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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).