I don't see it as being necessary to be within 12 yards of the boss to use TS for mana. That may be more DPS than doing it at range, but it ultimately wouldn't be worth the risk on a great number of fights. You can't do DPS if you die, and being that close generally involves a fair amount of running around.

Compared to Live you should still have comparable DPS time even if you aren't hitting the boss with TS. The reason being that the 2-4 seconds spent every two minutes to refresh totems on live will be 2-4 seconds every 5 minutes in the patch. It's not an exact match on time spent, but it's enough that the difference shouldn't be too big.

Eh?

Well two things. First, if you skip PvP and survivability-talents, then you will currently have plenty of talent points to go around for taking Storm Reach. Second, you can't meassure the dps gain of Storm Reach, since its relative power depends as far as I know entirely upon the encounter.

So looks like Build 9014 did nothing for us...

I am pretty shocked they didn't do ANYTHING to boost our DPS some to make us competitive.

As a very small small side note, at least ToW now lasts 5 minutes...

Agreed, but hopefully they are just taking their time making elemental viable dps again. My guess is that the changes is probably 1-2 builds down the line

After two patches that brought nothing new and several patches of continued nerfs, I've decided to write a short discussion about the current state of elemental shamans. Don't think of this post as a whine, think of it as both a warning and a "to do" list.

But first things first. Wotlk Beta introduced several massive changes to how classes should cooperate. The buff system was completely reworked, shifting focus from them to personal dps. As a result, Blizzard promissed that all classes would deal similar damage, making group compositions an easier thing to accomplish. Changes such as upping boomkin damage, bringing mage and warlock damage closer together and so on rocked the foundations of class balance. Two weeks ago (before LB coefficient change was removed from Storm, Earth and Fire talent), Tigole supervised Patchwerk dps test. The results were mage, warlock and druid having nearly equal dps, while elemental shamans barely kept up with tanks. Likewise, simulationcraft testing has shown elemental to barely deal 70% dps of the top damage dealers, with only holy priests performing worse. Following Ghostclaw's comment that all classes should be within 10% of the top, elemental shamans need a flat 20% dps increase just to be viable. TWENTY PERCENT!!!!

And at this point, we haven"t even mentioned the scaling yet. An elemental shaman gains 280 spellpower from totem of wrath and 211 spellpower from flametongue weapon. Reducing by the power of wizard oil, which cannot be used with flametongue (56), that's a grand total of 440 spellpower. This number cannot be changed in any way. While in the beginning, shamans will fare relatively well due to this head start (relatively well as in 30% under top dps), the relative value of this "head start" will reduce with better gear, affecting shaman dps in a negative way (read: instead of improving, the elemental shamans will be actually falling behind even more!!!!).

The above two points can be summed up pretty simply: elemental scaling is a disaster right now, made even worse with the removal of lightning bolt coefficient booster. It is logical that such a change was done to encourage the Lava Burst rotation over Lightning Bolt spam, but in turn, it resulted in a catastrophic consequence for the dps, as bad as it was already.

If we move on for a second, to totems. We have always been told that the totems are weak because of their power. However, given new buff changes, that is no longer the truth. For instance, Strength of Earth totem can be replaced by Death Knight Horn of Winter (a buff that moves with the person buffed), Totem of Wrath is similar to Heart of the Crusader (+ demonic pact) and so on. All of the replacement buffs are located either on the person moving around or on the target, whereas totems are still static ground buffs that need to be resummoned if one moves. Likewise, totems' range limits the party's movement options, risking the loss of buff or debuff. In pvp, a shaman is forced to drop his buffs, wasting one second for each totem. The totems, obviously, are still vulnerable to completely automated macroed attacks and still only have 5 health, making them killable by everyone. What's worse, if the shaman moves, say, 50 yards, he'll be out of range of his own buff. For comparison, Horn of Winter (as one example) is cast every 2 minutes, but remains on the Death Knight no matter how much he moves around, while the buff is only vulnerable to one specific type of "attack", Dispel. Blizzard's solution to this problem was introduction of Stoneclaw as defensive totem, to which I only have one comment: What the hell were you thinking? Two of the most used totems in pvp, Tremor and Earthbind, make the use of Stoneclaw a total, complete and utter joke.

