Someone someone will eat my head off if I don't say it.
The follow up talents, the primordial wave for us.
Either delete them because you clearly hate them or do
something to them because no one is ever going.
They're going to pass down for the Karen Tor for.
Pandaria. For calendar to.
The burning region for Gilneus or has not died for the Lich
King for the. Sindori for the alliance.
For the horn for Azeroth. Hello and welcome to a very
special episode of For Azeroth. I am one of the hosts and the
only host for this episode. My name is Manny, AKA the true
villain Manny and I am sitting down with two masters of the
elements. First up we have Hawk Hogan.
Hawk, introduce yourself. Yeah, hi.
Most people just usually just go by Hawk, right?
Yeah, I mean, for me, right, like I started playing some time
late Warlords, so still a baby to most people, but still
playing for like, what's it eight years at this point?
So yeah, I got pretty active in the element of Shaman or the
Shaman discord and of Shrine, right?
Helping people out of like questions that they had about
the guides and stuff like that. And at some point I, when I
actually wanted to get better at the game, I found Wow Analyzer
started working on that to actually help myself get better,
just find my own mistakes all the time.
And yeah, from then on I somehow got into SIM craft, into the
whole theory crafting thing, into the communities.
And yeah, at some point took over the Wowhead guides.
And yeah, that's basically it about me.
That is amazing. And like it's great that we have
you keeping the Earth Shrine going for Elemental Shaman.
And then on the enhancement side, we have word up, Hello,
word up. Introduce yourself.
Hello, I'm a I'm more of a fossil.
I've been around since Sunwell so and I've been playing almost
exclusively enhancement since then, But I I double in a lot of
classes. But yeah, I I am I picked up
doing guides around the start of war odds, maybe the end of Mop
because more is like a way to channel how if I could explain
to other people, then I could understand it better myself
basically. And then once I'd done one
guide, it then ballooned into no one else is doing these.
Can you pick up the wild head one and the IC vanes one.
And then since I'd started, it kept rolling.
And here we are now like 20 years later, still doing the
same thing. And then we have Earth Shrine
when we started that in 20/15/2016, and all the other
resources that have trickled down through then.
So SIM Craft and God knows what else that we've had our hands
in. I do the enhancement stuff for
that. So I'm that guy along with the
other enhancement guys. Surgeon Russo when he's still
playing. So for those of you who have not
guessed the theme, I finally did it Guys this is my stubbornly
Shaman episode of For Us Off. We are going to be going deep
into the class just because Shaman has been in a very
interesting place. I think we have had some of the
specs be feeling a little bit of the pain in Dragonflight and
though enhancement, I think has been living the dream for the
last little bit. And then we got into the war
within beta and suddenly everything seemed like it was
flipped on its head, but very late into the into the beta.
And that has created this very interesting situation where
we're now going into 11 point 0.5 and we've got a lot of
changes coming. So I need to sort of rewind a
little bit and we got to talk about like how in the world we
got here. So going to the elemental
section, what has elemental been like?
I mean going into dragon fight through dragon fight Hawk.
Yeah, I mean, the with Dragonfly came the big talent tree revamp,
right? So instead of just choosing like
9 out of 27, it's like 61 out of 150 at this point it feels like,
right? Which opened up builds, right?
They're a lot more synergistic now than they ever were.
And for us, that usually ended up with us putting all eggs in
one basket, building the most synergistic builds that we
could, which just drowned out rotations very quickly, right?
And drank Clyde. We usually talked about fire
builds or lightning builds, because either we just increase
the availability of lava burst and generally lava spells,
right? So much that we could only press
that one button, or functionally just ignore filler spells
completely. Or on the other hand, when the
TS set demanded, we just got rid of lava burst almost entirely
and only pressed lightning bolts, which was the other
extreme. Still in season 1 there was
still the best, where the tear set itself was pretty agnostic
and didn't really offer any of those things, right.
Availability of lava bursts or damage of lightning bolts.
So we had options there. But ever since then, it was just
back and forth between those two archetypes.
Yeah, with the War Within, they we worked I guess the spec
already trying to get rid of some of those issues, right.
They reduce the availabilities of lava bursts and they reduce
some of the compounding effects on lightning bolt that made it
as strong and also removed some of the fixed duration effects,
let's call it that. That just put the rotation very
much in a very strict position for lightning builds.
So they just got rid of some of the problem factors that we had.
What that meant was that doing the beta a lot of the place that
was pretty, pretty well thought out was flew afloat pretty well
was just a lot of fun really. And then right before it
launched, they did one or two changes that just made it so we
are back to only pressing lightning bolts right now.
So while it can be said that they fix a lot of structural
issues with the specs during the first rework, right, going into
the War within with just now in this position where it doesn't
really where the numbers are very good, but it's not
particularly fun to play my personal opinion, right?
And yeah, that's where we're currently at and that's what
they hopefully try to fix with the coming rework.
But let's see. Yeah.
And honestly, I think it was like 1 particular change that
they did right at the end of beta that kind of tipped the
balance for Farsi. But remind me, I believe that
with the Stormbringer build, it was very much kind of already
going that way earlier on in the beta.
Was that is that correct? Do you mean do you mean storming
or do you mean fast here? Because currently the best build
for 8 is fast here, right? The problematic talent there is
flash of yeah, flash of Lightning, which reduces the
cooldown of all nature talents by I think it's one second every
time you cast lightning bolts, right?
And that means that every time you cast lightning bolts, you
reduce, for example, the cool down of your storm elemental.
The storm elemental itself gives you more lightning bolts where
the cast time reduction so you cast more lightning bolt so you
get more storm elementals which means and so on right?
All of that was probably fine and wouldn't have drowned out
the spec completely, but then they what they did was probably
a good change and at least a flavour win.
