Usually the most skilled/geared players would benefit the most from having *a* shaman. Even more if it's an elemental shaman. This whole discussion is assuming equal skill and gear in your raid, which isn't true for a lot of raids. Buffing people that suck is quite a waste of buffs. So if your mages are doing more DPS than your warlocks it's probably a better idea to give the shaman to the mages. Regarding the boomkin it's hard to comment as every person you ask will claim a completely different DPS figure for the boomkins, some so low that the boomkin isn't worth his raid spot regardless of his crit buff.

You do *not* need mana pots or shadow priest or resto sham on brutallus if you serpent braid Mana Emerald, just something to keep in mind.

Math already shows that to replace the shadow priest you would've needed full mana pots, full mana gems and an evocation and still come 3500 mana short. SCB would help make up for some of that mana so I suppose if you actually run it without a shadow priest the trinket can be good.

SCB though is overall rather weak when you already have a shadow priest and don't need to evocate, and possibly don't even need mana gems (at worst you'll need mana pots over destro). But looking at the numbers I don't see why you would not give mages a shadow priest for a 6 min straight-up nuking fight - the DPS gain for them is bigger than for any other class and should be big enough to justify their lower personal DPS.

Anyway just gemming with SCB with no shadow priest (even if you have a shaman) will *not* be enough, not even close. you will also need evocate and mana potions. The DPS loss even if you use all these to last through the fight is quite significant.

Shadow priests weren't really about turning classes to be viable, I'm sure you can do decently without them, but at the longer fights their DPS increase is quite significant especially for mages who pay with noticeable DPS especially on the longer fights.

We had a couple sub-5% wipes on Brutallus last night with a resto shaman + 3 mages + shadow priest, it's pretty much required that you use some form of mana return on that fight, even with a shadow priest. The first time we made it to enrage, I had been using all flamecap + destro pots and ran completely oom, and had to evo for a couple ticks.

Did you not have JoW up on the boss? I know that in all my attempts last night, I was no where near running dry. Had Ele shaman and JoW.

Your shadowpriest probably doesn't put up the same DPS as the shadowpriest in the WWS, or you have a lot more haste than that mage, as you're only supposed to come slightly short on mana which can be fixed by shoving a mana gem in betwen the flamecaps (and thus losing some minimal flamecap uptime unless you *exactly* use the first one at 0:00, gem at 3:00 and 2nd cap at 5:00 and end the fight at 6:00), and your shadowpriest is bad enough replace the 2:00 mark destruction potion with a mana potion. A JoW with 100% uptime would be more than enough as an alternative allowing you to keep using 3 destruction potions and not losing any flamecap uptime, but that depends if a paladin is able to safely stand in judgement range of the boss to keep it up and spend 1.5s every 20s to keep it up there.

I've read the whole thread once, and I couldn't find any TC about the advantage of AB + FB spam over cycle (maybe I missed). It is hard for me to believe AB+FB spam is better than cycle, since cycle+spam AB with extra mana has better DPS and dpm than AB+FB spam. Can someone point me to a TC showing AB+FB spam is better?

The reason is primarily the debuff applying improperly, causing you to cast at a slower cast time while paying the higher mana cost.

But did you guys try simulating AB-frostbolt-AB-frostbolt-AB-frostboltX3-repeat? Then again there's the debuff fall-off issue that is much less significant if you just spam lots of ABs and then lots of frostbolts etc in big blocks (and still put a frostbolt between each non-fully-debuffed AB).

I popped a mana gem in the beginning or in the middle of the fight on our kill. Was just making sure I wouldnt need to evocate before execute.

Just killed brut with no shadow priest.

Although I had a resto shammy + ele shammy in the group too.

Had to chain pot and chain gem + 3 evoc ticks

Mana was fine the entire time, still came out with 1900+ dps (double lusts).

How do I get scorchio working?

I was doing this on our kill shot. Unfortunately, I had 4 scorch resists which meant having to restack scorch as I was only mage in raid. Our WWS report got bugged out somehow and no longer works, but I ended at 1930dps. Not too bad considering no CoE or ele shaman and having to restack scorch so much. I had a sp, resto shaman, and JoW and never came close to going oom using only flame caps and destro pots.

I really should take the time to calculate wether the DPS loss of scorch is worth the risk of restacking it:

1. Doing a tight rotation that makes it fall off with a single resist will have 1% chance every rotation to have to restack.

