I mean, it just depends on what you want hero talents to be,
right? Like depending on who I talk to,
there's a lot of like variants there.
We have some people that came in now over the last few days and
say like, OK, do I have to learn two hero trees?
Because if I have to learn two hero trees I would just play
different spec Victory for the Forsaken.
For Lauderon. For the Karen tour.
For Pandaria. For calendar to.
The burning region for Gilnaeus, but has not died for the Lich
King for the Sindora. For the alliance.
For the horn for Azeroth. Hello and welcome to another
special episode of For Azrok in my series where we talk to the
people who know what in the world is going on in the World
of Warcraft, the guide riders, the three crafters, the people
who like dig into stuff. And joining me is a great friend
of mine. Mr. Hawk.
How are you and how's World of Warcraft been treating you?
Oh yeah, I mean stressful, right?
Like that's how every patch releases.
I think we'd currently in the process of US or NA getting
their patch deployed right. So I think in a few hours, is
that about right? It's, it's going to be Tuesday
with extended maintenance that goes through to 3:00 PM PST.
Yeah. So it's it's going to be a.
Little more time zones. Yeah.
And then obviously that's when we in NA start actually beta
testing and hopefully it's good for you guys.
Yeah, that would be. But there is a lot happening and
a lot happening to our classes. So for those who don't know you,
can you tell us about yourself in the class that you like to
talk about? Yeah, So hi, I'm Hawk.
Hawk Hogan I've been doing elemental shaman theory crafting
and like tool support I guess for the last, what is it now,
eight years or something. Started doing Wow analyzer back
when and then slowly worked my way into like simulation craft
and do like theory crafting, crunching some numbers and
trying to figure out how the game works, how the spec works,
how to do it properly, how to play the class.
Still in the process of figuring that one out, but I do think
that I have at least a good theoretical some good
theoretical knowledge about the spec.
Of course, of course, it's always a moving target, so even
when you do figure something out, it might change on you in
the next path. For the Elemental Shaman,
something that is near and dear to my heart, it's been quite the
journey. Over the course of The War
Within we've had entire cooldowns completely changed
over, we've had our on and off again love affair with Flame
Shock, and even that is changing.
Can you tell me, in your opinion, how things have gone
for Elemental through The War Within?
I mean, it's been turbulent to say the least, right?
Getting like a full on Wework, which I mean they didn't touch
like the bass spells I guess, but still like everything kind
of changes or changed. Previously we had like different
build types depending on like which of our fillers we were
just spamming because that's just what kind of always
happened. And they just kind of took
offence with that if we just ignored one of our main like
minor coolers, our major fillers, I guess, depending on
whichever one it was, right. And so they just reworked
everything. Turns out every time something
gets reworked, it gets kind of strong.
So we got nerved quite a bit. Still ended up being pretty
good, not going to lie. And yeah, like in the end of the
expansion. Now, I personally think that the
gameplay was pretty good. It was very fun to play and
yeah, I mean still very strong. So I think they ended up in a
good position with The War Within and now with Midnight
there will be changes. So I think we're going to talk
about that one. Yeah, definitely.
But before we do, I'd love to talk a little bit more about the
hero talents, because of course The War Within was the
introduction of the hero talents.
We had both the Farseer and of course the Stormbringer hero
talents for Elemental. And there's been sort of like a
back and forth between the two and sometimes one was the Mythic
plus build and one was the raid build.
And they've been changing. So like overall have has
Elemental benefited from these hero talents and have they been
like overall a good thing? I mean, it just depends on what
you want hero talents to be, right?
Like depending on who I talk to, there's a lot of like variants
there. We have some people that came in
now over the last few days and say like, OK, do I have to learn
to hero trees? Because if I have to learn to
hero trees, I would just play different spec.
And for us, how it's traditionally been, it's like
Farsi as the rating, the single target build, right?
And storm bringer, like the AOE just burn everything in the
build, right? And that is more or less stayed
the same, right? Like Farsi is playable in mythic
plus definitely does better boss damage and a few dungeons like
usually like one or two dungeons each season.
It does see play and might be slightly better depending on
your context, who you're running with, stuff like that.
But yeah, like so having these completely distinct kind of
flavours for different Pve styles, so playing something
that feels quite different between rate, single target and
mythic plus AOE is just kind of drawing for some people.
I don't particularly mind it because I've, I do like the idea
of being able to specialize in some kind of like damage pattern
or something like that, right? But generally what happens if
you have to specialize is that you obviously lose in all of the
areas where you don't specialize.
So what we had a lot of the time is like Stormwinger does more
AOE, but we just lose out on single target.
So we just lag behind on that, which kind of held us back right
now we're probably so overturned that it doesn't really matter as
much. But that's a different kind of
question, right? Oh yeah.
So like having it as like an aesthetic choice and having like
the animations and summoning like The Tempest for the storm
Winger and have like all the lightning happening and
everything. It's pretty cool.
It it feels good. Farcia.
I'm personally enjoy all of it. I know that half the community
hates it. Just having more pets and like
summon your grandpas and have them actually do the job, right?
Like if you're playing the game and 30% of your damage is just
from the pets, it's just from the people that are standing
behind you and you're not really expecting to play a pet class.
I see how people would kind of dislike that, but I, I do very
much enjoy it. I mean, I've always liked
Primordial Wave, which is like the main thing that you need to
use for Farseer builds, right? Because it procs the Eurotelons.
But yeah, so end of the day, I'm not entirely sure if I think the
system benefits us in the sense of like it makes the gameplay
better or anything like that. But it I think the idea is
generally successful. So I'm I'm quite happy that they
take it over into midnight, I think.
OK. And so as you've gone into
Midnight and we've gone through the streamlining, we've seen a
reduction of a lot of the buffs that we used to have to keep an
eye on the plates that we used to spin.
Does Elemental still do what Elemental does?
Does it still feel like elemental?
And how is the gameplay being affected?
Well, it entirely depends again on who you're asking, right?
Like all of the like the try hards, the people that spend a
lot of time playing the spec, some of them may be playing it a
bit too much. Just say like all of the
interesting stuff is gone, right?
The skeleton is definitely still there, right?
Like it's a bit of a spender spec.
You generate your mouth some precious spenders.
All of the things that kind of do, all the pretty colours, all
the animations, all that is still there.
It's probably more now than it was previously because they just
kind of focused in on like overload.
So everything just happens more now is at least what it kind of
looks like and feels like. But all of the fun stuff, right?
Like Ice Fury broke up the rotation.
Ice Fury has always been a very, very highly debated spell.
Like the word clunky has at times been very, very well.
We disincentivize people to use it.
Let me put it this way, right? Because everything just gets
kind of called clunky and the word just loses all meaning.
But yeah, like, people always called it clunky because playing
around it was just kind of annoying.
You had to as well as you said, right?
