5.2 PTR / General Information

[heyaz]

I found this interesting, blue post:

• We are changing the way Lava Burst interacts with Flame Shock. Currently, Flame Shock is required for Lava Burst to crit. This is cool rotationally but creates problems where Flame Shock dispels or swapping targets is a massive nerf to Elemental, dropping their 2.5 multiplier on Lava Burst to a 1.0. We are going to nerf Lava Burst damage, cause it to always crit (like Chaos Bolt), and then cause it to do say 50% more damage to targets afflicted by Flame Shock. The net result should be that LB + FS is still the best DPS, but failing to do so will be a 1.5 to 1.0 drop instead of a 2.5 to 1.0 drop.
• Elemental's PvE damage will still be lower than we want after this change, but we want to bring up the damage of Lightning Bolt and other sources of damage together; we need to buff more than just Lava Burst to preserve the rotation... and avoid a lot of Lava Burst PvP videos

So... Lava Burst may always crit, but do even less damage if they are not affected by Flame Shock. Nice to always get a crit. But they are dropping the 2.5 multiplier on Lava Burst and having flame shock bring it back up to 1.5..... so you're telling me, even though I always crit, it will hit for even less, and if I have flame shock, it will still hit for a lot less. Not like Lava Burst already hits like nothing even with 20k spell power. It's still an RNG thing though, if they made it hit like chaos bolt or even elemental blast with guaranteed crit, things could get nasty especially with ascendance up. But people are still just going to dispell flame shock so even your crit is just a tickle.

Bringing up lightning bolt to a respectable level would be nice. It still hits for crap in PVP, casts slowly and you have to glyph to use it while moving.

The whole thing got to RNG dependent with mastery. They can't very well make any shaman spells hit hard on their own because if you get mastery/echo procs you'll 1 shot people. But if you don't get procs, you have no reliable burst.

Fulmination still sucks - 10% crit chance and damage all over the place... 40-70k 90% of the time, 125k+ 10% of the time. Long ramp up requiring you to use spells that suck in PVP (lightning bolt, chain lightning). And still shares a cooldown with other shocks even though they are completely unrelated. I'd rather see Earth Shock as a proc-only spell completely off the shock cooldown so when fulimation is up, it's up, without having to worry about flame shock. That and frost shock... talent that makes it a snare yet you can't use it half the time because it's on CD from some other unrelated spell?

I don't know how you'd fix elemental. It's a broken caster in general. Too much RNG, too much hard casting, yet no survivability. The only other comparable hard caster is a shadow priest, except they hit like trucks and have a reliable burst ramp up... and cc, and a bubble, and other stuff.