So in the latest hotfix, Shaman’s upheaval took a hit, which reduced an already borderline skill into one really not worth taking. There was a bugfix which prevented upheaval from being able to allow default weapon attacks in situations when Weapon Pool Skills (WPS) would normally occupy all of those attacks - say, as a nightblade specialised in their dual wielding line, with enough points to bring all 5 skills to 20% chance of activation, meaning that 100% of the time your weapon attacks or attacks with a weapon replacer should be replaced/upgraded to a WPS.
Now i would have THOUGHTupheaval should take priority over weapon pool as it essentially IS a weapon pool skill itself, and what’smore has the highest possible chance to activate. From my understanding, beyond 100% WPS percents scale back relative to their listed chance to activate, so if you say had all five of the nightblade WPS, as well as feral hunger from shaman, at 20% chance to activate (a total of 120%), each should be scaled back to 16.6% - a 1 in 6 chance of any given skill casting on weapon attack.
Since upheaval has a 100% chance to activate (on crit), my expectation was that upheaval, if it didn’t outright take priority, would at least be added to that total % of WPS - so, in the above scenario, our WPS % of 120% would go up to 220%, with our ordinary 6 WPS each getting a 1/11 chance to activate and upheaval getting the remaining 5/11. This would be sub-optimal - because upheaval deals less damage than most, if not all WPS (though it does strike an area with no target maximum, unlike most WPS), but it would at least make sense from a technical perspective.
Instead, Upheaval has been made so that it can only trigger from weapon attacks that do not trigger a weapon pool skill, meaning that investing any points in a WPS effectively reduces the damage of upheaval by its chance of activating, down to 0% when every one of your default attacks is replaced. From a dps perspective, that’s good, as these skills deal better damage than upheaval, but from a design standpoint that’s frankly awful. You shouldn’t be able to render one of your own skills obsolete by your build choices, particularly not when the expected mechanics would lead you to believe that investing in this skill would improve your character.
What i would like is for upheaval to be separate from the WPS, becoming a triggered effect - like CTC skills on gear - that simply occurred when an eligible skill scored a critical hit. Such a crit would create the upheaval effect at the location of the affected enemy, perhaps also enhanced by whatever weapon attack replacer you were using (which is the way that WPS work now)
This would potentially allow upheaval to trigger off attacks which were not weapon attack replacers, as well. it could simply be an effect which occurs whenever a skill dealing weapon damage critically strikes an enemy, dealing damage in proportion to the weapon damage contribution of the skill that caused the triggering critical. All of which would turn a - currently - rather useless skill into a potentially very cool & powerful one.