When did it even have a 100% coef? It had a higher than normal critt bonus, I believe they've changed the way Lava Flows work, to nerf our burst.

Ofancow, I have a few problems with your latest math post that I would like some clarification on.

First:

I looked at your first post and it said the AP would be 1435, which would be a difference of 430 SP between the two builds, as MQ adds 30% from AP. I was unable to determine where the extra 270 SP came from that wasn't shared by both builds. This makes for some serious changes in math and is my biggest concern when comparing your calculations to my own.

Second:
The reported LB coefficient from beta with SE&F is .94, not the mathematical .714*1.25, or .89. The resulting damage from your formula produces 19772.8 damage.


Third:
Your math is a bit off here:

556 [base] + (2003.8*.52) = 1041.9

This is actually 1598, but no matter, as I would like to introduce more...

The reported Flame Shock coefficients are .21 for the DD and .39 for the DoT. With your base numbers...

DD = 1224.7
DoT = 2006.2
3230.9*1.13*1.15=4198.6

Fourth:

I believe this formula to be inaccurate, based on how crit damage is calculated as worded in talents. It's not 24% more damage, it's 24% more CRIT damage, much like Elemental Fury increases crit damage by 100%. So to re-work your formula...

888+1132 / 2 = 1010 [base damage] + (2003.8 * .5714) = 2154.9 * 2.24 (100% crit chance with Lava Flows) = 4827 * 1.06 (CoF) = 5116.8
sub: 5116.8 *1.13*1.15 = 6649.2


So the total damage from a 51/0/20 rotation would be 300ish dmg higher than your post states, which is likely statistically negligible. Are you including the difference in the 5% crit chance between the builds with Lightning Overload? The damage modifier is a flat number based on crit since you don't add SP, so you would add it to the total damage per LB cast and CL cast. Some simple math...

LO = 765[base] * 1.43[crit] * 1.05[concussion] = 1148.6

At a 20% rate, divide by 5 and add it to each LB, or 229.7. With MD/MQ, the crit is 5% less, so the difference avg dmg is another statistically negligible 8, but it adds up.

With the removal of Nature's Guidance, which gave the 3% chance to hit with spells, what is going to be the hit cap at lvl 80?

The 17% hit hard-cap for bosses is at 446 +hit. 14% is at 368, this is the number to shoot for assuming either a Shadowpriest/Moonkin putting a hit debuff up OR you have the +hit talent. 11%, when you have both of these things, is 289 (I think). This all assumes Horde, Alliance are all 1% lower (420, 342, and 263 respectively) due to the Draeni aura. My notes might be a bit out of date, but these were calculated from the Combat ratings at 80 thread.

I"m the one that reported a .94 from other people's data (trying to fix their bad math) when I did testing on my own it pointed more towards a .89 coef. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it still .89 but when I get some time I might retest.

So yeah, through trying out talented Lava Burst, it's hitting for less and critting for less than Lightning bolt. Granted, I have 4piece T6 bonus, but shouldn't a spell that's on an 8sec cooldown and costs about double the mana of Lightning Bolt be hitting for more?

Right now I have absolutely no use whatsoever for the spell beyond using it on nature immune mobs, which, considering its cooldown is a poor reason to have the spell.

If I remember the old numbers that were being bandied about when Paralysis was still in the tree (10% Lightning spell power buff), there was basically no level of attainable gear at which 51/0/20 could equal 43/28/0. And that was when SEF was giving 100% DoT bonus damage.

So basically, yea, 43/28/0 isn't just in play it's the only game left in town. Until/Unless Blizzard decides to shut it down too, I guess.

It's still beta, give it time, whatever other platitudes we're supposed to say ... rabble rabble ...

On the upside, Thunderstorm is now so completely worthless that hopefully people will stop talking about taking it in a real build. It was always bad, but for some reason it attracted a lot of people -- now it's just obviously horrible, so people can focus on the real issues now and not be distracted by that tur... talent.