They changed primordial wave, the old shadow lens covenant
ability to be elemental. Elemental is basically just a
spell school that describes lava or fire nature and 1st at the
same time, right? So when they did that, that also
meant that flash of lightning now affected primordial wave.
And that is basically the driving force behind Farcia,
right? So all of the these different
effects just interact with each other in a way that they just
compound on top of each other. And they just made it basically.
I mean, impossible is a is a is a bad word to say, right?
But it made fire builds definitely worse in comparison.
Switching it over to the enhancement side, how did
enhancement feel because it also had two separate builds and like
what's the the story so far for enhancement?
Well, the the enhancement story's a really long one,
right? Because Enhancement went through
a lot of rework sort of back-to-back to back after,
after what where it had, it had settled into this really
complicated mesh of specs at the end of WOD.
And then Legion, they super simplified it into Storm Strike,
which everyone, well, some people liked, other people not
so much, which I might be one of.
And then that continued to be FA.
And then in Shadow Lands, they pivoted further.
So when they did Dragonflight, they had this giant melting pot
of different ideas that they tried that they could all throw
into the talentry and like see what worked.
And it turned out when you give us access to all of these
different competing effects and things, you can basically build
2 specs out of it. And so we had two properly
different builds that both functioned and they had their
own play style with Storm. And frustratingly it's called
Elementalist, which I'd like to change in the future, but that's
what it's called for now because it describes what it does.
And these two builds like 1 pitches all of the elements that
we use and the other one is Storm, Strike, and lightning.
And then when it comes to the war within, I personally would
have preferred the hero talents to like pick one of these two
build archetypes and go all in on it.
But that's not what happened. Instead, the two hero talents
tried to do both, and to to a degree, one of them works in
that area of doing both. It's very, dare I say, a bit
degenerate gameplay because it really pulls out a lot of the
nuance of how things work and it boils it all down into A1
singular focus, which is, to me personally, the antithetical to
the way the spec has always operated.
But it is strong, so obviously that means people like it,
because when things are strong, that means it's good.
So design issues put on the side.
You then have the other hero talent, which is Totemic, which
I, I don't want to speak for every class, but I think that
enhancement sits as like maybe the one of the most
polarizingly. One hero talent is amazing and
the other hero talent is basically non existent.
Because I despite the fact that I wrote guides for both hero
talents as their own archetypes entirely, I have yet to have a
single message from anyone ever since the like expansion launch
about I want to play totemic. How do I do this or this Because
aside from theming and so on, it's not fun because it doesn't
mesh with anything. It's got this horrible clash of
all of these ideas, but none of it flows.
Whereas Storm Ringer, it at least tells you very simply, you
have lots of maelstrom. Spend the Maelstrom on this a
lot and that's it. Everything else doesn't matter
and it works. It's problem ultimately is like
when you have that much synergy on a spec that's got a lot of
things that already have a lot of synergy together compounding.
It gets so strong that you need to do emergency nerves because
before the raid tear released and the season launched, the
spec was I I didn't realise how not strong or the specs were.
It would have released to be so oppressively strong that despite
the fact that it did really well in the raid, it would have been
overbearing. You'd have seen like 5 or 6 of
them maybe, which goes to show how dangerous leaning too hard
into synergy is for them. They need to maybe pick apart
individual bits that they care more about.
And then continuing on that, we're also seeing some
adjustments for Stormbringer, kind of reining it in a bit,
kind of making the gameplay a little bit like more controlled,
but also a little bit weaker. Can you tell us a little bit
about that? So the Stormbringer changes for
us specifically the, I think the intended goal, from what I can
glean from it is that they want to slow down the rate that you
get Tempest because right now, like relative to elemental, we
get Tempest really fast. Like you get, maybe I, I, I
mean, I can look at logs and I'll see that you have like 6/6
plus Tempest a minute minimum, if not more.
And Tempest hits really hard as as even elementals.
It's a it's a big button, does a lot of damage, looks really
cool. But for us it also spawns
wolves, which is ultimately like the core problem in why it
overloads into being as strong as it is, because that's
multiplicative. So the more that you get in a
condensed window, the harder everything hits, which is why if
you ever see like an enhancement and elemental player play
together who haven't played the other one before, one also
suddenly asked the question, why does my lightning bolt and
Tempest hit for 2 million while yours hits for 20 million?
And that'll just be it's only the effect of the amount of
wolves that come. So if you slow that down, that's
starts to get rained in a little bit.
And there is a lot of slow down coming between nerfing
supercharge and basically removing storm swell from us.
And they're instead, I think trying to reorient that value
into after you do a Tempest, you get a bit more follow up damage
with arc discharge reworks. And so the individual impact of
each Tempest is a bit higher, but they'll be a bit more spaced
out. I think it is their hope.
Whether that plays out with the other talent changes is a
different question, but I think that's their goal.
You spoke about like how like an elemental will come in and be
looking looking at Tempest and not be as happy with it.
Hawk, you were just saying that like, hey, Farseer's just been
the one ahead. How did that balance kind of
work out? Like what's holding Tempest as
rather not Tempest but Stormbringer back for elemental?
Yeah, so for us, hero talents were a bit weird to begin with,
right? Like First things first, right?
Like as I said, Farseer for rating was pretty much a lock in
from the start ish right? It just does significantly more
single target damage for AOE the fastest.
The the ancestors themselves don't really do a lot.
So recommending that formific plus was always a bit of a an
uncomfortable decision that we made.
We just argued, hey, boss damage is very important, especially if
you're pugging, if you're playing with like on the casual
level quote UN quote right, that it Warren still just playing
fast here in most cases. The problem there became that
farseers are bucked in a few different ways that they just
like pulling stuff. They just throw chain lightnings
and elemental bars everywhere. So in specific keys, siege is
one of them. It's very, very hard to play
just because you have to position your pets in a way that
they don't just pull the whole dungeon.
