I don't know how you guys came to conclude damage was calculated on impact or that latency was possibly messing up the results. This behavior existed pre-tbc. It has never changed. It always worked that way as far as I am aware of.

And yes I assure you I tested and observed many many times since I had my ZHC that you will notice that your fireball leaving your hand with ZHC up will get the ZHC bonus if ZHC is off when it lands. It really is the exact same mechanic with shatter. nova->frostbolt->lance. Frostbolt and lance get shatter bonus because when you cast both of them the nova is on the mob, because of the travel time of frostbolt, the mob will still be frozen when you cast your lance.

I wasn't refering to damage calculations that are based on the caster, I was refering to damage calculations based on the TARGET. While it could use testing, I would guess that for example of CoE wears off while your fireball is in flight, your fireball will not be affected by CoE. And if you spellsteal soemthing that protects you from a spell while the spell is in flight towards you, it *should* protect you against the spell, assuming the spell didn't already hit you on the server but on the client it's still in flight due to latency. Again this could use testing but it makes perfects sense for it to work like that.

I think we all know that buffs that are on the caster take affect when the spell leaves your hands... At least for spell damage (is it verified if it's true for crit/hit too? Because I wouldn't assume there is consistency here as the calculation of those doesn't work the same as spell damage bonus in general, as it depends on your target too and not just your character. Same could go for molten fury).

Why do you run 2 warlocks 3 mages instead of 3 warlocks 2 mages?

Purely a matter of attendance.

I am 100% sure that damage is calculated when the spell leaves your hand. Come on guys, this is basic mage stuff, you should all be abusing this to get an extra crit out of combustion already.

I never actually knew you could exploit combustion to get an extra crit out of it. I simply assumed it was calculated at the time of hit since combustion gained a charge even when it wasn't on you at the time the fireball left your hand.

This is absolutely false - as anyone who has ever tanked Council can attest. If you spellsteal the dampen magic buff after a spell is already in the air, you'll die.

But he casts dampen every minute and the buff lasts 2 min It shouldn't happen. Although it used to be bugged and BOP would remove dampen, which caused us a number of wipes on our first kill.

There's a difference between "damage" calculation and invulnerability effects. I don't think it's consistent.

Granted, I could just be remembering things badly, but I don't ever recall throwing up an ice block and taking damage, regardless of whether the "spell had left the caster's hand." Have any of you?

Why would you save bloodlust for the last 20%? Most hyjal/BT encounters test your raid survivability, so inevitably there are going to be deaths. Unless there's a phase with a specific DPS requirement (ie: phase 3 reliquary), it's better to pop it early when your entire raid is up and all cooldowns are available.

EDIT: Heh, I think Sancus was referring the initial pull

Same applies to vanish. Damage calculations is entirely different from immunities.

Krosh is the same way

06:49'17.323 Alezrik performs Spellsteal
06:49'17.714 Krosh Firehand's Greater Fireball hits Alezrik for 9450 Fire damage
06:49'18.167 Alezrik gains Spell Shield

Looking for a formula to put the value on the 4 piece bonus of T5 gear for a deep fire build. The proc is (4) Set: Your spell critical strikes grant you up to 70 spell damage for 6 sec.

From my observetaions, the proc happens when the spell lands and crits, so for fireball spam you would always get 2 spells at the increased damage, since the bonus is applied when the fireball leaves your hands.

Assuming a 35% crit rate on fireball (with 0 haste gear on), the t5 bonus is then worth?:

(70 + 70) * .35 = +49 spell damage on gear for fireball spam, but this assuming 0 applications of the buff are overwritten by back to back crits.

Things then get murky when factoring in scorching to put the debuff up etc.

A good example is our recent Rage Winterchill kill, had 63 fireballs and 16 scorches cast.

Trying to get a good handle on when to break t5. Thanks!

Just a couple comments...

For one, I don't test my dps on trash.

