Spell Idea, Turning Healing Rain into Electrified Ground for Elemental Shamans!

[CID-77]

As my fellow elemental Shamans know, spamming Chain Lightning into a pack is dead simple but one of the most rewarding things to do in-game. Lightning flies, numbers fly, it's good times all around. I was hoping to have one spell optionally thrown into our AOE rotation. With Earthquake gone now in Beta I started thinking and had a nice idea. I was wondering what you think.

My idea is to give Elemental shamans access to the Electrified Ground spell, the one the mobs before Dark Shamans use in SoO. I know it's visually intense but with the toned down spell effects from fellow players we won't be ruining anyone's experience.

My idea is to let Healing Rain turn into Electrified Ground, through the Conductivity talent. This would remove the healing effect if needed to tune it, and could do some extra damage or automatically increase the number of targets it hits beyond 6. Or to 6 so we open up one gylph, which would also be a nice extra.

Everything feels right about this to me. It's an extra skill to use in our AOE rotation but with Conductivity it's not something you have to cast to often. Chain Lightning spam will still be alive and kicking. Also the theory behind it works. Electrifying the Healing Rain makes sense. I got rather excited about this. Especially with Earthquake getting canned and in my opinion no real interesting new talents.

Could we get Blizzard to notice this idea?

Posted on the official forum too:
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11043255306#1

[Deleted]

I think realistically, the whole ground AoE effect amidst the Chain Lightning spam is just not an idea that can work. They tried to buff Earthquake to make it so and then said they cut it because it felt clunky and unnecessary. I'm not sure replacing one of those with another different one will really give us anything that we find useful that Earthquake couldn't have done.

[Xayl1]

Problem I see here is that it's a DPS talent in the middle of a Healing tier so if you are trying to maximize DPS it becomes a mandatory talent especially given that even without picking one of those 2 remaining healing talents we are still useful as hybrids. Making it strong enough to not be a DPS loss to cast it would also contribute to giving you zero reason to pick the other talents.

[CID-77]

Well, it could simply be a new skill to replace EQ, which simply makes Conductivity more appealing for Elemental PvE.

[Deleted]

As Zeruge said, it shares the exact same issues that Earthquake did. A placed AoE just kind of sucks compared to CL spam. It has to do really high damage to be worth it, buffing our already pretty adequate AoE DPS even more (and by a significant margin too, because of CL not requiring the target to be stationary). Could they make it work? Yeah sure, but it just isn't necessary. We have much bigger things that people would like addressed than an extra AoE spell.

[CID-77]

Fair enough. Though in reality I spend quite some time weekly spamming Chain Lightning, during my raid time. Having that one extra button to use would make it slightly more exciting.

[Deleted]

Fair enough. Though in reality I spend quite some time weekly spamming Chain Lightning, during my raid time. Having that one extra button to use would make it slightly more exciting.

I agree, our AoE 'rotation' is pretty boring, but I don't think a placed AoE is the right fix to that. Something like 'Lightning Nova', your Chain Lightning builds stacks of energy on targets every time they are hit, upon casting Lightning Nova these stacks explode, dealing damage to all units within 6 yards for X damage per stack. That would be pretty cool, but again, our AoE damage is already pretty strong, so this would likely be major overkill.

[Deleted]

I think that earth shock should be a part of the aoe. Something like when you earth shock a target you put a "overcharged" debuff or whatever you wanna call it which pulse aoe to all enemies in a 6yard range. The damage or duration of the debuff would be based on how many lightning shield stacks the shock had.

[Deleted]

Earth Shock is a funny one to try and use for AoE because Fulmination is such a powerful single target hitter, if it hit other enemies in some way too then it becomes far too powerful, or too weak if you split the damage equally.

Instead of electrified ground it could be an electrical storm of some kind, perhaps it follows a target and damages everything around it. Instant cast of course - using an instant cast amidst obscene amounts of CL spam is nowhere near as bad a feeling as having to actually cast something.

But even then, perhaps there's just no point in changing it because of button bloat.

[tobiashunter]

How about this? Now, keep in mind, I enjoy the concept of earthquake, just not the implementation.

Thundering Earth
30 second CD
Your chain lightning has a 50% chance to spawn a mini-quake with a 4 yard range. Mini quake deals X% Spellpower damage for 3 seconds, stacking up to 10 times. Lasts 10 seconds.

The damage is linear scaling. At 10 stacks it's equal to our earthquake prior to it's removal. It also refreshes on each proc so it will last ~2 seconds or so after it ends.

Times can be adjusted as needed.

The benefit of this is the more tightly compact the group is the more damage they all take. Putting it on a CD would stop it from becoming too overpowered.

Just an idea. Please tear apart as needed :-P

[Vanisara]

If we really want to an extended AoE rotation, just replace Earthquake with the cone shaped earth spike effect that every non-boss Shaman mob (and some not Shaman mobs) seems to have. They might be able to reuse the artwork (or use it as a starting point). Depending on how it's implemented it could add some complexity:

• Am in range? (assuming it's not 40 yard range)
• Are the mobs positioned correctly?
• Can I see that many potatoes in the air without trying to cut and fry them?
• Damn it focus on AoE!

If nothing else they could teach mobs to dance around it the same way we do. "How do you get an Ogre to dance? Throw a Shaman at him."