Moving on to pvp survivability. An elemental shaman, perhaps more than any other caster, depends on offensive casting. Warlocks get to use dots, mages have instants and druids have a decent combination of instants, dots and cc. I'm sorry to say so, but come wotlk, Blizzard effectively made elemental shamans dependant on two medium cooldowns, Thunderstorm and Hex. Don't get me wrong, both spells are great when you can use them. However, one cannot ignore the fact that Hex is the only CC in game with cooldown that has a cast time (with the exception of Howl of Terror, which can be made instant through talents and is an AoE CC) and Thunderstorm, designed to be a unique and new spell, is now just one of them. Mage Blastwave has a full third shorter cooldown, deals just slightly less damage and has a 6 second daze in addition to weaker knockback.

Last but not least, Storm Reach. As it stands now, the wanted rotation for an elemental shaman will be Flame Shock > Chain Lightning > Lightning Bolt x 3 > Lava Burst. In that rotation, LB and CL have 36 yard range, Flame Shock has 35 yard range and Lava Burst has 30 yard range. See the problem? We can easily drop out Storm Reach and still stay at 30 yard range, the maximum achievable for Lava Burst. In other words, Storm Reach NEEDS to increase the range of Lava Burst as well.

According to Nethaera, season 4 is ending on october 14th - in two weeks. Given past experience, it is highly likely that patch 3.0 is coming then as well. I therefore strongly urge Blizzard to push solutions for the above issues before that date or we are about to see the TBC mage disaster all over again, this time with elemental shamans. I beg you, listen to us, at least this one time.

Note: this message was posted on Elitist Jerks Beta talent discussion and WoW Europe forums.

Awsome post tufy, I hope someone will poste/quote this US beta forums, where the devs might respond/read it. I agree with everything you say, I think scaling is our number one problem.

You are right, of course, I ignored ToW's impact on the raid. However, note that ToW is in the same buff group as Demonic Pact, which scales with warlock's spellpower (gear) and has the potential to be better than ToW the moment our warlock reaches 2801 spellpower. As such, the power of ToW diminishes while the gear improves as well.

I never noticed that about Totem of Wrath and Demonic Pact. It is definitely worth mentioning, just in a separate paragraph as I think it obfuscated more than substantiated the point you were trying to make.

If you wanted to compare the two, it would mean that at 2800 demonology warlock spellpower that Demonic Pact would be a superior spellpower buff when neglecting the crit vulnerability that Totem of Wrath offers. Let's just say that the crit vulnerability is worth a 3% "raid-dps" increase. (I know that 3% is a gross and blatant oversimplification. Feel free to offer a better number if you have one.) Let's call the acceptable "noise" that the developers are accepting as 5% (I am using this number only from memory of blue posts - I will fact-check more later). Note that the developers do not care about equivalence between raid buffs, just that they are there. So the premise that Demonic Pact can be better than Totem of Wrath is acceptable. DP being significantly better than ToW however is a problem. Demonic Pact would *significantly* scale past Totem of Wrath then at 3024 spellpower for the demonology warlock.

Whether you can flat out compare the two buffs when Totem of Wrath offers similar raid buffs to Demonic Pact AND Heart of the Crusader is a separate point of contention. E.g.: How can we compare apples to kumquats + cantaloupes? There's just no graceful way to do this at the moment. In any other forum other classes would be quick to counter that elemental shamans are overpowered because they can actually offer more raid-buffs than any other class. There's two modifiers on Totem of Wrath, Wrath of Air, Elemental Oath and for a VERY odd raid make up we can cover Strength of Earth too. Yes, it's a 1% scenario. But I would not put it past some of the hyperbole that people use for "intelligent" discussions on the WoW general forums.

