Kegsta

From Chicken Wrath of Lich King Stuff (was 'Blizzcon' thread)
We still don't know if its instant or has a cast time, but id say it's to give us a rotation option more than anything. With a cooldown its not going to be Incinerate 2.0 (i.e. similar spell with another graphic)

The improved stormstrike changes arn't really going to benifit us all that much now that enhancement shamans themselves will be putting out lightning shield nature DPS, boomkins using wrath and rogues will probably beable to use instant again. They should just make it a flat 10% and remove the charges with improved.

edit: Lava Burst has a 2 second cast time according to the enhancement thread.

 

Vernichter

If rogues use Deadly Brew and enhancement shaman use Lightning Shield and Static Shock then yes, the charge change goes largely unnoticed by elemental shaman. However, as shown in the Rogue Wotlk thread, the points in Deadly Brew are not a necessity although they are more valuable than many of their other talent options. Similarly, enhancement shaman might not be able to opt for Static Shock and Lightning Shield depending on how effectively they are able to get by with SR alone for mana regen. Given that each Lightning Shield charge or Instant Poison proc will be worth less of its own accord than a 20% gain on a Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning, it is not unreasonable to imagine that a raid with an elemental shaman would protect charges for him. A straight 10% to nature damage would be a hell of a lot easier to work with, but I'm not convinced that it is strictly better. More consistent? Yes. More interesting and engaging? No. It really depends a ton on individual raid composition and how all the numbers work out.

"Mass dispel now 10 targets (up from 5)" - Playered
"Clearly a nerf to Zul'jin bear phase -- more catering to casuals, and it sickens me." - Praetorian

 

Rhaegal

I've been reading reports that Lava Burst has a 2 second cast time. That makes it completely useless for enhancement shaman to cast. With that in mind, I have a minor suggestion for an elemental rotation that I mentioned in the enhance thread, but want to run by my elemental counterparts.

9.5 sec rotation:
CL/LiB/LiB/LiB/LaB

The reason I suggest the 9.5 second rotation is a vague attempt at maximizing rDPS. Most enhancement shaman will likely be going with an elemental subspec in WotLK if things remain more or less as they currently stand (spell and physical crit rating merge, and Elemental Devastation in the first tier), which means we'll be using 10-second shock rotations as the norm instead of 12. Allowing Flame Shock to tick to the third of four ticks (the enhance would refresh it before the fourth tick anyway) before consuming it would allow for higher rDPS potential on long fights. Of course, this won't be perfect, because enhancement shamans will no longer be able to have perfect 10-second cycles due to 8-second Stormstrike, but it might work. Thoughts?

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Graze

That is great news indeed and your ideas sounds solid, however the timing required to always consume the shock feels like you're more likely to succeed in having a 100% critt rate on LaB than optimizing the Flame Shock ticking.

I'm a shaman, a conduit of the ancient forces of nature. A master of the elements, except fire, water or earth really... nor do I have any REAL control of nature. But I do hurl bolts of lightning!

 

Rhaegal

Yeah, Flame Shock ticking out is going to get out of cycle a little by nature of the 8 second SS and 10 second shock rotation. However, FS should always be up for an elemental shaman to consume, and if it gets to the point where the elemental shaman consumes it before the second shock in the rotation, we'd just Flame Shock twice in a row. It wouldn't actually be a significant DPS loss for the enhancement shaman for the elementals to keep eating up our FS, and would absolutely be a boost to rDPS without restricting your range to 20 yards.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Darian_TruBlade

I think it's dangerous to assume that Lava Burst can consume another Shaman's Flame Shock. The closest thing in the game currently is Conflagrate, which won't consume another Warlock's Immolate.

I'm fairly certain, therefore, that we'll have to rely on our own Flame Shocks for our DPS rotations. The rotation there would be FS/CL/LiB/LiB/LaB without haste, in order to get 3/4 Flame Shock ticks.

There may actually be a strange limbo as one get small bits of haste where replacing the CL with a LiB could be more damage simply because the extra .5 seconds of casting time will tighten the rotation.

 

tufy

That's crazy, cuz if the numbers above are correct, that spell's gonna crit for over 6k with base talents alone at 2000 +dmg, which is over 30% more than compareable Lightning Bolt. Well, I guess that would explain 8s cooldown :p

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

 

Pitbuller

Any rotation must be longer than lava burst cd + cast time. So 10s without haste.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

guldburkan

With the new Storm, Earth and Fire talent (increases the periodical damage of lame shock) and the Lava Flow talent(increases Flame Shock damage), there's a quite substantial boost to Flame Shock's dps. Maybe we're meant to eat our own Flame Shock with Lava Burst and not another shamans? This would also make it easier to make good rotations I believe.

Edit: Also, if the cast time of Lava Burst is 2 seconds (this was mentioned somewhere) the effective cooldown would be 10 seconds, letting Flame Shock tick 3 times before Lava Burst eats the last tick.

 

Rhaegal

I'm not actually convinced. There's a subtle difference between the wording for Conflagrate and the current wording of Lava Burst.

Conflag: "Ignites a target that is already afflicted by your Immolate, dealing 579 to 721 Fire damage and consuming the Immolate spell."

Lava Burst: "If Flame Shock is on the target, Lava Burst will consume the Flame Shock, causing Lava Burst to critically hit."

It's entirely possible that they just neglected to specify whose Flame Shock, whereas they do explicitly state it for Immolate/Conflag, but that wouldn't make sense if Blizzard is truly trying to improve the synergy between Elemental and Enhancement shamans, as seems to be the case with the new Improved Stormstrike Talent.