I don't see how this nerf could have been called for, we finally had good scaling, the talent was justified by being so far down in the tree already. They had two options in how to make a LaB rotation good and took the wrong one. Mu bolts hit for alot less now (1900 instead of 2.3k+) and thunderstorm hits for less than half now. (about 800 @ my ~1300 +dmg)

Also how can they get thunderstorm wrong two patches in a row? They said it wasn't intended.

They also said in TBC beta that mage damage was ZOMG and nerfed it a bit more just to be sure. Even after the nerf was revoked, the mage damage is nowhere near where it should be. They also said that Lightning Mastery change + LO change would cancel eachother and they were no less than 8% off. Face it, whoever does the balancing needs to go back to first grade maths.

EDIT: first post updated with changes. Note that ToW's damage on rank 4 went up a bit to 280.

Also, quick number crunching: at 2000 spellpower, LB just ate a 9% damage nerf, Flame Shock fares slightly, but not much better.

Seriously, what is up with those most recent changes? I don't have words, really. WHY nerf our damage across the board like that? To make elemental as miserable as enhancement?

Just so i understand correctly:

The origonal description was: "Increases the damage of your lightning bolt spell by an amount equal to 25% of your spell power"

It now says: "Your Lightning Bolt gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% of your spell power"

So if i understand correctly the calculations were previously worked out as normal with an additional 25% of spell power added as extra damage (eg with 1000 spell power - 3000 Damage + 25% of total Spell power for a total of 3250 damage)

And this was changed to Calculating damage with an additional 10% Spell damage (ie 1100 spell damage instead of 1000)

Have i got this right?

If it is, would additional base spell damage be better rather than having some extra damage added to the total?

-Storms

Damn, i was hoping that was not the case.

Is it just me, or are (raiding/pve) Elemental Shamans really getting the shaft by blizzard in this expansion ?


Nerfing of our LB co-efficient.
Nerfing of Talents, making our damage look substantially sub-par.
Almost completely removing all our +hit talents, forcing us to stack up on +hit, instead of being able to stack +haste/damage/crit like we can today.
Few if any new useful abilities. Hex is okey'ish, Thunderstorm seems useless (for raiding), Lava Burst seems to be a Enhancement spell more than an elemental one...


All in all, i'm getting really worried for the future as a raiding elemental shaman, and i'm more and more considering changing to enhancement, or just rerolling a different class.

Considering the above posts, I feel it might be good to re-post what Ghostcrawler stated in the official WotLK Beta forum.

____________________________________


Now, personally I find this part about talent-budget to be a bit interesting. Ok, talent budget is no big surprise since it has been mentioned before and anyone who has looked through the talents should have noticed it. However, one interesting part here is that this talent budget appears not that inter-linked with previous talents. Or in other words, apparently it is not justified to have an extremely powerful talent at the end, just due to that the previous talents were a bit on the weak side. The 25% boost on SEF was not justified, just due to Lightning Mastery.

What is the logical conclusion of this then?

Well, one part is that there might be a pointless to ask Blizzard to buff SEF to once again have a 25% spell coeffecient, regardless if the overall dps output might warrant it. However, another part is that there might be some talents that is actually not using up the full talent budget and which Blizzard could consider to boost. I.e. we might have some relatively weak talents that could deserve a tweak or two, and which in the end could cover any dps loss.

Another outcome if you accept SEF and Lava Flow to be balanced, is that Blizzard might actually have messed up the talent budget for Mental Quickness. The relative power of Mental Quickness depends quite much on how often you will cast spells. If Mental Quickness is balanced for TBC Enhancement Shaman that cast a spell every sixth second, then it follows quite logically that it will not be balanced for an Elemental Shaman that cast at the very least three times as many spells. It might actually even be skewed for Enhancement Shamans thanks to Maelstrom Weapons.

Of course, all reports are that Enhancement Shamans are on the low end of the dps-list, so I doubt they see Mental Quickness as overpowered. My main point is just that perhaps the Enhancement tree has become too much focused on spell damage, and too little focus on being an actual melee tree.