I'll stop my back-of-the-napkin calculations here and let others that are more familiar with both T6+ elemental shaman gear and caster-mail scaling in WotLK. I love my guild, but this also makes my elemental shaman the poster-child for badge upgrades. My knowledge tapers off when it comes to gear scaling. So while I take my numbers seriously, I am far from the cutting-edge of things.

You're forgetting ToW's crit is already replaced by Heart of the Crusader. Granted, on only one target, but 90% of the time, you're only shooting one target in pve anyway. That's why we can ignore the crit contribution (as it depends on your raid composition, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's worthless) and talk only about spellpower.

I agree, I could have split ToW issue and the general scaling of the spec, but I ignored the raid impact and talked about the scaling of the spec as such in one paragraph. It does't make much of a difference for us, since we're stuck with one buff, it just extends the buff scaling problem in raids. For instance - if you have an elemental shaman in the party, he will give you 280 spellpower at the t7 level and 280 spellpower at t12 level. If you're a mage, you'll get 280*1.15=322 spellpower at all times. If, however, you have a warlock in the party, he will give you, say, 250 spellpower at t7 level and 320 spellpower at t12 level (numbers pulled out of my ass, yes ). In the first case, you'll receive 287 spellpower and in the second case, you will have 368 spellpower on your fireball. It is therefore in your best interest that the warlock receives better gear, because his buff will directly improve not just your gain from his buff, but you will scale it further through your own talents as well.

See the issue?

I would gladly post it for you, but seriously at this time I would not be suprised if I was on ignore by most of the beta forum, I stopped posting contructivley 3 or so builds ago.

I did point on the beta forum the entire demonic pact vs tow a while back and ToW was subsequently buffed to 280 at 80 after is was nerfed from a 6% scaling buff to 120spell power (or was it 140), so at least while not scaling it is much better than the initial 6% and unlilkey to be passed up by a demonic warlock until late Tier 9 or so.

At any rate I am pretty much in wait and see mode, but if you want me to post it to US beta I will, citing the source naturally.

Since this is the EJ forums and not the gen wow forums could you please show some math on your scaling concerns specifically showing scaling coefs/s compared with other classes? (I"m not disagreeing. LB in particular needs some lovin' ) I just don't think EJ is the place for general class concerns. If there is math about things specifically and you want show others and have it peer reviewed please post. I understand ele sham are worried about the low dps right now, but I honestly am very tired of the pages of posts here that don't actually talk about anything in depth. I also wanted to calrify that "static" spell damage scales with crit and haste. Obviously that rate is not the same as CoE type buff, but to say it doesn't scale is incorrect.

Crit and haste affect +dmg, of course. However, as you noted yourself, they don't scale the damage as well as CoE or a percentual increase talent such as Improved Shadowbolt or the example I used, Empowered Fireball. My comment, though, was specifically aimed at ToW vs. Demonic Pact (tow is static spellpower, demonic pact is based on warlock's gear) and flametongue compared to, say, Lunar Guidance (again, static figure vs. figure modifiable by gear).

Considering we have a 2.5s base cast time nuke that gains 0.5s off cast time (roughly equal to 20% damage increase), 10% extra damage (LO) and 5% extra damage (Concussion), one can see even without calculations why such a scaling will be worse off than, say, a boomkin (reduced cast time of starfire by 0.5 seconds, which roughly equals 16,7% damage increase, 10% extra damage (Moonfire), 12% extra spellpower from intellect (at 1000 intellect, that's 120 spellpower), 20% extra spellpower (Wrath of Cenarius), 5% extra spell damage (Earth and Moon) and 4% extra spell damage (Master Shapeshifter), 15% spirit as spellpower (Improved Moonkin), as well as 3% haste, 3% increased total spellhaste, additional 0.5s cast time reduction on every crit and 9% total crit, of which 5% is shared by other raid buffs (comparably, elemental shamans receive 5% haste that they give to whole raid in range and 13% total crit, of which 8% is shared by other raid buffs). You do the math which scales better, but given your knowledge of the theorycrafting, I'm certain you've come to the same conclusion even without spreadsheets. I agree with radiante, though, we have to start putting our spreadsheets up :p

Improved Moonkin form is a flat haste increase now, and the 15% spirit -> damage conversion is to reduce itemisation problems with caster leather. We don't have spirit on mail gear, so it won't be something to worry about.

