Elemental Wotlk Talents discussion - Page 19

Lucitron · 07/25/08, 7:43 AM

Addendum:
Thought about another rumour that I've not seen the truth about, namely if Nature's Swiftness and Elemental Mastery still stacks, or if there is now a 10 second cooldown as it was hinted in the alpha patch notes. It feels like a relative relevant PvE question since it is possible that in the end people will go with a 50/0/21 build for raids, that is if Blizzard decides to keep Thunderstorm and buff/change Storm, Earth and Fire.

Gelanin · 07/25/08, 8:00 AM

Is it just me remembering wrong, or did we get screwed over royally with the latest Talent changes to the Elemental tree ?

From what i can see our threat reduction was changed from 30% to 10% in the Elemental Precision talents. And with the removal of our -threat totem, and the changes to Blessing of Salvation, it seems like we'll have some major Threat issues.

Munorion · 07/25/08, 8:02 AM

From what i can see our threat reduction was changed from 30% to 10% in the Elemental Precision talents.

According to wowhead, it's 10% per rank, and has three ranks.

Edit:
Just checked the official one, and yes, you are right, it's down to 10% there. So, I guess we'll have to wait until the next patch to see if they did change it. It'll be interesting to see if they apply this to other classes as well.

tufy · 07/25/08, 8:51 AM

Official trees seem to be wrong right now. Refer to MMO.

Leppa · 07/25/08, 9:00 AM

Do you guys see the new Malestrom change? Atm its grant 20% cast time reduce and its stack up 5 time, so they got the instant Lava Burst in the rotation. I think blizz try to make usefull this new spell to each dps talent tree.

Graze · 07/25/08, 9:10 AM

Originally Posted by Leppa

Do you guys see the new Malestrom change? Atm its grant 20% cast time reduce and its stack up 5 time, so they got the instant Lava Burst in the rotation. I think blizz try to make usefull this new spell to each dps talent tree.

This change together with the removal of Lava Flowes and the overall poor scaling of the spell is what I based my previous statement upon whether Lava Burst was meant for us or Enhancement shamans. It's obviously not for us.
Plus the fact that it only consumes the casters flame shock makes it a no brainer.

The spell is in my eyes, a complete failure. It's "something" to do when locked out of our nature school, but that's about it.

Leppa · 07/25/08, 10:18 AM

Originally Posted by Graze

This change together with the removal of Lava Flowes and the overall poor scaling of the spell is was I based my previous statement upon whether Lava Burst was meant for us or Enhancement shamans to use. It's obviously not for us.
Plus the fact that it only consumes the casters flame shock, it's a no brainer.

The spell is in my eyes, a complete failure. It's "something" to do when locked out of our nature school, but that's about it.

I agre whit you but i hope blizz do something whit the scaling and then we can use LaB on the rotation. I hate Lb spam or the 4/1 Lb-Cl rotation its soo boring, +1 spell in the rotation its not a big deal but its something new

Lohmarn · 07/25/08, 12:07 PM

Ok, I am supremely confused with people thinking that an Elemental's Lava Burst is going to eat an Enhancement shaman's Flame shock.

I dont know if you guys use Flameshock much but when applying Flame Shock to a mob/boss, they dont override each other, they stack. This means that our Lava Burst Spell and an Enhancement's Lava Burst Spell will not consume each other's FS, only the Flameshock of the caster of the Lava Burst.

So when we put Flameshock on and the Enhancement shaman does too, we each have a FS that only we can have consumed via Lava Burst. Now I dont know if that is the actual spell mechanic in WotLK, but now, thats the way Flameshock works.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Jakuniku · 07/25/08, 1:51 PM

Originally Posted by Lohmarn

Ok, I am supremely confused with people thinking that an Elemental's Lava Burst is going to eat an Enhancement shaman's Flame shock.

I dont know if you guys use Flameshock much but when applying Flame Shock to a mob/boss, they dont override each other, they stack. This means that our Lava Burst Spell and an Enhancement's Lava Burst Spell will not consume each other's FS, only the Flameshock of the caster of the Lava Burst.

So when we put Flameshock on and the Enhancement shaman does too, we each have a FS that only we can have consumed via Lava Burst. Now I dont know if that is the actual spell mechanic in WotLK, but now, thats the way Flameshock works.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think everyone knows that flame shocks stack. We're just not sure if it acts like swiftmend which can consume any druid's HoT, or conflagrate which can only consume the casting warlock's immolate. I don't remember why, but I think we're leaning towards the conflagrate behavior.

