Sandstorm deals too much damage. It hits almost as hard as Surge of Power, an ability that incapacitates the user for two rounds.
For example, a P/P Qiraji Guardling hits for 770 damage! That is equivalent to more that half the HP of most Pets.
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Sad, but true.
They overbuffed not just Sandstorm, but weather damage in general. The change hurt both PvE and PvP. And none of us can figure out why.
My hypothesis is that when they went through that nonsense rigmarole about Shattered Defenses/Flock - which was addressing the wrong problem in the first place - and found it didn’t do much when forced to be consistent with existing battles, they got an irrational urge to Change Something. And weather damage was the Something they changed.
Seriously, that’s the best explanation I can come up with. They did announce the Stampede changes, but nothing at all about weathers. Not a word. Not then, not since then.
I would say that someone entering the numbers wrong intothe database was more likely, if anyone had to re-enter the numbers into the database. All they had to do was leave a working system alone … but they just couldn’t do that. 
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How much was the buff exaclty? I remember vaguely that it dealt more or less 500 damage
I recall a bit more - 540? 550? - but depends on the pet’s stats, ofc. I think it went up by 20%, AFAIR.
They didn’t even mention any of the weather changes in the patch notes https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23529209/shadowlands-content-update-notes#item11
I thought that the buffs were closer to 40% increase.
It looks to me that the Devs decided to align 5 round CDs of the weather’s and the split aoe abilities to deal the same amount of damage. They then adjusted 2, 3 and 4 round CDs to follow that formula.
The split aoe abilities were very overpowered prior to the changes and despite a 10% nerf they were still overpowered with the nerf needing to be at least 25%.
The issue with the current power is the damage is too much already at 45 base. Then having a weather change aswell makes those abilities the strongest in the game. They also combo too well with the dragonkin racial and to a lesser extent the beast racial. They are able to one shot the average pet in specific circumstances which is too much for a game between 10-15 rounds.
Darkness and Sandstorm also introduce the 10% miss chance which ends up deciding far too many games when the number of turns can be sub 10 when one miss can swing a game. Obviously the RNG element will even itself out across multiple games but a 10% miss chance consistently creates a feels bad moment with no active way to play around it.
Scorched Earth and Blizzard don’t appear to have been buffed.
I think they were buffed from like 25 base to 27 because of their lower cooldowns.
Acid rain and call winter were two that didn’t get buffed.
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I was definitely wrong, but I’m now inclined to think it was an 80% buff, not just 40%.
I checked a couple of vids of the Idol, and see Sandstorm doing 370 on the tooltip back in Legion. Also, that is still the damage for the Idol shown here: https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/humanoid/miscellaneous/anubisath-idol/
Now it does 666.
Wowhead’s Changelog show base damage of 25; now it’s 45.
Whatever the percent, it is too much. Sandstorm and Darkness didn’t need buffing at all. This was senseless.
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Ah that seems about right. Now we wait 2 whole expansions for the fix… 
L2P issue here if you ask me.
If you mean that by using Sandstorm you don’t need to learn to play then that’s accurate.
I see that you’re running a triple sandstorm team of double Idol and Living Sandling which is practically impossible to play poorly.
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An ability that does almost 2x the damage that’s intended
L2P issue
Yeah right…
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Bump.
Are we really going to endure triple Sandstorm until the end of Shadowlands?
Yup.
The devs have a policy of making significant changes to pet abilities only at expansion ends. Let me make it clear that I strongly, enthusiastically support this policy. AFAIAC, the worst thing, the very worst thing, they could do to battling would be to keep changing abilities every month or two, or even every patch. Pets need consistent identities and performance. Universal Balance is neither possible nor worth the cost.
While I do support the policy of keeping pets consistent, at least within an expansion, I will say again that their decisions - all their decisions - leading into Shadowlands were bad. No redeeming features, no mitigation. Just bad. The daft, ineffective, overcomplicated, mistargeted Shattered Defenses changes, the breaking of Flurry, the totally insane weather buffs, and the reluctance even to look at Anomalus … I can’t even. There is no possible excuse for any of these, much less all.
But having done them, they will be here for the expansion unless something extraordinary happens.
P.S. Another factor is this: the number of willing PvP players is small - very small. The Sandstorm buff is generally not such a big factor for PvE players; indeed, many will likely find it helpful insofar as they notice it at all. While the devs do throw a bone to the small PvP minority occasionally, I really don’t think it guides theie decisions much.
Oh well. It’s a pain because I’m doing the family brawler achievements, and it’s very hard to do those with the constant Sandstorm spam. Once I’m done with those I can start countering Sandstorm., so it will be less of a problem I guess.
Edit: Humanoid Brawler was easy LOL. I used triple Sandstorm haha
Sadly the Devs are too proud to revert changes.
I do feel that changes should be made more regularly to the power levels of problem abilities instead of leaving them to fester for years. Taking down the power level of a Poison Protocol or a weather ability will have almost zero impact on the playerbase and it’s something that they are accustomed to already through the expansion cycle to different class abilities. If Sandstorm was nerfed 30% overnight there wouldn’t be much complaining and no one’s experience would be worse off.
I do agree with Grainne that mechanic changes should be done at the end/start of an expansion because they are more wide ranging and have a larger impact. I also agree that not all pets can be balanced but the outliers should be pruned so there is a diverse selection of “tier” pets opposed to a handful of oppressive ones.
Most of the Shadowlands changes that were communicated were ok or at least had an idea in mind.
The shattered defence change was in reaction to half of the content being cheesed by the same mechanics. They needed to move away from the single boss fights taking 50% less damage and try other modifiers but were lazy and mostly missed the mark as not much changed.
Flurry was an outlier so bringing it in line is much more new player friendly as it’s a consistent mechanic now.
In relation to Sandstorm affecting PVE and PVP differently basically in PVE it’s barely used in strategies because of the miss chance. In PVP it was the only way to consistently counter aoe and it doing more damage just made it better. The weather effect itself probably needs changing as it prevents too many archetypes along with hitting too hard.
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