New Devs Twitter Post on Ele

[HalasHermit]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...41818955603968


Crit making lava burst multistrike more?

Hope after all?

[Roamingstorm]

I really don't know how I feel about it...Honestly I don't think it's just numbers with the spec, but also the mechanics of how things work...While a possible buff is all well and good, I'd rather not see the spec turn into another Wrath situation to were we fall behind every patch and need to wait for a band-aid fix each time.

[Staplecrab]

It's an odd change. I don't think they'd make it so substantial that we begin preferring Crit over Haste or Mastery. And in that case it's just a minor DPS increase if all the drops you're getting are poorly itemized? I'd really prefer to see them overhaul Elemental Ascendance in such a way that they can increase Lava Burst damage. Maybe make it apply a fire DoT based on the damage you do during it's duration or something.

[-Etna-]

Doesn't fix unbelievably poor mobility. Doesn't fix abysmal self healing. But it's that tiny... oh so tiny glimmer of hope.

[HalasHermit]

Yeah I totally agree that mechanically we need work (hey mastery whats up?), and that its not THAT big of a change.....I don't know I guess I'm just happy we got a response from blizz beyond Celestalon's "lol L2P" post then silence......

Ah well, shaman has been my main since T4, not going to leave now.

[Deleted]

I find it pointless. It will be almost no difference having 1% more chance to multistrike. Just give it the chaosbolt treatment and Ascendance could give X% flat buff to two best secondary stats for 15 seconds.

[HalasHermit]

Well we already have the statt buff from ele blast (make it a x%?).

Blizz seems to love having shaman as the "we heard you like to RNG so we made it so you can RNG while you RNG" class so maybe as a happy medium, they add a set 6 sec dot (ticks at 3 and 6 sec) onto our mastery (scales with spell power or w/e) and then each tick of the dot you have the RNG roll for the free rock spear throw?

[Blithe]

So... let's say you have 20% critical strike chance and 40% multistrike chance, that would mean Lava Burst has a 60% chance to multistrike? While it'd make critical strike a little more interesting, it's nothing more than a band-aid fix. Our problem lies with our long cast times and dodgy mastery.

[Deleted]

Sooo if I'm reading this right...they want us to stack crit so we can multistrike, but not multistrike so we can multistrike? what? Can someone explain this better to me?

[Rawfury]

Typical band-aid fix for ele as usual. Glad i went boomkin when i did for the expansion. Not int the mood to be let down again

[Aurora]

Realistically they aren't going to fix the structural problems like mobility having already launched the expansion, the window for that is probably gone. At least in fixing the numbers it'll make Ele somewhat viable in PvE until the next patch.

[Deleted]

So... let's say you have 20% critical strike chance and 40% multistrike chance, that would mean Lava Burst has a 60% chance to multistrike?

They haven't said the conversion rate, its just an idea currently. It may well not be a 1% Crit = 1% Multistrike conversion, and even if it is, it only works on Lava Burst, not all spells. This probably wont suddenly make Crit our best stat, I'm fairly certain the conversion rate is going to be a most 1% = 0.5%, otherwise we are definitely looking at capping Multistrike by the end of the expansion for Lava Burst.

Sooo if I'm reading this right...they want us to stack crit so we can multistrike, but not multistrike so we can multistrike? what? Can someone explain this better to me?

Multistrike will affect all spells as it does currently. This conversion would also make crit increase the change for Lava Burst to multistrike. It wont make us stop getting Multistrike and stacking crit, because the crit conversion is only for 1 spell, and it very well may not be a 1%-1% conversion as I said above.

[Haffmaistro]

At least they're addressing the issues with Ele. Fire mages get 0 love and are the lowest dps in the game. Meanwhile, hybrids outpace it all over the place... Makes total sense.

Thats because you already have a solid spec with frost. Shamans dont have any other caster spec, unless you wanna heal.

[Deleted]

At least they're addressing the issues with Ele. Fire mages get 0 love and are the lowest dps in the game. Meanwhile, hybrids outpace it all over the place... Makes total sense.

Mages also have 2 other rdps specs, atleast one of them is top notch currently.

[Farnz]

Lol, a mage bitching about dps when you have a great option that doesn't involve re rolling class. ya we totally feel your pain. Go qq somewhere else. We actually got a response from bliz, i think hell froze over.

[Roamingstorm]

Lol, a mage bitching about dps when you have a great option that doesn't involve re rolling class. ya we totally feel your pain. Go qq somewhere else. We actually got a response from bliz, i think hell froze over.

To be frank saying "well you have other options" is still no excuse for one spec failing to meet standards. In the end having something you enjoy become unenjoyable is never a good thing.