Total raid crit % is 18% (Scorch/WC = 10, Oath/Moonkin = 5, ToW/HotC/Rogue = 3).

Stop comparing individual talents against each other, and give up on trying to argue that we scale worse than druids, we know that already.

PS: Wall of text = bad

Nobody is comparing individual talents, Binkie, I simply gave a list of talent differences, the result of which is the difference in scaling. You are correct, we do not have spirit on our gear, but item by item comparison at the same item level shows that mail gets the value of spirit in mp5 or crit (depending on item), both of which are, as you will probably agree, a considerably more expensive item stat than spirit.

Also, moonkin form is flat haste increase (3%), but Celestial Focus reads as "increases your total spell haste by 3%", which is where those 3% are from.

Total raid crit is, as you said, 18%, but a shaman can provide 8% of that (ToW + Oath), whereas a boomkin only contributes up to 5% (boomkin aura). In a fully buff covered raid, shaman thus gains 3% less raid scaling as druid (yeah, yeah, it's not 3%, but you know what I mean :p), because he brings more potential (but unused) buffs. I know, I know, a theoretical concept, there's too many variations to count is as a major issue. That's why I focused mainly on nuke scaling.

As you said, we KNOW that we scale worse than druids. The question is - what will Blizzard do about it, because that's clearly a major issue and patch is mere 2 weeks away.

As I posted earlier (World of Warcraft (English) Forums -> [FEEDBACK] Shaman DPS testing), I ran some Live vs PTR testing, I just finished a series of Level 80 beta testing and here were the results.

BETA TEST 1

LEVEL 80 ELEMENTAL SHAMAN
55/16/0
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000

2045 spell power
38.46% spell critical
60 haste (1.83%)
52 hit

vs. a completely un-de-buffed level 80 Test Dummy (except my ToW debuff)

Rotation:
Flame Shock > Lightning Bolt > Lightning Bolt > Lightning Bolt > Lightning Bolt > Lava Burst

Results
1,789,821 damage done
1822 DPS

Lightning Bolt: 62.3% of total damage done (39.8% crit rate)
Lava Burst: 24.0% of total damage done (98.8% crit rate)
Flame Shock (DoT): 7.7% of total damage done (0.0% crit rate)
Flame Shock (dd): 6.0% of total damage done (32.1% crit rate)

So, this was totally unexpected.

I do the exact same DPS at level 70 as I do at level 80, even though at level 80 I had significantly more spell power.

I did LB-only spams, and tested 41/10/20 LB spams, both were inferior.

I feel lied to at this point. Elemental Shaman don't "think" or "feel like" they are doing same/less damage at level 80. THEY ARE doing the same damage at 80, as they do currently Live (assuming you have my gear or better).

Granted;
-this test was on a premade character, and not Naxx 25 geared, but the total 100% complete lack of scaling shows through pretty strong. Level 80 Shaman with several hundred more spell power, using the FLS>LB>LvB rotation, break even with level 70 Shaman doing straight Lightning spam
-the extra DPS bonuses from the T6 set boost level 70 DPS somewhat, and there was no set bonus at 80
-latency on the beta server is about 380ms higher than Live for me (mathed out the difference, theorectically would increase DPS about 180 if latency would have been normal)

Still, about 550 extra spell power over Live, talented for and using "the" rotation Blizzard is shoving down our throats, and with spells that have a base damage much higher than the level 70 versions ... I should have seen some improvement. Basically the only improvement we are seeing right now is from raid buffs, and we will get those at 70 too.

Yes, I realize Blizzard said we need damage buffs right after they said we need damage nerfs. I just wanted to post this objective test result, as these boards are always full of theory but often sparse on facts.

