lizard

why did you take reverberation and elemental focus over iproved shields and static shock?



P.S.: dear god, please make the devs realize that maelstrom weapon might reset the swing CD and fix it....

 

Raut

Because you want to push out as many shocks as you possibly can given the above scenario. I'm not sure how Static Shock will work and how long the iCD is. But yeah, those are pretty much the first talents to go if Static Shock is any good. Imp Shields will probably suck either way. 15% more on something that does maybe 2-5% of your total damage.

Baby, you can hold my balls.

13:17 < Kalroth> gays on men tv? I love that channel

 

◊ Malan

They're confirmed but were not yet implemented in the Alpha.

And for the obvious questions that will be coming:

The following things were not implemented for testing: Spirit Wolves, Static Shock, Maelstrom Weapon
Things that were bugged: The Int to AP talent was apparently adding Intellect directly to weapon damage.

I told a CM and posted a suggestion as well that the Maelstrom Weapon definitely needs to not reset the swing timer. I'm told its being looked into. I also made a note that SR is extremely unpredictable because of the 15 second window, I'm told that is also being looked into.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Pronk

So with the new talents, does this mean that the only reason to sub resto is if you want less interruptable off-healing spells and 10 more yards of totem range?

It appears that with the change to +hit and +crit affecting both melee and spells that elemental devistation is going to have a substantial uptime.

It also sounds like, with the new talent "maelstrom weapon" that we're probably going to want a slow WF MH and a fast OH (not sure what weapon's buff on the OH yet) to try and proc the free cast of lava burst to get the free spell crit and the additional 9% more to crit melee and spells.

I'm sort of getting the feeling that our relative (to other dps classes) "trash" dps might decrease while our "long boss fight" dps will increase, because of the stacking effect of our rotations.

It looks like pvp got a lot of love too. It's too bad we'll have to respec if we want to pvp, even if we're respecing from enchance to pvp with enhance.

 

Raut

You only need 5 crits in 8-10 seconds to fuel Mael. That is highly doable and you can probably let ElemDev fall off for a sec or two to allow a slow OH. Your crit will be high as you are running around with ElemDev up pretty much constantly.

Baby, you can hold my balls.

13:17 < Kalroth> gays on men tv? I love that channel

 

Toastradamus

This seems to be the way Blizzard is trying to go with talents: each tree brings its own flavor to the class, and each tree has a valid pve and pvp spec, but they take different talents. I assume the plan is for people to make a pvp and pve spec (or raid pve/solo pve, or whatever) for whichever of their classes' trees they like most and switch between them depending on what they're doing using the dual talent specs thing however that ends up being implemented

 

lizard

i did some simple (and quite obvious) number crunching on static shock vs. reverberation:

concidering that your shocks without reverb will make a contribution of about 20% to your ovrall dps (a realistic value after hit and crit rating changes i guess), your overall dps increase from reverb will be somewhere close to 4%.

based upon a flat 6% proc chance without icd and over 100 damaging attacks and spells per minute, you will very likely get about one proc every 10 seconds. thus, if the damage it will cause on a proc is greater than 40% of your total dps, it will outperform reverb dps-wise.

of course, this equation only holds if you will be able to keep elemental devastation running 100% with molten blast (assuming that maelstrom works correctly) and if you won't get in mana trouble because of the lack of a water shield and elem focus.

concidering todays 1500ish dps values and 700ish lightning shield procs in raid situations (without imp. shield talent), the talent might really be worth its points. on the downside you will likely have heavy mana problems with a molten blast rotation without elem focus and water shield.

€dit: damn you, orthography!!

 

Rounced

Although with the change to hit and crit rating you will probably want to go slow/fast with wf/flametongue anyway. From what I could test in the alpha they were the exact same dps and that was before you got the 20% haste from the new windfury totem which gives a substantial advantage to the flametongue/fast offhand since it doesn't have to work around the WF 3 second cooldown as well as being able to keep flametongue totem down at the same time to boost spell damage.

 

◊ Malan

We really need Yo to update the sim for beta talents at this point.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

• Chicken

In regards to mana worries, you can basically assume 75% Judgement of Wisdom up-time if you have at least a Holy Paladin with you, and 100% Judgement of Wisdom up-time if you have a Protection or Retribution Paladin. While that doesn't really help for solo or 5-man concerns, it's pretty good news for raiding.

And obviously you won't be totem twisting any more. I don't think that even with the increased mana costs on spells in WotLK you'll have many mana issues.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Rounced

actually we need separate sims - one for WoLK and one for current game till WoLK is released.

wonder if someone could get a rawr to work for WoLK enhancement shaman

 

◊ Malan

Those were placeholders, they aren't the real mana costs of the spells.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Pronk

Since we're just theory crafting / brain storming, I wonder how good Feral Spirit is. I wonder if it would be worth going 21/50/0 to get more damage on your spell crits. I suppose it's going to break down to what percentage of your overall damage your spells are. The thing is, with the change to +hit and +crit, it may be worth it to get extra damage out of your 5s Shocks and (hopefully) 8s Lava Bursts.

The opportunity cost of going 21 points into Elem is, it looks like you end up with 1/2 in Improved Weapons Totems, 4/5 in Weapon Mastery (for only 8% additional damage from weapons) and no Static Shock. This does solve the mana problems since you'll be running with Water Shield and can have both Shamanistic Focus (-60% spell cost) and Elemental Focus (-40% spell cost X 2). I just don't know if it would be an increase in overall damage.

I'm not trying to say that we focus away from melee stats. I'm thinking more along the lines of this as a supplement to our damage.