[Deleted]

To be frank saying "well you have other options" is still no excuse for one spec failing to meet standards. In the end having something you enjoy become unenjoyable is never a good thing.

Yes, I'm sure there are threads about this in the actual mage forums. No reason to come here and tell us "atleast you get changes", where in reality, this shit was reported on their 1 year long beta phase.

[Deleted]

Yes, I'm sure there are threads about this in the actual mage forums. No reason to come here and tell us "atleast you get changes", where in reality, this shit was reported on their 1 year long beta phase.

There is also nothing wrong with people sharing their opinions, he feels that hybrids are getting a lot of benefits over pures, fair enough. He didn't derail this thread, only people complaining at him for sharing his opinion are derailing it.

In regards to your beta comment, there is absolutely no substitute for live gameplay when it comes to balance. The portion of the player base on the beta was a percent of a percent of the total player base. Balance issues are always going to make it out of beta, and the game will never be perfectly balanced.

[jimmyolsen]

To be frank saying "well you have other options" is still no excuse for one spec failing to meet standards. In the end having something you enjoy become unenjoyable is never a good thing.

While I agree with the premise that another option =/= excuse for one failed spec, there is a significant difference between mages and shaman in terms of viability. The issues with mages is one of statistical scaling to the point that frost has traditionally always been very strong at the beginning of expansions and fire traditionally strong at the end of expansions as crit rates increase. This is a trend that goes back all the way to Vanilla. The same can be said for Rogue Assassination/Combat dichotomy, and to a lesser extent Hunters and Warlocks.

Elemental Shaman by comparison have always been poor throughout an expansion because Blizzard refuses to make any mechanical changes of significance. Instead, blizzard buffs the Shamanism Lightning Bolt Scale Factor to keep us relevant when a new tier opens up because we fall further and further behind. Unfortunately this buff always comes two months after the tier opens up, despite all the math showing that we won't scale.

Both classes have scaling issues, the difference is that one of them has a spec that ultimately scales extremely well even if it's severely underpowered early on, while the other has 1 spec that is severely underpowered early on and continues to scale poorly.

Twitter Post

I don't see how this helps the major issues we have.

1) Short term Impact: Even if the crit -> multistrike conversion is 1:1 with current crit levels, this is an insignificant damage increase to one spell while adding a very minor increase to a second one. Turning 10% crit into 10% multistrike for Lava Burst would be roughly a 4% increase to Lava Burst damage. At current haste levels, outside of Ascendance we usually get 3-4 lightning bolts for every lava burst. Fort the sake of simplicity, let's say it's 3:1. The extra multi-strike would mean we get an additional 2.5% increase to our lightning shield generation for fulmination damage. Again, this is virtually insignificant single-target damage.

2) The problems with our stationary single-target damage is purely one of improper scaling that we've suffered the entire course of WoW. The significantly reduced spell power of Lava Burst will not be made up for by a 4% increase to its damage. This was compensated for in 6.0 by the ridiculous amounts of mastery and haste we had (combined with the Meta Gem procs) making Molten Earth and Earthquake do disproportionate amounts of damage.

Unfortunately, our mastery scales better than our spells do, especially because of how well it double-dips into the other statistics. I greatly appreciate that they provided us with a mastery that is not redundant with Multistrike and scales beyond 100%. However, we're going to have severe scaling issues that promote using Earthquake in single target later in this expansion (back to the 40-50% of our damage coming from Molten Earth + Earthquake) if changes aren't made to our base-line spell coefficients and our mastery coefficients.

3) This only marginally increases our mobile dps because we still have a 6-second cooldown on Earth Shock and are reliant on a 20% chance every 3 seconds (modified by haste) that Lava Surge procs. Flame shock tick damage is virtually inconsequential and now that multiple Flame Shocks generate no extra lava surge procs, we lack any incentive to multi-dot.

[Deleted]

In regards to your beta comment, there is absolutely no substitute for live gameplay when it comes to balance. The portion of the player base on the beta was a percent of a percent of the total player base. Balance issues are always going to make it out of beta, and the game will never be perfectly balanced.

Yes, players who started playing during MoP knew that everything will be fine when that final tuning pass, alpha, beta, PTR test, content patch, live release, release version, etc. arrives, like Blizzard told them. If you'd even follow trainee devs like Celestalon, you'd know that minimum balance work was done. At one point Celestalon suggested Elemental shaman to safe up Lava Surge procs for movement situations.

You dont need a million players to test balance of one single spec vs. another. It doesnt work like this. They had feedback, ideas, spreadsheets, video podcasts, blog posts of all major Shaman players on top of the other thousend shaman who played beta. Everything was ignored.