Let's see: if Lightning Mastery is supposed to be equal to Improved Fireball or Bane, then Concussion must be boosted to 10% in order to be equal to Fire Power. If Totem of Wrath is supposed to be equal to Moonkin form, it has to last forever, move with shaman and regenerate mana. If Nature's Swiftness is supposed to be equal to Presence of Mind, it needs to affect every shaman spell, not just nature ones.

Or my favourite - if Thunderstorm is supposed to be equal to Blast Wave, it has to have 2 yard GREATER knockback, daze everyone affected for 6 seconds and have a cooldown of 30 seconds.

I coud go on and on, but I think I made my point. Either talent budget is an extremely flexible term or a lie. Not to mention that SE&F nerf was a direct (and failed) attempt to fix Lava Burst rotation and not some kind of "budget fix", or they wouldn't have implemented it in the first place.

To me, the above seems like an excuse after the massive shift in the last patch. What I'm worried about right now is that we're basically running in circle - they're making huge sweeps all over the place - if PTR is about to hit soon, things will spiral out of control and this will hit Live completely unbalanced - THEN, we'll have a problem.

Doubt it is a lie or as flexible as you hint at. However, I do believe that the main developer team for WoW has changed and the people that were vocal for class and specific solutions have moved elsewhere or at the very least lost a lot of their influence. From blue comments that every class should be unique and that the overall damage output warranted unique spell coeffecients, we are now constantly feeded with the information that the spells should follow the template and that classes should be streamlined and inter-changeable.

The point is that a couple of talents changed and we have some blue lines stating the reasons behind it. You could either refuse to believe the reasons and find your own instead, or you could accept the reasons and try to go forward from that point.

I do agree that it looks pretty much like we are back at the starting position at the end of the alpha, though then again if we consider the overwhelming changes that other classes have got, it is quite possible that the reason why we are not moving forward is due to the developers have actually not truly started to go through the Shaman class. I.e. we are still waiting for the promised "polish".

Finally, I feel I should add that no, I'm not happy with this beta-patch and yes, if it is final and goes live then I'll be a re-roller. However, I'm loving my Elemental Shaman in TBC, and until that changes I'll continue to play it.

That's exactly what I was hinting at. This system can only function if it's tier-pondered, in which case top talents MUST be stronger than lower ones.

One solution to this and using interchangeability would be to take last 21 talents in one tree (say, elemental) and compare it to first 21 talents in other two trees (resto, enhancement). Putting points into any of those has to bring about the exact same dps, or at the very least give two viable and predetermined specs, with the rest "nerfed". I have no problem with MD+MQ and deep elemental dealing the same dps through different means. In fact, I downright encourage it. However, if that cannot be the option, then deep elemental has to prevail for a caster. This is currently not the case.

I have always seen it that talent have tiers and points. "higher" tiers or more points = better talents. Lightning Mastery is a 5 point T6 talent that gives -.5 seconds to cast time. Improved fireball does the same, but is a T0 talent. That doesn't add up to me, and I believe that vision is shared across the board. Then comes S,E&F which is a freakishly high tier talent, which gives a good damage boost, blah blah blah, because it's placed where it is and costs five whole points. I agree with tufy, the budget system is extremely flexible, or a complete lie.

(This can also be looked at the other way by saying LO completely outshines Netherwind Presence (Mage/Arcane)).

I can't agree with much more than what has been said above really, we have no indication of what will happen to our class, we just seem to get hit when they do the sweeping changes, I too love playing Elemental, I quite enjoyed it playing around before they changed the buff/debuff system, but even after that it was quite nice (S,E&F was pure love). But sad to say yes; I have my doubts.