And generally, as it turned out, over the season or over the
first few months, I guess, especially if you're playing at
a higher level where you're pulling bigger and pulling more
Mop, Storm Bringer is pretty competent just because it offers
a lot more AOE damage. The point that word I've made
specifically about Tempest not really doing anything for us has
a lot to do with Tempest not interacting with any part of our
kit, right? For us, it's a button you press,
it does damage, does AOE damage. Nice.
OK for them. Maostrom weapon for example
buffsted by more than 100% would have can probably correct me on
the number if he wants to. It's about 250.
Yeah, Oh. There about.
So it's, it's, it's an, it's a noticeable difference, right?
What they did with the Wework, the one that we get in the .5
patch that's coming up is that they allow it Tempest to also
overload from search of power and from Power of the Maelstrom.
That means that every time you press The Tempest, you basically
get 0.7 tempests for free. On top of that, if you time it
correctly, if you manage your mouse jump properly and that is
pretty competent, that just does a lot of damage.
And they also changed it so that the arc discharge that we get,
which is different to theirs, also works in single targeted
AOE. So they made it so Stormbringer
or yeah the Stormbringer tree itself works better for Mific
Plus because it does post damage as well as AOE damage and they
also added a lot of mechanics that interact with it, right?
The next change that they did is very big rework of the
ascendance cooldown, right? Previously you pressed the
button, you threw out a lava burst on every flame shock
target, and then you reduce the cooldown on lava burst to 0.
So you set there for 15 seconds or however many depending on
your talent choices and if you got any procs and just pressed 1
button. That was not particularly fun
for most people. So they decided to actually
rework that. What it does now is it gives you
one additional overload on any overloadable spell and also
buffs the strength of the overloads that they reduced in
the previous rework to 35% by 150%.
So it's 82.5% or whatever it is now.
Which basically just makes it a very strong button to press to
begin with, but also means that for something like Tempest, when
you get your power of the Maelstrom, when you get your
Supercharge, when you get your search of power, you're now
throwing out five tempests at the same time in numerical
value. And all of those do AOE and all
of those do a lot of damage to begin with.
And all of those also funnelled into your lightning rods, which
they're also buffed by a new talent.
It's it's a lot, right? So generally the storm ring is a
lot better now and it's so much better to the point where also
eclipses Farse here for the rate build now, right?
It's a lot harder to play just because of the interaction that
I mentioned, right? You have to sync up random procs
that are timer based with random procs that are resource based
with random procs that are RPPM based, and all of that with
different spender events. So it's not trivial by any
means, and it's especially drastic of a change considering
what we're currently doing with RCR, just pressing 1 button the
whole time basically. But yeah, so it's going to be a
very big change. Stormbringers currently
eclipsing everything. They probably need to do
something about Fast Year to actually address that.
And yeah. I mean, with all of those like
line UPS, you're almost aligning planets there to get to get to
some of those, but that's got to cause some amazing threat
issues. I'd I'd be worried about that
popping off at the beginning of a a pool.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's currently a GIF or something
going around right, of some guy standing in front of four target
dummies and pulling 20 million AOEDPS.
I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, I mean, the warrior can
probably press commanding shout once, but after that.
But what are you doing right? Also, especially because they
change deeply rooted elements, the random ascendance proc to
happen on spenders now. So it's feasible or it's very
possible that even if you try to intentionally, intentionally
delay the button, right, intentionally delay the
cooldown, you just put down your first earthquake, you proc the
thing and there you go. Like everything starts flying
and every nameplate just turns red.
And yeah, I don't know if you just have your pocket
augmentation with the that reduction talent with you now.
It's going to be interesting. We're going to get use of our
reincarnation at this rate, pretty much.
There is. There is one thing that is true
for both elemental and for enhancement and that is the
ascendance change that you just mentioned.
Ascendance is being changed to go off of spenders for both
enhancement and and elemental and I believe that it doesn't
care how much maelstrom or maelstrom weapon you spend, it's
just that you spent it. Both of you have mentioned that
this could cause issues. Word up.
You want to just tell us like what, what's going on there?
So it, it, it causes a lot of problems for us and there's,
there's quite a few like little bugs in there with the way that
it works because it's changed twice for us because initially
it was going off the hit from the spell.
So things like chain lightning, we're getting three to five
instances to potentially pocket Primordial wave is getting 2
instances in single target and set 6-7 instances in AOE and so
on. And that's pretty bad because
that means you get into a sentence a lot in AOE.
So they they pulled that back and it was on cast and in a way
that fixes that problem. It stops it working with the
ride the lightning, the PvP talent, which is great.
Well for balance is great for people who want to kill people
in PvP. It's not.
But when you change it to on cast, that doesn't fix the
problem of Primordial wave technically does cast it 7
times. So it still gets seven chances
to roll on deeply rooted elements and arc discharge still
technically casts a second cast of the same spell.
So that gets 2 after every Tempest.
And so you still are basically shirking the idea of they've
they've put a limiter on Dre to be I think it's 8 fast failures,
but you can't proc it again after you go into ascendance
with Dre. And then it's 2%, four percent,
6% over and over and over again until it absolutely procs.
So the obvious stated goal when you put 88 force failures on is
you do not get back into a sentence until a sentence is
over and that's it. Like that's a very hard line
that they've made clear because it lasts for 8 seconds.
There's virtually no universe where you're going to get 8
back-to-back spenders technically.
But when you start getting hidden extra casts from Arc
Discharge and Primordial Wave and so on, theoretically with a
lot of luck you could get back into it.
And so it doesn't really make a lot of sense in my head as to
why you try and reinvent the wheel of we'll do it on cast or
hit or this. So that when we had the gloves
in Legion, they worked fine. They went off.