Like spinning plates, just one more that you just kind of have
to manage. But after they rework that, I'd
like, I don't know how many of your listeners and viewers know
the history there, right? Like I sure he initially was if
I remember correctly 32nd cooldown and gave you like 4
charges of first Chuck. Then that got rebalanced a few
times. Was it even a minute and four
charges? I don't even remember, it's been
about a while and it anyway. It's been a long time since like
I think BFA days when we were doing the, the, the balance of
the elements and so you would want to go through and it's gone
through a lot of changes though. It's even older, right?
Like in Legion there was like the ice quake build and stuff
like that. Ice shoe already existed back in
Legion, right? So it's been like 10 years at
this point. So anyway, point being, they
changed it to a random clock now, right?
So just by doing things you just sometimes get it and every ice
shoe is like one for shock that you can use afterwards.
And that was kind of cool. You could save up like 2
charges. The way it procs is more or less
normalized, so you don't really get like 3 procs in a row or
something like that. So you can just bank it.
You have it for like movement stuff.
You can just actually move places, which is very nice to do
as a caster. People still call it clunky.
I don't know if that is related to like we have a talent called
Fusion of Elements, which the base UI just never tracked.
It was tracked and like a beta at some point, but then they
just removed that for some reason.
So we had to like work around it with we go us to even just
understand what is actually happening in the game because
Blizzard didn't want to tell us. But so that was kind of weird.
That was kind of janky to play around that.
But other than that, it was a pretty nice spell.
Now at the end of all, at the end of it all after the we
factors and reworks. So losing that is kind of bad.
Similarly, like a lot of the flavour stuff Liquid Magma told
him which back in legion or something you just popped it
down at the damage. Great, loved it.
Then it started applying like flame shocks, which that was
kind of neat when we had like primordial wave to actually
benefit from the flame shocks right?
And now they just removed it again and replaced it with like
a new talent, which is technically better.
It can just apply all of the flame shocks now, but it was
like the last totem that we had remaining.
And people like totems I think just for Charmin generally.
So bit of a loss in flavour I guess.
Yeah. And some other stuff, right?
Like we have lost a lot of procs, a lot of like random
stuff, a lot of things that were kind of you had to track or you
just didn't. Usually you will find just not
tracking it at all. People obviously want to track
it. If things are happening, they
want to see it, right? Oh, yeah.
So like they removed a lot of those things, which I think is
fair, right? It's it's a very weird
situation. They added a lot of things and
removed the little things that we kind of asked for.
But now it's just the shell that's left over.
So it just feels like, OK, and and now please add the fun into
the spec, right? It still feels like elemental
sound, but there's just the little bit missing.
I don't know if that's just me talking or someone who likes to
slightly min makes or slightly like try to optimize gameplay a
little bit, right? Because it's also a situation
right now where like if you go onto the Internet, you go onto
YouTube and you see like what creators are talking about with
regards to like midnight and everyone loves elemental shaman
and one says you should play that.
But that in my opinion, right, It's mostly just people that
played it for like a few hours and tried it in a few dungeons
and stuff like that. And it's really cool.
It it feels good, it looks nice, but there's just not much there
if you actually want to go into it, right?
Like when I was writing the guides and I'm sitting there
like, OK, and how can I tell people how to optimize this?
And I'm just saying like there, there is nothing I, I don't
know, like there's mass of the elements and like the which you
have to kind of play around and that's it really so.
So it feels like while the cool factor remains, a bit of the
soul has been hollowed out. Like the skeleton is still
standing there but the soul is just missing, right?
OK, OK. You did talk about the loss of
Liquid Mogmototum, the addition now that we, we no longer have
Liquid Mogmotum, we're boring from enhancement.
The ability to like now immediately apply a flame shock
onto 1 target and five others in there that hit like hits the
cap. How has that really changed for
the AOE of, of elemental? Because elemental AOE was a lot
of that project juggling. You wanted to make sure that you
were like sending and sending your elemental blast so you
could, you could empower and so forth.
You wanted to make sure that you were doing the the right amount
of juggling. And now it feels like you're
looking for a Aftershock proc to like send more spenders and go
from there. Yeah, I mean, you're right.
I even forgot to mention that I like Echoes of Grades Unknowing,
which is like the talent where you just alternate your
spenders. That is also gone now.
So you're just spamming your AOE spender when AOE is happening,
which it's it's earthquake is a great spell.
Might need a little animation update at some point if we look
at the new like augmentation earthquake animations and stuff
like that, but that's a different conversation.
But yeah, so like stuff like that has gone.
The whole Ice Fury fusion thing is gone.
Some talents that you could sometimes play around like
Search of Power where like your spenders would then upgrade your
next generator, stuff like that is gone.
So all of the flame shock juggling that we did previously,
right? Like we kind of understand how
exactly liquid magma totem applies it's dots.
So depending on target counts, how many targets have flame
shock, how many don't you just have to use your spells in a
different order to just kind of abuse the logic there.
And whether that was fun for people to do or not is very,
very it's it's debatable. I agree, right.
Like I personally enjoyed myself figuring out how exactly that
works and trying to maximize like the active flame shocks
with those builds. But to each their own on that
one, right? And now it's definitely.
Fun to read on my end, it was not something I was looking to
put into practice. Yeah, and now the new voltaic
place. So I'd like, as you said, you
shock a target and everything else also gets flame shocks up
to the maximum, which is 6, right?
The problem is just it entirely replaces your flame shock.
So you can't do it. Like if if you have to wait for
everything to be grouped up, then you can actually press the
button. So that's the one, that's one
thing. And then you also are kind of
reliant on everything standing together because you only have
one spell that's a splash that just applies the dot now.
So if they are not grouped, like what are you supposed to do?
You can't really put it somewhere else.
There's no other way to apply flame Shock at all.
There are no procs anymore where they just apply it.
I guess pressing Ascendance itself kind of still does apply.
It spread sometimes, but that's like a two or three minutes cool
down, right? So kind of debatable how
relevant that is in most cases. But yeah, like previously you
had Primordial Wave, which was like 30 second cool down.
So every 30 seconds you kind of had like your little set up
thingy where you try to do all the flame shock juggling.
You did the primordial wave and then you just kept playing the
game kind of, and now was like 15 second cool down -6 seconds
from one talent and then -1 1/2 again, something like that.
I think it's like 8 second cooling or something on the low
end. So pressing that button and then
the lava burst afterwards, it's like a good bit of irritation
now, which is not terribly another terribly bad thing
because it's one of the few instant casts you have, right?
So you can actually move when you press will take place.
But yeah, so like, I think it doesn't feel particularly nice
to play. I mean, sure, if everything's
scooped up, if everything goes well, it's kind of neat.
But yeah, I don't know, I definitely preferred the
previous iteration. Probably just what I'm used to,
to be fair, right? Like it might just be a thing
that will and like if we talk again like 2 years, I will just
sit there like MO wasn't so bad, was just a little bit of growing
pains, right? Understandable.
I mean it is going to be a different beast in AOE.
