Love the new Thundercloud changes

[Adventica6]

Really liking the change, I'm only a low lvl blm but If I cast thunder on a bunch of mobs the procs are really good now, where as before I wouldn't even bother.

I have no idea how this affects max lvl blms but it seems like a great change to me,

I think the enochain buff is good also but i'm not there yet.


Blms less angry now?

[Ferth]

Really liking the change, I'm only a low lvl blm but If I cast thunder on a bunch of mobs the procs are really good now, where as before I wouldn't even bother.

I have no idea how this affects max lvl blms but it seems like a great change to me,

I think the enochain buff is good also but i'm not there yet.


Blms less angry now?

Back during the open beta each thunder spell applied a unique dot on mobs. It was possible to place all three thunder spells on targets, by the time you finished hitting the second mob with the third spell you were getting thunder cloud procs constantly. It was so broken you didn't need to cast anything but blizzard 3 and thunder spells, provided you had more than one target.


That being said this change is incredibly minor at level 60. One thundercloud proc during our astral phase is technically a dps gain now, even if it replaces a Fire 4 cast, but it really does very little to fix our timing problems and is a very haphazard mobility adjustment.

In short, the devs need to work on better fixes than just potency increases.

At 60 we need a larger buffer for astral fire and enochian when we are required to move due to boss mechanics. The change to the enochian ability itself will help somewhat with the frustrations inherent in using the ability but they really should go a bit deeper in mechanical changes.

Personally, I would like to see firestarter added to fire iv. Potential instant cast fire3s would increase our situational mobility as well as give us an easier time during our fire phase, while at the same time requiring that we maintain enochian, which would prevent fire phase overload which we would see occasionally when we got a string of lucky procs back in ARR.

[LerissaCastle]

If you take into account the AF potency buff of fire spells... the potency of Fire IV is 280 * 1.8 = 504. Thunder III has a potency of 390 on a thundercloud proc. So technically thundercloud is lower by quite a bit. BUT if you count the potency of the dot as well... (assuming dots tick at 3.0s flat just for the sake of discussion) then we're getting a potency 710 attack. (Math is... 390 + (24s/3s) * 40 potency of DoT = 710 potency.

So really, it seems like Thunder III thundercloud proc is useful over Fire IV IF you are letting the dot run its course...at least for a little while.

This means holding thundercloud procs is more viable than popping them off as quickly as possible. Which also adds a tiny amount of mobility to the BLM. Need to dodge an AoE? Have a thundercloud proc in reserve? Pop it off while moving.

I'm sure others will think of better ways to handle this

[alphamax112]

At least it increases BLM's mobility by a little bit now

[Garash]

snip

Yes and no, the problem is that you're gonna clip dots and lose potency on that so you gotta be careful about that. A T3 proc won't always be 710 potency, you'll want to refresh it during UI if there's only 10 sec left on it, and you'll lose some potency on your previous thunder when you clip it with the proc.

[Egnasya]

For me it looks something like the following:

- Thundercloud proc and Thunder DoT damage increase work towards stabilizing DPS in situations when Enochian drops and you're forced to play level 50 rotation. It's still highly problematic to include T1/2/3 and Thundercloud procs in level 60 rotation.
- T3 base damage increase is interesting since it pushes - for the first time ever - T3's damage per second spent casting slightly above that of T2. Many didn't even realize that yet, curious to see what those guide authors with their hate for hardcasting T3 will make out of this.
- Enochian recast reseting buff to 30 seconds makes sense but it comes into play only so often. In stress fights you have a hard time keeping Enochian up for a whole minute anyway, so the change simply doesn't help at all if you're not even getting there. Yet I'm still convinced that it is deliberate part of 3.0 BLM design that you won't succeed in keeping Enochian up forever so I'm not too disappointed.

[Makou]

Maybe I misunderstood the text from the patch notes. But it seems like enochian didn't get a buff at all. Unless i'm just looking at it wrong (Which I very well could be) But once you cast blizzard 4 to rebuff Enochian, it should jump up to 30 seconds not 25, right?

[MetaRed]

No that's not what the Enochain changes were. Previously if you activated Enochain (actually clicked the ability on your bar) while Enochain was still active on your character instead of resetting it to 30 seconds it would just continue to tick down at whatever the timer was already at and you would essentially be wasting Enochain and be stuck in the 2.0 rotation once it fell off and you could no longer refresh it.

The Enochain diminishing refresh timer still exists as it did before 30 sec, 25 sec, 20 sec etc but now if you are currently under the effect of Enochain and you click Enochain on your bar once the cool down timer has expired it will reset Enochain to 30 sec and reset the diminishing returns on the refresh timer once again.

This is why before this change in patch 3.05 it was advised to let Enochain fall off completely before reusing it otherwise you would be stuck with further diminishing returns and potential time without access to Enochain.

[Makou]

Ahh. Thank you. lol That makes a lot more sense.

[Qooo]

The changes to Enochian skill is only useful when trying to activate Enochian skill at the start of rotation when Enochian buff is still on.
Don't use it somewhere in the mid or towards the end of fire rotation.
The 60 seconds cooldown of Enochian skill still remains, if you don't maximize your fire rotation for each Blizzard IV refresh, you will end up with Enochian buff drop off and Enochian skill is still on 10 seconds cooldown.