Also, yeah, sorry for the silly mistake on the rotation. That completely changes the rotation question: Is it better to drop CL from the max-DPS rotation entirely, in favor of a 4LiB/LaB rotation, or squeeze it into an 11.5sec CL/4LiB/LaB rotation that completely screws up the Flame Shock tick cycle, assuming you can use someone else's? It sounds like if you can't use someone else's, the optimum will end up being FS/CL/3LiB/LaB.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Darian_TruBlade

Ack. Forgot about the cooldown.

Thus, the prospective rotation is FS/CB/LiB/LiB/LiB/LaB. Without haste you'd be casting LaB 1 second after its CD was over. 12% haste would tighten that rotation, anything more and you'd have to start substituting LB or just deal with waiting for the cooldown to cast LaB.

The only problem as I see it is flight time. If Lava Burst isn't an instant hit like Smite, you have a high risk of consuming the Flame Shock cast immediately afterwards.

Well these are Alpha tooltips we're dealing with. The wording isn't very clear either way.

I'm not convinced that this is really greater Enhancement synergy. Only truly selfless Enhancement Shaman are going to be thrilled with the prospect of passing up their own debuff so we can eat into their DPS for our own. Additionally, Static Shock will be eating up more of their own charges as well. If anything, we'll be fighting Boomkin and Assassination Rogues for the scraps.

 

Pitbuller

15% passive haste and CL/LiB/LiB/LiB/LiB/LaB is perfect 10s rotation.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Rhaegal

Easily fixed by switching CL and FS in the rotation. You'd lose one tick of Flame Shock in the process, but that's better than losing all of them.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

PSGarak

If Lava Burst can consume Flame Shocks other than your own, then it has to be able to decide which one to remove. If you have one it should go for that, but if you don't have one up and there are two to choose from the logic could range from very suboptimal to very complicated. If it isn't already, I expect it to only work on your own Flame Shock. And if it isn't, I expect it to see that bug again from the one time Conflagrate would remove all Immolates.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Phlis

Anyone else getting a "Forbidden" message on yarr's talent calc? I am, so I made this from other posts on the site

WotlK Talents

References:
Shamans: 51 point talents and other stuff.

The build I'm looking at is basically this:
War Tools :: Talent tree WotLK - Test

With that point in Elemental Oath as essentially Filler. Lava Burst does look really really good. And with the Flame Shock improving talents, it looks like Flame Shock should be entering our rotations for as long as we can sustain it.

Flame Shock will be 588 before spell damage, scaling at 1.42 with spell damage.
Lava Burst(LvB) will be at 1188 avg before spell damage scaling at 1.57, same as chain lightning if it's a 2 second cast.

I think rotations will need to rotate around CL and LvB, For Example, here's 30 seconds of twisting both with no haste

0 FS
1.5 CL
3.0 LB
5.0 LB
7.0 LB
9.0 CL
10.5 LvB
12.5 FS
14.0 LB
16.0 CL
17.5 LB
19.5 LB
21.5 LvB
23.5 CL
25.0 FS
26.5 LB
28.5 LB
30.5 CL
32.0 LvB

Edit:
Basically in order of importance: if CL is off cooldown, cast that, else if LvB is off cooldown, cast that, then get a flame shock up, else LB to fill in the gaps.

 

Darian_TruBlade

His "unlimited bandwidth" host killed his page in the middle of the night due to the traffic. Until Yarr can find new hosting his calcs will be down.

 

madrix

Lava Flow: Increase the amount of spell damage gained while having flametongue weapon equipped by 5%/10%/15% and increases the damage done by your flame shock and lava burst by 4%/8%/12%.

Does anyone else read this as flametongue giving +spellpower and this talent increasing the amount of +spellpower this gives? At first i thought it was increasing the dmg done by it but reading it again, that just does not seem to be right. If it does give additional +spellpower, would the totem as well give that kind of benefit? Could be interesting though would make ToW less useful then it already is (which is not much).

 

Graze

I read this as : "When you have Flametounge active, (not the the totem), your bonus damage is increased by 15%" Making it like 300 +dmg. at 2000 +dmg (sounds like a reasonable amount at level 80??) instead of an Oil which could be like 50 +dmg?

I'm a shaman, a conduit of the ancient forces of nature. A master of the elements, except fire, water or earth really... nor do I have any REAL control of nature. But I do hurl bolts of lightning!

 

• Chicken

Oddly despite that talent all versions of the Flametongue Weapon spell I've seen in the new build are like the live versions.

That can mean that the Shaman revising is still going on (Which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, the spell data for the new healing weapon buff is currently quite buggy), or it can mean the effect of the talent is different than what you might expect.

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

 

madrix

That's how i read it as well at first but for the gained part in the talent, insinuating that it already was giving some bonus to sepll dmg.

 

tufy

Yarr had too much traffic, so host killed it. Unleashed Gaming (your link), though, kills all wotlk trees "On request of Blizzard, all trees based on Alpha information have been (or will soon be) removed." (stated in banner)

I read this as "if you have flametongue on your weapon, you gain additional bonus to your total +dmg", because it is "spelldamage gained while having flametongue equipped", not "spelldamage gained from flametongue increased". Totem is an interesting question indeed. Flametongue down = about 300 +dmg for each member, which would kick the living shit out of ToW. However, I believe it's simply worded wrongly and it's only the shaman's +dmg being boosted (hence totem doesn't have such an effect on anyone else). Imo, of course.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

 

Kopalec

Could ToW's usefulness be helped by the change in having rating merged for melee and casters? Say in 10 man raid with no Enh Shaman, put the Elem Shaman with the melee group?

 

madrix

Interesting idea, had not thought about that but yes it would be adding 3% crit and hit to melee. Could be interesting with the classes that are not hit capped.