Ghostcrawler saves the day

Anyone have access to any beta/ptr Brutalus WWS logs? Would be easy to compare against current logs.

"The good news is that overall, Elemental damage was low. That's going to give us a lot of room for Balance-like damage buffs. I'm not saying we're going to handle it the same way, but you should see it go up noticeably in a patch or two. Cool? "

Also this is strange. If overall ele dmg was low then why nerf our scaling talent? Im guessing they are testing ele dmg in a perfect setup with doomking and hunters in group and what not.

WUT? I could not be more confused with both of these dev posts coming out within hours of each other. I guess we just pray the latter is the accepted belief within the minds of the developers. I'd like to know why we're getting such opposing views though. Honestly I'm going to play shaman no matter what come wolk, but it would be nice to get a definitive idea of what direction the devs are taking with the tree.

Hawtfuzz, remember that Blizzard has to look at several situations for damage.

25person raid elemental damage (blues, epics)
10person raid elemental (greens/blues)
5person elemental (greens/blues)
Solo

So perhaps in 25man raids with epic gear, elemental damage was considered overpowered, because it scaled too well.
But solo, in craptastic gear, it was actually pathetic damage.

Another blue post of note:

As far as the PTR is concerned, on the bright side Flametongue imbue is working correctly now.

Several Totems are still not 5 minute durations (Tremor and ToW, possibly more).

I did 3.47 million damage in testing and oddly (or not), the only statistically significant factor in my DPS was whether I was grouped with a Warlock or not (sizable DPS increase if grouped, due to CoE). Hunters, Paladins, other Shaman, Balance Druids -- grouping with them made no statistically discernible difference in my DPS over that of my solo DPS.

SimulationCraft has been updated for patch 8982. The list of classes now supported includes: Druid, Mage, Priest, Shaman, Warlock.

Multi-player simulation that supports user-specified talent setups and action priority lists.

The config file has been enhanced to support MMO-Champion talent tree links.

Elemental Shaman are absurdly low at the moment.....

Interestingly that matches the data a raid (that was supervised / monitored by Tigole) collected last weekend.

Patchwerk (1)

Casters:

1. Warlock
2. Mage
3. Druid
4. Waaaaay down the list at the level of the tanks, Elemental Shaman.

That was before the latest coef nerf, so the Elemental Shaman in the actual raid did better than your simulation.

If any sort of scaling will reappear after developers thought things thru then I actually think that the CL cooldown is a much more interesting ability than a simple number fixer. In it's own right it a much better designed talent addition.
(The 25/10% probably needs to come back in some form or even blizzardmath will eventually show that lack of scaling hurts endgame raiding.)

Blizzard LK development team have a lot more designchoices to consider than the average EJ forum poster it seems.
The line about elemental shamans logging back on after 3.0 and having lesser LB hit feeling "cruddy" is a fun to play issue for a casual gamer that don't rank very high on importance in a community dedicated to spreadsheet optimizing.
The obvious fix to the percieved problem about "cruddy" is just to raise baseline damage. All the casual shamans would thus feel an increase in their nuking power.

So with that in mind I hope the Beta forum posters reading these forums could try to keep your sugestions and feedback within the Blizzard frame of mind and not purely a endgame raiding perspepective.

The issue regarding scaling is often deflected with the "elemental shaman is affected by more buffs/debuffs now" So in the future feedback regarding scaling probably needs two things
A) To be focused on specific differences in unique scaling factors for the class compared to other classes. If we let Blizzard keep thinking in overall scaling then we will get nothing considering we got access to 2-3 new scaling abilities from raidbuffs effecting our spells more than before.
B) Not forgetting the scaling properties already in place. Convection, Lightning Overload, Flame Shock tickdamage buff, Call of Flames and Lava flow effect on Lava Burst are effects that gives the relevant abilities a bigger return on added Spelldamage than the formula 1SD=1damage/3,5s. These might not look like big flashy 15% to shadow damage but they still count. Ignoring them will only drop you below Blizzard radar.

When discussing scaling the feedback the discussions often don't differentiate between scaling from Haste,Hit,Crit,SpellDamage,Int and Mp5
One could argue (and Blizzard will) that the ability to use very costly spell rotations due to higher INT and Mp5 additions from gear would be a form of scaling.
Another change that in Blizzards mind actually increased our scaling was removing most of our +hit talents since now our DPS benefits if we get +hit from our gear.

To claim we lack personal scaling without discussing the specifics and comparing to what kinds of scaling we have and the drawbacks of those leaves the discussion pointless in Blizzards eyes I would dare to asume. So while all this is being taken care here on EJ it needs to be very well thought out before taken to Beta Forums or it won't have any impact.

With the risk of being called on "Do it Yourself" I would like to see "scaling with gear" considerations presented more in the lines of this:

For any given scaling effect:
A) What percentage of your total damage is affected by it. (Conviction do not help Searing Totem, Lightning Overload only effects Bolts to mention a few examples). This would either need a lot of WWS suport or a large part asumption regarding end game raiding to get these numbers down.
*
B) Percentage of gear stats you get increased benefit from. (Not having added benefit from Spell power would put a huge dent in this percentage but not getting increased benefit from Haste rating would be mostly circumventable. Most calculations regarding this depends very much on the itemization of high end raiding and changes made once more raids get added. (consider the 4 set bonus to warlock t6)
*
C) Actually percentage added. (5% in case of conviction, in case of Lava Flows: 24%*percentage of Lava Burstscasts that crit (most of them asuming no FlameShock pushoff or resists)

Then once that is done for all shaman related abilities it can be compared to another nuker class/specc of interest.