The single target though, when we are walking up to that boss
and we are now dealing with like a raid boss or just the boss
that we're dealing with in a mythic Plus, how is that
affected? It doesn't.
It's not being completely reworked like AOE, but like are
we still able to do what we wanted to do?
Well, single target or rate generally is kind of the the
pain point in my opinion, right like from all the testing I've
done and from all the tests testing I've watched, we're just
losing a lot of mobility, right? The assumption right now is that
you will play voltaic place, but just apply it like every 15
seconds ish right. So play it without the cooldown
reduction talents and all of that.
So that's a movement spell. And then I guess you have your
earth shock, which like every. Let's say every 8 seconds or
something, right? You can press like a spender and
you can move a little bit that way and that's kind of it.
So I mean Stormkeeper gives you some instant cars, Lava search
gives you some instant cars. So I'd like there is definitely
it's definitely possible to like start a step places sometimes,
but if you just have to go far, you have spirit walkers,
obviously, but that is still not always available, right?
And if I look at at least how the bosses were designed in war
within, a lot of them required a good bit of movement.
So we're going to see how that goes in the pre patch, I guess.
And even in midnight, right, like all the right bosses that
we tested, I think they still require a good a good amount of
mobility. I felt like it was a bit of an
issue and most people that I talked with considered a bit of
an issue and didn't really have a lot of fun, at least on the
single target process and stuff like that.
So just kind of a question, right?
Like we are obviously not the only class, not the only spec
that kind of has like this charity ranged approach.
If you look at something like destruction Warlock or
something, or Warlock in general, I guess they're also
just sit there and casting. I think that they have some
better tools. I think that circle is generally
a bit better than most of the stuff that we have access to.
But at the end of the day, in my opinion at least, they often get
balanced around the fact that they have to move as much,
right? Like even if they lose a lot of
cars, they still do good damage. And yeah, I mean, there has
basically been no balancing at all on the PTR and on the beta,
right? There was basically no damage
shuffling for the specs, no aura adjustments, nothing.
Which will be a bit interesting when we patch in our launches,
but we will see about that one. So it's really hard to say
whether Blizzard, I mean Blizzard is keeping that in
mind, right? Like they are aware of that, but
like how aggressively they want to compensate for that.
We will see. I mean, it's the same thing.
I like they have communicated that there is a shift in like
how they design weight losses, how they design Mythic plus
around the loss in utility. And if you look at something
like destruction, I don't know that much about it, but to my
understanding at least they lose like some of their shadow burns,
all of their shadow burns, stuff like that.
They do lose some of the instant cast.
So they also lose like mobility. So we are definitely not the
only ones with that issue. But I mean, if you compare that
to like a mage who still can just blink everywhere all the
time back and just do like ridiculous stuff, yeah, it's
it's concerning. I am concerned.
OK, So you're looking at this not like where we went from like
Mr. Pandaria, where we could just cast like most of our
rotation on the move to Warlords.
It's not it's it's not that kind of pain.
You do feel like that they haven't properly compensated for
it? Yeah, I mean, we're not going
from like BM level mobilities to still kind of good mobility,
right. We're going to yeah, pretty all
right. I mean, to be fair, we are
reasonably mobile with like Ice Sphere and all the things right
now. And but like where we're going
to, I don't think there is a lot in terms of mobility.
I think that it will be an issue, I think, especially
because I mean it might not be actually true, but I think that
Blizzard is trying to design the games a bit more like player
friendly, a bit more like beginner friendly, right.
So making the skill requirement so much higher in terms of just
silent movement, min maxing mobility, right?
Like every single time someone comes to me or to the discord or
something and asks hey, how can I improve?
Hey, what am I doing wrong? My damage isn't there.
I don't know what what's happening.
I'm following the guide and you can just see maybe they aren't
following it one to one. Maybe there's some minor
mistakes, but usually the issue is that they are just not
casting. They're just moving places.
They just go into Ghost Wharf and just walk around for like 10
or 15 seconds, which like at that point you can't really do
damage, right? That's kind of how that works.
But yeah, so if they're making movement harder on the player, I
think that's very quickly. A lot of the like beginner
player base, a lot of the like lower end player base will run
into issues. Obviously like DPS doesn't
really matter that much and like normal or heroic rates, right,
because you will probably never see a an NRH or something.
But I do think that it will just feel bad, right?
Like if you are so immobile that you can't really perform well
and all of the other specs, maybe not all the other specs
are like BM's, majors, whoever else just have a much easier
time compensating or much easier time just being able to move,
then you will just lose a lot of players.
I think they will just we will. I think they will just go
somewhere else. OK, yeah, that's definitely
true. If it's not even across the the
field, it it just feels like you're going to see a lot of
people move, move away. Throughout the war within shaman
has been in relatively good, if not grotesquely overpowered
situations, especially when I forget what the talent was that
like reduced all nature spells and so we could single handedly
interrupt and they got rid of flash.
Thank you. And they've got they got rid of
that. So like again, we we needed it.
We needed a team. But in terms of this this
movement issue, do you think it is an all or nothing?
Do you think it might be something where we're hoping
that these procs start stacking up so that when we get to start
standing and delivering again, we get a little bit more damage?
Because there are there are classes where they have burst
windows. And so as long as that burst
window isn't interrupted, you're still going to keep up and
damage. There are classes that can just
consistently deal damage. Where's elemental standing right
now? Is it closer to 1 or the other?
Yeah, you're thinking about like the old school fire mage, right?
Or like they do damage for like 15 seconds and then they just
run around for like 2 minutes when nothing matters because
it's basically like 10% of their overall DPS outside of cool
lands, right? But yeah, with Midnight, we also
got quite significant nerves to Ascendance, right?
So Ascendance has previously buffed all overloads by 150%
that has been slashed 275, which is probably reasonable, right?
Like with the new Ibex Apex talents, we get generally more
overloads and all of that. And they also compensated
generally, right? Like the the top end.
So with the 75%, the overload still deal as much damage now as
they did with the 150 before because they just buffed the
baseline, right? So they did compensate in that
sense, but that just means they took damage outs out of the
cooldown window, right? How exactly that's going to work
is speed up in the air, because we haven't finished implementing
The Sims and all of that, right? So it's reasonable to say right
now that we might, for example, be playing the two-minute
Descendants because they changed our elementals, right?
Previously, we could change, we could choose one of the
elementals. It was like a 2.5 minute
cooldown. We just put them down.
He did his thing. Storm Elemental gave us some
haste these days. Earlier was like a cast time
reduction, which got a little crazy at times, but that's also
for a different time of place. I, I I.
Know you want to say it's a different time of place, but I
feel like it's worth mentioning that the, the change to a haste
buff instead of the further and further stacking cast time
reduction just feels like such a loss of skill expression because
you would, you would line up your, your cooldowns.
You would, without going into the bug about about that, but
you would line up your cooldowns, you'd get 3 instant
casts right when you right when you sent that and that would get
you going immediately. And then they cut it down so you
could only stack it up to to a certain point because there was
too many button presses in a short window and now it's a
haste buff. So like that feels like a loss
of skill. Expression, yeah, like as a
short explanation, right? Like you.
