Whoever decided Friends of the Tempest doesn’t work at all unless you already have a storm stack is my least favorite person. It’s so dumb I’m calling it a bug despite it doing exactly what the tooltip says.
Also, this node being the only realistic way to maintain storm stacks is very problematic, because they’re companions. If you aren’t going full minion, your companions do not live in end game content to be able to do this job, and having to stand on them to revive is suicide. If you do go full minion, your storm stacks aren’t relevant damage anyway. Crows don’t even follow you with the fury leap talent to pull them out of fire they’re standing in. The whole thing feels half baked.
Actually Friends of the Tempest is not dumb because you forgot Totem. At least I find that it works perfectly fine with Storm Totem, 1 Gathering Storm hit and your Storm Totem can easily help you to get up to 15 stacks. You don’t need to go minion build as Storm Totem can be resummoned easily as supporting skill even it dies. However, this skill node is indeed bugged.
Based on my testing, the original lightning variant doesn’t work with Wolf even with lightning spell retaliation or lightning melee hit. Cold variant seems totally bugged as it doesn’t work with all cold minion hit (Wolf, Blizzards Storm Totem with Icicle node, Cold Spriggan etc). There is like 1 or 2 physical minion hit doesn’t work with the Physical variant as well but I can’t recall which minion.