How much Maelstrom you spent was how it calculated the proc
chance. We could just use that method
and then also remove the problem of because we've got a talent
called Overflowing Maelstrom, which let's suspend up to 10
instead of five at once. When you're going off just
casting the spell and you've got a talent, that could potentially
mean you can only ever spend 5. So you can just spend a lot of
lower damaged ones to keep trying to get into it.
Potentially you can just get to the point where you don't play
that anymore and you become incredibly global locked.
You have a lot of resource waste because you can't spend it all
just so you can guarantee I can spam spenders over and over and
over again. And that's, at least to me, very
counter intuitive with the amount of buttons that
enhancement has to begin with. And it will guaranteeably lead
to being SAT resource capped, not able to get rid of it.
And if there's one thing that I've learned over the years is
that players cannot reckon with the idea that they're just
burning resources off, it's that they don't like it.
Whether it's numerically good or not, they don't like it.
And if it's even a potential problem, they have to fix that
or else they get a lot of angry feedback.
Obviously that's going. To be a completely weird
situation where you're going to be like, don't take this talent
it's a trap You actually do want to only spend spend 5 even
though each one is weaker. So I can understand that it also
like I don't like trap talent. I don't like devaluing talent.
So I, I, I dislike that in terms of.
What? What Elemental is doing with
this now that it's on on Spenders?
How's it going for you guys, Hawk?
Yeah, I mean. It's probably a change made for
us, let's be real here, right? The issue is basically that
historically we had a thing build type that started in I
think Sheridan Season 4 that we called Fire AOE or yeah,
Wildfire or whatever the current name of it was, where we just
started only pressing lava bursts in AOE, pressing single
target spells in AUE to fish for some AUE proc which doesn't
really do anything, and just completely ignoring your AUE
generator for a lot of it. It's just boring in my opinion.
It's not too good design. So what they did with the
previous rework was they changed a lot of our flame shock procs
to scale in a way that it doesn't matter how many targets
they're on, right? So for lava search for example,
it doesn't matter if it's on one target or if it's on 6, it will
roughly need 9 ticks. I think it is per target for it
to proc on average. Once Right after they changed
that, deeply rooted elements and AOE was basically dead because
we just did not get the lava search box.
We just did not have the lava list available to get any use
out of it, and generally having deeply rooted elements broke on
spenders just so it works better on AOE if you're normal.
Normally generating with chain lightning was a thing that had
been asked previously just so we could get rid of the whole just
let's just spam Lava Burst the whole time.
The issues that we have with it right now is firstly also the
thing we'll have mentioned, right?
SIM Craft or internally, we call it background casts, right?
Any casts that are not actually cast but still just happen.
We have one of those that's called Fusion of Elements, which
is just generating an elemental blast that gets thrown, which
also has a chance for us to proc deeply rooted elements.
Right now, I think this improves the talent by upwards of 50%,
certainly right currently on the PTR doing testing.
And if we ignore that right, if we pretend that this bug didn't
exist, then we get like 1 proc of the talent in like 3 minutes
at most, which it's still the best talent to take right?
So we are we're going to play it anyway.
But if you think they're like, hey, in this fight, will I get
one proc or two kind of boring. It's even though Ascendance is
strong enough to still support their talent and take it.
Not the best thing to do. And also another thing what I
mentioned, right, like it doesn't matter how much
maelstrom you spend a car, so how much resources you put into
that. We have two different spenders.
We have one that costs 55 and one that costs 80 if I have my
numbers right, and that just means that the higher cost
spender is automatically worse just because we'd get a lot less
tries on trying to poke the thing, right?
So while I like the change itself, it's not really balanced
for us right now, which coincides with Ascendance itself
being pretty strong, right? Especially in AOE, if they
increase the proc trans on it significantly, then they would
probably get it out of hand really quickly.
So those two would probably need to get head in hand in hand in
some way. I think I.
I just have to be clear as well with ours, it is a really,
really positive thing to change it to spenders.
If that wasn't clear, having it on Storm Strike was.
I know people like Legion. Having it on Storm Strike is
absolutely horrendous to me. There's no there's no other word
that I can use for it. It is.
People need to get out of their head.
Storm Strike is not a good button.
It looks cool, but it is a bad button right now and it does
nothing in AOE. So it was incredibly bad
designed to have it attached to that.
And it was horrible to be like so global to fish over and over
again. The infamous earth shrine ping
pin of just storm strike no matter what, doesn't matter what
else you have is not healthy. And moving into spenders is
really good, but where it's currently tuned is not.
And the way that it's designed really needs like a second pass
on effectively being a little more complicated for a lot more
player. Return if if I may.
What's your take on just removing the thing all together?
I hate the. Talent personally, yeah, I I
didn't I didn't like the gloves because I don't like wear RNG at
the best of times and the gloves and the RE have always been like
this extra X Factor of Oh my God, this is so much RNG.
I, I can't even like explain to someone sometimes your, your,
your damage is just going to be bad and there's nothing you can
do about it. It's not your fault.
Just go next. And a talent like that is really
unpleasant because while I. Am a gambling addict and I'm a
very big fan of RNG and stuff like that.
It's one of the reasons that I picked the class to begin with
during Legion, just because of the slot machine.
It's not healthy in the long run in a lot of cases, right?
And especially if the current way that while I was
progressing, or at least I think both of our specs are
progressing, is that there are a lot of different mechanics that
you have to time with each other, a lot of different RNG
factors. Anyway, this on top of it is
just pointless, right? There is enough RNG anyway.
I I think the. The way that our spec eventually
pivoted around the tail end of Legion and BFA and it's always
it it ran through after they reworked it too, is that there's
a lot of like sliders of basically you're hedging against
the worst outcome whenever you pick what button you press.
So while theoretically it might be the best to press this button
right now, if you press it right now, three globals later, you've
now not got anything to press and all of the pay off that you
sort of cashed out then is coming back to bite you now.
