The Phase 2 of WoW Season of Discovery is coming, bringing with it the introduction of an AOE spell named Hurricane. There's also anticipation for the potential addition of a rune, Gale Winds, aimed at enhancing Hurricane's damage and more. Let's delve into the details of Hurricane and explore the possibilities with this potential rune.
Prepare a sufficient amount of WoW SOD Gold before Phase 2 launched is necessary.
Hurricane is an uncapped 10-second channeled AOE spell to all enemies within an 8-yard radius with a 36-yard range, as long as you have 2 points in Nature’s Reach. It also increases the time between attacks on all those enemies by 25%. It costs 880 Mana per cast with a one-minute cooldown.
Gale Winds Rune
A datamined rune is called Gale Winds, and it would increase the damage done by Hurricane by 100%, take away its one-minute cooldown, and reduce its Mana cost by 20%. So, the damage per mob would go from 70 nature damage to 140 nature damage per enemy, and the Mana cost would go from 880 Mana down to 704 Mana, making it 176 Mana cheaper to cast if we did get this rune.
Talent Considerations
Unfortunately, none of our talents really increase Hurricane’s damage or anything. There is Omen of Clarity that could reduce its Mana cost completely, but it requires us to melee, which we might still be doing in Phase 2. Nature’s Reach increases its range, but Nature’s Grace will not reduce the cast time by 0.5 seconds since it’s a channel ability, not a casted ability. Even Moonglow wouldn’t further reduce the Mana cost, either. There’s also zero pushback protection until we get Barkskin, which isn’t until Level 44.
Mana Efficiency
So, let's see how many Hurricanes we have to cast until we're completely out of mana. I have here my pre-raid BiS set and I’ve added a couple of buffs, so I have Arcane Intellect, Kings, Mark of the Wild, and a Greater Intellect Elixir. That puts me at about 3,500 Mana as a Tauren. So, if we do not get the Gale Winds rune, we should be able to cast about 4 Hurricanes. But if we get this Gale Winds rune, we’ll be able to cast an additional fifth Hurricane before we’re out of Mana. So, potentially 50 seconds of some pretty decent AOE.
Spell Power Scaling
Let’s take a look at one more thing, and that is the spell power coefficient to see how it’s going to scale throughout Phase 2 when we get additional spell power. You can find out the spell power mod, which for Hurricane is 0.03, meaning one spell power will add 0.03 damage per tick of Hurricane.
If we take a look back at Phase 2 pre-raid set, we have about 179 spell power, and then assuming we’re going to continue to use the Boon of Blackfathom, it’ll bring us up to just over 200 spell power. Each tick per mob will have an additional 6 damage with 200 spell power. So, it doesn’t scale very well unless, you’re pulling groups of 16 or more mobs and you’re adding a 100+DPS. Then that might look a bit better on the damage meter.