To change the topic from talking about Monkey Nuts, I noticed something interesting in that Blue post on warriors and I believe it is what has been incorporated into Maelstrom Weapon in the latest patch.
Slam – We’re working to change this ability to suspend the swing timer when you are using the ability. In other words, if you’re .5 sec away from swinging your weapon when you start using Slam you’ll be .5 sec from swinging your weapon after Slam goes off.
Currently it definitely is not resetting your swing timer to use a fully stacked Maelstrom Weapon but I think it is more involved then that. From what I was observing (and I will try to do more testing on it later) it seems like whenever you have a stack of Maelstrom it suspends your swing timer during a cast instead of resetting it.
What would that mean? Well, it could make it so that it would be worth casting Lava Burst with only a 4 stack if that's how the timing worked out to get the cooldown started all over again.
One other thing. I was playing with the Targeting Dummies in Dalaran and at level 77 using the Mace from the new Ring of Blood (2.8 speed 111dps) mainhand and the Najentus Axe offhand (2.6 100dps) I was able to hit 2.6-2.7k dps without searing totem or the Feral Spirits and sustain it indefinitely, while using Lightning Shield, since I was able to make it to the next SR timer before running OOM. Swapping in a level 77 dagger (111dps 1.5speed) and using Flametongue had me at 2.5-2.6k dps (dagger isn't enchanted though).
Having a 5 stack up with the slow/slow for each Lava Burst timer seemed to work very well. When using the fast offhand I would have that stack up much faster then the cooldown and then was stuck either waiting for Lava Burst to come back up or using the stack for a Lightning Bolt and then waiting on the Lava Burst till I had another 5 stack up.
Using that extra bolt did start to run me into mana issues though where I was going oom a bit before SR was up again.
This also didn't involve any need to re-drop totems which would be a serious mana drain on any encounter involving movement.
From what I could tell Elemental Focus should be part of any Enhancement Build since that is the only reason I think I was able to sustain any of those rotations without any external sources of mana return (and without using Water Shield).
As for Static Shock....I'm not that impressed with it anymore. I kept Lightning Shield up the whole time and I was using the 20% increased damage to Lightning Shield orbs Glyph and according to Recount it was doing damage roughly equal to my Flame Shock DoT ticks (not the initial damage, just the DoT ticks). Which is significant enough to make it hard not to spec the 3 points but at the same time doesn't make me happy about it.
Concerning target dummies soon there will be level 80 and boss level dummies instead lvl 1. That should make things far easier to check out
My point wasn't about the damage level it was about the sustainability of the rotations and comparing a fast offhand to a slow one as well as pointing out what I saw as a serious lack with Static Shock.
Going after that Dummy was the same as going after Dr Boom as a caster. You can't compare the dps to what you would have against a boss but you can compare gear choices and rotation possibilities.
You are doing it wrong. If you are only invited into raids now because you have a Bloodlust button, something is clearly not right.
If you had bothered to read both comments A and B you would see that they are linked by the phrase "This doesn't take into account Bloodlust/Heroism, see below".
Blizzard are currently making buffs raid-wide and giving a lot of classes shared abilities so you don't have to cancel a raid because that pesky lolkin couldn't make it. This means raids will not be canceled because an enhancement shaman isn't there, but that's one out of three specs. Elemental shares our fate, if not even weaker, but resto is still pretty great. There's no point in stacking 6+ shamans in a 25 man raid anymore and good riddance I say.
(Quote edited for spelling and grammar.)
Yes this is the often stated goal of the development team. The flip side of which is; A hardcore raid group will consist of 9 to 10 debuffers/buffers which will occupy healer/tank/dps spots this will cover every possible buff and debuff. Every other spot will have A) Some gimmick guy that only works for that fight or B) The dps class that does the most damage because of inter class imbalance or a healer with an AoE heal.
I'll stop being obtuse. Does it look like there will actually be a reasonable balance between melee dps classes, for the sake of the argument I'll assume that means a 3 to 5% difference in damage done?
I am also assuming a `20% difference in TBC melee dps values, or shaman does 1100 rogue does 1300 dps.
I am really just bringing this up since I'm sick of all the rotation talks and this might have a greater impact on how we play then the rest of this Slow/Fast Flametongue BS.
Firstly, I want to say that I don't think we will lose our spots in raids. Stacking melee in TBC was not good, and enhancement shamans provide the most melee buffs for one spot, so we will probably be valuable.
This is true, it may simply be better take an enhancement shaman because you get more buffs for the raid slot. It depends on how the Guild is built. It also depends if the 20% haste buff gets Nerfed down to 16% and if Blood Spec Death Knights are any good at raid dps.