The main issue as I see it now is that the scaling abilities we have are very limited when it comes to A compared to other nuker classes. But I posting that alone on beta forums would do me little good I fear.

[Wrong forum, deleted]

[original post removed, deleted]

I'm planning on collating some things Daidalos and I talked about earlier today, and putting that in another feedback post. Mostly it's a few tweaks to improve scaling, simplification of rotations (ie: if SE&F stays as it is atm then a LB/CL/FS/LvB rotation will be best, and managing two 6 second cooldowns along with an 8 second and a 12 second dot is not going to be an easy rotation to master), actual AoE, and trying to reduce the RNG game that is elemental dps.

However, since I had a work dinner this evening, and am tied up tomorrow, you'll have to wait till Saturday (or Friday night in the US) for me to actually write that up.

[e]Actually, if someone wants to help out, I'm still short a fair portion of the wotlk raid items, so I've put a template up here if you want to put them in and email them to me. Then on Saturday I can sit down, do my write up, and then have some supporting data to go along with it (and even a copy of my internal v2 of SEIC to download )

Actually one of the reasons I specced Elemental in TBC was to get away from the "20% or fail" kind of play, to have a little more control and such. My dps on Brut can range from between 1500 and 1900 on a kill just depending on LO/Critts sometimes and that's really frustrating.

But yes I think the points above are really valid, fun how the "simplest rotation class" just got the hardest in the case of the current SEnF goes live. That rotation wouldn't only be extremely difficult to perform but also would cost alot of mana to maintain. An "Eclipse" like buff could be very interesting (Played my moonkin some lately) alternative as well.

One point I'd like to add however; CC viability for instances. The only 5 mans I've played so far we've vastely overgeared the instance and aoe tanked everything (tanks are amazing nowadays) but there's a wide spread feeling that Hex is not sufficient in any environment as a CC.

Hasn't it been proven adding CD rotations while stacking haste (which is what Elemental Shamans are supposed to be doing?), yields lower dps than just a straight LB spam? Are we forgoing haste in WoTLK? And, with a shortened CL CD, won't adding it to our rotation just make us go OOM faster than ever?

Hex is basically fear on a 45 second cooldown where the target retains control of their movement. It's a glorified silence and disarm which can be dispelled. That would fine were it not for the 45 second cool down and 1.5 second cast time. If the 45 second cooldown stays in effect, a shorter cast time would be appropriate (even instant, like blind). I'm really unimpressed with Hex for arena play. It is better than our previous CC options, but it's no cyclone.

In another post, Ghostcrawler again:
I guess thats more in line with what we're seeing, but the removal of the coeffiecent change in SE&F still makes no sense.

This is the best I've read in a long time and gives me a calming feeling. Things should be okey. With a few tweaks. I'm just worried stress will cause them to make rash decisions and leave us with a half done solution or a band aid.

While testing (and testing and testing) I uncovered a bug in Mana Spring Totem that had the Shaman AI obsessively putting down MS totems. With this fixed, Elemental dps increased significantly...... but it is still far below parity.

I agree Graze. For a while I've felt like this was another Eyonix "My shaman can spam LB for 5 minutes" pre-Elemental Focus buff. I really love the shaman class, even this underpowered incarnation, so I really hope they get it right.

And, it seems to me, that compared to the last expansion, and even going back to the last "class review", the dev's are communicating, and getting our concerns, MUCH better than before.

What rotation is this using?

How does LB Spam compare with FS/LB*X/LvB/CL?

Hopefully in a few patches we can see those numbers rise up to 3700-3900, which is all I've ever hoped for. Being able to compete with Boomkins, Enhancement Shaman, and Spriests is where the class should be in my opinion. Boomkin between Affliction Locks and Destruction Locks, as well as all Mage Specs really is impressive, but a little much I guess. If they can get all Specs between 3900-4300 at T7 levels of gear, I'll be very impressed, but I doubt it will happen.

What is the config file your using for those runs dedmonwakeen? I notice that the example raid_wotlk config file does not have Flame Shock in the rotation for Elemental.

Changing the Elemenal action sequence to:

actions=flask,type=blinding_light/flametongue_weapon,weapon=main/mana_potion,trigger=3500/mana_spring_totem/totem_of_wrath/wrath_of_air_totem/elemental_mastery/flame_shock/lava_burst/bloodlust/lightning_bolt

resulted in dps jumping to 2822.

The action string still needs additional tweaking as I don't have the correct syntax for the "flame_shock=1,max_ticks_consumed=1" option

I believe they stated it was only 2 minute totems that would go to 5 minutes as they are essentially raid buffs. ToW should be fixed but I imagine tremor will be staying at its current duration.

Searching on blue tracker didn't find the blue post though