Blizzard
Next PTR will have a small set of Elemental changes meant to focus on a couple specific problems.
Mastery capping
•
Mastery: Elemental Overload does 85% of base damage (from 75%) and proc rate reduced 17%
• Totem Mastery-Storm Totem bonus 5% (from 10%)
•
Elemental Blast gives 2000 stats at level 110 (from 2400)
• All damage abilities increased 3%
Some of the power of mastery is shifted from proc rate into damage. The nerfs to
Totem Mastery and
Elemental Blast don't require talent rebalancing, since they are minor and those are talents are already generally favored. The slight total DPS loss from those changes is counteracted in the baseline spec. With both talents, the mastery cap (with all these changes) would increase from 10400 rating to 15067.
Chain Lightning dominating
EarthquakeChain Lightning is so strong that
Earthquake is often not attractive to cast. There are also secondary issues such as the importance of
Lightning Rod procs and resource overflow in AoE.
•
Chain Lightning damage reduced 12% and generates 4
Maelstrom (from 6)
•
Earthquake damage increased 29%
•
Earth Shock damage increased 13%
Damage is shifted from
Chain Lightning into
Earthquake, and
Earthquake is further increased to account for generating less
Maelstrom (which helps the overflow issues, including on
Static Overload procs). The Earth Shock buff helps stave off the potential for Earthquake to get too close to it again, and a buff to
Earth Shock was pretty reasonable generally.
Again, the goal is to address these issues in a relatively contained way. 7.3 is generally light on class changes, but we wanted to try to get at these known problems. As always, open to feedback on any complications that these look like they might introduce.
One additional concern we're seeing here is that based on preliminary testing this change is not accomplishing its intended goal without an extremely large number of targets.
Chain Lightning spam is still projecting to be higher than using your
Maelstrom Power at all up until you reach around 7 targets.
Earthquake is still not strong enough.
So far as we can tell, with the current changes (which have
Earthquake at 100% SP per tick) a more standard
AoE rotation won't be worth it over
Chain Lightning spam unless it's brought to at least ~117% per tick or so (where it'll be about equal at 5 targets.)
The only case it appears to be worth it in is where it's the only way to proc
Sephuz's Secret, in which case using it only to proc
Sephuz's Secret but not at any other time is dps neutral.
The extra factor that wasn't accounted for here is the impact that the change to the damage per Mastery hit would have on
Static Overload procs. This also significantly increases the range of impact that
Static Overload has, which only makes how inconsistent it is even more painful.
The question I have at this point is why is this even left as a potential question?
Earthquake is our only AoE Maelstrom Power spender. It should be so massively, unquestionably stronger than spamming
Chain Lightning that even the notion of
Chain Lightning spam should be laughed out of the room.