I’ve got over 11k hours just in Shaman alone since the beginning of times ive seen it fall ive seen it grown i helped others with building ive helped content creators with shaman builds for SC/HC and yet still the thing that Triggers me is my favo skill for the Shaman Tornado.
U guys rly need to take a good look and rethink mostly about the bottom part of the tree the Fire convertion/ignite and im willing to help here.
first and for most why? ive testing this allot and sure if u close your eyes towards the shaman passive tree its oke. is fun visually but thats it theres no scaling with the passive tree what so ever so overall is just bad design.
What to replace it with: well easy instead of phys->fire make it phys-cold this way u open a shit ton of new ways to build shaman passive wise and skill wise and gear wise, im a huge fan of Frostbite and my latest build im working on now is a frostbite tornado and it is so fun and good but that there is no phys-cold bothers me so much i had to make a post.
I can go all day and write a book with 100 pages about how bad phys-fire is for shaman but i hope this was enough and one day it will be phys-cold instead.
here some ideas for connect nodes…instead of ignite per 2 sec… make it do frostbite and give as last node frostbite pen. ( not a bad idea since allot of other skills that barely scale with it got these nodes still ).
I like this idea…
Yesterday I even talked about it saying “I don’t get why the Tornado can be converted to fire? It doesn’t synergize at all”.
The worst part is that not even the gloves “Rule of the Simoon” synergize with it. I mean, I never tested it, but I’ve seen someone making a thread here claiming this item doesn’t use your specialized Tornado tree.
And I thought maybe Tornado could be like the Elemental Nova… It would be naturally physical + lightning + cold, then we could choose to “enable” each of those elements individually to specialize them in the tree.
The lack of Ignite support is not the key issue with ignite Tornado IMO.
The real problem is its abysmal proc rate, at base it is 1 stack every 2 seconds. Maxing the nodes behind it gives 200% increased frequency. So the final rate is 1 ignite every 0.66 seconds (2/1+2)) at the cost of 5 skill points. Ignites last 2.5 seconds so a single Tornado would maintain like 4-5 stacks of ignite at max. Now lets say we are spamming Tornadoes with 200% increased cast speed you’re still not going to break 100 ignites…
DoT builds are varied, some like poison lich can get away with having less stack uptime by stacking more damage multipliers and penetration, examples would be Poison lich and Electrify paladin which can deal like 500K+ticks on the dummy with only 300-500 stacks. But top tier DoT builds would still push for 999+ stacks. Tornado just cannot even reach 100 stacks.
Even if you change it to Frostbite it changes nothing, you could rather spend those points into Storm bolts and Storm bolt proc rate, convert it to cold and get 10x the frostbite stacks from frostbite on hit chance from gear. Those nodes are still a waste of skill points.
Not sure about the damage multipliers but the storm bolt and pull stuff works. The fire shred used to not work for selfcast tornadoes a long time back but now it does.
And the problem with Fire is exactly what F0lk said; the shaman has zero passives that boost fire damage.
And the problem with Tornado is that it is a DOT (and can’t crit, ticks don’t count as hits), so to scale it’s damage you have to focus on Atunement and DOT. Soooo, Atunement.
So what I really really want to do with Tornado is focus on it’s CC ability to freeze and use it with Maelstrom and the Tornado-generating version of Tempest Strike. Build for Atunement, and DOT damage. And try to build as many stacks of Maelstrom as possible.
But apparently we can’t have nice things. So agree, a +1 for cold tornados.
Nah I disagree, Rogue has 0 passives that buff cold, but cold conversion flask and mourning frost builds do fantastic all the same. Lack of native scaling isnt generally a problem plenty of builds make do without it.
As golden pointed out, set ailment infliction skills are just… bad. you have 0 gear avenues to improve its application rate other then cast rate. So its just worse then spamming any other move that can inflict hits for ignite.
And Tornado’s native DoT mechanic is frankly just shit. Regardless of the element you give it. it has terrible values and thus scales like crap.
I like off elements like fire for primalist, and cold for rogue, they are interesting and provide fun build choices. Tornado is just a bad skill full stop if im being honest. Without stormbolts, tornado is craptastic.
