Ocyr

Increasing base spell damage and ignoring spell scaling is just another move in the wrong direction.

Posted on the beta forums today;

25-man Patchwerk:

ImageShack - Hosting :: patchwerkdpsip5.jpg

Ranks:
1: Arms Warrior 5354
2. Survival hunter ( i think) 5046
3. Enhancement Shaman 4749
4. Moonkin 4229
5. Ret paladin 4089
6. Other moonkin 3798
7. Rogue 3637
8. DK 3407
9. Warlock 3252
10. Feral Druid 3187
11. Elemental Shaman 2921

And increasing ~20% of our total DPS by less than 10% is certainly not going to make up a 1400 DPS gap.

I can't see any way in which the Developers can be oblivious to this problem. They are too smart to be missing a problem this big, especially when everyone keeps giving them proof (and several of the DPS reports I have seen, came from Patchwerk-spawn DPS tests run by devs themselves, and they all showed Elemental Shaman dead last in DPS). Following the logic of Sherlock Holmes, knowing what we know, the only conclusion left, however improbable, is that the developers are intentionally leaving Elemental Shaman "broken" compared to other classes. Why, I have no idea. Maybe they really do plan on nerfing the DPS of basically every other class by as much as 50% (something sort of obliquely hinted at earlier today in a blue post)?

edit: a friend of mine pointed out to me that Lava Burst only makes up about 25% of an Elemental Shamans overall raid DPS. So a non-scaling 10% buff to base damage means that this buff is about a 2% buff to overall DPS. He also mentioned that the latest build only has a 0.06 "bandage" to the Lightning coefs, down from the 0.08. So Elemental Shaman got a 2% non-scaling buff to 25% of our DPS, and a 2% scaling nerf to 63% of their DPS ...

Or they have, in their own internal build on their own internal server. Their statements certainly are confusing enough, when they say (in this order): Elemental Shaman DPS is too low, we are giving it a Balance Druid-like pass; several deep Elemental talent changes that have occurred that we think you guys will like; we aren't changing anything else and Elemental Shaman damage is now fine.

If you take those statements at face value, assuming only the talent builds that we now see, one would have to assume the developers are on drugs. So baring that, it's possible they are working off a different talent tree than we are. I can hope, anyway.

 

Darian_TruBlade

The best thing to do, I think, would be to gather as many reports together as possible in one place. Not just one, two, or three, but dozens. Hundreds if it's at all possible. Take a big sampling of many different fights and make a flickr slideshow of damage meters or WWS reports.

Then, make a thread linking the data asking Blizzard to clarify where Elemental DPS should be in relation to everyone else, because if we're as close to the baseline as Blizzard says we are then a lot of specs are in for some big nerfs.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Darkmantle

I remember reading a blue post talking about how hard scaling was to balance because they had to look at blues, epics, really good epics and not let things get out of balance at each of those different gear levels for every class. However I can't find that post on mmo-champions blue finder but I did find:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
Which talks about balancing scaling from blues to epics.

So I think we can hold out hope that they are looking at a number of different levels of gear.

 

Medicine Man

For my own sanity, I'm going to have to trust that this isn't all they're planning on doing. But then, Ghostcrawler stated outright that a "Moonkin-level" pass over our talents was in the cards somewhere along the way. Clearly they have not done this yet.

One possible interpretation of this latest piece of news is that they buffed lava burst by 10% just to balance out its performance vis a vis lightning bolt. That does seem to be the major point GC has been trying to make in his last 2-3 posts. Reading a subliminal "oh, and we're done with your spec" into the narrative is probably paranoia at this point.

 

radiante

Ghostcrawler keeps talking how our coefficient is the same because we have CoE now. What he keeps forgetting is that on live we never did compete directly with other classes like warlocks and that other classes (like moonkins) did get new talents that make them scale better in Wotlk.

If they wanted more of our damage to come from fire maybe they should have designed a spell that you cast every 10 seconds.

 

Medicine Man

Actually Ocyr, I think you are creeping past a really good point here. (Not the speculation about the devs medication regime, although I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them are wolfing down Xanax at this point.)

A lot of the confusion is likely caused by Ghostcrawler simply not knowing what information has been released to the gaming public, despite the fact that he is basically the only guy who talks to shaman at the moment. With all of the information GC has, perhaps what he is saying makes sense?* Thinking along these lines, it explains why GC started talking about the comparison between lightning and fire damage for an ele shaman. Unless they are seeing LB really eclipsing LaB on some kind of internal test, I'm not sure why they were even worried about the ratio in damage between the two. I've been paying attention to the public elemental news and my understanding is that the debate about LaB's usefulness has been decided for some time.

