Shaman Artifact Weapon Trees - What do you think?

[Nyel]

It's not at all comparable to summoning a warlock pet, frost elemental, unholy ghoul or hunter pet in combat though. Failure to do any of those immediately severely cripples the player's dps. By contrast, the Fire and Storm Elementals typically should be summoned on CD, but are equally useful if delayed for a burst phase.

If you don't like the "DoT" comparison, which is far more analogous than a permanent pet, then the abilities you are looking for are Xuen, Dire Beast (current, not Beta), Stampede, Grimoire of Service, or Shadowfiend. Each of those is a hit and forget spell that is used either on cooldown or for burst dps. Not a permanent pet that is a necessary part of the class's dps.

Ultimately though, you have a vision of what the Elemental is that differs, and we will have to agree to disagree.

You're absolutely right. All of the abilities you mentioned are (imho) horrible and should never have the focus of an entire talent tree. That's my issue here. I don't want to have 1/3 or 1/4 of my talents wasted on an Elemental that's mediocre at best.

My biggest problem is, as some people have already mentioned, that Blizzard needs to commit to what they want to make Elemental. If you're going to give us all these pet talents, then make us an actual pet spec that has a permanent controllable elemental. Relying on summoning and re-summoning an uncontrollable non-permanent pet, yet loading us down with pet talents, speaks to me of some half-arsed design.

^ absolutely right

[UnknownSoldier]

I wouldn't mind Elemental being a pet spec. I remember back during Firelands the Shaman community was getting rather excited, because our set bonus let us have what was essentially a permanent Fire Elemental. At the time the big speculation was that Blizzard was testing the waters on making Elemental a permanent pet spec; unfortunately something which never came true, and after that point I feel is when Elemental started its downward trend into what we see today.

My biggest problem is, as some people have already mentioned, that Blizzard needs to commit to what they want to make Elemental. If you're going to give us all these pet talents, then make us an actual pet spec that has a permanent controllable elemental. Relying on summoning and re-summoning an uncontrollable non-permanent pet, yet loading us down with pet talents, speaks to me of some half-arsed design.

[kosajk]

Who sayed it wont be controlable? From what i read it wont be tied to totem so pet bar is not a big deal expecially when they have one alredy with talent, about using it 3 or 4 Times in a fight its really a problem? it can be even macroed on most fights prabobly and forget if its that big deal who cares about 3~5% more or less dps if you are not in some of world best guilds
After all this sayed im enh so i dont really have perspective although i sound silly that you guys have problem with ~2 min cd maybe try wolfs for some time with set bonus which reduce their cd that is really silly thing without controll

[Kralljin]

My biggest problem is, as some people have already mentioned, that Blizzard needs to commit to what they want to make Elemental. If you're going to give us all these pet talents, then make us an actual pet spec that has a permanent controllable elemental.

Aside from the artifact talents, you're free to not choose any Pet talents.

Relying on summoning and re-summoning an uncontrollable non-permanent pet, yet loading us down with pet talents, speaks to me of some half-arsed design.

Do you need a pet bar? Even with PE i only need a pet bar for Primal Earth Elemental to cast the 20% reduction, which will become baseline effect.

You summon the FE, it starts hitting things, haven't encountered any huge issues with the AI since MoP.

If you need a pet bar that badly, take PE.

I mean even if you don't like the Pets talents, FE still works for your playstyle because of the 100% Maelstrom buff and Fury of the Stormlord, it doesn't seem like that this CD will suck balls unless you chose every single talent to improve it.

[Menubrea]

Aside from the artifact talents, you're free to not choose any Pet talents.



Do you need a pet bar? Even with PE i only need a pet bar for Primal Earth Elemental to cast the 20% reduction, which will become baseline effect.

You summon the FE, it starts hitting things, haven't encountered any huge issues with the AI since MoP.

If you need a pet bar that badly, take PE.

I mean even if you don't like the Pets talents, FE still works for your playstyle because of the 100% Maelstrom buff and Fury of the Stormlord, it doesn't seem like that this CD will suck balls unless you chose every single talent to improve it.

Exactly. You could completely ignore any pet talents instead invest it elsewhere and still get some value out of Fury of the Stormlord and your Fire Elemental. Using your relics on Molten Blast and Lava Imbued instead would give you 60 % crit damage and 20 % damage on Lava Burst respectively, which would synergize nicely with Path of Flame, Elemental Fusion and Totemic Fury for increased damage, frequency and guaranteed crits.