Normally the way World of Warcraft works is that you can
stake haste up to like 100% and half the cool your GCD right
from 1.5 forecast is down to .75.
And on top of that you could then stake cast time reduction.
So if memory serves we had 40% cast time reduction, right?
So we could cast the lightning bolt every .4 seconds I think.
And we had that up basically 100% of rate fights.
So you just had to like do 2.5 button presses per second, which
is, is a form of skill expression, I guess, but might
not be the most, yeah, the the most sensible thing, the most
healthy thing. Yeah, but I'm not particularly
against it. Right.
Like it's also one of the things where you just ignore everything
else. You're not even pressing your
spenders at some point because you're just spamming your
generator because it's so fast. So just do that.
But yeah, so they slash that in half at 1st and then at some
point they rework that to haste, right.
So it just kind of covers everything or covered everything
now. But yeah, so they just said, OK,
we're just going to remove the elementals as their own button,
which fair enough, right? Like we have 3 minute
descendants or two-minute descendants and then the 2.5
minute cool down on top of that. So we're just going to delay
that to 3 minutes all the time, Probably some, but then also
faster reduces that further. So it's less than 2.5 and then
nothing lines up and you're just confused, like doesn't really
know what it wants to be. And it also wasn't particularly
impactful anymore after all of the nerves.
So how they did it now is that they just bound the fire
elemental to ascendance. So if you press ascendance, you
get the fire elemental. And when you press Stormkeeper,
you don't get the lightning elemental anymore, you get the
storm elemental now. And they just removed the haste
from that storm elemental because with how often we're
able to cast storm Keeper now, it's probably better to just
have the pet and not have haste on top of that.
Yeah, like some of that doesn't really work the way you want it
to, right? Like fire mental extends your
dots every newly applied flame shock and ascendance also
applies flame shocks, but it applies to flame shocks first
and then spawns the pets right now.
So you just don't get the extended duration and stuff like
that, which is just just feels weird.
Just kind of, I don't know if that's an oversight or just like
a mistake. I couldn't tell you.
Yeah. So kind of getting away from all
of that, those things, right? Like where, for example, storm
elemental so strongly just only pressing lightning board or like
fire mental being completely useless.
Basically like the the thing that's 3% of the overall damage
or something, maybe 5. So now they actually buffed that
quite substantially, whether it's worth to play like all of
the pet talents, Probably not really, but at least it feels
like it does something now. And also it's just kind of
automatically lines up now because if you press the button,
both things happen, Descendants and the Filamento.
So you're not just trying to work around that and
everything's just kind of weird. And I mean, it's one of the
stated design goals. So like every time you have to
press 2 buttons always at the same time, why just not turn
that into one button, right? Like why not make the macro that
you're going to use anyway just into a thing that the game just
gives you most? Definitely there was also in
single target. Do you want an elemental blast?
Do you want to do you want to send the shock?
Now obviously air shock will help more in a in a movement
heavy fight, but the bounce between those has always been
like a a strange thing in midnight.
Is it are they still competitive with each other?
Is there a use case for both or currently?
I guess this is something that would roll out in The Sims, but
ideally where would you want it to be?
I mean, honestly, even if Elemental Blast would be better
in single target, you're not going to play that like you.
You need to go places, you need to move.
So just having an instant cast as a spender is definitely the
better choice over just sitting there and casting another cast
like an elemental blast for two seconds.
Right? Because what would that leave
lead you? You could use your storm keeper,
whatever the coolerness with all the Cdr toes these days, kind of
hard to figure out. Let's say every 30 seconds or
something for like 2-3 instant cars depending on if you have
like Tia or something. And then you also have a lava
search which blocks every 2015 to 20 seconds, right?
So if you have like 3 instant cars every 30 seconds or
something, that might be not enough.
I think so, yeah. You will definitely play your
shock there for AOE for Mythic. Plus it's a bit up in the air
because Elemental Blast is really strong.
And the big problem with Elemental Blast for rate is also
that Farseer, the expiring Farseers also caused Elemental
Blast, right? So you get the stats anyway.
So I'm getting even more stats. At some point you're just going
to cap out. You just have all of them.
And similarly, because overloads also count and with the Apex
sounds, we're going to get overloads on all overloads.
You will probably have enough of those just by default.
But yeah, so we will see in Mythic Plus when you're playing
like Stormbringer or something like that, whether it's worth to
just get the extra stats. But to be fair, like they've
changed fusion, the spell I mentioned earlier where Ice Fury
kind of had these things that just would prock an elemental
blast at some point, now that ICU doesn't exist, can't really
do that anymore. So there's also another talent
called Power of the Malstrom, which like every time you cast
lava burst, you have a chance for the next lightning bolt or
chain lightning to overload an additional time.
And that also triggers fusion now.
And because we are actually lava bursting in AOE again, we just
get it that way. We get Elemental Blast in AOE,
so we do still have some of them.
Whether that's going to be too many already to also pick
Elemental Blast as like a cast is yet to be seen.
Like, yeah, not. Really true.
The value of the choice is being diminished by the fact that
you're getting it anyways from all these other sources.
Yeah. Speaking about value, we sort of
mentioned it, but we should say it out loud for listeners.
Tell us about the Apex talent and the the love of overloads.
All right, so yeah, let me actually get that, pull that up
so I can actually have correct numbers on that one.
The name is feedback loop, right?
I, I don't know if everyone's aware of how the apex sounds
work right? Blizzard just changed it.
Like there's an extra node at the bottom of the tree now with
like a zero out of four. It's like an extra circle.
And the whole idea is that you can put four points into it.
The first point, the 2nd and the 3rd together, and the third is
like 3 different talents. I I think this is a very poor
way to phrase it. But like the first point you put
into feedback loop gives you extra elemental overload damage,
the second point gives you extra quick chance and quick damage,
and the last point gives you I think it's a 50% chance for all
of your overloads to then trigger more overloads.
I haven't actually have had the time to completely test that how
that actually works. Because right now right?
Like a normal spell, a normal lightning bolt can overload,
then Descendants gives it an extra overload so it overloads
twice, then Power of the Maelstrom can make it overload
an additional time so that's three times, and then
Supercharge can make it overload 1/4 time.
If every one of these roles now has a 50% to also overload, so
you could have 8 overloads on one singular spell cast, that
would be a lot. And I've never seen that in any
of the logs I looked at or any of the testing that I've done.
So I don't think that is actually works that way.
The assumption right now would just be that it does like a 50%
role on every one of them up until it like succeeds, right?
And so it's like kept at one additional overload.
That would be the assumption. That's usually how it sounds
like these work, but I honestly don't even know because it's not
on the pre patch. So I still have time until the
actual expansion launches to figure out exactly how that
works. But anyway, no, it's it's part
of what I said, right? Like, well, we just put even
more emphasis on overloads. We have a chance to get more
overloads from the town and also the overloads are doing more
damage. So that just kind of makes it
feel or it makes it look better because overloads of the
animation. So I like, it's just kind of the
thing that elemental does, just have more of everything pretty.