As I said I wasn't disagreeing with your conclusion in my post. I'm simply trying to get people to stop posting things that basically are well worded QQ. Data gathered as ofancow did is the type of posts I enjoy reading since it actually contributes something. Its data that can be objectively discussed

My main issue is that there are no real attempts to do anything comprehensive. Everyone just takes one talent and compares it to another class's and complains about how the other class is so much better. If you are arguing that our scaling is worse than all other casters (or are you just talking about druids?) back it up with some real math. If you want to show that we scale worse than other casters spec out a raid specced mage, lock, boomkin, spriest, and ele sham and show the scaling coef / s so people can take things in and dispute any misconceptions about said spec or scaling. Not walls of texts listing talents telling other people to do the math.

Consider yourself a scientist, if you make a claim I there should be data to back it up. The question of scaling of the dif caster classes is an important and interesting from a TC standpoint but I'd like to see comparison with more than just druids and I'd like to see real math.

P.S, I just got my net back today after 2 weeks without in my new apt so hopefully I can get back to contributing more.

I understand entirely the issues elemental shaman are having right now, and agree 100% that they need to be brought up to part with the rest of the DPS casters as they seem to be lacking the right amount of oomph in PVE boss encounters at the moment.

However, a lot of your statements are really just incorrect and a bit confusing when it comes to balance druids DPS talents and style. I don't want to run through all of them because it wouldn't be on-topic for this thread, but PM me if you would like a better analysis of Balance DPS actually works right now. Just note that wrath isn't even the main DPS nuke for balance. And I don't feel you're QQing at all so don't take this as an attack, just a request to be more accurate.


-


A lot of what I've read from the class designers was a real concern about solo DPS (And thusly PVP dps) being too high which is why many of your initial scaling talents got chopped up. Is it likely that Lightning Overload is the source of this disconnect? It is plausible that its' impact in solo and PVP situations is enormous, but not carrying over to sustained DPS situations. They could be struggling to find a way to balance that without removing a signature elemental ability? That's what stands out to me as why they're having trouble. Lightning bolt, overload, auto-crit lava burst, earth shock is a huge amount of burst that can hit almost simultaneously due to travel times.


Balance has no bursty instants or any way to get high damage burst without a cast time, so it seems far easier to adjust. I'm confident the designers will find a way to bring everyone within that 5% window of skill/gear/encounter type they're searching for, it's just difficult to see how sometimes.

I know what you want Daidalos, and I absolutely agree that data should be presented. That's just kinda hard to do when you're half the world away from home (San Francisco, I'm from EU otherwise) and your only basis for discussion are your own spreadsheets on a USB key and a little common sense :p

erragal, if you want to increase the damage of a certain spec, the usual way is adding coefficients, not removing them

Withdrawn

He said "unique buffs". The moonkin can get those same buffs(from the totems) so they are nullified.

Lightning overload is a 20% chance to do half damage. In simple terms, its 10% chance to do full damage, or 10% extra damage per LB. This has been the case since the current LO was implemented.

LB rank 12 is 603 average damage. With 1000 spell power, an untalented LB would hit for 603 + (1000 * .714), or 1317 damage.

It seems to me you're the one who doesn't understand how coefficients work. I hope this helps some. His coef/second is just to show you how much scaling per second a person gets.

edit: grutak beat me to it.

I don't think it is Lightning Overload. LO hits for maybe 1100-1400 on beta, vs people with 19-25k health. From what Koraa and then GC said, I think their internal spreadsheet was broken. My unfounded opinion is that they were factoring Stormstrike and improved Scorch into our DPS multipliers, when in fact due to recent changes in those talent mechanics Elemental Shaman no longer gained benefit from either of them.

As for burst/pvp dps, Balance Druids (and all spec of Mages) have access to exactly the same burst mechanic that Elemental Shaman do -- Nature's Swiftness (or PoM). Though like Balance Druids, Elemental Shaman no longer have much incentive to put 21 points into the Restoration tree.

Sorry, I must be reading too carelessly.

I thought he was suggesting that our coefficients decreased with our talented cast time to show one of our disadvantages.