With the changes made in patch 11.0.5 to increase the effectiveness of several Elemental talents and cooldowns such as Ascendance, the Lightning Rod talent greatly overperformed. With a hotfix that went live a little while ago:
Elemental
Lightning Rod now transfers 10% of all lightning damage dealt to Lightning Rod targets (was 20%).
This reduction should significantly reduce its effectiveness in AoE damage situations, and less so when fighting a single target.
This change may require Shamans who were online and using the Stormbringer hero talent tree to either log out and back in or swap to the Totemic hero talent tree and back to the Stormbringer hero talent tree for their Conductive Energy hero talent to properly work.
The problem isn’t Lightning Rod’s damage. The problem is Maelstrom generation on large packs, particularly with Ascendance. Single target, we’re strong but not ahead of, say, Arcane, and in AOE outside our cooldowns we’re very good but not wildly out of scope.
The reason LR is doing so much damage is because we’re flooded with MS from Asc → Pwave, which means we can apply EQ to every mob in the pack, and then have 1-2 Tempests available to get anything that didn’t get LR from EQ. That means we have 4-5 EQs up, 1-2 tempests, 2-4 Lavabursts hitting each mob, and multiple CL hits on everything, PLUS the LR damage flooding out onto every mob from 4+ insta-cast Chain Lightnings… all in about 10 globals. And that’s not including overloads, which there will be an insane number of, because we’re in Ascendance.
Now, if you, say, halve the MS generation of LvB, then you got from Asc insta-generating 48 MS to just 24 and so the follow-up Primordial Wave (with inevitable overloads) should only give us 1 EQ, rather than insta-capping us and allowing us to drop 2 EQs immediately. Knock a point off MS generation from CL per jump as well, and that stops Stormkeeper from being another insta-MS cap button.
This will reduce the EQ spam, which in turn automatically reduces the number of Tempests we’re able to chuck out, which will immediately halve Lightning Rod damage output without changing any of the damage on abilities or impacting single target.
