I sort of keep coming back to how Scalecommander always was the one that needed more essence when compared to Flameshaper. Although this is a bit evened out now in Midnight, it was highly the case back in TWW and we were already raising eyebrows when Flameshaper got all sorts of Essence Burst talents where Scalecommander has none.
I wholeheartedly agree with how Scalecommander feels horrible outside of cooldowns, very noticeable in Single Target (less so in AOE) and it is in desperate need of an enhanced essence regeneration talent or access to something that allows it to be flowy. Losing Power Swell hits Scalecommander right on its head, I do hope they’ll do something to give some flow to SC.
Power Nexus not being baselined also hurts, because its just more of a quality of life talent (it is pretty meaningless in single target) but feels very nice to have when walking between packs in a dungeon and you know you can shoot 2 pyres or 2 mass disintegrates when you open your rotation, this is especially true now because with Power Swell you had just the amount of regen to back this out, now, not so much.
It is more to do with the feeling and reception of the hero talent rather than Power Swell gives me 10% damage. Without Swell, the spec feels incomplete, yet the talent at the moment is just unreachable.
- The spec feels far too filler-heavy outside of Dragonrage/Unbound Flame windows.
- Shattering Star tier heavily incentivizes running Star Salvo, which means Scalecommander can’t afford to spec into Power Swell – its main source of essence generation – drastically killing the flow of the spec.
- Unfortunately, taking Star Salvo means Scalecommander can’t really take Power Swell anymore. Without Power Swell, the only essence “generation” Scalecommander has outside of just casting your filler spells and praying for procs is from Imminent Destruction, which is not nearly enough to carry your rotation in between Dragonrage uses.
This was mentioned and written by Gilgvoker on the US forums.
I’d also emphasize that pathing between talents, and having 3 Essence Burst talents (Ruby, Azure Essence Burst and Essence Attunement) does not help our case. Merging or moving some talents could help free up some much needed space.
Agreeing and adding on top of the Lay Waste note: Lay Waste is in an incredibly awkward spot and is a gatekeeper for Flameshaper and that hero spec never uses Deep Breath, which then just feels like you’re wasting a talent point to get to somewhere, whereas it is mandatory for Scalecommander in all content. I could imagine just moving LW into Onyx Legacy (which wouldn’t solve any problems we have in our capstone bracket though) and moving Power Nexus to where Lay Waste was so no talent would feel useless for either hero spec.
Mandatory Flameshaper rant: it feels like it is not a hero talent and absolutely feels abandoned.
EDIT: I move my thread here, so there are no duplicates of the same thoughts.
General Thoughts
To start it off with, thank you for getting rid of Risen Fury, it was one of the most frustrating spells/effects in dungeons, not being able to extract full value of your supposed-to-be-game-warping ability never felt good.
Onto Unbound Flame: This is a much needed flexibility added to Devastation, you can open up the next pull with Essence Bursts, in your hand and on your own demand which is amazing. Damage wise its a little bit lackluster, I was expecting it to hit a lot harder given we only have 4 uses of it every 2 minutes, therefore I think it should be a mini-nuke.
The Tier Set: I like the tier, Star Salvo made into a good talent, which has its downsides (will get into this next) but overall I really like that Eternity Surge is finally worth upranking in AOE situations and it actually is dealing a lot of damage (in the form of Shattering Star(s)).
The bad: We have nothing to “sacrifice” so that we could get Star Salvo. We’re sacrificing Power Swell as Scalecommander and it feels horrid after getting out of Dragonrage and consuming Unbound Flames, we’re just there spamming Living Flames or Azure Strikes depending on the context which does not feel good in any way.
Losing Swell makes us lose flow, which something Devastation was always great with. It had a very nice flow overall and even when theoretically Swell was a very small loss the feeling of the spec dropped tremendously, resulting in just playing Swell no matter what.
Another important thing before I come to conclusions is that we need Causality to be either baselined or moved to the first slot of the talent tree. There is no actual way we’re dropping Causality and we have never dropped it since it was introduced. The talent tree for Scalecommander now is basically locked in in every situation on the capstone part without being able to change up anything. Flameshaper can afford to lose Iridescence so it has Star Salvo but that is due to not having to play Onyx Legacy.
Which then introduces a whole new set of problems:
We have way too many mandatory talents as both hero talents, FS losing “only” iridescence shouldn’t be too big of a deal because it does not lose Swell and Flameshaper already has Titanic Precision, Essence Well to have increased Essence Bursts and flowiness.
Scalecommander at the moment has nothing to generate Essence Bursts with other than fishing for them when in downtime. Power Swell helped us get through these issues a lot, but having to take that talent off is just horrible.
Apex
The apex changes are welcome and Unbound Flame is a nice button with very good flexibility which feels extremely nice compared to Risen Fury.
But the Rising Fury part still just lasts way too long although a bit less provocative and polarizing given now we have complete control over our Essence Bursts instead of every 4 seconds. The ramping up should be completely done by 12-18 seconds.
Conclusion
- Please baseline Causality and in doing so, do not replace it with anything. We’re hungry for Power Swell because it makes our kit and spec feel nicely flowing at all times.
- Make Unbound Flame feel like an actual nuke and you can tune it just right due to it having 100% critical strike chance, a thing we always asked for when it was all about Engulf.
- If you do not want to baseline Causality then move Onyx Legacy into the Hero Talent “Might of the Black Dragonflight” So we have access to Swell and/or Star Salvo.
- Scalecommander is in need of enhanced essence generation, spamming fillers does not feel good in any way and this has been a problem for a very long time now but as of right now it is the worst it has ever been.
- I do not miss Azure Sweep, but it had a purpose and it always felt okay to use to me because it dealt good damage in both ST/AOE and had CDR built into it which helped us be able to not even pay attention to spacing Empowers out for Power Swell.
- Rising Fury still lasts very long but at the moment it feels needed due to the extra haste we get due to the loss of Swell.