You aren’t really disagreeing with my point; tornado damage is poor*, there isn’t a path to increasing it via ailments or it’s native DOT, but if they’d return the cold conversion, maybe we could use it for CC via freeze.
oke but we all agree the fire nodes/ ignite nodes on tornado is useless it could be better for eith a phys-cold or something with stormbolts. any anything outside fire or make fire scaling possible wit hshaman thru passive…also so far doing Tornado frostbite and its shredding crazy got 700+ stacks in few sec sure its not all tornado is mostly stormbolt scaling and frostbite applying thru them but tornado dmg adds up + u can have unlimited tornados so u got a insane stormbolt procs, but i just wish they put me thinking towards tornado tree and replace the fire stuff for something ells or give shaman passive fire scaling
I’m like 99% sure this was a cold conversion pre-1.0 and the Shaman re-work, someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: I’ve caught up on the conversation, and while I can agree with @DiceDragon that there are absolutely ways to make a conversion work with no passive support, the main issue with the fire conversion on Tornado and Earthquake is that even with Uniques and cross-classing with Beastmaster/Druid there are 0 other fire skills for Shaman. So, you’d be speccing into fire (through items only) for one, MAYBE two, skill(s). It’s just not worth it. Either more skills need fire conversions (even with unique support), or they need to replace those fire conversions to be something else. This is not related to the relative power of the skills outside of the conversion though, Tornado (as you pointed out) is just a generally weak skill.
The fire conversions being on uniques is because the converted elements are “off piste” for the mastery. Any thematic conversions for a mastery (ie, cold, phys & lightning for the Shaman) would be in the skill tree.
That’s the problem though, unless I’m just not thinking of one, there are no Uniques that convert Shaman skills to Fire. Leaving only Tornado and Earthquake with fire conversions and they don’t match the thematic conversions for Shaman. So I was saying more fire conversions, even if they have to come from Uniques, would help alleviate the issues with Tornado and Earthquake having useless conversions.
If you want to play a Fire Shaman right now you only have Tornado and/or Earthquake, everything else would have to be another element or physical. Causing the standard issues you have when you do a multi-element build.
Also, while we’re on the topic, Storm Bolts on Tornado should give the lightning tag and/or convert part of the damage of Tornado itself to Lightning. Right now only Physical Storm bolts work without needing to be multi-element. And there’s just something inherently wrong with a Shaman, master of elements, only having Physical as their best build. Even if cold can work, it’s mostly using other masteries, like Druid.
Edit: sorry, this tornado talk is getting me back on my tirades about how Shaman has an identity crisis. There’s just very little cohesion between it’s skills and the Avalanche rework didn’t help. Ever since 1.0 Shaman has just been in a state of “EHG has no idea what they want this class to be.” It’s passives say to use Totems, but only one Mastery skill is a Totem or can be converted to Totem. Because of this it’s Mastery skills say that it must be a user of natural elemental natural disasters, but there’s no elemental cohesion between these disasters. So 4/5 of your skills are base Primalist skills with maybe one being from Shaman (probably Earthquake or Avalanche, unless you’re going for a Druid Totem Build featuring Storm Totem from Shaman, like the melee Falconer build featuring Detonating Arrow from Marksman). EHG needs to sit down and really think about what the identity of Shaman should be, and rework the entire Mastery to fit that idea.
I started around 0.8 something, Its always been a Fire conversion since I tried it.
Alright, Imma give my experience on an Ignite Beastmaster I played wayyy back in like 2021. The basic idea was to use Tornado for ignites and Fire res shred with Rule of Simoon, Swipe as mana generator/clear and Earthquake as nuke also Warcry for more attack speed and I think between Fury leap and Frenzy totem for the last skill. It was actually kinda viable at that time since:
you get a decent amount of ignite chance from weapons and uniques.
Swipe’s Spirit wolves counted as 2 hits (and dealt player damage)
Earthquake applied like 30+ ignites per cast with a lotta more multipliers (also I don’t remember exactly but I think Seismic tide didn’t have a cooldown)
You could get ignite effect on gear like Firey dragon boots which was much better than the weak penetration mods we get now.