Much that turrent set up. I mean it's the same thing for
like the quid right? Normally in World of Warcraft a
quid does double damage. Do you have an the idea how much
damage to quit from elemento shaman does now?
I thought it was 250%, but now that you've got that scaling on
top of it, I, I, I don't know. Yeah, Yeah, it goes up to 300%
now, right? Like just from or 325, even just
from your normal talents, you get like an extra 50% and then
an additional 25% on top of that.
It's like for elemental shaman and normal quit value would be
like 200 a math 100 to 75%. And now you then get like 50% or
2 * 25% on top of that. So yeah, like you get two 325%
quit damage on all of your spells and then you have
something. They change Lava Burst now,
because Lava Burst always quits, right?
So usually we had like a problem where quit was very bad because
it always quit anyway, so just get other stats.
But now that spell also scales with quit chance.
So lava Burst might just be doing like 380 four 100% quit
damage or something. Now, which that is a lot, I'm
not entirely sure. But yeah, I mean, high numbers
are fun. And I don't think it's actually
going to be much of A like gambling issue, like on G issue
where you just sit there like, oh, I didn't quit on my spell.
So now I don't do any damage, right?
Like we have so many instances, so many cars, so many things
happening that just kind of normalizes pretty easily, right?
And we don't really rely on quits for anything mechanical,
right? Like we're not saying like I
need a quit for my thing to proc because otherwise I can't press
my button because things like that just kind of lead to issue,
lead to very big swinginess at times.
So I like fire mage had that problem historically where like
if you didn't have enough quid to actually get like your
pyroblasts up and your hot streaks and everything, you just
couldn't really do much, which not really the case anymore.
They kind of worked around there now.
But yeah, so like a lot of the numbers things or something look
very crazy now because of all of the additional multipliers on
top of each other. But yeah, so Apex talents, I
think they designed it with the goal in mind to have those
always be picked. And I think they succeeded, at
least for Elemental, which would be kind of a shame, right?
Like you could just write purely mechanically.
You could just ignore it and just put more spell more points
into the bottom of the tree normally, but if you have like
this new shiny thing and just completely ignore it, that would
be kind of a waste. Yeah, I, I, I'd like that.
It's definitely something that people would love to to play
around with. And so far shamans have been
winning with that two out of three.
We'll see what happens when we get over to Resto, but is there
build where you could see working without it?
It just seems so good that like it would almost feel foolhardy
not to use it. I mean the problem isn't even
how good it is, the problem is just how bad everything else is.
We are sitting in the situation right now where I'm thinking or
whether currently recommended build by us without Sims.
Right? So we don't have the hard
numbers on it, but the currently recommended build is taking
voltaic place and purging flames in single target.
Voltaic place is basically just a glorified flame shock right?
Like it also does some damage, but because it doesn't really
scale with everything because it's bucked, I guess it deals
less than you would expect. And at the end of the day, it's
not really that much damage. And then you'd take like purging
flames, which is this, this new cleave talent, right?
Which was like the primordial wave effect previously, where
like the lava burst just hits all of the targets with a flame
shock on it, which does nothing in single target from that
cleave mechanic. But it also says lava burst
damage increased by 10%. So that alone is probably enough
to just have it be viable. Like the 3% DPS that you gain
from this 10% buff. It's probably good enough.
I mean, yeah, I guess that that's great if you're doing a
fight like the tic tac toe boss in the in the new raid where
early on it's single target. And so I guess this is good
enough for single target. But as you get into the the
cleave situation where the summoning, the ads, being able
to use the enhanced flame, flame shock voltaic to to start on the
that AOE, get the lava burst onto a bunch of them gives you
like that AOE on demand on very short demand because the
cooldown of voltaic is is quite low.
So I guess that's good. But the fact that it's it's
there even at a pure single target feels like you said, like
the rest of the talents are lacking.
So what could use the Shine for Elementals talents?
I mean just just to mention it right, like because you said
that you can just flexibly I, I forgot how you phrase this like
you can just use the voltaic place to just dot them up
immediately, which is technically true, but also not
really right because flame shock has an 82nd 18 second duration,
right? And the cooldown on voltaic
place is 15 seconds. So you're basically pressing it
on cool down just to keep the dot up in single target anyway,
right? Because there's also no procs or
anything anymore. Like show when you press
ascendance you get your flame shock up and also you get the
filamental. So you get like 1 double
duration flame shock. But generally you always have to
press it every 15 seconds just exactly there.
So if you press it and then you have the ADS spawning like 8
seconds later, well, that's kind of an issue, right?
You can just not press it, I guess.
And then you don't have a flame shock active, so you can't
really press your lava burst anymore, which that's also
awkward, right? Like a lot of people want to see
flame shock come back. So Voltaic Place wouldn't
replace flame shock entirely. It's just an additional button
for that reason. So you just have it on.
You have just flame shock readily available, maybe still
with the short colon that it has right now, just use on the boss
or something or on whatever main target.
And then you just have that as like a cleafing or a wee thing,
whatever you want to call it leads to some other issues
technically. And I mean, the intended goal
here is to kind of cut back on buttons.
So it's just having like those redundant buttons just both
living there on your boss. It's just kind of awkward.
So I see why they didn't do it that way.
I see why they haven't replaced that, but so yeah, just to
mention that I kind of forgot what your your actual question
was that you asked me. Could you repeat that?
Do you remember? Oh man, we got so into the
weeds, but it was basically what talents need the shine in order
to give Elemental some some options like.
Yeah. I mean, the, The thing is like
we have what is it now 15 or so talents down in the bottom there
and four of those nodes of all those points are just voltaic
place. So the moment you decide I will
not take voltaic place at all, you just kind of pick everything
else. That's just kind of how that
works out, right? Generally, you could probably
say that all the pet talents, like what is it?
Everlasting Elements, that's the name, increases the duration of
the elemental slightly, and it basically just says they get one
more cast in when they're alive, right?
So for something like a fire elemental that gets spawned
every 3 minutes, let's say, right, if you're not even
playing all of the other elemental talents, just having
like it does one more cast doesn't really matter that much.
It's kind of a little disappointing, kind of
questionable though, how many points you actually want to put
into your passive pet talent. So I like, I do.
I'm not the biggest fan of the elementals.
I'm not the biggest fan of the pets.
I do like the flavour that they give.
I like the whole like, OK, we're drawing in the primal elementals
and manifestations of them. It's just kind of cool, sure,
but just have like the dude next to you is just casting emulated
Fire blast or something and that's it.
And then sometimes he just turns around because he doesn't find a
way to actually get to the boss and just kind of fails.
Like we added a lot of the time now in the War Within where I
had friends that just sent me clips where like one of their
elementals just balled into the last room in Priory and just
pulled everything. We still don't know how that
happened, but yeah, that happened consistently for some
people. So yeah, like all of the pet
talons kind of could use some love, in my opinion.