[UnknownSoldier]

I dunno; over the past few years I've joined the legions of Shamans who have lost complete faith in Blizzard to ever properly balance the class, especially after WoD [launch]. I have very little expectations of them ever creating a successful Elemental spec, let alone an Elemental spec that would have multiple options for DPS (pet vs solo).

[Kralljin]

I dunno; over the past few years I've joined the legions of Shamans who have lost complete faith in Blizzard to ever properly balance the class, especially after WoD [launch]. I have very little expectations of them ever creating a successful Elemental spec, let alone an Elemental spec that would have multiple options for DPS (pet vs solo).

To blow this up to 2 actual different playstyles isn't correct.

The major difference between those 2 "builds" is actually just that the pet based one throws down FE more often and it deals more damage, nothing more.

With the fate of Storm Elemental (FE becomes a Lightning Elemental, after all) unknown, it remains to be seen if you actually summon any Elementals aside from FE (Or Lightning).

Leaving that aside, giving feedback based on the thought that "the devs will fuck it up anyway" doesn't really help in my view.

[wordup]

After drawing up rudimentary rotations in spreadsheets, I'm worried about two things:
1) Maelstrom is extremely low value per point because currently, Rockbiter is worth a lot per cast in terms of resource gen and raw damage. The difference between running a simple RB/LvL/AA rotation I was shown by Purge vs. a basic rotation using SS/FT on CD, using SF procs & any deficit spent on extra RB/LvL came out around 5%.

[[2) Based on current numbers (which will likely change, and there is no feral spirit damage currently factored in because there are no numbers for that), we are extremely close to the wire sustaining the Maelstrom to fulfill a rotation using the higher end damage talents (Fury of Air/Windsong). If I run the calculator in my current 743 live gear, I have around 40% Haste and can't sustain the extra Stormfury procs generated via Windsong if I want to maintain Fury of Air, which is worth upwards of 5x the damage per Maelstrom spent of any other spell. Given there's no real Maelstrom generation relief on the Artifact atm, we may be locked into things like Resonance/Affinity just to sustain a rotation.]]

Scratch the above was modelled wrong.

This means Doom Winds needs to be strong enough to bridge that gap, or the mastery scaling needs to be much better than initially anticipated, which even then is questionable as more generation via mastery in Windfury is technically a net loss total since Stormfury gains the same amount, and each proc generates an extra 70~ Maelstrom expenditure.

[jimmyolsen]

If I run the calculator in my current 743 live gear, I have around 40% Haste and can't sustain the extra Stormfury procs generated via Windsong if I want to maintain Fury of Air, which is worth upwards of 5x the damage per Maelstrom spent of any other spell. Given there's no real Maelstrom generation relief on the Artifact atm, we may be locked into things like Resonance/Affinity just to sustain a rotation.

Naturally, you have to work with the numbers given to you, but I refuse to believe that the tooltip on Fury of Air is correct. It's currently slated to do 4X the damage of lightning shield( which requires 5 more seconds of maelstrom decay) with half the cool-down and 8X times the damage of Stonefist Strike which is on the same talent tier. 160% over 10 seconds, rather than 160% every second for 10 seconds seems far more reasonable. The fact that it's also aoe and doing more ST damage than LS and SS which are single target screams tooltip error.

You said the artifact has no real generation. Is that even accounting for the 20% chance to get double maelstrom from rockbiter (still ambiguous if it would generate 40 or 50 with resonance)?

[wordup]

Naturally, you have to work with the numbers given to you, but I refuse to believe that the tooltip on Fury of Air is correct. It's currently slated to do 4X the damage of lightning shield( which requires 5 more seconds of maelstrom decay) with half the cool-down and 8X times the damage of Stonefist Strike which is on the same talent tier. 160% over 10 seconds, rather than 160% every second for 10 seconds seems far more reasonable. The fact that it's also aoe and doing more ST damage than LS and SS which are single target screams tooltip error.

You said the artifact has no real generation. Is that even accounting for the 20% chance to get double maelstrom from rockbiter (still ambiguous if it would generate 40 or 50 with resonance)?

Like you say, I can only look at the numbers they present and Fury of Air is worth more than anything else in the entire kit by an enormous margin, definitely an outlier.

