it’s not an issue for them.
How it should have been implemented was that it applies flame shock on current target and then sends out a “wave” of lava bursts that can overload, just like Ascendance does…
Ele at this point is just ultra bland and clunky unless you have ascendance. Then you have 15s of fun before 3m of clunky snorefest. Remember at the start of the expansion when we could have elementals up most of the time? Good times, shame we had to nerf that into the ground for no reason other than making ele more bland.
They really need to revert Pwave for Ele!!!
They should not have touched primordial wave, it was such a good spell. I’m torn on the new lightning bolt, Losing ancestral guidance feels bad too but p wave is the big one for me.
At first I thought it was a bug or lag from the new patch or a change in my build talents. But nope they butchered primordial wave. Rotation for applying flame shock just feels clunky now. My DPS has dropped a lot and I’m 633 ilvl. Are there any other significant changes that were made to ele shaman? The primordial wave seems like the biggest one.
Yeah, hopefully they change it back 
It was a terrible change!
I mean I don’t necessarily agree with that notion since if you look Enhance, whole Pwave loop went from (say on 5 targets with just sending it at 5 stacks) Pwave > Lava Lash >Lightning Bolt (3 GCDs, 3 unique buttons) to Flame Shock > Lava Lash > Pwave > Primordial Storm (4 GCDs, 3 unique button presses) with only removing 1 unique button by having Pwave turn into Primordial Storm while increasing the number of GCDs needed to do damage. This isn’t including other min maxing that would significantly increase the numbers of GCDs in the loop such as spending an EB, Tempest, or Chain Lighting when you get to 10 stacks, building back to 10 stacks and then sending Primordial Storm for Frost Witch uptime, or lining it with Doomwinds properly since Primordial Storm’s 3 strikes are mainhand hits that proc Windfury Weapon. Not doing those things vastly reduces the damage potency of the loop. All this largely being incongruent with the stated reason the developers gave:
That is one part of it, but the main reason this change was good for them is that they flat out got a new ability in Primordial Storm which scales with both hero talents and pretty much all of their talents and damage amps, Pwave had Primal Maelstrom baked into it when they removed it, and Molten Assault got changed to spread Flame Shock to 5 targets instead of 4, for Stormbringer specifically they added Pwave (not Primordial Storm) to the list of things that can apply Lighting Rod. If they did what they did to Elemental and just changed it without all those thing with Pwave just doing piss damage and granting Splintered Elements, no Enhance build would even touch Pwave at all. But they clearly thought about what people liked about the Pwave and what people didn’t like.
Even more so, the removed it from Resto but then changed how Farseer functioned and added in a bunch of new talents and changes to make up for it.
I largely just think nobody looked at Ele outside of the Tier Set (given they just nerfed it while we’ve been yelling about Pwave) or the animation changes. There’s alot of reasons I think this but the simplest one I can point to is that this dev note is found in Enhance’s section of the patch notes:
But nowhere to be found in Elemental’s section.
Yes, this change to primordial wave has made ele sham so much less fun. Very disappointing.
Simple. Nobody at Blizzard plays Elemental Shaman.
Seems like nobody who works @ Blizzard pays attention to the Elemental Shaman community either 
Let alone looks at the shaman class forums, lol
Yep at this point the PW concerns are like beating a dead horse, Blizz just doesn’t care about the Ele community.
Be sure to upvote my comment at the blue-post for upcoming class changes 
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/class-tuning-incoming-march-4/2067642/443Maybe they’ll bite … I doubt it, lol — But one can hope 
What’s that?
Yeah I commented there too. I clicked that thread so fast I was like YES, FINALLY, They are address the terrible Shaman changes! And nope, not a fricken’ peep.
Yeah I had the exact same reaction honestly. 
Felt like a hammer to the chest 
I didn’t mean the question literally lol. Like, Blizzard says “What’s that?” because they forgot it exists