Edit: Most of that discussion happened before Maelstrom Weapon was introduced, so it was thought that maybe enhance shamans would provide elementals a flame shock so they didn't have to dps from 20 yards away. With the addition of Maelstrom, it's pretty obvious that an enhance shaman is going to want to use an FS/LvB combo to keep ED up so that line of speculation is pretty dead.

Lohmarn · 07/25/08, 3:06 PM

Originally Posted by Jakuniku

I think everyone knows that flame shocks stack. We're just not sure if it acts like swiftmend which can consume any druid's HoT, or conflagrate which can only consume the casting warlock's immolate. I don't remember why, but I think we're leaning towards the conflagrate behavior.

Edit: Most of that discussion happened before Maelstrom Weapon was introduced, so it was thought that maybe enhance shamans would provide elementals a flame shock so they didn't have to dps from 20 yards away. With the addition of Maelstrom, it's pretty obvious that an enhance shaman is going to want to use an FS/LvB combo to keep ED up so that line of speculation is pretty dead.

Using the above argument still doesn't validate the debate "If Lava Burst is speculated to be like swiftmend or conflag", because that is still HoTs from 1 person, not multiple characters is it not? And also, one warlocks Immolate can't be consumed using Conflag by another warlock can they? All this is still supporting what I was iterating,

Since each shaman can have is own flameshock reserved, then the logical conclusion would be that the Lava Burst would consume only the Flameshock reserved for that particular shaman.

It would be nice if they let Enhancement shaman apply the FS and us burn it using Lava Burst, but then blizzard would be catering to a class, and they NEVER do that amarite?!

Graze · 07/25/08, 6:15 PM

Swiftmend is one of the smartest spells in the game, not only can it consume ANY resto druid HoT on the target, no matter who casted it, it also calculates which one is the best to use, depending on how much time they have left.

Flame Shock/Lava Burst works exactly like Conflag does (now). Despite having almost identical wording as swiftmend.

This is not very new, but it is somewhat deal breaking regarding the use of Lava Burst. Just like Lucitron says, it contradicts itself by improving something (Flame Shock dot) that we want to remove. Whilst keeping us at a 20 yards range. Lava Burst is not good enough to use for us.

tufy · 07/25/08, 6:17 PM

Oki, stubborn as I am, I refused to believe that our LB coefficient was nerfed, so I did a bit of my own testing. I removed ALL my gear and tested rank 1 LB. Just as we assumed, I was doing around 17 damage to the target. Then I stacked up the full gear and tried using rank 1 again. It did ZERO damage. Not just that, it was the same with ranks 2 and 3, while every rank after that did less damage than it should (for instance, rank 4 did 25 damage, where BASE damage of the bolt is 92-105).

So whatever we're dealing with here, whether be a nerf or not, it's bugged to the core.

Posting this on Beta forums (EU english) as well.

Graze · 07/25/08, 6:21 PM

Originally Posted by tufy

Oki, stubborn as I am, I refused to believe that our LB coefficient was nerfed, so I did a bit of my own testing. I removed ALL my gear and tested rank 1 LB. Just as we assumed, I was doing around 17 damage to the target. Then I stacked up the full gear and tried using rank 1 again. It did ZERO damage. Not just that, it was the same with ranks 2 and 3, while every rank after that did less damage than it should (for instance, rank 4 did 25 damage, where BASE damage of the bolt is 92-105).

So whatever we're dealing with here, whether be a nerf or not, it's bugged to the core.

Posting this on Beta forums (EU english) as well.

That's [Totem of the Void], it reduces all LB damage to virtually 0 on the beta.

EDIT: I see you don't have that, but other items might be affected by the same bug.

tufy · 07/25/08, 7:02 PM

Originally Posted by Graze

That's [Totem of the Void], it reduces all LB damage to virtually 0 on the beta.

EDIT: I see you don't have that, but other items might be affected by the same bug.

Yup, I would have accepted the ToV bug, but it's obviously not limited to ToV, it has a greater span. We have to be extremely careful with any spellpower tests for talent checks.

Roywyn · 07/25/08, 7:57 PM

Originally Posted by tufy

Oki, stubborn as I am, I refused to believe that our LB coefficient was nerfed, so I did a bit of my own testing. I removed ALL my gear and tested rank 1 LB. Just as we assumed, I was doing around 17 damage to the target. Then I stacked up the full gear and tried using rank 1 again. It did ZERO damage. Not just that, it was the same with ranks 2 and 3, while every rank after that did less damage than it should (for instance, rank 4 did 25 damage, where BASE damage of the bolt is 92-105).