If you want to raid enhance, find a guild that will let you raid enhance, learn your shit and get as strong as you can. It's that simple. Who cares what SK's zero-hour, content raping raid team has if a dual enhance team is 95% as good and can clear the content.
I don't think leaving the guild to find another is really a viable solution either. A change in main spec or main characters is much more likely, assuming your loyalty is greater then 0. As far as I'm concerned I am in a competent guild that is well lead and full of people that know what they're doing, assuming they don't all die or get married I'm not going anywhere.
I never mentioned some SK zero hour raid scenario. I'm talking about the other stuff associated with a good raid class. Things like more of that class being leveled and geared, guilds actively recruiting them, and for good or ill less professional guilds follow the examples set by high end guilds.
It still makes sense that crit rating will be among our highest value stats, in part because it feeds so many of our procs, but mostly because it's the only stat that [a]ffects more or less 100% of our damage in a linear fashion with no cap.
If you think about it:
Crit: Affects all damage except Static Shock at roughly the same rate
AP: Affects all damage, but affects spells 30% as much
Hit: Affects all damage until 9%, then just melee and spells until 17% spell hit, then just affects melee.
Haste: Affects melee, flamestrike and Static Shock, has a small effect on MW and an even smaller affect on WF.
Armor Penetration: Affects all melee damage (Budget is very cheap)
AGI: Affects all melee, and via AP, all damage. (Budget it is twice AP though)
INT: A little better than AP due to AK and Kings (Budget it is twice AP though)
STR: A little better than AP due to Kin[g]s(Budget it is twice AP though)
One thing to remember is that crit does not affect damage in a linear fashion. You've got a multi-equation system here with several feedback loops. For instance, until you reach ~30% buffed, the value of crit is highly inflated due to UR uptime increasing. Once you hit 30%, you take that out of the equation. Of course, the entire time you're battling diminishing returns on procs(1% to 2% is a doubling of proc rates, each step of 1% from there becoming exponentially smaller), so crit value decreases as your crit goes up, it just becomes markedly more noticable after the 30% threshold when you no longer have two opposite equations working to cancel each other out. I would imagine the threshold is actually lower in WotLK, because you're seeing an extra 20% haste from WF totem. 30% is a rough estimate now for 99%+ UR uptime with 2.6 weapons, but as your weapon speed or haste rating goes up, the amount of crit to hit your UR cap goes down. 25% might be an acceptable number for WotLK, I don't know, I don't have a beta account to see. Unless they've removed the WF cooldown, hit rating is going to get exponentially better as your gear level goes up, with depressions at each cap. WF doesn't scale with gear. The AP bonus on WF weapon is static, meaning that as the EP value of your gear goes up, the value of the AP bonus on WF goes down. This leads to more and more of your damage being white melee damage. At gear levels of high T5 early T6, you're looking at about 36-40% white damage, at mid SW levels, you're looking at 50-53% white damage, meaning that the extra hit rating is affecting ~15% more damage, which means that it's ~15% more valuable to a high-end T6 enh shaman than it is to a high-end T5 shaman.
This trend will continue in WotLK, although obviously the paradigm has become somewhat skewed because of the addition of new abilities, but the basic progression will be the same; as gear gets better, hit rating improves. This may be slightly less pertinent if spell damage goes up considerably, since there will be less white damage to affect, and thus the effects of hit rating will be much smaller, after the 17% spell cap of course.
SimulationCraft updated based upon latest Beta news. In some cases this means that it does not match current Beta push:
(1) Some talents are implemented as described rather than how they are working (or not working as the case may be)
(2) Some of the "homogenization" has hit yet, but it was implemented anyway: Judgement of Wisdom, Earth and Moon, etc
(3) Blue posts have stated that Mind Flay is getting completely retuned. My implementation matches that of Arcane Missiles.
I also generate Google Chart output now.
There are also various raid summary charts for DPS ranking, gear overviews, and up-times for debuffs such as the Stormstrike.
Sorry you are still thinking lvl 70. We have no clue yet what gear itemisation will be at 80. It doesn't matter one iota what the crit rate is for Int at lvl 70, its what it is at 80 that matters, although granted I expect it to be worse. Until they have released a few updates to the beta that actually contain the raids and we can actually see the new starter lvl 80 epics we have very little to go on regarding itemisation.
Remember to that they have categorically stated that they are not done yet. They haven't finished the initial class reviews let alone started on balancing. So expect major changes to come before patch 3.0.2 goes on the test server. Then expect further major changes before patch 3.0 goes live after they start class balancing, and raid boss testing.
Its fairly clear that this time round they are listening and that comments and suggestions are getting taken up. Of course we still have the whiners on some of the blizzard forums who assume that the way it is on beta today is what is going live. Whereas its clear that they are still a long way from even finishing the content let alone balancing stuff.
