Hello,
We are reaching the end of the PTR cycle for 11.2 Ghosts Of K’aresh and it has for sure been a ride.
For season 3, Tier sets are being experimented with, by making a tier set effect for each of your Hero trees.
This means that Stormbringer and Totemic has recieved their own unique tier sets that is supposed to alter and enhance their gameplay.
That happened for Stormbringer. But not for Totemic.
Even worse, the Totemic tier set hasn’t even worked untill this last friday.
It is now, that we have found out that Totemic is very undertuned (simming 4.6 million in single target)
and that the tier set has weird interactions with Fire Nova.
It is very unusual that something has been completely untestable, until the very last week of the ptr cycle. Especially, when the tier sets are the only thing that Enhancement is recieving this upcoming season.
If it was earlier into the PTR cycle, i would have given feedback for a rework of the tier set so it could succeed with altering or enhancing the gameplay of Totemic. But for now, i think it just needs to be tuned way higher to be competitive.
Likewise, throughout the last two seasons, our 2-sets have passively buffed Lava Lash.
This new tier set is the first to not passively give Lava lash more damage. And Totemic notices that a lot.
Perchance, a substantial buff to Lava Lash is in order.
The AoE aspect of Totemic is also pretty Dire.
Even though you can make the 2set send out seven Primordial storms at once, with a bug to Fire Nova, the actual damage of the 2set is still pretty terrible.
Also, the talent economy is quite strained.
^ P.S
Spenders still do terrible damage and has no validity for Totemic.
Stormbringer is looking rather grim as well.
Design wise, the tier set is beautiful.
It encompasses a high octane and rewarding gameplay.
Or atleast you would think that.
In reality, you are micromanaging your Awakening Storms procs, which you barely have any control over, so you do not proc the tier set at the end of the pull and lose a ton of damage.
You end up going AFK multiple times during a dungeon so you dont lose your procs.
This is rather terrible gameplay.
And would love some help with controlling Awakening storms.
Also the tier set grants you a Tempest every time you Enter Ascendance.
This means, if you proc the 8th awakening storms while you are inside Ascendance, you then extend your current ascendance timer by 6 seconds and then gives you a Tempest.
Just a small side note, but if you are in your tier set Ascendance, you cannot press actual Ascendance, because then it just sets the timer to 15 seconds instead of extending the timer.
Pretty annoying for single target.
Now the single target of Stormbringer is also rather tragic, but not as bad as Totemic. We are simming around 5.1 million dps.
Some of the top performers, like Elemental Shaman is simming over 6 million dps.
That is an absolutely insane amount.
Our raid build, takes heavy use of RNG elements to gain damage. We are playing a combination of Deeply Rooted Elements (DRE) and Flowing spirits.
You play DRE because of this entering clause, which means that you are on average gaining more tempests with DRE than you are with normal ascendance.
And you play Flowing Spirits because you have no damage window that you need to line wolves up with, so they might as well just line up whenever.
This build incentivizes monotonous gameplay where all you are doing is pressing stormstrike and spending maelstrom on lightning bolt.
You aren’t building towards any great payoff, you are just hoping for a highroll.
There is an immense damage deviation with this build which will be extremely unfun for players.
It is most likely way too late to fix these problems, but atleast band-aid fix it by making us do some damage.
It was a massive blow to see Elemental shaman get a 23% damage buff, while we got extremely late bugfixes. Both specs needed major tuning.
Also,
Here is a suggestion for 11.2.5 or Midnight:
Please rework Totemic.
Make a “Primalist” Hero tree that mimics or incentivizes the gameplay we had in Dragonflight.
That is all that Enhance players truly want.
Could even add Unleash Elements back into the game.