Slight tangent:
With the upcoming changes to combat logs, it should be possible to assign totems to their owners.

To respond, yes I included the loss of spell hit when running Yo's simulation.

Elem subspec:
1500 AP
30% crit
9% melee hit
0% haste
0 armor penetration
0 expertise
4490 boss armor
97.5 2.6 speed weapon x 2
Dual Mongoose enchants
1% spell hit
5% spell crit
No trinket procs
24 shocks per 2 minutes (Earth + Fire)
Stonebreaker's Totem
R.E.D. Meta Gem
Talents: DW, SS, Flurry, UR, Weapon Mastery, 30% AP->Spell Damage, Reverberation, Concussion
Buffs: BoK, BoM, MotW, Flask of Relentless Assault, Haste Potions, SoE, Battle Shout, Roasted Clefthoof, Malediction CoE, Scorch, Misery, uncheck "Some other guy is eating my SS"

Restoration subspec:
Only difference is 12% melee hit, 4% spell hit, uncheck Reverberation and Concussion, and drop to 20 shocks per 2 mins.

Everything else is held the same and run for 10k hours, 15 separate runs.

That's a very stupid reply to make, considering as pointed out by previous posters either spec makes no difference to raid dps. My comment about the fire totems is not silly at all, as of now our totems are not included in damage reports (excluding WWS logs that can be misleading) so it is impossible to do actual in game comparisons of either spec, however as of 2.4 when totems are included in our damage it is quite likly that a raiding shaman will see a decent increase in dps by speccing into elemental compared to resto.

As for the totem range discussion, the only boss fights I'd say totem range matters on would be Illidari council and archimonde (being feared out of tremor totem range). Pre-T6 stuff you got Vashj and thats about it, Ignoring trash cause its not important. Generally speaking you're in a group of 5 melee, if the dps target moves then the whole group would move and you would just redrop totems on the way.

Only 3 seconds, actually, for group DPS. Strength of Earth and Grace of Air/Windfury totems are the only ones that increase your groups DPS. You can very easily add those in in between shock timers.

Definitely not; the main benefits from going Elemental come from 20% faster shocks and 15% increased totem damage. 3% extra shock damage isn't worth much -- at 15% damage from shocks, adding 3% shock damage is a .045% increase in overall DPS.

This raises the question of what to put the 3 points into, and from my pov I don't think theres anything else worthwhile. A small increase is a increase none the less, and it's definitly the "optimal" use of leftover points.

On Yo's sim, elem subspec (15/45/0+1) comes out ahead of 3/45/13 if you don't need the totem range. Unless the 3/45/13 allows you to twist where 15/45/0+1 does not. Then it's a no-brainer.

So does 15/45/0+1 allow for twisting in terms of mana sustainability and GCD management?

Dropping two totems per move is quite possible inside a 10/5 shock cycle -- you have 2 totems (STR and wind) for 3s of time which fits fine. When you close to shock distance, use your shock, drop SoE, you should be in SS range so use that, then drop the wind totem.

Twisting, however, is impossible while maintaining DPS within an Enh/Elem spec...you'll have to slip on your SS/shock cycle fairly often, and since almost all of the gains of this spec come from increased shock count you'll be doing less DPS while burning more mana.

If you consider twisting to be your primary role in groups (and some raids do expect this), Elemental is NOT an option. And twisting does improve raid DPS.

One more thing to think about: are you often in hunter groups? Hunters tend to stay more than 20 feet back from the fight; if you are Enh/Elemental, you'll need to run 10 feet toward the hunters and back to the boss every 2 minutes which will gimp the hell out of your DPS time. Better to stay Enh/Resto in this case.

From experience I would say twisting while having a elemental offspec would be a waste of points, not because of mana but because the whole point of the elem offspec is the reduced shock CD which would be totally killed by the GCD spam.

Regarding T6 fights where I greatly appreciate the increased totem range, the main one that comes to mind is Illidari Council. Even with 30 yard range on totems I still occasionally (1-2 times per fight on average) have to redrop my totems because of poor AoE placement, and the uptime of every totem is important in that fight (both resist totems and strength of earth; I don't consider wf/goa because I twist). Nothing else really comes to mind, though. It's obviously useful for Hyjal trash but I tend to redrop totems during Hyjal trash frequently regardless.