 

lizard

this is an interesting point tbh. assuming that your ratio of melee dmg to spall dmg might be somewhere around 70% - 30% or even 60% - 40% with a fast flametongue offhand (while i do not know for sure if flametongue benefits from elemental fury), trading 2% of your melee dps for roughly 25% * <your spell crit chance> * <your crittable spell dps in %> might even be worth a try.

at 65% melee and 30% crittable spell dps, assuming a 25% spell crit chance you would lose 1.3% dps from weapon mastery and win 1.875% spell dps, resulting in a 0.575% overall dps increase.

however, i would estimate that the spirit wolves' dps will more than make up for that. with a theoretical uptime of 37.5%, they only have to do 1.533% of your dps while active. at 2k shaman dps that would be a lousy 30 dps from the wolves. while i am not a fan of summoned creatures (rock elemental, anyone?), ido sincerely believe, that the wolves will perform a little better than that ^^

 

berg

The +3 hit from resto row 3 is gone and replaced with something more useful to resto shaman. I think it is hard to imagine any enhancement build that uses resto as secondary.


It seems unlikely to me that Maelstrom weapon is a meaningful dps increase over the old weapon specialization but I support the change wholeheartedly. It will be very nice to finally make decisions during the shaman damage cycle.

Malan if you have the ear of the devs keep turning the screws on the swing timer that is an enormous issue that probably seems trivial to anyone not deeply familiar with the class. Also I think it is important to comment on the layout of our tree. We have too many rows that you cannot escape without investing 6-8 points. It will be quite difficult to escape the enhancement tree without spending 56+ points even if the spirit wolves wind up being a non-factor.

I would also love to see some kind of synergy between maelstrom weapon and static shock. Maybe make the charges increase the chance for it to proc or some such. Static shock as it currently stands seems second rate.

 

• gunsmithx

Maybe I'm misremembering but didn't someone work out that with our timers 4/5 reverb was ended up working the same as 5/5?

 

Killme888

Personally I think this is the way to spec for max dps come WotLK.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I really don't see the point of getting elemental focus with twisting gone and how you're ever gonna run out of mana, especially with a ret pally.

Edit:

Actually, just noticed that holy paladins will want to be judging also for 10% haste, so you'll pretty much get JoW/JoL no matter what as long as you have 2 pallies.

Edit 2:

Prot pallies' judgement has a thunderclap effect, so yea, any two pallies.

 

Skreekins

I'm going to have to agree with you there, though I wish there was some way to take improved shields and improved ghost wolf (not necessary for raiding, but I've gotten so used to having it).

One thought is that it might be worth only going 4/5 reverberation to drop that extra point in elemental focus. If we do end up having some mana issues, .2 more seconds on our shock cooldown would probably not impact our DPS that significantly and would allow us to have the clearcasting effect to hopefully soften the blow to our mana pools by refreshing lightning shield and lava burst.

 

◊ Malan

I can confirm that Windfury Totem (haste) and Windfury Weapon (extra attacks) stack.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Beowolf

Some potential SS/Shock macros could be:

Shocks at 5 seconds:

Stormstrike (0 seconds)
Flame Shock (1.5 seconds)
Earth Shock (6.5 seconds)
Stormstrike (8 seconds)
Flame Shock (11.5 seconds)
---------------------------------
Stormstrike (16 seconds)
Flame Shock( 17.5 seconds) 'loss of 1 second due to GCD'
Earth Shock (22.5 seconds)
Stormstrike (24 seconds)
Flame Shock (27.5 seconds)
---------------------------------
Stormstrike (32 seconds)
etc etc

Essentially a 2 shock -> 1 shock+ Lava burst rotation. The question is, would it be better to hold off on that 4th Flame shock or cast it before the 3rd Stormstrike? Is there any way to model this? It might actually end up that the best overall allocation of talents would be to put ONE point in improved SS and use that additional point to finish off Call of Flame!

With 9 second stormstrikes:

Stormstrike (0 seconds)
Flame Shock (1.5 seconds)
Earth Shock (6.5 seconds)
Stormstrike (9 seconds)
Flame Shock (11.5 seconds)
Earthshock (16.5 seconds)
---------------------------------
Stormstrike (18 seconds)
Flame Shock( 21.5 seconds)
Earth Shock (26.5 seconds)
Stormstrike (28 seconds) 'loss of 1 second on SS'
Flame Shock (31.5 seconds)
Stormstrike (36 seconds)
----------------------------------
etc etc

This gives us a 2 - 2 - 2 - 1 order that can be continued indefinitely.

Then again, it might just be simpler overall to do one flame shock per SS, and throw out a lava burst whenever we have 5 stacks. That way there is no loss for timers for other things. We really need a simulator to help us figure this out :P

 

berg

One would hope that the days of a static rotation such as listed above are behind us.

As long as maelstrom weapon proves to be viable it would seem that achieving 5 charges would provide a hefty impetus to choose and perform your instant spell at the first available moment. We would then dynamically repair our cycles accordingly.

 

SpottedCowz

I'm hoping things are actually relatively static. A dynamic rotation can allow you to eek out a few extra points of dps (I do it now in my twisting. I sneak in an extra couple shocks a minute rather than just going 1 shock/10sec), and it does separate the skilled from the nubs, but it also causes a bigger fluctuation in the dps range. Our dps range fluctuates enough off of WF alone, I don't think we need to hope and pray for more fluctuation...

 

Malakitoo

There are some people posting on the WoW boards that windfury totem and bloodlust do not stack, is there any way you could confirm this one way or another?

 

• Toots Hepcat

I will not be signing up for the beta. But I would love to leech data off those of you who have.

Few things I'm wondering about:
- Spell co-efficients
- Does the instant-cast generated by Maelstrom reset the swing timer? (My guess would be yes)
- Searing Totem vs. Flametongue Weapon
- ANY reason to take Spirit Wolves outside of PvP?

A clever idea, poorly analyzed, is cloaked stupidity.