[Elemental] Cataclysm Discussion - Patch 4.3 - Page 25

Røb · 02/01/12, 12:21 PM

"Since the Elemental takes a snapshot of your stats at the moment it's dropped, it will gain substantially from all your procs being up at once."

Does this work with searing/magma totem as well?

Harne · 02/01/12, 1:18 PM

No, those totems update on every shot/pulse with whatever stats you currently have. They are also affected by buffs you gain that don't help the Elemental at all (Concentration on heroic Majordomo, for example).

CummingsSM · 02/05/12, 2:09 PM

Originally Posted by Mahoraba

Doing 'fine' is a delicate way of saying you're not going to beat out the classes that can use an instant cast AoE spells see: Arcane Explosion. I attempted using Earthquake a few weeks just to see how well it worked out and it just didn't work out at all, it only procs spellweave on the initial cast. Chain Lightning even though not the best it did much better as long as you don't target the blood in the front of the pack (every one targets that one, it dies way too fast) target the blood in the backish and you'll be able to CL without having to swap a target.

On the Green (Ysera) platform if you stand on the far left of the platform you will be in range of both arm tentacles, this lets you Dual-Flame shock for more then just when the Mutated Tentacle is up. (Note: I found trying to keep up three Flame shocks was a loss of DPS because of all the target swapping to do so, not to mention the camera spinning)

Thanks for the CL tip - I was trying to tell whether EQ was worth casting there at all and I suspected it wasn't but couldn't really tell. I would find it very useful if there were a place to collect information like this about what people are doing to deal with specific mechanics. I feel like I'm starting to fall to the back of the pack as we get into heroic progression.

I can comfortably maintain 2-3 Flame Shocks and it sometimes seems possible to get 4, but then it really starts to interfere with fulmination procs for me. My personal sweet spot seems to be 3, while prioritizing the 3rd FS lower than maintaining my normal rotation.

Originally Posted by Harne

No, those totems update on every shot/pulse with whatever stats you currently have. They are also affected by buffs you gain that don't help the Elemental at all (Concentration on heroic Majordomo, for example).

The elemental belongs to the totem, you cast the spell to create the totem and then the totem casts the spell to create the elemental. So it would appear to me that all of the totems behave consistently in parsing your character stats when they cast their internal spells, but the spell that summons the fire elemental is obviously only cast once.

Shaamah · 02/12/12, 7:52 AM

very simple question, can't seem to find an answer. Lvb>7-9stack fulm, but in the rare occurrence we reach 4-5 seconds remaining on flameshock, with LvB coming off CD that same second, what should we do?

1. Fulm so that FS can be refreshed in time and no LS stacks are wasted but possibly lose 1 lavaburst by missing a surge proc.

2. Lavaburst and lightning bolt spam until FS needs to be refreshed so that we miss 0 lavasurges and keep a 100% uptime on FS - but lose many lightning shield charges.

3. Lavaburst and then fulm at ~3 (or less with lucky surges) seconds left on FS so we get the lavaburst, get the 9 stack fulm but lose 2-4 seconds on flameshock uptime and possibly more lavabursts as a result.

ultrajustin · 02/16/12, 8:39 PM

This spec gives more dps than the simulationcraft one, and far more mitigation to boot. I've simmed my own character, and the bis profiles for a moderate gain.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

PS to the following posts: simulationcraft = maximum dps on paper. Opinions will vary on usefulness, enjoy.

Canith · 02/21/12, 5:56 PM

What is your definition of 'moderate' dps gain? I used your spec and simmed myself, and it was only a 200dps increase. Also, i am somewhat peturbed at the skipping of the improved shields. I can understand it to a degree seeing as it only makes up about 7 % of your dps, but all you seem to gain is Fire/Earth ele and searing time as a tradeoff of 15% of fulmination's damage.

• Jessamy · 02/21/12, 6:27 PM

Worse than that is the loss of Ancestral Swiftness with that spec. On paper 3 extra points to dump in Ancestral Resolve or Spark of Life seems like a survivability gain. But aside from Ultraxion, being able to move out of fire 15% faster is more significant in practice.

Shaamah · 02/25/12, 12:58 PM

In my experience the fire ele spec is situational and also quite gear dependent. I was seeing a simmed dps gain of almost 1500 at one point while gearing this tier but the benefits are much smaller now. You will have to sim your own gear and decide if you feel it is worth it because there are some quality of life issues with the spec.

1. If you are wiping quickly and rerunning, 1/2 of your progress attempts will have you doing garbage dps without the elem - pretty frustrating.

2. 15% movement speed is as Jessamy says far better than it looks for surviving and positioning yourself well to dps effectively.

♦ masanbol · 02/25/12, 2:03 PM

The only fight I would consider that spec on is Ultraxion, which is also the only fight I switch out Unleashed Lightning for the FE glyph. Sims I ran on my own gear showed a ~150DPS gain on a Patchwerk fight, which would suggest to me that the QoL issues Jessamy and Shaamah mentioned would likely burn up that tiny gain on any fight where you were not standing still.

Fukurou · 03/06/12, 8:03 PM

Originally Posted by Jessamy

Rolling Thunder and Elemental Overload have a lower chance to proc per target for Chain Lightning than for Lightning Bolt. If you have adds to bounce to and gain more proc chances from, then yes CL does more damage to your main target than LB does.

I was confused that Jessamy mentioned Rolling Thunder in this case both in this thread and in Simple questions, because the wording of the talent seems to be exact about 60% chance for both LB and CL. So I decided to run some tests on a target dummy. Here are the results:

Spell name	# of casts	Overloads	Rolling Thunder	Rolling Thunder %
CL	40	2	26	62%
CL	40	6	32	69%
CL	40	4	30	68%
CL	40	5	29	64%
CL	40	10	34	68%

Total	200	27	151	66%

LB	40	17	37	65%
LB	40	11	34	66%
LB	40	16	31	55%
LB	40	12	31	60%
LB	40	16	35	62%

Total	200	72	168	62%

Each row represents separate attempt. In each attempt I casted 40 times, then checked actual number of spell hits using Recount (thus calculating number of Overloads) and then counted Rolling Thunder procs in combat log.

Judging by results CL does not have a lower chance to proc Rolling Thunder on single target. It even ended up to be higher for CL than for LB but this can probably be attributed to RNG.
Chance to proc an Overload is indeed noticeably lower.

This should not change the overall conclusion about LB vs CL but I was curious about reasoning.

Binkenstein · 03/06/12, 9:48 PM

Not sure where the RT information came from, it's only ever been overload that had a reduced proc count.