To try to add more to this discussion, if they want casters to be interchangeable, they need to be somewhat equal, equilibrium is achieved, in my eyes at least, via scaling. If the multipliers are all wrong, then it's extremely hard to balance the raw numbers [at different levels of gear] to a good point. They've fixed that via debuffs, everyone basically gains as much now, there's no shadow only debuffs and such, only self buff talents. One problem solved. But you can't have one class do more damage than everyone else naked (tbc shadow priest) and about half what the others to when they're decked out in Sunwell epics (still tbc shadow priests). The talents doesn't have to be "Generic Spellpower talent X", they can be things like Lightning Overload (unique and fun, despite the nature of procc based dps), and Backdraft, but right now, it doesn't look all to balanced to me.

Ghostcrawler stated that talent budgets are not inviolable, and are in fact broken often. They are more akin to guidelines rather than actual rules.

From posts GC has made recently we get the sense that Blizzard effectively made a pass at reducing/buffing talents they felt strayed too far from the guidelines. If you look at the upcoming priest changes, a lot of the nastier nerfs have been rectified either directly or indirectly.

I agree with Graze that Elemental, and Shaman in general, seem to just be floating around without a clear direction. Is it that we lack any strong voices in the beta forums or simply our unfortunate lot that Blizzard is largely focused elsewhere? I'd guess the latter, however frustrating that position is.

It's because there's a high number of threads/posts being made that cover the same stuff again, random stuff, or are completely un-necessary. I know Malan, Daidalos and myself are on there, and post, but we tend to get drowned out. Fortunately there is someone at Blizzard who will be reading our posts, it's just a matter of waiting.

IIRC Thunderstorm range will be going back up (the reduction was supposed to be height), the SE&F LB change isn't so bad (0.893 was the old, 0.814 from the new version), although the flame shock dot reduction is a bit disappointing, but we're a few builds behind the current dev version and we know that LB spam isn't going to be the expected rotation, so there are going to be more changes on the horizon.

MD/MQ just killed:

Elemental

- Elemental Fury and Call of Thunder are switching places. Call of Thunder will be a 1-point talent, and Elemental Fury will be a 5-point talent. For Elemental Shaman this won't mean much, for Enhancement it means they can have easier access to 100% spell crit damage.
- Lava Burst's cast time has been increased to 2.5 seconds, but Lightning Mastery will reduce that cast time by 0.5 sec with 5 points. Thus, the coefficient of Lava Burst has been improved to match it's new cast time.
- Lava Bursts base damage numbers have been significantly increased.

Enhancement

- Mental Quickness and Unleashed Rage have swapped places.
- Spectral Transformation renamed "Earthen Power". It causes your Earthbind Totem totem to have a 50/100% dispel all snare effects when it pulses.
- Weapon Mastery: Now a 3-point talent (4/7/10%)
- Stormstrike - New animation, also now increases all Fire, Frost and Nature damage done by the Shaman instead of just Nature.
- New Talent (Tier-8) - Lava Lash: You charge your off-hand weapon with lava, instantly dealing 75% off-hand Weapon damage. Damage is increased by 25% if your off-hand weapon is enchanted with Flametongue. 3 second cooldown. 4% base mana cost. (Also note: Lava Lash does Fire damage, also procs Maelstrom Weapon)
- Maelstrom Weapon: Can now be used for Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave.
- Feral Spirit - Many bugs with Spirit Wolves fixed, also increased the damage done by the Spirit Wolves

Restoration

- Ancestral Awakening improved to 10/20/30%

I guess we knew this was going to happen.

We're back to high base damage and low scaling, again. So we can expect to kick butt in early content, and then fall off in the end-game, again. edit: as Tufy noted, it likely means that Haste will once again become our most valuable stat in the end-game. Although now we will have 3 cooldowns to work around, instead of the current 1, which may play some havoc with calculations as to where the crossover is in net DPS benefit (assuming there is one).

Bolt: 2.5/3.5 co eff, + 5% from concussion, +10% spellpower from SE&F
Burst: 2.5/3.5 co eff, +5% from concussion, +6% from Call of Flame, +18% critical damage from Lava Flows.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll scale worse than Lightning Bolt.