Skip the
italic stuff if you don't want to read about why i made that change.
These are a few changes I made to balance elemental shaman with some numbers.
Would like to know your thoughts about this.
If I had a account in the US forums would post it in the damage dealing part since it looks like the only place where blizz takes into consideration the posts.
Firstly I'll talk about the two bigger changes made:
Lava Burst no longer automatically crits when Flame shock is on the target, instead the dmg is increased by 50% (this one is multiplied to the dmg).
(This change solves mainly the problem of not scaling with crit since LvB can now crit like a normal spell, it also still requires that FS is in the rotation like blizzard wants, and ensures it continues on the rotation even with high % of crit, without this change in 3.1 content we might no longer use FS for the granted crit as it lowers the dps with such high amounts of crits from guear and buffs. Also it does not effect resto shaman dps it even improves it a little bit)
Lava Flows talent no longer gives an increased critical dmg with lava burst, but it now makes Lighting Bolt give a charge and when the charges reaches 4 the cd of LvB is reseted. Also increases FS range by 10yd.
(It no longer gives the increased crit dmg to balance out the other change made with FS. The second part of the change fixes the not scaling right with spell haste. When it reaches 4 it resets the cd of LvB or when the 8sec are reached whichever comes first. It gives the charge the instant the cast ends (and not when the spell lands) and does not count the overload procs. With 0% spell haste it would still be 8sec cd but with higher levels of haste LvB would be rdy to cast faster as lightings would be faster. It also helps with the problem we face of having to wait or lose lava burst cd time due to not perfect % of spell haste, making the theorycrafting numbers closer to the real numbers, its probably because of this that blizz internal numbers were always higher then the public wws numbers since beta)
Now about some other changes made to balance a few things:
Lava glpyh was removed
(Due to the fact the new talent Shamanism gives 20% so its no longer required and not to overweight the contribution of single LvB cast to the amount of dps. Also because raiding elemental already has to many "required" glyphs to use with the new lighting bolt one)
Lava burst base dmg was nerfed by about 10%
(to fix some of the dps changed also as the overweight reason above)
Elemental Reach talent now gives 3/6yd to all elemental spells and 10/20% radius to fire nova, magma totems and thunderstorm spell.
(this gives elemental the +3/6yd range for all spells and not the inconsistence thats available now, 35yd on FS 36yd on LvB and so on.. the new spells included in this talent are all shocks and hex spell as its just 20yd as opposed to Entangling Roots and Polymorph as some examples)
Call of thunder now also gives spell crit to Lava Burst spell
(Since LvB isn't a granted crit anymore it should be affected by the other elemental crit talents)
Storm Earth and Fire talent doesn't give increased range to earth shock or wind shock anymore
(Since elemental reach talent covers that role now)
Totem of Wrath is now a passive ability granted to all the shamans fire totems.
[i](So that elemental can aoe without lowering all the raids spell power and crit. If the shaman wants to place just the totem for single target usage he can put down flametongue totem as its also a fire totem and doesn't stack with totem of wrath giving only the wrath effect. This talent can also be used to increase the dps of only the shaman by a minor about like 2/3% if necessary[i]
The new +10%dmg buff while clearcasting is active is ok and a diferent type of buff
(But I would prefer a ignite type buff but this one is also ok, I'm expecting this to add in a multiplied way with the rest.)
You can cheak some numbers with the new rotation here where you can press export and change the values of spell power crit and haste to see how it goes
(hope it doesn't include to many mistakes):
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...1Nc23qwWQM42Hw
As for the aoe i didn't do any maths on this but it would be something like this:
Since blizz as been taking out Chain lighting from the rotation by improving only lighting bolt, and also with this changes it becomes clear that CL is out of the rotation, it should be completely reworked like this:
Storm Earth and Fire talent will reduce the CD of CL by 6sec reducing the CD completely for elemental.
Chain lighting now has a 2sec cast talented
(or a 2sec cast base and doesn't have the talent reducing anymore, either way it should have 2sec in the end) its base dmg is reduced to about 30% (around 300base dmg) and its mana cost reduced a little bit, but it no longer loses dmg with jumps and it can jump with no limit
(previously 3 jumps). (So elemental shaman would use this with magma totem for aoe, or for when the caster cant get any closer to the mobs/players being able to still do some of his aoe dmg)
As for pvp its much harder to balance without going into the overpowered zone, but in addition to this changes made one thing that would help out all the specs survivability (even the spec with most survivability is having problems in staying alive for more than a few seconds in arena) so it could be trainable hopefully:
Something like Tsunami spell:
Summons a totem with 33% of the shamans max hp filled with the power of the tsunamis to protect the shaman for 15sec while the totem is active. Requires a water totem slot. 3min cd.
(this would be something like what many mobs already have, for example some mobs in ZA had this type of totem that was placed and made them become immune to all dmg, so we had to destroy the totem fast. Since totems can't be healed and don't have resilience and so on protecting them it would be easy to destroy, in pvp against a competent player it would last about 3sec. it can also have some kind of animation like mana tide so it can be easily spotted and destroyed. This gives the unique feeling blizz wanted that totems should be destroyed easily and fast.. This obviously helps hugely with survivability all around pvp. In pve it should do some threat like the old magma totem so if the mob doesn't already have enough threat from another player it will destroy the totem.
Sorry for the wall of text and ty for reading.
12/20/08, 6:20 PM