So you have to sort of sometimes make the quote UN quote wrong
decision right now so that you have a better decision in a few
seconds. But when you add Dre into the
mix in that you basically remove that lever of being able to
control at least at least try and influence the the needle and
instead you have to just go all out.
I will make the worst decision over and over and over again so
that I can get the best outcome eventually.
And fingers crossed it's really good.
And if it's not, well, then that's a shame.
We'll try again. And I don't, I, I, I personally
don't like that much control being removed from me, even
though it can have some funny logs.
But yeah, it's it's a polarising effect and the removing reducing
ascendance to two minutes does a lot for me anyway, because it
means that technically, unless they massively overtune it, I
can ignore it and just play regular ascendance and have a
call call down. I loved the casino build back in
Legion for elemental. It was just like hey do I do I
get my money back, let's roll again.
I conversely hated Legion enhancement because it was just
fishing for Stormbringer procs to go back into that same
change, which seems very weird but here I am.
I do think that fishing is is an issue that kind of feels like
they constantly want us to be in there as as shaman and Farsi
year is now becoming like the lesser child if you will of the
of the hero talents. What do we need in Farsi year to
bring that up? Hawk, I mean.
What they did to begin with right now were good choices,
right? Like the one thing that they did
is I think the town's called routine communication.
There was an 8% chance on lava burst to proc an ancestor,
right? With the way that the rotation
is currently progressing and the way the spec is developing, they
just made it so it prox on basically anything.
I think it's on lava burst, lightning ball, ice tree, and
frost truck or something. So that's a good thing to begin
with, right? The problem is for signature
it's probably just balancing right?
Like just us I think. I mean, numbers right now are
still very much up in the air because SIM craft is not
entirely done, we're just working on stuff.
But I think it's 5% behind for a significantly easier rotation,
which is probably fine. Could be a bit closer, but yeah,
fair enough for AUE. The problem is that the fascia
can only cast non elemental chain lightning, if that makes
sense. Like chain lightning by default
hits three targets and elementals specifically gets a
passive on top of that that it hits five.
So the farseer only hit 3 targets with the chain lightning
and that can't overload. And I don't think the extra
quick modifiers are on that, but I'm not entirely sure on that
one. But yeah, just a lot of our spec
interactions, a lot of our spec effects are not on the pets
itself, which that's just how the game works in all of cases.
But that just means that anytime we actually start to go into
AOE, the Farsi does damage to three targets.
Doesn't matter if they're six, if they're 20, if they're 25,
whatever. I mean, I understand that
Blizzard very much likes target capping spells in a lot of
cases, right? But 3 is probably a bit low on
the one end. And just generally this, the
chain lightning on that is just too weak.
How they fix that in practice if they're just going to make that
also able to overload or hit 5 targets on and how that works
numerically? Good question.
I'm not entirely sure, but yes, something probably should be
done and they also need to fix the targeting on that because
that's just ridiculous it seems. Like Blizzard is very stuck on
target capping shaman in particular.
We've seen Tempest itself get rained in when initially when we
went live that went rightfully so.
Yeah. Probably in.
In fairness, that one, that one was kind of justified, like,
yeah, yeah. There there is.
Some nerves that that feel bad when you read them, but you can
kind of go, yeah, yeah, I understand why you're going to
do that. And that was probably one of
them because we and that might be enhancements fault, but it
did a lot of damage, but like. When you look at what Shaman has
for like actually reaching reaching those large numbers,
it's sort of like the soft cap on Earthquake or Sunder and
flipping it over to enhancement. I have just seen how many things
have been hard capped in Totemic, where it is now being
completely revamped. But the biggest AOE we had was
the totem and lively and lively totems, which had a hard cap of
five. So what's going on with Totemic
that's getting the biggest revamp of anything for Shaman
right now? The totemics rework is really,
really big. It's they basically it's not the
same tree anymore. Like the the I mean the biggest
1 immediately is like totemic rebound.
Going from storm strike to spenders is a massive, like far
more like wider implications than almost anything else on the
tree. Because it's problem is always
you've got to tell them that there's lava lush stuff and the
talent, the storm strike stuff. They don't interact like they
they clash immediately. So those two talents existing
and being strong means the tree will never work.
So putting on the spenders instead, That's really good.
Though the problem is those bolts that it shoots out hit
really hard and they scale with how the totem is currently
scaling up so it rolls over into itself.
That's the exact same problem as Dre.
It doesn't care how much miles from you spend on those bolts,
it'll always fire 1. So if you've got Dre that's
saying spend it as low as possible and you've got rebound,
that's saying it'll proc and it'll do it's damage, you don't
take overflowing. And then that means the tree is
already very global locked to begin with.
It is now even more so because you are constantly riding 10
maelstrom and you can't get rid of it.
And then the sundering incorporation in there is very
cool. I think sundering could maybe do
with a little spray paint on there to make it look a little
less like it does. But it's it's a cool it's a it's
a cool effect. It's really cool to press
lavalash and sundering shootout and you do it a lot because you
have hot hand up a lot, especially with the new
capstone. But sundering as a button,
especially for the fact that it's got to cool down as long as
it is the actual base spell is pretty pretty terrible.
It's doesn't do good damage. It's like cool thing was the
knockback knockdown, so extra CC in the dungeon.
Everyone thinks that's awesome. That's removed from basically
all of the extra access to sundering in the in the new
tree. So you're hinging the trees AOE
off a button that already kind of wasn't very good, was being
dropped by a lot of builds and was just taken as a throwaway
point. And then you're suppressing it
further with the extra procs, which rightfully you're procking
a lot of them, but cutting it down to 30% is a huge downgrade
to an already weak spell. And then you're latching on a
lot of the payoff to earth surge, which is the you press
you manually cast on drinks. It doesn't work from the ones
that come from the lava lashes with reactivity and the totem
then pulses really hard and the totem already hits pretty hard.
