Blizzard
Next PTR will have a small set of Elemental changes meant to focus on a couple specific problems.
Mastery capping
•
Meisterschaft: Elementarüberladung does 85% of base damage (from 75%) and proc rate reduced 17%
• Totem Mastery-Storm Totem bonus 5% (from 10%)
•
Elementarschlag 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
Totembeherrschung and
Elementarschlag 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.
Kettenblitzschlag dominating
ErdbebenKettenblitzschlag is so strong that
Erdbeben is often not attractive to cast. There are also secondary issues such as the importance of
Blitzableiter procs and resource overflow in AoE.
•
Kettenblitzschlag damage reduced 12% and generates 4
Mahlstrom (from 6)
•
Erdbeben damage increased 29%
•
Erdschock damage increased 13%
Damage is shifted from
Kettenblitzschlag into
Erdbeben, and
Erdbeben is further increased to account for generating less
Mahlstrom (which helps the overflow issues, including on
Statische Überladung procs). The Earth Shock buff helps stave off the potential for Earthquake to get too close to it again, and a buff to
Erdschock 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.
Kettenblitzschlag spam is still projecting to be higher than using your
Macht des Mahlstroms at all up until you reach around 7 targets.
Erdbeben is still not strong enough.
So far as we can tell, with the current changes (which have
Erdbeben at 100% SP per tick) a more standard
Wirkungsbereich rotation won't be worth it over
Kettenblitzschlag 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' Geheimnis, in which case using it only to proc
Sephuz' Geheimnis 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
Statische Überladung procs. This also significantly increases the range of impact that
Statische Überladung 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?
Erdbeben is our only AoE Maelstrom Power spender. It should be so massively, unquestionably stronger than spamming
Kettenblitzschlag that even the notion of
Kettenblitzschlag spam should be laughed out of the room.