Two, the sextant is a lot better than people give it credit for assuming the procs aren't utterly wasted (such as procing right as some mechanic forces you to stop attacking). In the multitude of bosses I've used it on and checked the # of procs from our WWS reports, it has about a 25% uptime, yielding roughly 47.5 +dmg over time. Obviously good or bad luck will skew that number quite a bit, but that's a general ballpark, and the first proc is usually within seconds of the fight starting, so I usually pop AP with it. Meanwhile, the icon's on-use gives you about 25.8+dmg if its used every cooldown, but since it can be used at-will at good times that number will probably skew upwards. So you have to ask, which is better? 40 crit rating and ~21.7dmg, or a flat 43 dmg? At least for 33/28 I think the sextant is preferable given those figures.

As for my gear not being hit capped, I'll be aquiring the archimonde sword and the T6 gloves in the not so distant future, which would actually push me well over the deep fire hit cap when I'm coupled with an elemental shaman, so my choice of gear/gems is really not that unfounded. I do concede that 12 +dmg gems are simply better than the damage/crit equivalents though from a mathematical standpoint, but the fraction is slim enough that I don't lose sleep over it.

I'm not here to tell everyone that 33/28 is the wave of the future and you should all switch. I'm just saying that the difference between it and deep fire is negligible at best in Hyjal/BT gear, especially when you're with an ele shaman, and personally I find AP to be a hell of a lot more useful than molten fury. There are a number of fights where doing your damage up front is more desirable than blowing your wad at the end (azgalor, kazrogal, archimonde, bloodboil, reliquary, teron...). I think it just comes down to personal preference when the theorycrafted difference is imperceptible.

It's called swapping people into groups to get the bloodlust when people die. I always swap people on the fly...especially dps into groups with shaman. With molten fury active under 20%...bloodlust during this period results in an overall dps increase assuming you have at least 4 dps classes getting the bloodlust. A disadvantage of this would be if the shadow priest & warlock putting up CoE both die before 20%. But it's still 2-5% (if the warlock had mal) higher dps while bloodlust is up for the mages.

There are of course some exceptions to this...if the fights long enough for 2 bloodlusts...if people are going to die no matter what (Teron)...if the shaman will go down soon (teron before the shaman turns into a ghost).



Assuming I was simply wrong about +dmg being calculated at impact...do we know that crit is calculated at the time of cast completion? I would assume so but I still dont' feel comfortable with shatter and combustion.

What vontre is saying is that you can cast combustion and get 4 crits when the buff is up instead of 3 if the first fireball crits. When the first fireball lands...you go to 2 stacks. But does this first fireball gain any crit from having combustion cast while in flight?

So basically people claiming to iceblock off of incoming PoM pyros are full of it? (becuase I never even bothered trying in arena with my ping and thus didn't test it in a duel either and just believed I wasn't getting BSed).

*resorting the list of people I listen to*

Ok, let me explain.

Watch your crit count carefully. Combustion does not gain charges, or lose invisible "crit count" charges, until your spell hits the target. It's programmed this way because your spell has to actually hit a target to give charges. Otherwise you could just spam flamestrike rank 1 on the ground and get to 10 combustion charges guaranteed.

Anyway, regardless of other mechanics, all the damage calculations of the spell are done when the spell leaves your hands and mana is consumed. Hit, crit, resist, damage, all of it. The damage is not DEALT until the spell lands, however. So if you have combustion stacked to 5, and have already crit twice, you should fireblast immediately after your next fireball. Both the fireball and the fire blast will gain the 50% crit bonus from combustion.

But the ignites won't add up. Its a known bug.

Ah...I see what you're saying now. So when you cast that first fireball and use combustion...and then it crits...this is only using your normal crit. It still consumes a charge even though you didn't get the benefit of 10% crit when the damage was calculated.

Then does Vontre's spreadsheet correctly model the fireballx2 fireblastx1 rotation? I had forgotten about that bug...but i thought there was some effort to improve the mechanic a while back?

