I am working through a proc based lighting shaman build and was wondering why some skills don’t scale as I would expect. To make this build work was stacking attunement for damage/mana efficiency and planned on using melee attack speed to juice Tempest Strike, however, Tempest Strike doesn’t scale with any form of attack speed increase and attunement doesn’t provide mana efficiency for Earthquake, even though it has both the spell and attunement tags. Why?
Also, the Lightning Strike passives in the Shaman tree are very underwhelming for the investment required. The damage is trivial making the 3 second ICD an odd restriction. Even with added spell/lightning base damage, spell/lighting increased damage, and attunement they don’t contribute noticeably to damage. The proc also gets lost in the barrage of other lighting procs. Maybe change it to spawn an eye of Lagon (could look similar to the adds on the A4 boss but with lightning theming rather than void) that briefly does the eye beam attack along with a significant damage increase or removal of ICD.
It doesn’t scale the attack animation of Tempest Strike no, but the description states that “Modifiers to attack speed instead apply to Physical, Cold and Lightning penetration for both the melee attack and the spells”.
You have to check each individual skill to see how attunement scales it. In the case of Earthquake it is a 4% damage increase per point of attunement. It doesn’t provide mana effeciency for the Earthquake skill.
I understand Earthquake doesn’t scale efficiency with attunement, the question was why. I assume the reason is because of the large damage effectiveness multiplier, but it just feels bad.
Thanks for pointing out the Tempest Strike text, I missed that.
I am really not a fan of how attunement works currently. The fact that skills will remove some of the mana benefits of that stat just feels terrible. Scaling Earthquake with Strength gives you the same damage increase along with the armor scaling, but attunements mana efficiency gets deleted. How odd would it be if your armor bonus from Strength was removed if you used Earthquake? There is a trade off for using attunement, less defense, and with Earthquake there is no benefit.
Maybe I am missing something, but it seems like building around attunement is just bad and should be avoided. No defense and the mana benefits are hit and miss.
I think attunement has its place in other contexts. It can provide critical strike avoidance with a node in the druid tree. It has better benefits for certain minions like Summon Spriggan (Health, damage and healing effectiveness). The problem with an ability like Earthquake is that if attunement scales both the damage and provides mana effeciency it becomes a, somewhat, spammable ability. And since it hits so hard it can prove a problem down the line.
Attunement is probably the weakest of the main attributes. As you say there’s no defensive bonus in stacking attunement compared to the other attributes. The only case I can think of where attunement stacking is good is the Judgement build that’s doing the rounds on youtube. Attunement provides both %Damage and %Healing effectiveness for Judgement, which in turn gives both the aura higher damage and increased healing.
But yes attunement’s inherent bonuses should perhaps be looked into.
My perspective is using Earthquake with Storm Rift and Seismic Tide. A single cast is 98 (50+16+16+16) mana and has a 2 second cooldown (which I find comical). I think there is space between zero efficiency and spammable in this situation. 1% efficiency per stack would about halve the cost, which doesn’t seem out of line given the investment and trade offs. Is there a way to spam a 45 mana ability as a Shaman?
Regardless, I am glad someone more knowledgeable than myself is on the same page about attunements usefulness and that I haven’t missed something.
Tempest Strike basically is just used to get your mana back until you get lategame items that pump its damage up to be sustainable. I’ve noticed this with a lot of abilities - They only really become useful by themselves once you have certain gear or passives.
I am curious why you expect attunement to provide mana efficiency?
Skills scaling mana efficiency with attributes is very rare, only a handful of skills do that and it has nothing to do with a skill being a spell or not.
If you mean by stack, per point of attunement, then you would need 100 attunement to reduce the cost by half.
Mana efficiency formula is: Cost / (1 + %efficiency)
So for example with 50% efficiency and 50 base mana cost it would be:
50 / (1 + 0,5) = 33,33
Heh, I tried doing that like 2 years ago… sad to see its still horrible. My advice ditch it and go Spriggan form/storm totem shaman.
I lost the build planner(good riddance) but I remember I was using Maelstrom, Tornado, Earthquake, Tempest Strike, Fury Leap with all of them proccing lightning bolts. It had potential but the damage was so low and so many issues Tempest strike slow (Swipe with the mana gen nodes can get your mana back faster), Earthquake clunky and deletes your mana, Lightning bolts ok for trash but can’t handle larger numbers and boss fights were like poking with a toothpick.
Sure there’s been some changes like Tornado’s lightning bolt scaling with the skill’s nodes but Imo Lightning shaman still a meme.
The example I gave was using Seismic Tide, which I qualified in my comment. Seismic Tide adds 3 * 16 to the cost of Earthquake, which adds up to 98 (I incorrectly said 96) and ball parked a halving at full gear as a generous estimate for the sake of argument. The point stands, adding mana efficiency doesn’t make the ability spammable.
Main stat only scaling damage is very weak and inconsistent with how other main stats scale. I think the expectation that Attunement do more than scale damage and that main stats have more interesting interactions than defense isn’t unreasonable, this isn’t D3 afterall. In its current form Attunement is a trap.
It is still a meme, but I think there is potential. I am using Storm Totem and Tempest Strike to clear trash and using Earthquake for big damage. I have Eterra’s Blessing for more increased damage and to buff the Storm Totem when I don’t need a heal. Fury Leap for mobility, global base damage and Frenzy. At this point I am only level 75 and working through the level 90 Monoliths. The only death so far is from the Rotting Hoard because I forgot about the patch note change .
All skills, with a few exceptions (mostly Shatter Strike and the VK’s void skills, maybe a few others) get 4% increased damage from a single stat which is pretty consistent.
Intelligence also increase Ward Retention (Defense)
Strength also increases Armor % (Defense)
Dexterity also increases Dodge Rating (Defense)
If you are scaling damage with Attunement you give up any defensive scaling and in return you get an inconsistent mana efficiency benefit. The damage increase IS consistent, it is the secondary benefit that Attunement doesn’t get consistently. I think it makes sense to have something in return for losing the defensive scaling.
Yeah but Int also gives ward retention, str gives increased armor, dex gives increased dodge, vit is more of a side stat but gives hp, so all of them to contribute to defense in some way.
My str stack werebear has 87 strength and hits 3.5k armor with just base armor from gear, add a single flat armor from boots and flat from blessing and it goes above 6k armor.
Per attunement: Frenzy totem gets increased minion frenzy
Ice thorns, avalanche, spirit thorns and maelstrom get freeze multi
Warcry and eterra’s blessing(also high cost skills) get mana efficiency
Primalist also doesn’t have any mana-> defense synergies like Mage
Yeah that’s what I thought too… anyways I gave up by empowered monos (Tempest and the bolt procs reeally didn’t do it for clearing the way I specc’d anyway)
GL tho! maybe you will find some broken interaction and break the game.
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