Yes, I'm still thinking at 70, but I'm thinking at 70 after the patch, and with the assumption that stat ratios will increase/decrease approximately equivalently. IE: Agi->melee crit will be at a much higher rate than Int->spell crit, and crit rating will aid both spell and melee crit better than Agi or Int. And given the choice between gear that has Int & Agi (hunter gear), or gear with straight Agi (rogue), I'm still more inclined to take the rogue gear and make up the lost spell crit with crit rating gems and the guaranteed crit from LvB.
I do understand that all of this is subject to change. They could do something drastic like change the Int->spell crit ratio and make it on par with the Agi->melee crit ratio, or change the mechanics of rogues so that Strength is prevalent on their gear instead of Agility. But I haven't seen any changes in the desired itemization of Hunters and Rogues (of course, I haven't been looking very hard), and so the assumption that itemization for their gear will remain similar holds a lot of weight in my eyes.
I'll stop being obtuse. Does it look like there will actually be a reasonable balance between melee dps classes, for the sake of the argument I'll assume that means a 3 to 5% difference in damage done?
I am also assuming a `20% difference in TBC melee dps values, or shaman does 1100 rogue does 1300 dps.
The other side of homogenizing all the buffs and debuffs is doing the exact same thing to all the classes damage outputs. Rogues won't be doing 20% more dps then an enhancement shaman in Wrath, 5% is a more reasonable expectation. They were just given a very significant raid buff on a very short timer (Tricks of the Trade - a Misdirect on a 30 second cooldown that also increases the target's damage by 15% for 6 seconds) and I would bet that, in Blizzard's mind, that is enough to even them out so they do not need to do so much more damage then other classes.
Originally Posted by dedmonwakeen
SimulationCraft....
I'll take some screenshots of recounts after beating on that level 1 target dummy in the beta to show it better but there is something significantly wrong with your simulation if it is showing Lightning Shield with that much damage from Static Shock.
From my playing around I was showing Lighting Orb damage as being around 2% of my total damage (exactly even with the damage gained from Flame Shock's DoT and only the DoT, not the initial hits) while beating on that target dummy, no where near the damage attributable to Stormstrike (which is the level your chart seems to be implying).
Only thing I could think is that your simulator is having Static Shock proc from all damage sources whereas in the Beta it only procs from nonproc based damage (eg would proc from a Stormstrike or a Shock but not from Flametongue damage or Windfury hits).
For instance, until you reach ~30% buffed, the value of crit is highly inflated due to UR uptime increasing.
I think if you simulate it, you'll discover that the value of crit is not "highly inflated" below 30% buffed. It is inflated, but usually by less than .2 EP per 5% crit.
It is likely we'll need to follow our EP values to prevent overstacking -- just as we do now. It's also likely that the gem of choice when gearing to EP will have crit rating on it.
Shaman DPS has always been about balance, and all signs suggest that it'll be even more about balance in Wrath. The only thing we're likely to stack until we cap is Expertise, because itemization of that stat is so damn cheap.
Only thing I could think is that your simulator is having Static Shock proc from all damage sources whereas in the Beta it only procs from nonproc based damage (eg would proc from a Stormstrike or a Shock but not from Flametongue damage or Windfury hits).
You nailed it. I didn't know where to draw the line...... so I included it all.
The sim knows when something is a "proc" so that is an easy fix. Thanks for the catch!
What about the "ticks" of Flame Shock and Searing Totem?
Last edited by dedmonwakeen : 09/03/08 at 4:09 PM.
On the topic of static shock, I'm wondering if it's the best DPS per point to put all three talent points into static shock. For reference, if you look at http://http://maintankadin.failsafed...pic.php?t=5124 you'll see that reckoning uptime (for a tankadin) is not changed much by putting only three or four points in a five point talent. I would be interested to see if this might be the case using static shock considering the other viable options available to enhancement shaman.
Static shock doesn't have an uptime, it should scale equally with the number of points in the talent. Assuming you can manage to keep the shield up. Even if static shock has a hidden cool down the proc rate is low enough that it wouldn't be significantly diminished with successive ranks.
The other side of homogenizing all the buffs and debuffs is doing the exact same thing to all the classes damage outputs. Rogues won't be doing 20% more dps then an enhancement shaman in Wrath, 5% is a more reasonable expectation. They were just given a very significant raid buff on a very short timer (Tricks of the Trade - a Misdirect on a 30 second cooldown that also increases the target's damage by 15% for 6 seconds) and I would bet that, in Blizzard's mind, that is enough to even them out so they do not need to do so much more damage then other classes.
So to you at least it seems as if enhancement is receiving a generous increase in personal dps to compensate for the loss of our unique buffs?
To change the topic from talking about Monkey Nuts, I noticed something interesting in that Blue post on warriors and I believe it is what has been incorporated into Maelstrom Weapon in the latest patch.