2. Doing the scorch a little earlier and doing 2 scorches (or waiting for server response to see if the first scorch resisted which would most likely be inferior to just 2Xscorch) would cost a little DPS but reduce the "need to restack chance" significantly - to 0.01%.

3. Doing the scorch early enough so you can fireball and still have time for a 2nd scorch after the fireball before scorch falls off should cast less scorches on average and still keep the 0.01% chance for scorch to fall off every rotation. It does have a little more rotations per fight, though.

I don't have the time to calculate at the moment but I would love to see results. My guess is that #2 will lose to #1 and #3 but I'm not sure if #1 is actually better than #3, although reducing the chance of scorch-restack DPS loss by 0.99% might be enough to justify somewhat higher frequency on scorch casting. But really it needs to be calculated wether 0.99% chance to restack scorch every rotation is more or less of a DPS loss than simply scorching somwhat more often.

Is there any data available on the new meta gems (Ember Skyfire Diamond) dps increase vs the already decent Chaotic Skyfire Diamond.

The CSD is most definitely worth more than 14 spell damage. The +2% int seems like a pretty silly bonus. Even if you had 1k intellect raid buffed that would only give you 20 int (200 mana) more. More of a shadow priest meta imo.

I was about to ask the same question as on last page regarding elemental shamans and groups.
Wow Web Stats
Thats from our Brutallus kill.
Mages with spriest and resto shaman - 2 LWers.
2 Destro locks with the hunter and resto shaman - 1 LW.
1 Bloodlust each.
Mages gained 21k mana from the spriest whereas the locks tabbed 33/32k in 15(+2pot)/17 taps.
Just to add: It was maledicted CoS.

As for the Elemental shaman group(and correct me if wrong):
Mage crit gives 150% damage + 40% of those 150% as ignite damage.
Thats 150*0.4 = 60 => 210% of the base spell.
Warlocks get 200% + 4 "potential" ISB charges.

I´d easily say that a warlock benefits more from the 3% crit for the raid DPS in that regard.
Adding Sunwells itemization and a slight lack of hit for warlocks, they would also benefit slightly on that.
As for the 101 spelldamage, I can´t give a statement on who benefits more from that - I´d leave that to you.

But I´m always there to get proven wrong

Having recently switched to 40/0/21 from 2/48/3 (at least till I get 4-piece T6), I'm somewhat torn regarding how to value haste. Using my stats in Lhivera's TC tool, for example, gives me 1 haste rating = 1.4 damage, making it the single most valuable stat for me. However, I've already reached the point where stacking IV/Bloodlust brings my ABs down to 0.9 seconds, running into the GCD (with Bloodlust alone, its 1.1 seconds).

So there are really two separate questions I have:

- What is the best way to value haste given the opportunity cost of unsyncing bloodlust and IV, and what would be a good rule of thumb for comparing haste to crit rating or damage?

- What is the point at which it becomes better to unsync bloodlust and IV?

So I just re-plugged my buffed stats into Lhivera's TC script for the first time in a while and I saw an interesting trinket change. It shows quag's eye as being more dps for me now than the icon.

60.41 Quagmirran's Eye
59.42 Darkmoon Card: Crusade (3-minute restack)
58.65 Icon of the Silver Crescent

Has something changed with the Quag trinket to make it more worthwhile?

Crit has also seemed to gain a decent amount of value relative to spell damage, but of course not as good, but I assume that's just because of the higher gear level. Last time I used the TC script was early T5.

Wasn't Lhivera's said to be quite off? Hadn't had the chance to actually take a hit at it (and don't remember anyone linking to it either). If you get a stat so much better than others that you should stack it over anything it's quite worth your time to verify you're doing proper calculations ;p

Especially with AB's great spell damage coefficient (DPS per spell damage = modifiers X 2.5/1.5 while most spells get around 1 instead of the 2.5/1.5) and the fact that your mana efficiency isn't increased for a spec that gains a lot for being more mana efficient, along with looking at vontre's spreadsheet and magegraph, make me wonder if those values are correct.

Full JoW uptime and a draenei shadowpriest doing very good dps turns out to be enough aswell.

Full JoW is arround 5k on this fight which is two Cooldowns you can use on damage consumables

From my experience its only about 2500 - 3500 mana if you only fireball.
mana tide and mana spring each about 3k mana,
Master of Elements ~ 7k+ mana
VT ~23k mana