And then they add a new talent to thundering, which is that it
can proc to reset, which again we have a lot of RNG.
This one is the most offensive RNG on every tree because that
hits really, really hard. OK, so to get it out of the way
that that'll that'll proc for like 5 million damage if it
crits, which is a lot in AOE. And that reset is a chance of a
chance. So your chance to get storm
surge or formerly Stormbringer is baseline like 8-9 percent.
And the chance for the sundering reset to happen is 8 to 9% again
on whenever it goes off. So it's 9% of 9%.
So it's super, super rare, but when it happens, that means you
just propped 5 million damage for free.
And then you add in over surge from there, which is that when
you're in ascendance, the totem does 150% more damage, which
includes those pulses. So if you proc a sundering reset
as you've proc the deeply rooted elements, you now get 2
back-to-back sunderings that deal 10 million damage instead.
And the chance of that happening is very low, but the payoff is
ludicrously strong and you have 0 control over all of it
entirely. And then the other other really
big talent problem is Flowing Spirits, which is the whenever
you press a button, you might spawn a dog.
And it's based on the element of the spell that you cast.
So if you don't take elemental spirits, it'll be stone trike
and Wind fury can proc physical wolves and that's it.
That's your only way of getting it.
And so right now the way that that is tuned is that you it's
based it's a flat percent chance.
I think it's 10% on any instance of any of those spells.
You press storm strike a lot, you prog wind fury a lot and
you'll spawn a lot of multiplicative dogs.
I think my record right now is 24 up at once, which which is
not helped by the set bonus where it also always spawns an
extra 1, so you're getting 2 instead of 1.
And for some reason it's not suppressed on the physical ones,
so they last for 15 seconds, not 8.
And 24 dogs is around about a 2900% multiplier on physical
damage. So now Star Trek hits really
hard and you guessed it, the storm, the sundering procs on
the totem hit really, really hard.
So I think that'll that crits for around a little shy of 30
million out of nowhere. And we're looking at logs of
playing through it. And when this does happen very
rarely, you will suddenly see the log be very low and flat
line and a nice like happy one, 1.2 million.
And then suddenly it'll spike up in the middle of nowhere to like
20 million. And then it'll go back down and
you'll never see it again. And that is horrendously RNG
really. But you can't plan around it,
that needs to be super ultra fixed before this goes live
because it will get the spec nerfed because it will be
terrifying to see in practice. I don't even know what to say I
wanted to jump into the PTR and just like delete something in
BRD yeah, that definitely that definitely needs to be nerfed.
I I would have to say that the 15 seconds instead of eight, it
just seems it's got to be a bug, right?
There's no way that's Oh yeah. The the I think when they've put
it in because they've attached it to spells that proc the
element. So they've gone, you know, frost
shock, ice strike is frost wolf and so on down the chain.
They've put it in for elemental spirits and they've sort of
forgot that the non elemental spirit ones are going to work.
And then they've just sort of tagged the spell on and they've
not flagged it to be the reduced 1.
And so that one's the one that's abusable because they, for
whatever reason, there's a lot of different spell IDs going on
and service scripts with wolves to begin with.
And one of them hasn't been caught up in that because I mean
the the other bug, you might remember Once Upon a time, if
you happen to have the spirit Raptors glyph, which changes
your dogs into Raptors. This has happened once before.
If you have that glyph, then it doesn't have the scripts because
it's not flagged. So the so that'll just spawn any
type of dog at all or any type of Raptor in this case, without
any careful what elements propped it because who knows,
but the glyph just changes it. So it's no longer a cosmetic
glyph. It's a performance glyph.
So I think there's been a lot of there.
It's just spaghetti in there that is all messed up.
And that talent needs, well, it needs God right now before it
goes live. But it is a scary one.
And the the worst part of it is that talent is one that I think
the spec really, really needs because you have to cast Feral
Spirit a lot and it's not a fun button to press.
It's really cool to have loads of dogs, but it's not cool to
press it because it doesn't do anything when you press it.
So if you have a way to just proc them, that feels a lot
better as an alternative. But as it is right now, it's not
in a healthy spot to sort of release to the public is my
concern. And Totemic's the one that
abuses it the most because the other stuff in Totemic, it's
like a big thumbs up. The capstone rework is
fantastic. That's so much better.
The improvement to the imbuement 1 is really good.
The wind fury, flame tongue interaction and sort of the the
broad scope of pulling it away from caring about storm strike
and Lava lash in opposition and more like spenders procs.
These are the things that matter for Totemic and keep the tongue
down. It'll never fix the problem of
having to babysit the tone until they fix the like how it
targets, but I I it's a big, big improvement.
It just needs a little bit of extra work.
So then. Without the bug, the bugs or
this like out outlier is are we going to see Ashley Totemic
being in a good spot? So if you remove the bugs and
play it as is, it is slightly better than it is on live in
terms of numbers. So it's it's numbers aren't good
right now. They they've significantly
nerfed the proc rate on lively totems.
So you don't get many searing totems out and just the tuning
points of a lot of things, especially sundering, which is
supposed to carry a lot of weight for this is basically not
because it just doesn't do enough damage and it doesn't
proc wind fury despite being a main hand attack because it's a
proc. There's a whatever the intention
is, it doesn't do that and it's relying on the totem a lot.
So it's a lot of pick all the talents above the totem and some
of those talents just still don't work that well together
because that's the only way you sort of extract damage out of
the tree. And that could very easily fix
be fixed by just changing some of the numbers around to weight
it away from the totem and more into what you do with the totem.
