vokzhen

Hey all, I've heard a lot of talk about wind serpents as pets for hunters with high crit ratings. However, I have yet to see anything brought up about the way wind serpents will interact with Stormstrike and elemental shammies. Specifically, how much extra damage a wind serpent will need over a ravager in order to make up for the loss of raid DPS suffered by the shammies (especially elemental) with the potential for extra charges being eaten by Lightning Breath.

(And yes, I know this might be a bit on the nitpicky side of things, but nevertheless it's still maximizing raid damage).

I know very little about the classes (at least in terms of what this question entails), but thought I'd start the discussion at least. This is what it seems to me we need:
- Average Lightning Breath damage (BM or Survival? will it make a big difference?)
- Average damage of elemental shammy cast (should it be more specific than this?)
- Chance that any one charge will be eaten by WS, Enhance, or Elemental

We probably need an archetypal character for each spec, with the relevant stats. Should T6 be the base? Sunwell? (My gut feeling is that the higher the gear, the more it will favor the shammies over the wind serpents, due to how each scales).

As I said, I don't have the knowledge to figure this out, so I figured I'd get the ball rolling.

Just to be clear, this is NOT discussing whether Elemental gets more out of Stormstrike than a Wind Serpent. Rather, does the net gain of using a WS over a ravager make up for the loss of damage from the elemental shammy?

I'll edit this post with any consensus that is reached.

EDIT:
- Removed enhancement shammy questions, as it's always better for enhance to save the debuff for elemental.
- Clarified what we're trying to figure out

 

Manito

I've had a couple shamans complain about my windserpent stealing charges from them with LB.

My Death Knight Armory
Manito's Modified Steady Macro
Separated macro that allows chained commands.

 

panny

Lightning Breath is pretty low damage compared to a Lightning Bolt or an Earth Shock. I know my Earth Shock hits for at least 1000 when raid buffed (without Stormstrike). Lightning Breath is ~100? Does the Hunter really gain all that much from a Wind Serpant? I thought the ideal pet was a wolf or owl.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Osse

Wind serpent is 60-80 dps better than ravager for survival hunter in raid situation with t6+Sunwell gear. This is with WS stealing stormstrike charges.

Checked out some old WWS logs and wind serpent vs cat dps differences on Brutallus made an average of 80 (checked out 10 long kill attempts). Both hunters have roughly equal gear and they were in same group.

 

• Philondra

My guild runs very heavy on DPS shaman (1x enhancement shaman, 2x elemental shaman), and the rule is to always let the elemental shaman use the stormstrike charges when possible. Note that the stormstrike debuff has a total of two charges and the stormstrike skill has a cooldown of 10 seconds. Lightning bolt has a base casting time of 2 seconds, meaning that, barring a nearly impossible string of unlucky resists, both charges will be completely used even if the elemental shaman is the only person/pet in the raid using nature abilities. Given that lightning bolt criticals for T6/sunwell elemental shaman can hit for around 6k if the stormstrike debuff is up, I really don't see any situation in which a hunter's wind serpent pet consuming some of the stormstrike charges over the elemental shaman would be a net benefit for the raid.

If there are no elemental shaman in the raid, then it is very likely that the wind serpent pet is fine. Generally speaking, a conscientious enhancement shaman will be using the higher DPS fire/earth shock rotation, meaning that even if he has taken the shock cooldown reduction talent, he will only be consuming a maximum of one stormstrike debuff before it would naturally fall off. Without the cooldown reduction talent, an enhancement shaman's staggered cooldown timers (10s for stormstrike, 6s for shock) mean that there will be times in the middle of the fight when none of the charges are used due to rotation quirkiness:

0s Earth shock, consuming one stormstrike charge
1.5s: Stormstrike, refreshing the buff to 2 charges
...
6s: Shock cooldown up, refresh Flame shock [2 SS left]
11.5s: Refresh stormstrike, no charges used in 10s.

Of course, since enhancement shaman have very low spell hit, it is not uncommon for a shock to be resisted, thus consuming no charges. In practice an enhancement shaman cannot consume the charges by himself, and the benefit that he gets (+20% to his ~5-7% of his damage) is not wonderful. Given that your hunter experiences a ~60-80 DPS gain by bringing a wind serpent over a ravager, it is probably best in terms of raid-wide DPS for the hunter to bring his wind serpent if there are no elemental shaman eating the stormstrike debuff.