[CID-77]

If we are talking about adding something that spreads or pulses, having a reason to blast Lava Burst on proc would be nice. Now there is no reason to open with Flame Shock and use your procs. It's just straight up CL spam, anything else is a dps loss. Having CL spread the FS dot and getting LB to ignite the whole thing would be cool.

[Raugnaut]

How about this? Now, keep in mind, I enjoy the concept of earthquake, just not the implementation.

Thundering Earth
30 second CD
Your chain lightning has a 50% chance to spawn a mini-quake with a 4 yard range. Mini quake deals X% Spellpower damage for 3 seconds, stacking up to 10 times. Lasts 10 seconds.

The damage is linear scaling. At 10 stacks it's equal to our earthquake prior to it's removal. It also refreshes on each proc so it will last ~2 seconds or so after it ends.

Times can be adjusted as needed.

The benefit of this is the more tightly compact the group is the more damage they all take. Putting it on a CD would stop it from becoming too overpowered.

Just an idea. Please tear apart as needed :-P

Thats basically passive, which does nothing but buff up Chain Lightning Numbers.

How about this- Every Chain Lightning hit adds a stack of a buff, and upon reaching 20 stacks, your next Lava Burst or Flame Shock will hit all targets with 15 yds of the main target.

[tobiashunter]

Thats basically passive, which does nothing but buff up Chain Lightning Numbers.

How about this- Every Chain Lightning hit adds a stack of a buff, and upon reaching 20 stacks, your next Lava Burst or Flame Shock will hit all targets with 15 yds of the main target.

I was trying to keep specifically with the EQ theme myself. I'd LOVE that idea though.

[Deleted]

Thats basically passive, which does nothing but buff up Chain Lightning Numbers.

How about this- Every Chain Lightning hit adds a stack of a buff, and upon reaching 20 stacks, your next Lava Burst or Flame Shock will hit all targets with 15 yds of the main target.

As much as I'd love to spread Flame Shock as easily as an Enhancement Shaman, I don't think you've really thought about how many Lava Surge procs that will give us :P Or how absolutely mental it would be to AoE Lava Burst 20 targets at a time xD

[Deleted]

As much as I'd love to spread Flame Shock as easily as an Enhancement Shaman, I don't think you've really thought about how many Lava Surge procs that will give us :P Or how absolutely mental it would be to AoE Lava Burst 20 targets at a time xD

Even 100% uptime on Lava Surge wouldn't matter in an AoE scenario. CL would still be better because of GCD limiting the amount of LvB you can cast. In his AoE situation you would spam CL until you hit 20 Stacks then hit FlS, get to 20 stacks then LvB, 20 stacks then LvB. I wouldn't be a bunch of LvB spam. The issue with that though is there is a very high rank up time.

Assuming you hit 5 targets, with 50% Mastery (and assuming Mastery procs stacks), every cast of CL hits 5 Targets, of which 2.5 of those targets also proc another 5 targets, for a total of 17.5 targets per cast. That means that you would cast FlS/LvB after every 2 casts )on average, sometimes less, sometimes more) of CL with 50% Mastery (which is pretty high remember for start of expansion, but regardless). That means you wouldn't get to your first LvB until around 8 seconds into the AoE rotation on average (2seconds per CL = 8 seconds, plus the GCD from FlS, obviously haste affects the CL cast time, but I counted for that with the FlS GCD and the fact you already have 50% Mastery).

On an extended AoE fight that could be really strong (not could be, would be), but EQ was just the same in that situation. It already had potential to be really strong over an extended AoE situation. Not to mention that with this level of AoE damage (firing out an AoE pulse of multiple Lava Bursts would be INSANE AoE burst, especially once you got it rolling and were casting LvB every 4 seconds max) would almost certainly mean a severe nerf to CL, because this would be used on Cleave fights too, its a buff to all forms of Multi-Target damage, not just the 6+ range, which is the only level of AoE that we could really use any extra help with (excluding Multi-DoTing spread out targets, which this does nothing to help anyway).

[whyabadi]

Lightning Strikes passive
Your Fulmination will also fire a Chain Lightning at the target chaining to additional enemies for each Lightning Shield charge consumed.

[Aleksej89]

I just want to point out that the "Electrified Ground" is, gameplay wise, identical to the Earthquake spell blizzard removed in WoD.

Both spells have a short-ish casting time and would do aoe damage in an area over a period of time... which seems to be something blizzard just does not want in WoD for Elem shamans.

Also why would you make it connected to the Conductivity talent?
No talents in that row have anything to do with damage output - and yet you would make 1 of those 3 talents provide a damaging spell, which would make it a sure pick over the others (at least in most cases).

Conductivity needs to be COMPLETELY removed, and replaced with something passive that is constantly useful.
Like converting a % of all damage you deal and directing it towards the most wounded player within 40 yards - or whatever else that will not suck for all specs in 99% of cases...

[Deleted]

I was thinking about the same issue of our aoe yesterday aswell, I came out with a few ideas that doesn't involve a ground based effect.

New dreanor perk : Chain Lightning now hits 2/3 more targets.

In combo with that a new passive :

When your Chain Lightning hits more than x amount of targets it ignites your flame shocks into a volcanic explosion.

We should tweet our ideas to devs before it's late in development for a mechanic change.

[Krazzorx]

They always could do something as simple as: Lava Burst also does 10% damage (or how ever much is balanced) to all targets within X yards of the primary target.