Aspect of the Viper passives gave generic DoT damage+attack speed while Aspect of the Shark didn’t have a limit allowing for much more attack speed.
I levelled with Dual Rainbow swords (which had like 75% ignite chance), it actually worked kinda decent, was manageable in Empowered as well but it started to lose steam. Also Tornado was bugged and wasn’t even igniting enemies. Then later some patch changed Spirit Wolves so they scaled with Wolf stats making the Swipe ignite damage pretty weak. They then capped aspect of Shark so attack speed got nerfed and finally the 0.9 Ailment rework (NERF) patch which was kinda the final nail on the coffin for this meme build.
Well of course this build would simply not work in the current state of the game, but it was viable for me back in the day. Though respeccing to Poison Serpent Strike Beastmaster (another #deadbuild) was mostly better due to the increased synergy… But stuff like LP didn’t exist back at that time so I wonder how it would end up in today’s game.
Anyway for a more recent example we can take the Jasper’s Searing Pride EQ Beastmaster build (I made it sometime back for the Perrythepig Tempest Strike build contest).
Beardus has minmaxed and tested the build pretty well and despite having a major chunk of Flat fire damage (200+ at 100 stacks), even he agrees that it is still less DPS using the Fire conversion (even with a Throne of Ambition’s more Fire damage) and specializing in Fire.
I also made an Earthquake Werebear build recently where the Fire conversion on Bhuldar’s actually hurts the build since you don’t benefit from the more phys damage from Maelstrom and it makes no sense to go for fire resist shred since it does not buff your swipes (and also you miss out on armor).
So I think in the end, EHG need to decide if they want these Fire conversions to actually matter to players because then they need major support both from itemization and Primalist passives/skills synergy as they are just not worth it and are basically a dead weight(or you can say a noobtrap) in the current state of the game.
Also please remove the Fire conversion atleast from Bhuldar’s Wrath, I know they hate Earthquake Werebear enough to give it an unfair 5 seconds cooldown but making it full Fire is just cruel (and I don’t think anything other than Transform builds use that mace currently).
I have heard in other threads (old threads) people talking about how Tornado used to be cold as well.
So, apparently you aren’t the only person from the universe where Tornado was cold first (this interpretation of the Mandela effect amuses me the most… that, and I swear to god that Sinbad was in a genie movie, and the reason I remember that is because when it came out I thought, “well, his career’s over”, and the reason why that is memorable is because I didn’t care about Sinbad’s career then or now).
But in the end, can we have a tornado build, where actually the tornados deal the damage? Tornado is one of my favorite skills, from a looking point of view, but relying every time on something else to do damage is really bad, the tree should have a path that make the tornado tick crit, and add some real multiplayer. Tornado is probably one of the skill with less multiplayers on LE, even Leap have more multiplayers
Yup, Tornado has 5 nodes with (positive) damage modifiers, Cinder Strike has 3 (kinda, I’m not counting Explosive Impact as that’s for a proc or Cauterise as that’s crit multi).
Tornado does have 100% more from Eye of the Storm and 88% from Debris, it can also get 80% more from Howling Cascade if proc’d by Swarmblade slash or 45% more if procc’d from Tempest Strike.
However, these multipliers CANNOT make up for the 30% damage effectiveness which cannot be modified. I’ve tried and its pretty garbage even with massive flat from Tempest strike and additional multipliers like Ladle and Throne (I haven’t tested Swarmblade).
There are many skills like this in LE which simply cannot do viable lategame damage on their own Cinder Strike, Explosive Trap, Net, Tornado, Puncture, Flurry, Vengeance, Rip Blood, Mana Strike, Firebrand, etc.
IMO if they are not gonna buff them, EHG should rebrand these skills as Buff/Proc skills and give them the tags for the same. So players don’t fall into the trap of actually trying to do damage with these skills.
I agree. Tornado should be buffed to reflect what an actual Tornado can do. It can cause damage similar to earthquakes, and looks kinda dull for it to have only 30% dmg effectiveness, against the, now buffed, 700% from Earthquake.
Wasn’t even aware it has such a mediocre effectiveness before reading this. Only time I tried Tornado was on a Shaman build, only to have it proc more Storm Bolts, which was the real damage dealer.
