Toots Hepcat

Just to play devil's advocate, Barcode, I have similar gear and put out 2300 dps on a boss last week.

It's a common misconception that hunters use macros because it's easy. Not at all -- hunters use macros because it's the best way to time their special abilities with autoshot. Not using a macro can mean hundreds of lost DPS for them.

We're not in that situation. For an Enhancement shaman, Macroing Will Always Be less DPS. Not because macros are for wimps, but because there's no inherent benefit to them and it's hard to time our variable cooldowns. For example, your macro, by virtue of interlacing two 6s cooldowns with an 8-10s cooldown, gives all three of your abilities that an 8-10s cooldown.

The only way to maximize DPS comes from firing off abilities that do the most DPS first, and saving the abilities that do less damage for when nothing else is available. And this means a priority list.

This isn't all that hard. You're already resigned to using two buttons -- your macro and Lightning Bolt. You're only one button away from doing it right.

Button 1: Lightning Bolt (Probably better DPS than chain lighting; my button uses CL on an alt press
Button 2: Stormstrike
Button 3: A cast sequence with a 6s reset, consisting of whatever 6s cooldowns you like. Most of us would use Earth Shock -> Lava Lash for max dps, since Flame Shock isn't all that great under 3.0.2

Press 1 with a 5 stack, soon as you can
Press 2 when it's up, soon as you can
Press 3 when these are down
(Else refresh something)

 

Malan

In this particular case he's saying he's ok with that. He's not trying to min-max, he just wants something that *works*, and he made that very clear in his post.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Barrar

From my understanding the ES glyph will be quite useful once Blizz corrects the cooldown issue. This could very well be a good 3rd choice. ES will still be one of our higher damage spells once we dig further into the ele tree at 80.

 

Barcode Too

So pretty much there's no way to organize your abilities via a macro to always use the highest damage ability first? That list you posted a few posts back makes sense to me, I just figured that after a few seconds into the fight the benefit of Stormstriking first would be negligible. I guess I'll just have to get used to it and stop being lazy. Once it becomes second nature it'll be as easy as using the macro anyways.

So in the x-pack it should look something like this, correct?

Provided Flame Shock is up

1.) lava burst (with 5 stacks of MW)
2.) stormstrike
3.) earthshock (or renew flame shock if its down)
4.) lava lash

 

Kaang

So, ES, SS & WF glyph at level 80, no so bad i guess. The rotation for ES not being as big of a part of the GCD will be... intersting, as it is currently bugged i hadn't really factored it in. That raises another question, with the GCD potentially being reduced to a near zero value will that change the rotation to MW (LB) if it's up> ES as soon as it's off cooldown > SS > LL > refresh totems as needed?

 

Barrar

The main reason a macro will never work to allow you to use your "highest damage" first is because MSW is a ppm so sometimes it is almost instantly ready again and other times it may take a bit. As far as lava burst goes that has not worked with MSW for quite some time. I'm not sure if you have been keeping up with the Blue posts or the rest of this thread, but it is full of great information and I highly recommend you check out at least the last 40 pages or so. Flame Shock as well currently is not worth the waste of a GCD. Current prioritization has been covered as follows:

1.LB/CL w/MSW 5 stacked
2. ES
3. SS
4. LL

Of course things can change some with your own gear, but only you can determine that with the sim.

 

Toots Hepcat

It's not apparent, but multiple simulations from players with many different sets of gear all suggest LB->SS->ES->LL is the correct priority in terms of damage output per ability. Stormstrike does a lot of damage on its own, has two chances to proc Windfury and Maelstrom Weapon, and increases the damage done by lighting or earth shock by 20%. It's pure gold.

Please read our thread, or the pocket 3.0 guide in my sig. Lava Burst isn't accelerated by MW, and probably never will be. Casting it will mean channeling the spell and reseting the swing timer. Some are considering this as a viable playstyle (called "Slam Casting," after its similarity to the warrior spell), we'll see at 75.

 

Southrncomfortjm

Edit: Toots got it first.

 

edwalter

Not quite. First, don't use flame shock. It is not the most efficient use of a GCD/Shock cooldown anymore. Second, LB = Lightning Bolt in all of the recent suggestions, not Lava Burst. Lava Burst is no longer affected by MW, so your #1 should be Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning instead.

So the priority list is:

1.) lightning bolt (if 5 stacks of MW)
2.) stormstrike
3.) earthshock
4.) lava lash

 

Rhaegal

People like castsequence macros because they're great organizational tools. As you yourself have stated, Barcode, having a castsequence macro means that you don't have to pay as much attention to what buttons you're pushing, and can focus more on avoiding boss abilities, watching health bars to see if someone is in desperate need of a spot heal, the list goes on. However, I think your question is not "What macro can I use to do the best DPS?" but "How can I organize all of my abilities in such a way that I can devote most of my attention to survival without gimping myself too badly?"

I think Toots's proposal above is spot on for you, because it's pretty much exactly what I've started doing (though instead of the castsequence macro on button 3, I still separate out my abilities by priority). If you have all of your abilities lined up in a row, in order of importance (this is the part most people don't do automatically), and every time you hit a button, all you have to do is glance down to see what the ability that's off cooldown and furthest to the left on your bar, it takes all the on-the-fly decision making out of it. You don't even have to realize what button you just hit until after you hit it (kinda like a castsequence macro), you just know that you did the right thing because everything farther to the left was on cooldown, and everything to the right wasn't as important.