So whatever we're dealing with here, whether be a nerf or not, it's bugged to the core.

Posting this on Beta forums (EU english) as well.

Downranking got hit pretty hard to ensure people don't use BC/earlier spells at 80. Stuff you learned 25 levels ago gets 0 benefit at all.
I lack the data to pin down how it works exactly. I'd guess it's "after the spell gets its full base damage/healing, it loses 5% every level until it gets 0% scaling 20 levels later" or so. Something along these lines.

Lower than base damage is pretty odd though, but I heard some things of mana shield giving mana and reducing HP at rank 8, and doing nothing on rank 1-4.

Kaideq · 07/25/08, 10:08 PM

It's not downranking that got hit, it's the whole spell power conversion that is bugged, equipping certain items reduces the damage of your spells to 0.
I have had to de-equip and equip half my gear several times when I swapped 1 item in or out, because all my spells were hitting for 0. Re-equiping the same gear from scratch solved the issue most of the time, in one case I had to bolt a mob with a different gear setup once to get it fixed.

We can't come to any real conclusions about scaling/talents at this point in time as you can't know what part of the spell power conversion is bugged and what part is not.

tufy · 07/26/08, 3:09 AM

Originally Posted by Roywyn

Downranking got hit pretty hard to ensure people don't use BC/earlier spells at 80. Stuff you learned 25 levels ago gets 0 benefit at all.

Then explain to me how exactly Earthshock rank 1 can deal damage, even though it's a level 4 spell, while rank 3 Lightning Bolt (level 14 spell) deals no damage at all?

Roywyn · 07/26/08, 6:39 AM

Originally Posted by tufy

Then explain to me how exactly Earthshock rank 1 can deal damage, even though it's a level 4 spell, while rank 3 Lightning Bolt (level 14 spell) deals no damage at all?

That's a bug, no one doubts it. People reported some ranks of mana shield to absorb 0 damage with some gear, just like you had spells with 0 damage. Some rank actually reduced your health and gave you mana from what I heard.

But there also is big change in downranking. People on alpha reported that after ~20-30 levels, spells get 0 benefit from spell power.
Testing of Bellator and Quantum concludes that as well, I summarised and linked them here:
Wrath of Lich King Stuff (was 'Blizzcon' thread)
I'm still missing some crucial info before we can pinpoint how exactly downranking works, and as you said there are a lot of bugs with it right that make getting reliable data even harder.

Kaideq · 07/26/08, 7:59 AM

I think you are missing the point here, as it is now the non down-ranked spells are not hitting for the expected values, considering talents as well.
It's not just down ranked spells, that are showing weird values.
If tests show that fireballs/arcane missiles behave in way x or y , that does not have to mean lightning bolts / chain lightning are behaving in a similar way at this point in the beta.

tufy · 07/26/08, 12:08 PM

But there also is big change in downranking. People on alpha reported that after ~20-30 levels, spells get 0 benefit from spell power.

0 benefit, aye. However, that would mean a rank 1 spell would still deal the damage written on its tooltip (as is the case with Earth Shock). However, testing reveals that Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning deal less damage than even their tooltip suggests.

Now, I have a mage over, so I tested this with rank 1 fireball. The damage dealt was between 16 and 25 damage per fireball, i.e. not taking spellpower into account, but dealing tooltip damage. So, I went back to my shaman and reset all talents to see if it was a talent affecting spellpower. Guess what - it's not.

My guess is: Blizzard tried returning LB's (and CL's) spellpower back to its normal value (i.e. from 0.79 to 0.71), but they implemented an additional modifier instead of removing the old one. This resulted in bugged spellpower calculation that we're seeing now.

In other words, whatever we test right now may be affected by this bug - hence illogical numbers for Paralysis calculation.

EDIT: it's Totem of Ancestral Guidance. It has the same bug as Void.

Tana Umaga · 07/26/08, 2:53 PM

But why on earth does Blizzard want to revert the boost to LB coefficient? Has anyone asked, any blue post about what was their intention? Seems weird to me investing a lot of time developing talents to boost the shaman a bit, while on the other hand reducing its spell coefficient...

Graze · 07/26/08, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by Tana Umaga

But why on earth does Blizzard want to revert the boost to LB coefficient? Has anyone asked, any blue post about what was their intention? Seems weird to me investing a lot of time developing talents to boost the shaman a bit, while on the other hand reducing its spell coefficient...

