Oftentimes when I’m theorycrafting a build, I’m looking through various items, skills, and passives for synergies, and so frequently I find things that almost work, and would be awesome to include, except for one tiny restriction- sometimes even a single word. Most often this is a melee/spell distinction which I feel like isn’t needed. I’ll focus on Primalist since that’s the class that I’m most familiar with, but I’m sure other people can give examples that they’ve noticed from other classes.
Tempest Strike has a node that gives it a chance to trigger from attacks while Transformed. But only with melee attacks. Why? What if I want to be a cold Spriggan with a chance for Frigid Tempests while casting my Spirit Thorns? These are the types of things I’m talking about, restrictions that actually prevent interesting build possibilities.
Beastmaster Passives-
Even the baseline mastery bonus is restricted to Minion Melee damage. Where’s the love for Storm Crows? What about Spriggans, or Totems? Why not just 50% increased damage without making it melee only?
Envenom is similarly restricted- only minion melee attacks get the chance to poison. What if I want to buff Thorn Totem or Vines? It’s before the lock of being exclusive to Beastmaster, so it should be synergistic with other masteries, if I choose to invest that many points into a different tree.
Viper Fangs (the Aspect of the Viper node) gives companion attack speed, but only for melee. Again, excluding Storm Crows/Spriggan.
Aspect of the Shark itself is melee only- both the damage and the attack speed. I don’t think it would really change anything if it was “10% more damage and 10% more attack and cast speed” and it would be so cool to have the option to spec into this while using spell based minions.
Part of the problem I think is that Primalists have 3 distinct types of minions- Companions, Totems, and regular minions. I can see why you would want to enable some nodes for certain skills/playstyles, and not others, but it just stings looking at how to build out a character and seeing a node that is so close to being good. A lot of these feel like they haven’t been updated since before Storm Crows existed, and with stuff like adding Avalanche to Scorpion, it feels like spell-based minions are being unnecessarily excluded.
Shaman Passives-
The top left-most passive, Shamanic Infusion specifically goes out of it’s way to exclude Fire damage. It could just say “physical and elemental” but it doesn’t. Mostly this doesn’t matter as there aren’t many Primalist fire skills (only Tornado and Raptors natively as far as I know), but they keep adding ways to convert things. Bhuldar’s Wrath for Earthquake, and now Rahyeh’s Embrace for Spriggan and Storm Crows. This node just feels outdated and clunky.
Now, I understand wanting to have distinct themes for classes. I appreciate having a vision and wanting to keep classes from blending together too much. If you don’t want Shaman to just be a different flavor of Mage, I respect that, but it seems inconsistent when items keep getting added that enable builds/damage types that previously weren’t an option. 90% of the time these restrictions don’t matter and won’t change what people were going to be doing anyway, but for that last 10%- the people who are trying to make their own, janky, off-meta build- these restrictions kill what would otherwise be cool concepts before they can even really manifest.
TLDR- Please consider opening up/removing specific restrictions on various nodes to allow for more diverse builds/playstyles.
Thanks for reading.