I think one thing we are overlooking is the change to +healing. According to the wording on the patch notes "1/3rd of +Healing will count as +Dmg" this would lead us to believe that as a class that can heal we will be receiving 300 or more +damage just due to the nature of our class.

Do the calculations again assuming this to be true and the nerf will not be "as bad".

I think that's part of the problem. Previously a spriest would be pretty much mandatory to get the most out of your elemental shaman.

With the changes it means we aren't as reliant on another class to be able to function, but yes, there is a straight out dps decrease. Making a change to CoE, adding a late tree extra-dmg-for-LB/CL or mob debuff talent, or even increasing LO from 4% per talent to 5% would probably be sufficient to get us back to a reasonable level.

I'm pretty sure it only applies to +heal not dmg and healing. Although if it did it would offset it I just doubt it.

Take one resto item.
Divide heal by 3 to get dmg
Compare with similar level elemental item.

I think elemental > resto in that case, which means that unless you raid elemental in resto gear, that change isn't going to help us much.

It will help the resto shaman do a little dps on the side though.

An enhancement shaman in my guild suggested changing Stormstrike to a 10-15% damage buff to nature spells for 12s, with no charges.

This, IMO, would work really well with these new changes.

People seem to have their emo up in this thread but I'll be curious to see how these changes make it to live - at this stage I'm not sure if the point of the changes were to create such an obvious nerf or if it's just been poorly thought out. I guess we’ll need to see over the coming days and weeks. Needless to say I hope changes are made before go live – while Elementals where doing nice damage I don’t think it was over the top… taking these changes on good faith it would seem they’ve tried an off-the-wall change to make Lightning Overload more appealing and solve mana efficiency in one swoop – but they need more testing to make it work ‘properly’ (at least that’s what I’m hoping)

The changes to Water Shield are a little odd – I’m not sure why it can’t be a passive Mp5 shield with a longer duration. Another short-term buff to manage just seems extreme to a class already managing 4x2 minute buffs to me.

I can’t find the exact link but I did find the threads from Eyonix saying they didn’t feel anti-spell-knock back was a required was a little odd. It’s a little boring but I’d kill for this.

What I meant was that that debuff would make up that dps we lost from the coefficient nerf.

Although, it would seem logical to just add something to the Lightning Mastery talent so it's something like the Mage's Empowered Fireball talent (or something to that extent anyway).

I've been working on ShamanDPS for the last hour or so.

Re-worked some of the calculations, tried simplifying the calculations/references, and I've got a 2.2 page, a Co-Eff nerf page, a LO buff page, and a complete 2.3 page. I've thrown in roughly what specs I have from raiding elemental, but Ames should be sending me some base figures to throw in there to double check things.

End result shall be uploaded tomorrow. Then I'll start work on adding rotations in.

I'm still missing the new mana cost for LB/CL, but if we take mana out of the equation, the Co-Eff nerf seems to be about -12%, the LO buff Around 2%, but overall we're looking at about an 8% nerf.

Again, as soon as mana is important, there's a buff, but the dps output is flatter than in 2.2, so for sub-3 min fights it would also end up slightly on the nerf end.

Would be interesting to see your calculations. I just did some quick math today and came up with that it should be about the same damage output.

Going from 3 to 2.5 sec cast time will make us lose about 14% spell dmg. (3/3,5-2,5/3,5).
Just to make it simple, say that you have 700 spell dmg. This will make you go from about 600 effective, to 500. That is 100 dmg. 40% crit chance will make it ~140.

The LO is the same thing as a +100% with 10% chance or 10% increased damage. My overall Lightning Bolt is about 2k, which will make it 200 more dmg.

Now, the number maybe aren't exact, but it's just some quick maths.

This is looking at it from a PvE perspective, in PvP the burst damage will be gimped to a more steady, higher DPS output.

Again, ignoring mana, but the buff should make it possible to conserve mana even without a Shadow Priest 24/7.

But seeing the mages now get a better coefficient, I don't really see why they are nerfing ours... We will still fall behind on the damage.

I think what we're all missing is that LO can proc LO.

The chance to get a 2nd bolt is now .2*.2 = 4%.
The chance to get a 3rd bolt will be .04*.2 = .8%.
The chance to get a 4th bolt will be .008*.2= .16%.
The chance to get a 5th bolt will be .0016*.2 = .032%
and so on.

Given recursive LO procs, LO will effectively be adding 25% more bolts at half damage each, or 12.5% more DPS. The old LO (with LO proccing LO) was a 6.26% increase to DPS.

Lightning overload will be the new defining talent of the Elemental tree in place of Lightning Mastery. Granted it will not be as good as the old LM.

Just a thought and im not ever sure if someone got an answer to it. But if Lo does the half the damage wouldn't a dubble proc mean that first LB does 3000 damage first LO 1500 damage and second LO 750 damage.

Wich makes it a bit less sexy with dubble procs alos i think the calculaions for them a tad harder.

Just a thought....

I think LO is just a 50% dmg LB spell. Not 50% dmg of your previous cast.