In conclusion:
1.) If there is an elemental shaman consuming stormstrikes, hunters should not bring wind serpents if the goal is to maximize raid dps. The enhancement shaman should do his best not to consume charges with earth shock whenever possible.
2.) If there is not an elemental shaman consuming stormstrikes, hunters should bring whichever pet they and their raid leader decide is most valuable.

My question for you is: What does a wind serpent's lightning breath hit for? I never change my rotation to accomdoate hunter pets, but as my guild doesn't use wind serpents for the reasons stated above, I have no idea what lightning breath actually ends up contributing. Do you have a WWS? It would be easier to work at a model if we had some good numbers to work with.

 

◊ Shalas

At most, with one enh shaman there are two SS charges per 10 seconds to use. The elemental shaman casts a spell at least once every 2 seconds (between haste gear and CL, it should be significantly more in practice). Glancing at a few WWS logs, Wind Serpents cast LB about once every 2.5 seconds. Assuming Osse's number of 80 dps is accurate and spells are evenly distributed, the net effect is this:

# Wind Serpents	WS DPS gain	Charges used by WS per 10 seconds	Pre-SS LBolt size for equal DPS gain
1	80	.8	5000
2	160	1.375	5818
3	240	1.58	7595
4	320	1.69	9467

Assuming I made no math errors and the assumptions are accurate, using wind serpents is a net DPS gain for the raid even with an elemental shaman unless you have an ele shaman that can do 2.5k DPS without SS.

 

• Philondra

Shalas,

Thanks for whipping up the quick math on that. some refinement has to be done (such modelling lightning overload procs for the elemental shaman and figuring out what the DPS figures would look like if a given player was guaranteed 2 stormstrikes every 10s), but those preliminary results were honestly not at all what I would have expected. I am quite surprised that it is actually worth letting the windserpent eat the stormstrike charges if we want to maximize raid DPS.

One question I had (unless I am misinterpreting something) is that Osse noticed an average of ~80 dps increasing with the WS eating stormstrike charges. Osse, was there an elemental shaman in the raid, or were all the stormstrikes split between your pet and the enhance shaman? Does your enhance shaman twist totems, which very likely lowers the amount of earth shocks he casts? You also mentioned that "both hunters" had similar gear levels. Does this mean that you were comparing Hunter A's cat vs. Hunter B's wind serpent? That could introduce some error as well. Also, I was under the impressions that ravagers (basically anything with a high attack power and gore) were better for raid DPS than cats, but I have never raided on a hunter and am only going on what others have told me. Can someone please correct me? I glanced at the survival hunter thread, and the best recent statement I found was regarding 35% crit being the point where a WS starts to outdamage a ravager for a survival/Go for the Throat hunter.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just trying to understand if my long-held belief that WS pets don't have a place in a raid with an elemental shaman is wrong. I'm just looking for some context to your reported 80 DPSdps increase.

 

Atren

There are separate issues here and few key questions should be answered:

1. How much does single lightning breath do damage without SS? How much damage over 10 seconds period?
1B. What if hunter was not BM? Does that have effect on the damage?
2. How much extra damage will elemental shaman get on average? Enhance shaman?

About first, lvl 6 shows 99-113 damage channeled ability. I do not know how pets scale with hunters altough. How often does he do the damage as it says channeled, once a second?

 

Killme888

Obviously anything is better than a WS for the SS charges. But, he's saying using a WS pet(eating charge or not) is a 80 dps increase over a ravager, not that SS charges are increasing the WS's dps by 80.

 

• Philondra

Well, the issue I saw (as stated above) was that he wasn't saying that a certain hunter received an 80 DPS increase when he used a wind serpent over a ravager. He was saying that Hunter A's windserpent did more damage than Hunter B's cat, telling us that he looked over WWS attempts (no link) and that Hunter A and hunter B had "similar gear" (again, no link). That's not enough for me to just accept this ~80dps number at face value. Can someone point me to hunter tests of where windserpents stand vis-a-vis other pets when all other variables are held equal?

But you're right -- No one is saying suggesting we should hold the stormstrike charges for the wind serpents, and I didn't mean to imply that the DPS bonus is solely attributable to stormstrike.

Edited to Add:

*Here's a post dated approximately one month ago by Vasilii in the survival hunter thread detailing theoretical max survival damage (including pets): http://elitistjerks.com/679142-post1300.html

This shows the survival hunter's wind serpent doing a theoretical 231.74 DPS using no kill command. If kill command damage is attributed to the pet, then the difference between one hunter putting it in his rotation and one not would greatly skew pet DPS. The comparison we are interested in is one hunter using two different pets, not two hunters using different rotations.