And I think they can do that. They're sort of running out of
time, which puts me in a bit of an alarming position because I
don't super want to write about like guide updates of ignore
everything and just full send buff the totem and hope that you
proc really well. But should those numbers be
fixed and these horrendous bugs reined in, I'd say that like in
single target, you've got a pretty reasonable chance that it
will just about maybe break even with your average storm bringer
pass. But where it stands right now,
it will still just be like out. It's just much more likely that
they can fix it at some point if they care to then before, before
it wasn't fixable, it was sort of a lost cause.
So I think they've done a good job, just not all of the job
that they needed to do. OK.
I feel like the biggest fear that I have with that is that so
much of it is like this guardian pet damage, not what I got into
shaman for, but unfortunately going over to elemental, I feel
like so much of it is elemental damage.
Hawk, please tell me what does it look like for Pharcy for
elemental? How are they sitting and do I
still need to have elemental as like my core part of my damage?
I mean, as I said earlier, right, like Farsio currently is
functionally non viable and if if you're trying to be optimal
about it, right, like Farsio will be 5% behind the single
target and just completely out and AOE more or less, right?
I think, I think the damage itself that the Farsias do
currently on life, it's about 30% plus or something, and it
goes down to like 20% plus just because the way that the Farsi
years work right is that every time you cast a spell, they do a
flat amount of damage. Basically they throw a lava
burst that's always a quit. So that's basically constant
number. And with the high uptime that we
have on Storm Ali, we can just get a lot of lightning bolts
into that window and they do a lot of damage with Storm
elemental. First of all, it's being changed
to give haste now instead of car speed reduction and
significantly less haze than it did car speed reduction because
also it affects all spells now, right?
It just means that we can fit a lot.
And also the up time is we do significantly just because we
lose flash of lightning, right? So the faster the ancestors
themselves, we'll just do a lot less damage overall.
The bigger issue here that I'm seeing with the removal of Flash
of Lightning specifically is defensive because currently what
Flash of Lightning does is it reduces every nature spell,
right? This doesn't mean every
offensive nature spell. That means every nature spell
including wind shear, which is the interrupt, right?
Which also includes Astro Shift, which is the defensive, which
also it just reduces everything. We have 5 or 6 second cooldown
on the kick. We can basically mitigate
everything at this point. Or that's kind of what it feels
like. And they will remove that,
right? So suddenly every single
defensive coolant basically goes up by 100%, right?
It just double S again. That's at least the feeling that
the player base will have when they go to the next patch.
I'm not sure how drastically necessary it is to address this.
I know that most people that I talk to that are rating very
high level rates are doing queen proc and stuff think they should
probably still be fine. Enhancement, for example, has
the full cool down duration on those defensives anyway, and
they seem to be mostly fine, I think.
So it's probably a workable situation, right?
But just having some kind of compensation for the amount that
we're losing would probably be a nice gesture, right?
In the Wild article that came out yesterday from recording
right, I mentioned that it would be an option to reduce the
cooldown on the Stoneskin totem or Stone Bull Walk totem, I
think to two minutes, Which first of all just means we have
it more often, right? And also means that we can to
tamic recall it and get some more value out of that.
It wouldn't be a big thing. The totem itself is numerically
pretty bad in my opinion, so probably wouldn't break the spec
or anything, but would probably just be a welcome change in that
direction. How they are going to, I mean,
how they're going to compensate for the utility.
They probably just don't need to.
It was ridiculous, especially with how they changed interrupts
to work. Having actual interrupts is a
lot more valuable this season or this expansion that was
previously right. And being able to basically just
solo kick a pack if necessary, just completely uncoordinate,
just go in there. I just kick everything that's
necessary. Don't worry, was probably a bit
much anyway, right? So yeah, it's it's still a very
hard loss, but we will probably manage.
But yeah, in terms of box that we have, right, like the fusion
thing, that prox DIE we mentioned earlier.
And then we have a lot of things where the numbers just kind of
don't work in AOE because of the way that they redid the mastery
with the previous rework. They just shuffled some parts of
their internal spell data won't. But that just means that
earthquakes currently are doing 100 or earthquake overloads
currently are just doing 100% too much damage on PTR.
And I think during a sentence they are fine, but it's very
hard to say because there's like 3 different bugs or four
different bugs that are interacting with each other.
And I am not entirely sure if the math that I'm doing there is
correct because they forgot to apply some nerves again and
stuff like this. It's the usual stuff that always
happens kind of. But yeah, just generally I think
if it comes purely to box, we are in a much better position
than the enhancement Charmans right now.
I'm just scared that if they want to address the actual
numbers issues that they currently have, because I think
we will eat some nerve to ascendance to AOE in some form
or fashion. Even after they fix the box, I
think it's still probably too strong.
But if they aren't very careful as to how they're going to
change it, they might just completely nerf the spec into
oblivion and then they will have to actually buff it again.
And if they make a sentence less interesting numerically, even
people will probably see that as a loss of enjoyment just
generally in how the spec plays. Because I think right now on PTR
and single target, it feels really, really, really good to
play. OK.
So we are a week away from this going live, so they've got a lot
of work to do. If you could ask the developers
for one thing to to encapsulate what what shamans need, word up.
We'll start with you. What would you ask for?
Well. You you can't, you can't fix the
problems right now with one thing because it's sort of a lot
of little individual things that need to be sort of teased out
like in order of priority. Like very, very, very, very top
of the list is that flowing spirits need someone to like go
into the office and just spend the day and work out what makes
this an acceptable level in their head.
Likely like RPPM is probably a good idea.
Flat percent chance, pretty dangerous and you just have
different RPPMS for each element.
That's probably healthier than right now.
But however they choose to address that, that needs to be
addressed before live, not after in post before, because that'll
be really bad if that goes goes live.
The sundering reset is one that I I sort of picked out one.
You need to buff sundering no matter like that's the the
bottom line. That spell needs buffing the
reset. Personally I'd rather go with
ticking Cdr instead. Just take it from flame shock or
something. Just make it trickle in.
