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Maelstrom needs a lightning conversion to synergize with a storm bolt focus build. Converting the other skills to cold has too much anti-synergy specifically for shaman with nodes like Conflux.
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Storm Crows need an option that makes them untargetable/immortal. The companion mechanic that requires you to stand on them to resurrect makes using them to generate storm stacks a dead build. You can’t gear to keep minions alive, and scale self damage/defense. They aren’t tanking for you, they just stand in fire and die.
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The range that storm bolts can cast is way too small, Even with the 50% increase in the tree you can’t stand outside a boulder spin radius and hit the mob . If you’re using the staff node, you can gathering storm anywhere on screen, the storm bolts should do the same. That should be default functionality. The tree should feel like benefits, not fixing how things should work in the first place imo.
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Storm bolt should have at least some aoe, like literally everything else in the game.
I’m doing cold convert. Maelstrom is cold. Warcry is cold. Fury leap casts storm bolts. It’s working.
I do agree Storm Crows need to be untargettable like the Falconeer pet. Maybe make it so if you take the traversal node for Storm Crows then it makes them unable to be targets but they do no damage or reduced damage if that is a concern for the devs.
Also I disagree that Gathering Storm doesn’t synergize well with cold shaman. Honestly using that skill, is the first time I really think a cold melee shaman can work. Lightning melee shaman were in a decent to good spot just using lightning cleave and being built properly. I had a level 90 on in early access and it tore through things SO quickly. Not to mention as Milk Loaf above me stated for a pure cold shaman you can go Maelstrom, Warcry, Crow Storm, and Avalanche. That leave you room to either use Storm Totem which can do cold damage too or maybe Eterra’s for healing if you want it.
Things that have anti synergy with cold convert:
- Cold convert stops you from shocking, so the DR from conflux, which is a passive specifically for gathering storm won’t function.
- Turning shocks into chill/frostbite doesn’t benefit crit which the maelstrom node in gathering storm is trying to make a thing.
- Storm Bringer has better synergy with crows than Wind Bringer because they double dip the minion and player lightning damage
- Avatar of thunder has better synergy with crows/storm totem generating storm stacks than shattered heavens
- It’s a much larger opportunity cost in skill points to convert 4 skills than 1
I never said you CAN’T cold convert, but being unable to lightning convert maelstrom makes the build clunky in a lot of ways that one thing would solve.
I also have issues with this spec. It seems like it’s trying to replace the old Tempest Strike AoE generation by letting you create Maelstrom with Gathering Storm, but the problem is that you can’t convert Maelstrom to Lightning,
Tornado does not convert to cold or lightning, so you’re stuck with physical tornado and lightning Storm Bolts (why fire conversion? Nothing in the passive tree affects fire and the only other fire option is Earthquake? Bring cold tornado back!)
Avalanche is cold but doesn’t scale with lightning at all.
Cold convert Gathering Storm has the problems you mentioned on top of every other source of Storm Bolts (except Fury Leap… For some reason?) aren’t affected by the Gathering Storm nodes so they’re all lightning.
Warcry synergies with Maelstrom, but not lightning.
Fury Leap adds Storm Bolts that scale with Gathering Storm, but doesn’t convert the actual leap.
Earthquake is can be half/half physical lightning OR fire (again, why fire?) so that’s a bust.
Only Tempest Strike works with Storm Stacks like Gathering Storm but the stacks spend so quickly the node in Tempest Strike is kind of worthless.
Storm Wolves and Storm Crows synergies with Storm Bolts but again, that doesn’t work well for the cold conversion on Gathering Storm.
I hope the devs at the least acknowledge/confirm if storm bolts outside of fury leap are working as intended. When I read the GS/TS post it says all storm bolts will be affected by gathering storm. I wanted to test the cold conversion and was surprised to see lightning bolts going off.
Side Note GS Question: Does anyone know if the storm bolts are affected by certain passive tree nodes that mention Gathering Storm (e.g. lightning penetration) because I’ve seen some content creators say it affects the bolts, but based on the tooltip reading I wouldn’t think it does
I agree with a lot of the things said here, but my question–and maybe it’s a dumb one–is how to go about making a Shaman with good synergies without converting to cold? I just wanted to do a basic-ass lightning Shaman built around Gathering Storm/storm bolts, but with no way to convert Maelstrom or Tornado to lightning, despite their ability to generate storm bolts, it just seems like I’m basically shoehorned into doing a minion build with wolves/storm crows/storm totem? Or am I missing something?
I built to maximize the storm blast procs with crit from maelstrom stacks, and mana scaling damage. Crows and storm totem are stack/buff generators. Maelstrom doesn’t do much damage, but it throws 3 storm bolts/sec, which is more than the gathering storm stacks generate in a crowd. I have wolf specced just for the third crow, and unspecced spriggarn form on the bar just to fill mana by shifting.
They really need to change the fire tornado nodes to lightning. As most of the primalist abilites are based around cold, lightning, and physical
It used to be cold. I have no idea why they made it fire when none of the passives or any other skills aside from earthquake do any Fire Damage. It just feels off. Like they didn’t know what to do with Shaman
Yeah, I honestly wonder if any of the devs actually play Shaman. It’s not that it doesn’t have synergies and stuff, but they don’t seem as plentiful or as obvious as on the other classes I’ve played. It seems like you really have to stretch to make cohesive builds, especially if you want to do anything besides pure totems/minions or an ice build. For a class that seems to be so heavily themed around lightning by default, making a lightning-focused build seems tough, and it’s even more so if minions aren’t your thing.