I have the extra 20% chance for double resource modelled into it yes, so with 3 ranks in the talent it's approximating 20% extra Rockbiter gen total (15*1.2=18/rockbiter) since it's only working with averages. Maelstrom is just not worth very much currently; the hope is that Stormflurry + Hurricane which have no values will change it, & Fury of Air tooltip becoming more reasonable would also ease this. In exchange then you could take a Windsong/Tempest oriented build to focus on Stormstrikes.

[nazrakin]

There's also Unleashed Doom + Doom Vortex, since those are major traits you'd think their damage bonuses are a bit more substantial than any of the minor traits.

[wordup]

There's also Unleashed Doom + Doom Vortex, since those are major traits you'd think their damage bonuses are a bit more substantial than any of the minor traits.

Well we have no numbers on the primary (Doom Winds) or the 3 Majors (Unleash Doom/Vortex/Wolves) so there's nothing relating to them atm, until we hear more. Doom Winds has the most likely effect on our MP gen since it's going to force WF procs, but again that is a direct increase on SF so we may still get blocked by gen to spend them.

[nazrakin]

Well we have no numbers on the primary (Doom Winds) or the 3 Majors (Unleash Doom/Vortex/Wolves) so there's nothing relating to them atm, until we hear more. Doom Winds has the most likely effect on our MP gen since it's going to force WF procs, but again that is a direct increase on SF so we may still get blocked by gen to spend them.

Yeah, just saying what I hope happens. How is malestrom generation in a build without Fury of Air?

[wordup]

Yeah, just saying what I hope happens. How is malestrom generation in a build without Fury of Air?

Without Fury we have quite a bit of excess to spend on Lava Lash to dump just to fill globals, but the damage is noticeably lower.

[Nyel]

Artifact Weapon Talents got an update:

http://beta.wowdb.com/artifact-calculator#dAAAAAAAA

Stormkeeper is a GREAT new skill for us. Better than the passive buff that was there before and it finally gives our Lightning spells a new meaning. And god thank you, they removed Thorim and replaced him with Ra-Den in Fury of the Stormlord.

[Northy]

Artifact Weapon Talents got an update:

http://beta.wowdb.com/artifact-calculator#dAAAAAAAA

Stormkeeper is a GREAT new skill for us. Better than the passive buff that was there before and it finally gives our Lightning spells a new meaning. And god thank you, they removed Thorim and replaced him with Ra-Den in Fury of the Stormlord.

I preferred Thorim :P But whatever really...

I am sad to see the Lava Surge talent be replaced with an extremely dull one which increases the duration of Flame Shock. Also, any idea of what the proc chances are on any of these (especially that awesome volcano one) and whether ANY of our procs/mastery/etc break cc?

I'm a PvPer so I have a ton of unanswered questions.

[nazrakin]

After drawing up rudimentary rotations in spreadsheets, I'm worried about two things:
1) Maelstrom is extremely low value per point because currently, Rockbiter is worth a lot per cast in terms of resource gen and raw damage. The difference between running a simple RB/LvL/AA rotation I was shown by Purge vs. a basic rotation using SS/FT on CD, using SF procs & any deficit spent on extra RB/LvL came out around 5%.

[[2) Based on current numbers (which will likely change, and there is no feral spirit damage currently factored in because there are no numbers for that), we are extremely close to the wire sustaining the Maelstrom to fulfill a rotation using the higher end damage talents (Fury of Air/Windsong). If I run the calculator in my current 743 live gear, I have around 40% Haste and can't sustain the extra Stormfury procs generated via Windsong if I want to maintain Fury of Air, which is worth upwards of 5x the damage per Maelstrom spent of any other spell. Given there's no real Maelstrom generation relief on the Artifact atm, we may be locked into things like Resonance/Affinity just to sustain a rotation.]]

Scratch the above was modelled wrong.

This means Doom Winds needs to be strong enough to bridge that gap, or the mastery scaling needs to be much better than initially anticipated, which even then is questionable as more generation via mastery in Windfury is technically a net loss total since Stormfury gains the same amount, and each proc generates an extra 70~ Maelstrom expenditure.

Revisiting this post... how are things shaping up now that we have numbers on Doomwinds, Stormflurry, and hurricane? I also noticed that Rockbiter went from 15 to 10 MP and the artifact talent from 2x generation went from 20% to 15%.