Again, it would kind of make sense that it doesn't happen
right now just because they want to have a lot of passive
talents, right? And also they have reworked,
removed, added a good few things, right?
So at that point, you just kind of touch everything, which that
was never expected to happen here, But yeah, so those talents
could use some love. I mean, I'm personally not the
biggest fan of all of the passive stat notes that they've
that they're bringing in with Midnight.
But like we have a talent that just gives you a 3% mastery,
which another one that just gives you 3% haste, another one
that increases your elemental damage by 2%, then another one
that gives you 3% more elemental damage and all of that.
So all of those, well, it's like, here's a number you doubt
deal 2% more damage. OK, I guess that's fine.
I guess having cursive talents is kind of OK, but also it's
kind of uninteresting. We've gotten 3 new talents and
each of the hero talents, are those much the same sort of
passive, uninteresting ones, or are there any highlights in
those? I guess start with the Farsi
year. Yeah, I mean, Farcia is pretty
boring, right? Farcia, one of them now now
names, I think it's Mystic Knowledge gives you 1% intellect
per active ancestor, right? So generally you have like your
ancestor Swiftness and your Stormkeeper, both of them spawn
once you have 2% more into the 2% more damage.
Great. OK.
Then. You can also just randomly spawn
more still, so sometimes it might be 3%, but yeah, so that's
pretty boring in my opinion. Then you have another one that's
called Windspeaker, which basically just reduces some cast
times by 10%, including Lava Burst.
Can you notice that? Yes.
If I take the tone point out and then put it back in and just sit
there and just compare those two cast times, I will be able to
notice. But in normal gameplay also just
becomes normal, right? Like if, if every if if it's
always 10% faster than just the new cast time of it.
It's just there and then the last point just gives you like
an extra 20% proc way proc chance for lava surges, which
doesn't mean that it goes from 10 to 30%.
It just means it goes from 11:50 as far as we can tell, which I
don't really notice the difference.
Right? Like if it's if I get a pluck
every, what is it in 20 seconds or every 18?
Not really something that I can personally notice.
Oh, sorry, go on. Sorry, I think it the only time
that like, like obviously you're going to have all these talents
and so you won't notice it, but it it'll make a difference if
the proc comes up earlier when you're when you're dealing with
movement. But it's because this change is
so small and so passive and so unnoticeable.
Yeah. Like it's OK.
We were about to go over to Stormbringer.
Any better talents there? Yeah.
Yeah, I do think so. Right.
Like the first town Stormwell basically just says casting
Stormkeeper gives you 10 maelstrom and your storm
elemental, which is spawned by casting Stormkeeper last two
seconds longer, 2 seconds, right?
Like it's, it's a cast doesn't really matter much.
But having some actual milestone generation, having something
happen when you press a button like Stormkeeper is kind of
neat. Don't think it necessarily
needed it, but I mean, it's generally a thing that they want
to do and a thing that I appreciate.
Well, like they say, don't just have empty globals, right?
We're not sitting there and press a button and then nothing
happens and then I press another button and then the thing
happens. But just every button is
supposed to have immediate feedback, which I think is
reasonable for a game like this, right?
The second talent, I don't even remember the name, it's just 2%
nature damage. Yeah, wasn't really too much,
not really interesting. The last one is called
Descending Skies, and they basically took the idea from our
current tier set. And every time you cast
Descendants, you just get a Tempest, which that's kind of
cool, all right? Like because when you play
Stormbringer, you're kind of go fishing for Tempest before you
press Ascendance anyway. But sometimes you just can't do
that, right? Sometimes the proc just doesn't
happen or something. So being able to just have the
proc every time you press the button is just kind of neat.
OK, yeah, that does sound better.
On top of that though, I believe the way that Tempest now works
for Elemental has changed. So like going from the War
Within, how was it in the War Within and how is it now?
Well, it hasn't really changed, but also it has, right?
Like previously there were two different ways that you could
get storm stormwater, like Tempest box, right?
One of them was just like every 300 miles from spent you would
get them, right? So what we did was like have
counters there that just counted how many miles from you spend in
like a run or something. And then that didn't really work
sometimes. And the week ours were bugging
out or the counting in game didn't really work and it was
just kind of annoying. And then the other way was like
every time you cast lightning mode or chain lightning, it was
like an RPPM. So like a time normalized random
effect that just poked something and that after you had was 3
after poked 3 times, you just got The Tempest, right.
So how it works now is that every time you spend Maelstrom,
there's like a chance for it to happen.
That scales with how much milestone we spend, right?
So if it's a more expensive thing, it's more likely.
So it's basically the same idea as deeply rooted elements, the
sentence book that we had in War Within.
So just like a mixed mash of different things.
It just kind of feels the same still because you you press your
spender, you get The Tempest at some point right?
Too much. If that's also normalized, I
would. Assume that it is at this point,
because most things Blizzards has in terms of RNG now I'll
just kind of forced to have procs after a certain amount of
time or something like that, right?
Because being completely swingy, like sometimes you just sit
there, press your spend the three times you just have 3
Tempest and sometimes you just press it 10 times and nothing
happens at all. So.
Yeah, that. Was changed.
I do think that it's for the better generally because sitting
there with the 300 counter, for example, right?
Like if you are at the end of a poll and you're sitting at 280
spend and you know, like the next time you press your
earthquake or whatever, you will get this this proc, but you're
just sitting there like fighting one enemy.
So what do you do? We just not pressing your
spending anymore. That's not really good
generally, whether the change. Actually solves that.
Is it? Is written more different piece,
right? Because we found out.
On. The guy in the discord arc found
out that deeply rooted elements is based on like a deck of cards
thing right? So you know, like every time or
every, I don't remember the numbers of the top right now,
every 30 times you press your spender you would get 2 procs or
something like that, right? It's kind of the idea so.
We just started. Tracking that with we.
Goers. So we just could tell, hey, we
cannot get an ascendance block now or we have to get one now.
So if we were highly likely to get one at the end of a pack, we
just would stop spending. And if we knew that we couldn't
get one, we would just try to get more spenders out to just
psyche through that really quick to try to get the deck stack,
yeah, for the next pack, right. And yeah.
All of that kind of thing. Might still exist now with
Tempest, right? We haven't really looked much
into how the randomness works there, but you can assume that
if it's worded the same way and just kind of works the same way
that it might just use the same RNG, right?
So that's a bit of a concern, but other than that it's just
generally better now. OK, so then with.
All those concerns with the way that it had to be tracked, does
elemental lose out more than most classes with the changes to
the API? The quote UN quote add on
Apocalypse well. I don't think so.
All of the things that we wanted to track are just kind of gone
now. There are some things.
Like. I alluded to it a few times
like. Lava Search.
Kind of works in a way that system you can just kind of
predict when your procs are happening.