Results for a similar "best of" gear set up for Beast Mastery using a wind serpent pet are shown in this post: http://elitistjerks.com/689693-post121.html

The theoretical DPS of the pet is listed as 536.20 with the first gear setup, with Special DPS 130.72 -- this special DPS is, according to the poster, both bite and lightning breath. For reference, Kill Command DPS is listed at 110.72 DPS.

Given that the beast mastery post showed a special attack DPS of 130.72, I'm having serious doubts about the accuracy of the ~80 DPS figure. Can any hunters confirm or deny this?

 

Mirranda

The error here is actually really simple, I'm surprised no one has noticed it yet.

What was stated is that Hunter A's WS did 80 DPS more than Hunter B's Cat. But that's not an actual 80 DPS increase. To answer this question, you need to see what Hunter A's WS would do DPS wise WITHOUT Stormstrike, and what it would do WITH Stormstrike.

At this point, you regraph the DPS increase and model it for the average lightning bolts as done above but with the assumption that it was an 80 DPS increase for a WS to have the Stormstrike charges rather than an 80 DPS increase with a WS over a Cat.

That's the major flaw. Please repost some data so it can be regraphed.

Pretend I typed something witty.

 

• Philondra

Thanks Mirranda,

That thought had crossed my mind, but I figured I was just reading the graph wrong (this I why I don't work with numbers for a living.) However, I decided against mentioning it, since we don't even know how what percent of the stormstrikes the WS ended up eating -- or, more accurately, what percent of lightning breaths were boosted by stormstrike. So either way, we're back to waiting for hunters to supply us with cold, hard data.

However, as I understand it, the reason that Windserpents are better has actually little to do with stormstrike debuffs -- it's that for high levels of crit, the marksmanship talent "Go for the Throat" provides so much focus regeneration that the pet effectively cannot spend it all, making the high damage, high-focus lightning breath the best focus dump ability once hunters get a lot of crit. Thus the DPS boost is only partially a factor of stormstrike and more a factor of a better focus dump skill. Unless I'm misinterpreting things again (damn numbers), why would we be modelling the WS damage assuming that it's all coming from the stormstrike?

 

Mirranda

We're not, but again, you can't figure out how much DPS would be required from the Windserpent (including him taking the SS charges) to make up the difference of the Elemental Shaman losing DPS from Stormstrike charges without knowing how much DPS the windserpent is gaining from taking the Stormstrikes.

For my raid standpoint, and purely from mine, we run 2 enhancement shamans, and myself as Elemental. As such I actually get about 65% of the Stormstrike charges (rough guess, more than 50%, less than 75%, definitely not 100%). But recently our survival hunter started bringing his WS and I noticed that significantly dropping, which at least with two enhancement shamans in the raid and me getting roughly 3/5 of my casts boosted by 20%, it's a significant dps loss for myself. Over two weeks of Brutallus kills (our first kill and this weeks kill) the first week I did 180 DPS less than I did the following week. The only two differences between those two raids was the Survival hunter in the first, and that I got 1 burn on the second, 0 on the first.

Now I'm sure there's more to it than JUST that (rng factor, etc) but it definately lowers my DPS by a large amount, which I doubt the Survival Hunter is making up (esp since he only did 1400 dps counting his pet).

I may be a biased opinion, but unless you can prove to me otherwise, I still stand behind the Elemental Shaman making a much better use of Stormstrike than a WS, and for overall raid DPS bringing a lower DPS pet (even if it's only 40-50) to boost another person's dps by a larger margin (in this case, near 180?). Perhaps it's only because we generally run 2 enh shaman.

EDIT:
As an after thought, the DPS gain from SS for a WS is probably negligable, but it was factored into the numbers posted above. The question still remains as to whether an elemental shaman losing 20% damage on X casts (where X is the number of charges lost to the WS) is made up for by the wind serpent's increase of dps over Y pet (in this case a cat?).

So, everything I said may actually have nothing to do with any of it, but I'm leaving it here incase it actually did.

Pretend I typed something witty.

 

• Binkenstein

Enhancement shaman are a waste of SS charges.
An elemental will see roughly 100dps gain from using both (a 6.7% increase)

 

• Philondra

Again, I don't think anywhere in this thread has anyone argued that an enhance shaman benefits more from the SS charges than an elemental shaman. We're trying to figure out what the interaction between elemental, stormstrike, and windserpents is in order to determine at what point a hunter can bring a windserpent into a raid with a stormstrike debuff and the raid will do greater dps than if they had brought another pet (cat, ravager).