Currently it definitely is not resetting your swing timer to use a fully stacked Maelstrom Weapon but I think it is more involved then that. From what I was observing (and I will try to do more testing on it later) it seems like whenever you have a stack of Maelstrom it suspends your swing timer during a cast instead of resetting it.
What would that mean? Well, it could make it so that it would be worth casting Lava Burst with only a 4 stack if that's how the timing worked out to get the cooldown started all over again.
One other thing. I was playing with the Targeting Dummies in Dalaran and at level 77 using the Mace from the new Ring of Blood (2.8 speed 111dps) mainhand and the Najentus Axe offhand (2.6 100dps) I was able to hit 2.6-2.7k dps without searing totem or the Feral Spirits and sustain it indefinitely, while using Lightning Shield, since I was able to make it to the next SR timer before running OOM. Swapping in a level 77 dagger (111dps 1.5speed) and using Flametongue had me at 2.5-2.6k dps (dagger isn't enchanted though).
Having a 5 stack up with the slow/slow for each Lava Burst timer seemed to work very well. When using the fast offhand I would have that stack up much faster then the cooldown and then was stuck either waiting for Lava Burst to come back up or using the stack for a Lightning Bolt and then waiting on the Lava Burst till I had another 5 stack up.
Using that extra bolt did start to run me into mana issues though where I was going oom a bit before SR was up again.
This also didn't involve any need to re-drop totems which would be a serious mana drain on any encounter involving movement.
From what I could tell Elemental Focus should be part of any Enhancement Build since that is the only reason I think I was able to sustain any of those rotations without any external sources of mana return (and without using Water Shield).
As for Static Shock....I'm not that impressed with it anymore. I kept Lightning Shield up the whole time and I was using the 20% increased damage to Lightning Shield orbs Glyph and according to Recount it was doing damage roughly equal to my Flame Shock DoT ticks (not the initial damage, just the DoT ticks). Which is significant enough to make it hard not to spec the 3 points but at the same time doesn't make me happy about it.
had the same results yesterday - it was very easy to keep ED up for about 95% of the time and getting 5 mw stacks before lava burst was ready again. It was also very interesting to see that lavaburst did 12% of my overall dmg and Stormstrike only 8%.
Simulations suggest about an 11% increase in WF DPS when stormstrike is used (above two slow weapons with no stormstrike). Thus a 20% increase in stormstrike frequency should increase total WF DPS by about 2.2%, or 1.1% per talent point.
Last edited by Toots Hepcat : 09/04/08 at 11:32 AM.
1) could you put a level 70 option into the list
2) your list of talents does not include MW. I am sure most people will use MW, but I wanted to check level 70 builds without it to compare.
Using the latestverino of enhsim, I got these numbers. I am trying to simulate level 70 EP with my current gear (which is far from optimal). As I am not in the betaa I had to napkin math the crit because of the 25/40 agi change.
The EP values I came up with area little suprising, as I am below the expertise limit but crit was still the primary top EP
NOTES: As I was trying to get level 70 values, I used LB spam, and my spell crit was significantly below my melee crit (~10%). Im not 100% sure if that is corrent.
Using the latestverino of enhsim, I got these numbers. I am trying to simulate level 70 EP with my current gear (which is far from optimal). As I am not in the betaa I had to napkin math the crit because of the 25/40 agi change.
The EP values I came up with area little suprising, as I am below the expertise limit but crit was still the primary top EP
NOTES: As I was trying to get level 70 values, I used LB spam, and my spell crit was significantly below my melee crit (~10%). Im not 100% sure if that is corrent.
When running sim make sure that ep ranges are small enough. Hit value go down if test go over spell hit by large margin.
Default value for hit ep range is 150. And 13% is deafult spell hit. When sim test hit value spell hit go up to 25% if you lower hit ep range value to 45 you get much higher ep value. Make sure that you take all spell hit buffs off. Same with expertice don't let sim overcap and devalute ep values. I have tested this sim from first release and hit ep is allways been over crit before spell hit cap. When posting ep numbers you should link config file too.
Edit: Sprout can you re-run sim with right hit ep range and edit your spreadsheet then. Sheet with wrong numbers don't do any good.
Here is a simple spreadsheet with the various gems and an EP calculator. Nothing exciting but I have not seem any sheet to evaluate gems. (was not really necessary before)
1) could you put a level 70 option into the list
2) your list of talents does not include MW. I am sure most people will use MW, but I wanted to check level 70 builds without it to compare.
1) It is lvl 70.
2) If you set LB or LvB to Maelstrom Weapon config, it assumes that you have 5/5 in the talent. It reads in the config. If you do not want to use MW, leave it empty("-").
09/03/08, 1:41 PM