We have never really tracked that because it's just kind of
annoying and no one really likes it.
We would have probably started tracking it in midnight because
there's really nothing else to track and really nothing else to
do. But now we can't.
So I guess that's fine. And all of the box or the weird
mechanics or the things that Blizzard didn't allow us to
track that we had, we got us to work around, they just removed
now. So now with the new system.
Like the deck? Of card thing that I talked
about right now with Tempest, right, like being able to track
that would be kind of nice. You probably could still track
that if you're just kind of degenerate enough and just kind
of have like an extra button that just tells you, hey, I just
got a Tempest, right, so you could just macro more things.
And it's that that's my concern for all that.
I don't apocalypse thing, right? Like we are where people just
are not going to sit there and just accept it.
But we'll just try to work around everything.
I know that we like in preparation for this, we had a
few conversations about like ways people figured out how to
kind of bypass and circumvent some of the things that Blizzard
try to not really allow you to do.
So I'm just kind of. Concerned that we have.
To or that people will do stuff like that.
But I mean, at some point you're just going to have to blame the
player for that, right? I mean, game design only goes so
far. If people want to be degenerate
about it, they will always be. And if at the end of the day,
they have to use like ACT like this Final Fantasy thing that
just reads your network traffic and reads your screen and just
kind of does all of that, which is against TOS, right?
Like it's, it's technically not allowed for either final or for
World of Warcraft, but we will probably start doing that at
some point if the if the gain that they can get from it is
high enough, right? I don't think that's actually
the case for Elemental right now.
I am personally kind of sad about losing some of the new
ones, losing some of that whole thing and because you were
talking about like. The add on Apocalypse.
Specifically some of the cooldown manager settings and
all of that don't really mesh well with like tracking debuffs
and stuff like that. So like before take place.
And if you're just trying to figure out, OK, what's my flame
shock duration, when should I refresh?
What's the pandemic when, when? No, I'd like the point where I
have to reapply the dot to not lose any value out of that.
You can't really do that anymore.
They just kind of don't track that well enough in my opinion.
I'm not I I haven't researched enough to know whether there's
like an add on that does it at this point already or I wouldn't
expect that to be. I don't think it you can
actually do that, but either they're going to relax those
restrictions a bit or maybe someone will find a workaround
or it's just how we're going to have to live now, right?
It is a. It is a hard thing.
Even though we're only one dot, so you would think that it would
be fairly easy for us. The problem with the variable
length when you can have the elemental extend extended means
that you can't simply say like, hey, after I send it, let's say
15 seconds later, it's now in pandemic window.
Because if you've doubled that, that distance, sorry, that
duration, you're, you're clipping a lot.
So yeah, it is hard for elemental shaman.
But like I think we would be doing a disservice if we didn't
talk about elementals, defensives and where that is
with the war, with the war then going into midnight.
So I'll give you the floor for this one.
Yeah, I mean, it's part of the whole pruning, right?
Like. Generally, I think it's fair to
say that most specs, if not all specs, lost some defensive
capabilities. The problem is just where do you
start, right? Like for Elemental, we started
with, well, two, let's say. 3 defensives, right?
We have Astral Shift which is our main defensive.
It's like 2 minute cooldown reduces all damage by 40%.
It's generally pretty good with the choice talent I know.
You can either buff it so. It reduces more damage or you
reduce it down to a minute 30, which most often you do that
because 40% basically covers everything dangerous in the
game. But like if you don't live it
with a 40%, you're also going to live with a 60% Dr., So whatever
the second thing that. We have.
Or had and have Is the F elemental right like the F
elemental when you summon it will give you what is it now 10%
HP or is it drop 1515 still? Yeah. 15, yeah.
OK, they changed it previously. Was like a 5 minute.
Cooldown and with a one minute duration.
Now it's through 2.5 minute cooldown with a 3 minute
cooldown with a 32nd duration. I think that's correct and also.
They took the. Health gain out of the elemental
and put that into an extra talent node.
So you just kind of have to take an extra talent now, which it
doesn't really matter. We're not really start 4 points
in the class 3, but it's just kind of awkward that you have to
pick talents now for things that you had previously, I guess.
But I don't personally care much for that kind of logic, so.
The problem with that? Notice that it also turns off
your taunt for the pet right? Like previously when you were
dying in the dungeon or like your tank died, you just press
earth elemental and it's probably going to live for like
5 seconds, maybe 10 which is usually enough for a tank to.
Get rest and cast. Like something to maybe try to
get some aggro back or something.
I definitely found a full wipe, yeah.
I mean. I definitely use it a lot for
that during my bugging areas or eras.
So yeah, like. Now with it.
Not being able to taunt. Anymore.
I mean you can still summon it, it just doesn't do anything.
If your tank dies, you will just die anyway, so kind of a bit of
a loss there. Or you.
Just keep it having the taunt and then you just don't get the
HP, which maybe that's a choice for my big plus.
But then you just lost your defensive right?
And thirdly, like the actual defence that we lost, stumble
walk told him gave us a shield, not the biggest shield ever.
Think it was like 2025% of your health or something like that.
And then it also gave you like a ticking shield every few
seconds. So what's kind of need against
like damage overtime effects? Not really the best spell to
save you from like a nuke for like a big damage event, but
usually it's served you well enough.
That's completely removed now, right?
Which turns really quickly into an issue if you also go to that,
that our self healing basically doesn't exist.
I'm not entirely sure how this that squish affected that, but
like our self healing is pitiful now.
Like we just can't do anything with it to my understanding.
Enhancement, at least, can. Still heal themselves with
maelstrom weapons weapon stacks. But the way that it works now is
you spend and then your healing Search afterwards, right?
So you're just kind of sit there and just have to also have it so
late that it doesn't really save you in the moment anymore.
You have to prepare it and then it's late anyway.
We're here to talk about elemental.
So for us, Healing Stream Totem doesn't do anything.
Healing Search doesn't do anything.
The only extra thing that we got is some or two new talents about
Earth Shield or like Earth Shields put on yourself.
It has like 9 stacks, maybe 12 if you're suspect into that, and
every time you take damage it heals.
You for a bit. And there's a new talent that
just says it never loses stacks and to heals you for 15 more
percent. Is it a lot?
No. Really isn't anything to write
home about, No. Currently, because of some
clever use of game mechanics, you can just kind of double the
healing output from Earth Shield, which makes it at least
worth a a mention. But that's a bug and I don't
really expect that to stay in for Midnight, so I think they
need to make it a default behavior.
It's worthless. Without it, I'm sorry.
I like. Yeah.
Anyways, go ahead. No, go on.
No. It's it's such an anemic heel.
Even if it just stays on and every time there is a damage
event, because it does have its own internal cooldown, you're
not going to catch every damage event, right?
But every time you you have a damage event, you get a little
bit more health back. It's still not doing it.
Like I don't think a healer is going to notice the difference
between somebody who's got an earth shield on and somebody who
doesn't in terms of like 2 shamans standing beside each
other. And it that is with such a waste
of talents. That you're putting into it and.