I don't see anything about the information released there that shows LO to be working that way. And even if it was, a 750 spell damage LB 4% of the time isn't exactly thrilling to me. It still wouldn't cover the nerf which is yeah about 8%, maybe a bit higher for top end shamans with full consumable usage.

So basicly now that we are nerfed and buffed at the same time, we can regen more mana but we do less dmg on single casts, LO will compensate a bit that loss of dps at no additional extra threat and we all know what big problems we have with agro, overall tbh the patch doesnt sound so bad unless u do pvp all day long and in raids u just press one button and maybe another one to place a sequence of totems down from time to time... i personaly see it as a good thing, doing 100% pve with my shammy as for pvp i dont know but one thing is clear:

PVE

-14% dmg on LB
+6.25% dmg on LO
+more mana to last longer period of time and ofc do more dps on long fights 3LB+1CL beeing able maybe 24/7 with a shadow priest in party now meaning also more dmg

The question is now with the new changes is it better to go for more crit then ever before over spell dmg?

For example(unbuffed) with totems down:
1. 1000 spell dmg 50% crit
or
2. 1200 spell dmg 40% crit ..

havent checked exacly if they are at the same level of gear but sounds preaty much right if we consider 2%crit ~ 40 spell dmg after gear

Jini is correct in that your new calculations do not factor in recursive LO procs. Luckily for us, it's a geometric series that converges to [% proc / (1 - %proc) ]. In 2.2, this is 0.0526 and in 2.3 it is 0.25.

As a sample calculation I will pretend one has 1000 spell damage and 40% crit. If you don't care about the math and just want to know how this nerf affects you, skip this part.

LB = 563 to 643 = 603 avg
CL = 734 to 838 = 786 avg

2.2
LB: 603 + (.857 * 1000) = 1460
CL: 786 + (.714 * 1000) = 1500
LB (with LO): 1460*1.0526 = 1536.796 ~ 1537
CL (with LO): 1500*1.0526 = 1578.9 ~ 1579

LB (with crit): 1460*0.6 + 1460*0.4*2 = 2044
CL (with crit): 1500*0.6 + 1460*0.4*2 = 2068
LB (crit + LO): 2044*1.0526 = 2151.514 ~ 2152
CL (crit + LO): 2068*1.0526 = 2176.776 ~ 2177


2.3
LB: 603 + (.714 * 1000) = 1317
CL: 786 + (.571 * 1000) = 1357
LB (with LO): 1317*(1 + (0.25/2)) = 1481.625 ~ 1482
CL (with LO): 1357*(1 + (0.25/2)) = 1526.625 ~ 1527

LB (with crit): 1317*0.6 + 1317*0.4*2 = 1843.8
CL (with crit): 1357*0.6 + 1357*0.4*2 = 1899.8
LB (crit + LO): 1843.8*(1 + (0.25/2)) = 2074.275 ~ 2074
CL (crit + LO): 1899.8*(1 + (0.25/2)) = 2137.275 ~ 2137

This nicely proves that crit doesn't matter for our purposes (relative increase in damage output is the same), so we can ignore it.

For the above calculation, the 2.3 LB deals 96.4% of the damage that the 2.2 LB (i.e, a 3.6% nerf). The same is with CL, except it is 96.7%.

In the following chart I've listed the nerf at varying levels of bonus damage. It uses the LB damage nerf %.

This is in contrast to what previous posters were calculating, if LO did not proc itself:

So the nerf is around 2% less than what was previously though. Hope this helps.

I dont agree there is a point were crit/spell dmg becomes better to have then spell dmg/crit best exmple is to study the limits and u will see even if u have 100% crit if u dont have enough spell dmg u cant do much dps u will have mana all the time but wont be able to use it, on the other hand if u get too much spell dmg and no crit u have nice dmg at start but u go oom fast.
Blizzard changed a bit the rules and with it the calculations of what it could be perfect gear setup for the new talents, if u decide to ignore it very well but for me is important because i realy want to maximize whatever crap blizzard throw at us

Because itemization is so limited and a 2% nerf, it shouldn't really shouldn't make much of a difference, but...
Bink, are you gonna change your shamanstats spreadsheet to rebalance stat weights?

Nope. I've gotten a few CL LO procs, meaning it only procs off previous casts.

Very well so we got nerfed anyway u put it on single cast, problem is what happends on a longer period of time say 10 minutes? and if we got nefted with 2% i am willing to change my trinkets/rings gems and whatever to compensate yes.

Also why would one think that LO procs off LO? It currently doesn't. Other similar things like sword spec and WF don't anymore. I have never had LO proc another LO in my months of playing.

Calculations for the clearcast changes:
Average Mana 2.2: x-x*crit*0.6=x*(1-crit*0.6)
Average Mana 2.3: x-x*(1-(1-crit)²)*0.4=x*(1-(1-(1-crit)²)*0.4)

Some numbers (Mana Usage Change is calculated as 100% - (Old Mana Cost) / (New Mana Cost) to get the reducement of total mana you use after the patch):
This means if you have between 25% and 30% total crit you get the greatest benefit from the change and over 50% total crit the change even increases your mana usage.

Use [code] to preserve spacing. I think you overlooked that LO procs will also be able to proc clearcast and that's not an insignificant with a 20% proc rate.