Personally I wouldn't mind them removing the band-aid .08 coefficient, making LB scale like a normal spell if they give us a talent or such that gave us that boost back in a greater scale (.10 to .15) or such. Giving LB back it's old glory of being the best scaling spell in the game perhaps is too much but this act of "ha, you can't have either" is a slap in the face.

I can't possibly even remotely claim Elemental DPS needs a nerf. On the contrary, we need a buff when it comes to scaling.

Torgol · 07/26/08, 5:07 PM

Originally Posted by Tana Umaga

But why on earth does Blizzard want to revert the boost to LB coefficient? Has anyone asked, any blue post about what was their intention? Seems weird to me investing a lot of time developing talents to boost the shaman a bit, while on the other hand reducing its spell coefficient...

There have been a handful of official statements (though I couldn't give you specific references) to the effect that the developers "don't like hidden mechanics." They'd prefer to have everything follow set rules in a predictable pattern, with no exceptions. The increased coefficient for LB and CL was a quick, temporary fix that they were forced to implement in order to keep elemental scaling from taking a major nerf when they changed the base cast times on the spells. But it's not an ideal solution in their eyes, because it means that LB and CL behave differently from the vast majority of other spells in the game. Their coefficients are not what you'd expect based on their cast time. If they have a chance now to revert that change and re-implement it as a talent, as an aid to transparency and consistency, they're probably going to take it.

Why they didn't simply implement the increased coefficient as a talent to begin with (say, as an added effect of Lightning Mastery) I have no idea. Seems like it would have saved them a lot of headaches.

Apaine · 07/26/08, 6:55 PM

Originally Posted by Torgol

There have been a handful of official statements (though I couldn't give you specific references) to the effect that the developers "don't like hidden mechanics." They'd prefer to have everything follow set rules in a predictable pattern, with no exceptions. The increased coefficient for LB and CL was a quick, temporary fix that they were forced to implement in order to keep elemental scaling from taking a major nerf when they changed the base cast times on the spells. But it's not an ideal solution in their eyes, because it means that LB and CL behave differently from the vast majority of other spells in the game. Their coefficients are not what you'd expect based on their cast time. If they have a chance now to revert that change and re-implement it as a talent, as an aid to transparency and consistency, they're probably going to take it.

Why they didn't simply implement the increased coefficient as a talent to begin with (say, as an added effect of Lightning Mastery) I have no idea. Seems like it would have saved them a lot of headaches.

Which basically means paralisis' % damage increase to lightining and CL is not a damage increase. It's just there to maintain status quo. Which begs the question: why is it a 9 tier talent taking space a potentially usefull "new" talent would take? I mean normally other classes would get tier 9, 10, 11 talents to "improve" their spells... not just to keep them the same. This should indeed be implemented as increase in lightining mastery or Overload, but not as one of the new talents that makes the rest of the wow community think "shamans are getting a 10% LB and CL damage buff"

Torgol · 07/26/08, 7:15 PM

Originally Posted by Apaine

Which basically means paralisis' % damage increase to lightining and CL is not a damage increase. It's just there to maintain status quo. Which begs the question: why is it a 9 tier talent taking space a potentially usefull "new" talent would take? I mean normally other classes would get tier 9, 10, 11 talents to "improve" their spells... not just to keep them the same. This should indeed be implemented as increase in lightining mastery or Overload, but not as one of the new talents that makes the rest of the wow community think "shamans are getting a 10% LB and CL damage buff"

I'd tend to agree with you, I don't see why it needs to be implemented as an entirely new talent. However, with the Paralysis talent being the way it is, I have to wonder if the real benefit of it isn't supposed to be the debuff, which could turn out to be quite handy depending on the specifics of how it works. If the 15% proc rate is enough to give it decent uptime, and if it affects bosses, it seems like that could be a good bit less damage coming in on the tank, thus fairly valuable in a raid setting. That's all theory, though, since we know very little so far about exactly how it works.

Overall, I see very little in the tree that's going to actually increase our dps in any way. Most of the highest talents are pvp gimmicks, the new Lava Burst spell is rapidly being relegated to just another pvp gimmick for us, since we've lost a lot of the improved damage talents for it and it can only consume our Flame Shock. . . there just doesn't seem to be much at all that's improving our scaling, aside from Elemental Oath. I can only hope that the upcoming polish pass fixes some of that.