Make it more predictable than what it is because we can't have
I I. I don't know if you played in
shadow lands with enhancement, but if you remember firewalls
and hot hand, it wasn't fun to have to roll for one to get the
other one to then go nuclear because you've already got the
good one. I don't need to wait for the
other one to make it super good. So having the two layered super
RNG pick one, ideally the ascendants proc and make the
other one predictable. That one is another one.
Ascendance. Ascendance feels awesome.
By the way, I didn't touch on this.
Two charges on storm strike is really really fun for the new
ascendants. Well, old ascendants, but it
feels new. Dre just needs to be scaled off
the amount of males from you spend.
Bottom line, I know that it puts it in overlap with Tempest.
That's OK in my opinion anyway, just let's let's go with that
route. Then all of the finicky bugs of
hidden casts and one of the little thing that in case it
goes live for the sake of literally everyone else who
plays with enhancement of the potential problem it may cause.
Imbuement mastery, the procking flame tongue, AOI off wind fury
make it 1 hit not 3 ticks please.
Because the combat log if you look at like a 5 minute combat
log of enhancement in AOE, you you'll usually see like around
5000 combat like entry log entries.
Maybe that's that's pretty high. But like if you add that talent
in there, it suddenly goes to like 10,000 or 12,500.
And if you played in wads, you might remember that if you used
Ancestral Guidance and then pressed Fire Nova, the entire
raid lags immediately. And as fun as it is to have a
kill switch on the entire raid to be able to press it and make
everyone lag, no one likes playing with you when you do it
more than once because the joke goes away.
Just like no one like playing with an Holly DK on Demathrius.
They press over the epidemic and then you can't play.
Please just change that, because if Totemic is good, people still
won't let you play it. But yeah, the key things is
sundering flowing spirits. Dre, look at them again, I will
say. One thing that I I am really
happy with with the flowing spirits is that you can control
your wolves. Just that alone makes me want it
more than than the roll. The wolves that we have on live
right now that Yeah. That is, it is really cool that
they thought of that in the process because it that that
wasn't completely like agnostic of us saying anything.
They went on their own with that one and it is really cool.
And then? I, I, I got to give you the
list. I gave word up the list.
What are the priorities of things that they need to fix for
Elemental? Yeah, I mean a few.
Things overlap, right? Like DAE Maelstrom just bug
fixing generally, right? Like everything that's there for
us, like I said, I, I will, I'm expecting a change to a
sentence. I'm expecting a nerve there, but
I just want them to be real careful about it and just keep
it fun, right? So just specifically nerve the
AOE component if that's possible, and try to keep it
similar or exactly the same in single target.
When it comes to actually actual changes, it's mostly stuff that
I haven't talked about yet. It's fire elemental and the new
talent Erupting Lava, which I don't think fire elemental
basically is so bad now in comparison to Storm Melly that
they just need to do something with it that just put anything
on it and it's going to be better basically.
And the other talent are just erupting lava.
I just, I I like the concept, I just don't think it works
entirely well. It's a thing where every time
you press lava burst you eat up a bit of your flame shock.
And this whole dot management thing is not something that the
community generally enjoys and that is really part of the spec.
So especially with the amount of passive eating up of the dot
that happens right now, you're basically just pressing the
button like you're just pressing flame shock every 5 seconds.
Not even to mention that it's just under tuned and it just
doesn't compete. But yeah, just keep an eye on
the stuff that doesn't work, that will not be picked and
those few things. Ascendance die.
I'm going to. I'm going to just throw out my
suggestion for that. My suggestion is simply that
every time it would proc, it just empowers the next couple of
ticks. Just rather than having a a like
it munch away the three seconds, which I believe in your article,
you showed a a case scenario where you're basically eating up
the entirety of the the flame shocks you put out just empower
the next couple of ticks. So you get some like extra
damage and you want to pump it in.
Yeah, sure. Oh.
I, I can't, I can't go someone, someone will eat my head off if
I don't say it. The follow up talents, the
primordial wave for us, either delete them because you clearly
hate them or do something to them because no one is ever
going. They're going to pass down there
anymore because it is so it has been crippled so much by repeat
nerves that you can't pat down there anymore.
Either add something to it, please, so that there's a little
bit of like friction or choice or delete them because they have
no place anymore. Thank you that I have to say
that because someone will be at my throat otherwise I I think.
Ever since Amir Dasil, they're just like, no, you can't have
that much haste on demand. So hopefully they will do
something like that. But again, we could keep going
for for hours. There's so much to talk about
with Shaman. This is something I've really
wanted to do for a long time. Sorry.
Thank you guys for coming out. Where can people find you when
you're not here talking about Shaman Hawk, Let's start with
you. Yeah, I mean.
I'm chronically online on Earthshine basically, so if
people want to get a hold of me, just ping me or mention my name.
If you say it three times, I'd probably just appear or
something. And other than that, it's just
stuff like Wowhead and things, right?
Well, just right guides and. Word up, where can people find
you if they need to know something about enhancement?
I'm the same. You'll find me on Earth trying,
lurking more, more so than anything at the moment, because
I'm playing the game and they'll be like, there's Wildhead and
Icy Veins. They're always updated by me
too. They're the best places.
And if anything super important happens, I'll probably tweet
about it. But that's basically where you
can find me. I attempt to keep to myself at
the moment when it's this busy at the expansion.
Definitely I've. I've been enjoying the Game 2
just pre pre show talk. I was just saying I don't know
if I should be learning PTR stuff or I should be learning
live and every time I jump into it takes me just a couple of
pools before I realize which version of the game I'm in.
So there's a lot to enjoy both on live and upcoming.
We will definitely talk more about what those impacts are as
11.0 point five hits. But until next time guys, may
all your hits be crits.