Such a waste of a button press if you so happen to go with the
other choice, which I'll leave for you to explain.
Oh yeah. I mean, it's it's basically the
question I. Like either you're going to have
the thing where it just doesn't lose any sticks, so you just
have it on yourself. You heal, I don't know, maybe a
health ball over 5 minute fight or something.
I honestly don't even know the number for that.
But as you said, like 3 seconds. I think it's the internal
cooldown, so every 3 seconds you can heal at all.
Which the next question is OK. Do you even take damage every 3
seconds on the fight? Like smaller one or slotch fist
or something like that where you have like the permanent AOE just
ticking on you? Yes you will just completely
saturate that ICD. You will just get to heal all
the time and even then it's kind of bad right?
But in a normal fight where you just take damage every so often,
it's just kind of useless, right?
And then you're also saying that like, OK.
With Farcier, if you're specced into that choice, note you go
out from 9:00 to 12:00 charges, but like after you got healed 12
times you're going to have to press the button again, right?
I mean, technically you can't even have.
The Earth shield on 2. People but just don't bother.
I mean, put it on there pre combat, I guess, but other than
that it's just there's really no point, right?
The alternative choice note on that right now is something
where like every time you refresh Earth Shield, you just
get like a big heal depending on how many charges you're missing,
whether that's going to be. Useful or not is also kind.
Of up in the air, because I mean, it's probably it's
probably nice if it's if it works, it works.
So I like if you need a heal and your sex are low and you can
just press the button and you just get like a pick like 30,000
HP heal or something after the scratch that squish.
That's kind of cool. But also if you're saying that
if you have 11 charges or something of the 12 and then you
press the button, nothing happens, All right.
If you have to actually have it expire, nothing happens if you
have to refresh it when you're full HP or you just don't need
the heal immediately yet I mean you get healed sure, but it's
wasted. So at the end of the day it's
just not readily available right.
So not really much you can do about it.
Yeah, the the way that I. I'm looking at this, is that
with our conversation about not having enough things to do while
you're moving or ways to fill that gap, it might be that like,
you're below, you're below X amount of charges.
It's worth pressing before you go back into combat in a
progression situation where you get pushed out and you're like,
oh, I guess I can't, I don't have anything to press in this
button. Here's the last thing that you
do to just give yourself a little bit of health going back
in. Yeah, I mean, maybe right, But.
Even at that point. If you're expecting to the thing
where it doesn't lose charges, you don't need to reapply it.
If you put, If you're expecting to the thing where it heals you,
you don't really want to use it as a movement global because you
want to have, you want to stay at low charges to be able to
heal yourself, right? So it doesn't, it just doesn't
really make sense. It's, I mean, I, I understand
what I, I do think that I understand what they're trying
to go with, right? Like previously, if you just had
to replay it and nothing happened, it just kind of felt
like a waste of global because it is.
And so them just giving like something to happen in the
moment when you reapply that, it's just kind of cool.
But yeah. I mean the only other.
Thing that they also added, we have a talent that's called Wind
Veil, which was previously seasoned wins I think is the
name every time you interrupted. Something.
Previously in the Warfin you took less damage from.
That. Specific spell school, right?
So if you kick the fire spell, you took less fire damage.
If you kick the nature spell you took less nature damage.
If you kick like a combination of things like in volcanic spell
or something, you just took less damage from both.
And now they just changed it that you just take less damage
after interrupting any spell. The duration on that with 12
seconds is pretty good to be fair.
It's just generally A situational thing, right?
Like if you just interrupted the enemy, it didn't deal damage,
right? So now having a damage reduction
against that specific enemy might not matter.
Maybe it does, maybe it's just going to start casting something
immediately after again, has happened at times, right?
But generally, generally it can. Be very good in like mythic.
Plus stuff like that. But in a rate, either it's
incredibly good because you just sit there and interrupt
something all the time, right? Like when she has a 12 second
cooldown, Winfair has a 12 second duration.
So you just have like permanent 15% damage reduction, which
would be very, very good, obviously.
Or the boss doesn't cost anything and you just can't use
it, which is probably more likely to happen, not the other
way, so. Overall though, heading into
midnight, what's your prognosis for Shaman?
For the people who are going to be running around in the pre
patch being like, what in the world's going on when we get to
midnight? Is there hope it is lightning in
a bottle there? For elemental, I am doubtful.
I like, I mean, I always try to be positive about changes, even
if I'm personally maybe not. But I mean, the skeleton is
there. I like it's still the same spec.
It still has like the very characteristic, very special
elemental buttons and it still feels like elemental.
I'm just scared that because the expansion will last usually two
years, right? That's how that usually goes.
So I'm just kind of scared that it will just get boring very
quickly if you don't really have anything special to do, if you
if everything's just kind of basic.
I do think that's a concern that most specs have a lot of other
specs have as well, right? I don't really think things like
the defensive issue, sure, for like high end players or people
that want to play in a way that they have to be concerned about
things like that, it will matter.
Right, but like for. The general player base,
probably not the biggest issue right?
Like you're not going to die because you don't have 1/3
defensive. But generally A spec should be
fun to play. And if it's so easy and so
simple, you might still just enjoy having fun, right?
Like turning off your brain, pressing buttons, see all the
pretty colours and do all of that, which I'm a big fan of.
That's part of the reason why I play elemental, right?
But I do very much think that sometimes you should be able to
just sit down and just have a think about what you try to do
and just try to be able to optimize things if you want to.
So yeah, that's kind of my concern with.
The with. How elementals looking in
midnight so? The lights are on, but you're
worried nobody's home. Pretty much.
OK, well, I I'm hoping. For for the excitement to to be
there. I know tier the first tier sets
are never things that like add good hooks but hopefully with
the future seasons we'll get that as they.
A little bit of inside. Baseball is that as I follow
these specs, I also see how they change and go through.
And one of the things that we were talking about as we were
setting up this show is how Elemental got that first brush
and that first pass. And it doesn't feel like they've
come back to really add in those hooks.
And we had a similar situation with the beginning of the war
within where it wasn't until the the .5 patch that they were
like, OK, let's get this up and going hoping that that is not
the situation. But like as we are so close to
all of this going live, that may be the truth of the matter.
We will see if people want to find you and everything that
you. Do where can.
We find that, well, generally, like on Earth, shine on the.
Charmin discord right? If people have like things.
That they want. To know usually.
My discord DM so open maybe sometimes I'm a bit bad about
responding to things but then just just write me again.
I will probably notice at some point, but yeah, like Earth.
Shine discord is usually pretty good.
Way other than that, like the guy, it's small head is the one
that I do and yeah. Maybe at some point.
Streaming, but we will see you in that one.
Well, Hawk, thank. You so much for coming on to the
show and I'm hoping for the best for Elemental Shaman.
It is of course, something near and dear to me, as I am stubbly
Shaman all the time. But until next time folks, may
all your hits be kits.