EDIT

So I went into last night's WWS...just to see that it is still a bug.


The correct calculation if fireblast hits after fireball

04:11'38.059 Cardynal's Fireball crits Shadowmoon Champion for 4820 Fire damage
04:11'39.215 Cardynal's Fire Blast crits Shadowmoon Champion for 2757 Fire damage
04:11'40.137 Cardynal's Fireball dots Shadowmoon Champion for 27 Fire damage
04:11'42.200 Cardynal's Ignite dots Shadowmoon Champion for 1976 Fire damage
04:11'42.200 Cardynal's Fireball dots Shadowmoon Champion for 27 Fire damage
04:11'44.012 Cardynal's Ignite dots Shadowmoon Champion for 1976 Fire damage


The incorrect calculation if fireblast hits right before fireball

04:30'06.793 Cardynal's Fire Blast crits Shadowmoon Houndmaster for 2851 Fire damage
04:30'07.075 Cardynal's Fireball crits Shadowmoon Houndmaster for 4825 Fire damage
04:30'08.965 Cardynal's Fireball dots Shadowmoon Houndmaster for 30 Fire damage
04:30'09.778 Cardynal's Ignite dots Shadowmoon Houndmaster for 965 Fire damage

I suppose it's possible the damage was dispursed through 3 ignites...but the target was dead after the first one. Either way the ignite tick 2 seconds after the fireball doesn't include the ignite from the fireblast. But if it ticked 3 times...teh damage wouldnt' be correct

Good points. I have always favored a more conservative early bloodlust when deaths are not an issue. It didn't matter too much when everyone was arcane, but I guess the DPS benefit from a later bloodlust outweighs the risks of an early deaths. You are right Cardynal in that swapping other DPS into bloodlust groups can recover a lot of the lost DPS from an unexpected death. But since we generally run with 4 shamans, so all the DPS can usually get a bloodlust .

You are correct, but no that isn't what Vontre meant. The spell damage is calculated at the time the spell 'leaves your hand'. This means a good old combo of combustion->flamestrike->blastwave will yield some rather 'odd' results. For example:

combustion -> flamestrike (+10%) -> blastwave (+100%)
flamestrike does get +10% crit to all the targets it hits. For sake of simplicity let's say your flamestrike hits 10 targets, 2 of which are crits. When you cast blastwave, you have 100% critrate on your targets. They will all crit. If the damage was calculated at the time of landing, then logically combustion shouldn't allow for all 10 targets to get +100% crit rate.

combustion-> flamestrike (hit 5 target, +10%) -> flamestrike (+60%) -> blastwave (+100%)
this is a variant to better illustrate the same bug, but in an even more odd way. The first flamestrike will gain +10% critrate to its targets. But we INTENTIONALLY only hit half the mobs, so as to be sure not to get 3 crits. Then comes the weird part. If you flamestrike again, this time with 60% extra crit (ie: 90%+ total critrate), then most of your targets will crit. But the odd part is that if you follow it up with a blastwave, you will ALSO have your blastwave get 100% crit rate. It is debatable that this is another bug on top of the 'bug'/mechanic discussed above, but the impact of having damage dealt calculated upon the spell being done casting rather than when it lands has many impacts on the results you see.


EDIT: I didn't want to deal with this, but this is the reason I never recommended anyone bothering with 2x fireball/fireblast rotations. I've heard a bunch of differing reports from patch to patch as to whether that bug ever got fixed. To the best of my knowledge it is still very much alive. A fireball->fireblast won't add the ignite damage, but rather, if I recall correctly, only keep the ignite damage from the fireblast and 'lose' the fireball ignite (I know it sounds like nonsense, but thats how it works last I heard a credible source doing tests on it). I've stopped caring since I've got my 4pc, which has been quite a while, so I never bothered to spend 2 min of my time to double check how this works.