 

Jerem

Hunters using a windserpent generally bind the serpents' lightning breath to their steady shot.
LB is instant cast, and hunters cast Steady Shot (more or less) whenever it's ready (1,5 sec GCD).

My serpent's average LB is 258 damage (without any specific buffs), in a 41/20/00 spec (Beastmaster) with Beast-Tamers shoulders (+3% pet dmg).
Letting my serpent consume Stormstrike charges will give it an additional ~50 dmg every 1,5 sec or so.
That is a ~33 DPS increase.

The serpent's LB average damage would need to be at least 3 times higher (around 7~800 dmg per hit) to benefit more than an Elemental Shaman from Stormstrike (based on Binkenstein's 100 DPS number).
Ant that is assuming the serpent will have a Stormstrike charge to consume every 1.5 sec.

I think it's pretty safe to consider an Elemental Shaman is the raid actor that makes the best use of Stormstrike charges (until a Windserpent's LB hits for an average of 800 dmg, which would require ... 3 patches back in time ?).

When I play my Shaman in Elemental, I ask our Enh. Shaman to change his shock rotation (no Earth shocks) and Rogues to use poisons that wouldn't eat the Stormstrike charges (I believe Dots achieve that). I'd ask hunters with Serpents to stop at the stable also.

 

• Binkenstein

Thusly, I posted the information I had on what stormstrike means to an elemental shaman, or in other words, what sort of damage a wind serpent would need to gain from SS to be viable.

 

KraxisSingular

I don't think anyone would argue that an Elemental Shaman benefits more per SS charge, that is plain obvious. The matter at hand is if the WS gain on DPS (over Ravager/Cat) overcomes the Ele Shammy loss of DPS from lost SS charges. So far I don't think so, and I don't think I would bring my WS if I knew an Enhancement and Elemental Shaman was coming too.

 

Osse

The 80 dps difference between pets was with 1x ele 1x ench shaman in the raid. Two wind serpents in the raid btw.

Think about it this way:

2x BM hunters gain ~80dps each compared to wind serpent. That's 160dps.

With ravagers you lose 160 raid dps but gain how ever much ele shaman gains when only he/she uses the charges.

If you raid with one hunter the answer is obvious, if you raid with two it's questionable. If you raid with three hunters using three wind serpents the answer again is obvious.

One thing to think about is stormstrike uptime in some fights and what happens if the ench shaman dies. Obviously you want to think about how things are in optimal conditions but raiding is not always that.

 

Pixen

Just thought I'd ask because I haven't seen it specifically addressed, but do the enhancement/shammy combos requesting hunters not use WS's also request rogues not use poisons? Honest question, because I could see that creating a similar problem.

 

Tazrach

One of the issues some hunters had was the lack of tamable lvl 70 Ravagers. This is no longer the case and thus if you have cause to use the WS because your crit is high enough to take advantage of the improved focus dump, you should also have a backup Ravager ready to go should raid comp dictate this.

 

• Daler

If they have an enh shaman, any rogue worth a damn will have no poison on the MH and Deadly Poison on the OH, so it's not a problem. The DoT ticks don't consume SS charges.

 

Daidalos

Just expanding on what bink posted in case people want to see the math.

LB average dmg for a ele shaman starting sunwell (fully raid buffed) would be around 2771.55 dmg(including crit) on average but this is not counting LO. LO dmg would be 1385.7

LO has a 20% procrate so every 5 LBs you can expect 1 LO so taking the average of this
5*2771.55+1*1385.7 = 15243.45 total dmg for 6 "casts"
15243.45dmg/6 hits = 2540.5 average dmg per hit

20% extra dmg = 508 additional dmg on average per SS charge

assuming 1 charge per 10s thats 508dmg/10s = 50.8dps
assuming 2 charges per 10s thats 1016dmg/10s = 101.6dps

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Pixen

I knew that Rogues should be WF MH/DP OH. Wasn't aware that DP ticks don't consume charges, so I'm sure that helps a lot. Carry on.

 

vokzhen

I was under the impression that LO was NOT just half the damage of a lightning bolt, but instead half the BASE damage but then with all the normal modifiers. In fact, iirc Bink's elemental shammy post even points out that LO has an 8% higher coefficient (I assume a remnant from pre-nerf). Or am I reading and remembering incorrectly?