I currently play a lightning build with my shaman ( still on campaign, level 28). I specialize gathering storm with the node who allow you to cast directly storm bolt with a staff at distance. I am still confuse, did I just made all the others nodes of the skill who were based on the stack of storm cast useless ? ( and there is a ton of node arround that ! ). My counter genrally stay at 1 now, time to time 2 but never grow further since i constantly cast directly strom bolt.
Other thing that really annoy me a lot is the game don’t make the change of skill in the skill bar. The skill should become Stormbolt (spell only and no more a melee damage), and not continue to be Gathering Storm. Without that change the UI continue to show a wrong DPS based on the melee damage of gathering storm and not only on storm bolt. To check my DPS I need to open the skill tree and go to the node who say I will now cast storm bolt with a staff, it’s really tedious at a moment.
I think to some extent that’s a design philosophy. For most builds it feels like 70% of the choices make sense, and then the remaining 30% nothing makes sense. I think they do this so there’s room for individuality in builds instead of clear min/max solutions.
Anyone else got gathering storm to do any dmg?
I am playing a storm bolt build and I get to 40-50 stacks by using gathering storm. Thought this would rock the world especially single target since in farming I am running around the 15 stacks thanks to minions.
But it does 0 dmg…
Then I accepted the 15 stacks as my max, now using tempest strike as main dmg and my dps just trippled.
I like those skills that expend storm stacks (earthquake for big burst f.e.) but they should never feel better then using the main skill…Why does gathering storm scale attument as +1 flat dmg and the other abilities as 4%?
I also would like them to rethink storm stacks. The mechanic is nice but it requires you to use
- gathering storm to build stacks
- dump skill to expand them
- minions to keep them at 15
My suggestion would be to remove all the “expand storm stacks” requirements of other skills and make them “cast X storm bolts” (this way not every single one would need you to spec gathering storm)
Then make the storm stacks a gathering storm only mechanic which says something like “spend a storm stack each 0.5 seconds to cast storm bolt. Every 10 stacks you have when storm bolt is cast increases it’s damage by X%”
This way you could go all in into gathering storm and stacking those stacks for a big chunky storm all around you while keeping your stacks high, ramping up dmg and rewarding players for an aggressive fast playstyle.
Been running with a Storm Bolt focused build and am now lvl 65+ and it’s melting mobs in MoF.
I never liked having to build Storm Stacks and it never gave me enough stacks to make either the Minion ability or Earthquake expending all the stacks worth it. So I cut out Gathering Storm altogether.
Maelstrom can be noded to blast Storm Bolts at 4 enemies each tick with 3+ stacks of Maelstrom. I also get 4 stacks of Maelstrom every few seconds.
My duo-wolves are noded to shoot storm bolts at enemies who hit them and a small chance to shoot storm bolts when they hit enemies.
Fury Leap turns you into Thor and sends Storm Bolts out as you’re flying. If you have the Fury Leap reset proc you can immediately do it again.
I’m experimenting with Tornado Storm Bolts as each tornado casts its own storm bolt and it also reduces the storm bolt cast frequency.
As a mana dump:
Earthquake -converted to lightning- is OP. Turn it into the triple cast EQ for nearly 3x damage per cast.
Till now I use Storm Crow, I really like their spell and the thematic; but oh god this skill need a rework. I were using eterra’s blessing for survavibility and for babysit them.
Now with boss being tougher it’s start to be complicated. Too difficult to keep them alive while healing them ( they litteraly seat on every huge AOE !!!) and avoiding AOE myself, and to problematic to resurect them in boss battle for same reason, so it’s basicly having a skill for 10-15 sec in the battle and after fight with 4 skill til the end or you die.
I can handle to need a healing skill for keeping myself and them alive and the gameplay was really fun on maps and till now (lvl 69) no problem to keep every one for cleaning maps. But for Bosses it’s really pen in the ass, and without Eterra’s blessing ( because I wanted to test couples of others skills for a time) they just die and die every 10 meters on the maps also.
I think it will be impossible to go further with them, maybe with a beastmaster build but I am not sure they can really compete with the others pets in this case.
Storm crow is really painful I confirm ! They should remove the way to resurrect pet. I prefer recast the spell when they die than standing 5s in a circle where there’s 90% chance to die on a boss.
My biggest problem with storm bolt is the mana cost. I’m doing a lot of storm bolt and I’m quick out of mana…
in the passive tree they should rework the gathering storm gain 5 mana by strike and put it to 20. 5 manas by strike is really short when you lose 10 mana by storm bolt.
@Gibz111 I was crafting this build in HC and struggling to make Gathering Storm work. I thought Maelstrom could sweep up the lighting and damage but GS just isnt strong enough. When you say you get 4 stacks of maelstrom every 4, is this manually clicking the key or a feature of leveling the skilll?
You can’t quite fully automate maelstrom stacks. If you use storm totem to generate storm stacks, and the storm stacks being expended generates maelstrom stacks, that will keep it above 3 a lot of the time, but it will fall off from bad rng. The node on maelstrom that makes a manual cast provide more stacks based on the time since you last manually cast it is good for filling that gap. If you want damage out of this build, it comes from mana stacking with the mana->damage node in gathering storm. The trick to maintaining mana with that is shifting in and out of spriggarn to fill it up.