There is no way to twist ON the WF cooldown and maintain a 10/5 cycle.

There's a nice combo if you're willing to slip a little (.5 to 1s) on the WF cooldown -- WF+wind+FS+SS+ES, repeat -- but the mana utilization will kick your ass. I tried it the other night and couldn't sustain it for more than a minute; I would only suggest is for folks who use twisting situationally (such as twisting tranquil to keep aggro down at the beginning of a fight).

Random Thought: Rather than suggest various builds, run them through the sim, and then say "this one is better", maybe we (by we I mean you guys, because I'm not much of an Enh TC type) use the base stats (0/45/0) then add single points, and run the sim again.

This way we'd be able to have a "This talent is worth X dps per point for our base stats/build." Then we can solve a concussion + reverb + nature's guidance + call of flame equation to find the highest dps gain. It could quite possibly come back to the 3/45/13 build, but there would be more "proof" for it than random selection & testing.

Test examples on top of the standard 45 Enh points:
1-5 Concussion
5 Concussion, 5 filler points (as CoF is calculated seperately)
5 Concussion, 1-5 Reverberation
1-3 Nature's guidance (with 10 filler points)

So it sounds like 3/45/13 for twisters, 15/45/0+1 for non-twisters unless you need/want the extra totem range. Then it's 2/45/14.

Something else worth noting. On hit trinkets like DST and Madness of the Betrayer are bringing 3/45/13 within 2 DPS of 15/45/0+1 (comparing both specs using both DST and Madness simultaneously).

Bink makes a good point, probably a good way to look at it if someone has the time to run those.

The thing is, if you're in a hunter group, then your raid doesn't care about optimum dps anyway, so you probably don't need to worry about moving around. And the hunters should be moving up to be in range of your totem. (As GoA and Mana Spring are the only buffs you give hunters... )

Not entirely true, you could be putting a 2nd enhance shaman into a hybrid tank/hunter group like warrior/feral(or 2nd warrior)/hunterx2/shaman, or Feral/hunterx3/shaman. Depends on the raid makeup.

T5 - Fathom-Lord Karathress, you move a lot.

T6 - Illidari Council, depends what you are set to, but in general you have to move some. Illidan, he is moved a lot by the MT. So are p2 elementals.

Edit: Removed Malan's already mentioned bosses.

Yah but with FLK 10 yards doesn't matter, you're going to drop totems at each of the mobs and thats it. There's no way to position them such that 10 yards would cover 2 of the mobs.

It is quite simple to simulate a 5% gain and divide the results by 5. One for each point.

See above. + from reverberation/5. Not that this matters, since you'll only be in harmony with the Stormstrike cycle if you go to 5/5.

I'm all for using theory when theorycrafting. Going straight to the simulator is easy, but requires you make assumptions about the simulator. I posted the other day on the issue of a 10s/6s SS/shock cycle resulting in a necessary lag of each of these due to the GCD -- and I am pretty that Yo's simulator doesn't model the GCD. Without this, the numbers on resto specs will be inflated slightly but significantly (I predicted about 1%).

WWS will merge your fire totems provided you're the only one dropping them. For the sake of testing specs, ask others not to. Recount et al are a bad tools for theorycrafting anyway. Can't dispute a screenshot of a graph.

Finally: don't waste your time testing on Blasted Land Mobs, they can't be missed. Nature's Guidance is wasted on them.

You don't really need damage per talent point as much as you need damage per talent. Running with and without (eg) concussion would probably give you enough information to make the more informed comparisons Bink is talking about. I would hope that the changes are linear enough that you can just divide the dps gains by the talent point investment and come up with a rough guide. Since you're only using it to compare talents to each other the absolute precision doesn't matter so much unless two mutually competing talents have comparable gains.

If we cannot specify points in a talent, then we can't test the partial concussion builds. It should be simple enough to change it in the Sim (I assume Yo! still lurks around these parts)

I need a mob I can hit on, for a long time, to test various specs in game.

I am considering making Nalorak that boss, as I see him twice a week.

Comments?