1) LB/CL
2) Stormstrike
3) Earth Shock
4) Lava Lash
5) Lightning Shield or Water Shield, depending on talents

Sure, it's still not 100% perfect, but it will outperform a castsequence macro and doesn't add much mental processing time if you're busy thinking about other things, like not standing in volcanoes.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Devnex

You could probably do it in two macros fairly safely if you just wanted to turn your brain off.

Macro #1
#Showtooltip Stormstrike
/castrandom Stormstrike, Lightning Bolt
/stopcasting

Macro #2
#Showtooltip Earth Shock
/castsequence Earth Shock, Lava Lash


Personally I prefer the control you get with doing it manually but, unless I'm missing something, that should work as long as you mash macro 1 while hitting macro 2 twice every 6 seconds.

Edit: I've found throwing a stopcasting in all my LB macros stops me from resetting my swing timer with a 4 stack MW by mistake.

 

Barcode Too

Taking flameshock out of the rotation honestly makes it alot easier to focus on the fight by itself. I was just concentrating on trying to get that back up and hadn't considered the impact this new patch had on your ES crits. Again, I went from 0-70 in 3.5 days played on that triple XP so am having to learn the class for the first time. I used to be a main tank, but I had a shaman alt I got to high level before leaving the game last year so end game is all new to me on the shaman.

What kind of macros do you guys who are manually doing most everything use, if any?

 

Buffokill

I've been following the conversation here for about a month and to say the least I've completely rethought how I play and look at things.

I used the sim to test how much spellpower was needed to make the coefficient from LB beat out the CL base damage.

here is what I came up with

So somewhere between 1150 and 1200 SP we find LB beating out CL
If I don't get reamed for this I will try it again with level 80 values.

 

Skiace

I'm unclear on the functionality of /castrandom. Does it randomly cast one of the spells, but if one is on cooldown it will cast the other without any error messages? If you have 6 abilities listed and 2 are on cooldown, will it randomly cast among the remaining 4?

 

Amaxe

That's a damned good guide there. Some of it is new to me. other parts I can confirm worked by playing. Going to bookmark that one

 

Devnex

Cast randoms will not attempt to cast spells that are on cooldown.

 

Darkclaw

I currently have this macro set up for my SS button, since it's 99% the first thing I do, and it has helped me in fights where i have to find new targets fast. (I may do similar with ES)

helps to cut off some other thing you may be doing like healing etc in an emergency, or to just start combat and swap to new targets faster (for me)

 

Amaxe

You can cut the macro in half:

And it will auto acquire a new target anyway

 

Andrast

You might as well just have:

/castrandom Stormstrike, Earth Shock, Lava Lash

Just spam that endlessly. It obviously doesn't pay attention to any priority rules so is clearly less dps than doing things manually. But if you need to brain-afk on trash it can be useful. Honestly I'd expect the different between this and "precision" playing to be minimal on all but the most DPS intensive fights.

Then you can just choose to cast either Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or a heal from your MW-5.

 

Pitbuller

This should do about 99.9% from best dps. I tested sim with worst case scenario priority Lava lash > Earth shock > Stormstrike. That was only 5dps lower than best rotation. Avarage dps loss should be then 2.5dps with this macro and manually fired maelstorm casts.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Rouncer

Actually it changes once WotLK comes out and we get access to the Earth Shock glyph. Once we get that it will be ES -> MW5-LB ->SS -> LL -> LS. Since you will always want to be hitting ES the moment you can since it will have the shortest GCD so will limit hitting another attack for the shortest duration. (I played with priority orders and different glyphs for hours and that was always the most dps).


the above is only true if the Earth Shock glyph is fixed and is able to reduce the GCD by a full second. If it remains broken then more testing will be needed with an updated Sim model to determine the proper priority order and which glyphs to use


Priorities are still more effective then that macro since priorities will still cast 6 second cooldowns every 6 seconds while that macro turns both 6 second cooldowns into 8 second cooldowns.

 

Moord

Sorry to ask what may be noob question, but is there anywhere the new sim is listed as a .zip file rather than
a .rar file? < For those of us that have not paid for WinRar >. Or, alternatively, is there a way to extract the sim without buying WinRar?

Thanks

 

Andrast

This isn't correct. The castrandom macro I posted does not change both lava lash and shocks into 8 second cooldowns. If you hit the macro with SS on cooldown the macro engine will randomly choose between LL or ES.

The problem with the /castrandom macro is exactly that it randomly casts your abilities. There is no attention paid to priority. It simply randomly casts any of the listed abilities if they aren't on cooldown. But as Pitbuller said the loss in dps is fairly small.

Pitbuller stated that even using the worst priority the loss in dps is fairly small. This macro should have dps somewhere between the worst priority and the best one.

7-Zip is a free (as in libre and as in beer) and very excellent compression tool for windows. I strongly recommend it over winrar.

 

Malan

Wait, are you serious? Using the complete back-asswards rotation was only a 2.5 dps loss?

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Andrast

No, the dps loss using the back-asswards priority was 5dps. Since the /castrandom macro would on average be in the middle of that it should be around 2.5dps loss according to his numbers.