Lightning bolts were pretty underpowered aspect of Primalist pre 1.0 they were spread out across various skills, did not scale the same way(some with attunement and some without) and had some quirks(Fury Leap/Maelstrom versions did not scale with skill tree but Tornado/Werebear did). However, it was possible to make decent builds out of them. Lightning bug is a popular example and I had a strong Werebear build based around these bolts(through maelstrom/rampage/tornado) for damage.
Now we got the rework with 1.0 the good thing is the bolts across all skills got generalized with the same attunement scaling and some flat damage. But they lost the damage multipliers inherited from the skill’s proccing them(a pretty substantial nerf). In return they got a trashy skill tree which doesn’t even begin to make up for the damage lost. Gathering storm is a shit skill tree IMO especially for Procc’d lightning bolts, there’s barely any skill nodes affecting storm bolts, concentrated storm, rending vortex if you use maelstrom and that’s it.
Then there’s the worst node in the skill tree Excited bolts, a mana consumption fee anytime a storm bolt procs which can just delete your mana pool against multiple enemies. This node causes increased consumption the more you try to scale mana/increase proc rate which deters building into storm bolts for more damage. It is mana ‘consumption’ instead of ‘cost’ meaning there’s no way to reduce it through efficiency/cost reduction. Just a horrible node… but pretty much mandatory if you want Storm bolts to deal any damage.
I absolutely hate reworks that pretty much delete existing builds/playstyles a similar thing happened with the Serpent Strike rework which was also a travesty(Aspect of the Viper serpent strike beastmaster used to be a solid build). These aren’t overperforming builds by any means (especially compared to some of the popular bugged/overtuned things out there) but I feel these pretty much get swept under the rug and forgotten which feels like shit especially if you’ve wasted time building around these skills.
This post is just my opinion on the Storm bolts/Gathering storm change and a rant on how these reworks pretty much trash on the original design rather than improve on them. Probably some people can/have made good builds around the new Gathering Storm, personally I think its trash.
Sorry for long post/rant TLDR; Gathering storm skill tree is bad for proc based Storm bolts, Rework feels like shit (IMHO) and old version was better.