Assuming Blizzard is 2 steps ahead of us, this hypothesis also explains GC's sudden fixation on damage/mana ratios for lightning bolt and lava burst. If LB is doing close to LaB's damage on their internal servers, then they may be assuming our reaction would be to devise mana-conservation damage "rotations" that exclude fire spells entirely.

It seems like a serviceable explanation for the mixed messages coming from Blizzard right now.

*Moreover, the +10% damage to LaB is likely the only change the devs are sure about, and thus is the only thing he's going to mention in advance.

 

Rapparee

I think it's fair to say that Ghostcrawler has new data and old data and doesn't know what goes with what build as far as shaman are concerned.

On Sept. 24th, The following Blizzard statements about Riptide were released.
Honor Items and Honor Reset, Blue posts
Riptide changes
We improved the base heal by 33% (Not sure if you have that build or not). It also now procs Tidal Waves, and we've changed Tidal Waves to two charges now (up from 1). Also, Improved Water Shield will affect Riptide.

On Oct. 7th, Ghostcrawler released these statements
Malygos 25 Update, Shaman / Druid changes, Blue posts
# Tidal Waves -- Riptide now also procs this effect.
# Riptide -- We're going to increase the initial healing component.


While this is not directly related to Elemental spells and talents. It's quite obvious that the internal builds have so many changes that any one Blizz representative is unable to track all those changes and update the public on which ones are public and which ones are internal. The following statement is my personal opinion and is based on past treatment of elemental. Your damage will remain near that of a great tank as they tank. Blizz will update one or two elemental talents that increase mana conservation or reduce threat.

 

mek

They have regularly stated that Lightning Bolt specifically is too powerful, and that it scales too well, and that it may need to be nerfed - statements which fly in the face of all in-game testing Elemental shaman have actually done. It has to be an error on their part - problems with their dps modelling, or some mechanic like LO not working as it is currently expected to. That's the only explanation I can conceive of.

 

Laupen

I'm a little confused...

LB has been nerfed back to the standard co-efficient, because it supposedly scaled too well, right?

Well Wrath (0.5 sec shorter cast) has, as far as I know, a standard co-efficient and the talent Wrath of Cenarius improves it by 10%. Also, Shadowbolt (0.5 sec longer cast) has, again as far as I know, a standard co-efficient and the talent Shadow and Flame increases it by 20%.

I don't really understand how it's justified that we were scaling too well. To me it seems like a 15% increase to LB would be in line with other classes at the moment. If it was doing too much damage because our base damage for LB was higher than it should be compared to Wrath and Shadowbolt, it only seems logical to reduce the base damage and have the co-efficients in line in order to keep scaling similar between classes.

On top of all that, the interpolation of a co-efficient boost between the cast times, relies entirely on similar levels of spell damage between the three classes. However, this is obviously not the case due to the two talents in Balance that increase spell damage from Spi and Int, and all the various Warlock ones which I'm not all that familiar with. Bascially, I can only hope that mail gear is going to have significantly more +spell power than leather or cloth in order to address this issue.

Please feel free to correct me if I have this wrong or I've over simplified it a little, but whether it's the actual case or not, that is what the average joe shaman will read from the tooltips of his friends chars and feel somewhat cheated.

 

Graze

A talented Flametongue Weapon Imbue is 274 spellpower and the new Wizard oil is 56. That's a 218 spellpower head start you get as a shaman once you ding 80. Improved Fel Armory thingy(Demonology talent) grants 39% of your spirit as spellpower for warlocks, meaning they need 559 spirit before they catch up to that.
A Balance druid needs 1816 intellect OR 1453 spirit before they catch up with that. Let's assume 1000 int and 500 spirit for a Balance druid (out of the blue numbers) and they still won't catch up (only ~196 extra spellpower and no, I did not count in furor into this)
I doubt the classes above will reach the numbers needed to outdo our little "head start" in a good while - however our spells doesn't scale good enough for these numbers to matter much, we're still gonna fall behind.

EDIT: Noticed Fel Armor grants a passive 180*1.3 = 234 spellpower, (in addition to the 30% of spirit conversion) making it superiour to Flametongue Weapon. Nevermind the comments about spirit above.

I'm a shaman, a conduit of the ancient forces of nature. A master of the elements, except fire, water or earth really... nor do I have any REAL control of nature. But I do hurl bolts of lightning!

 

Ocyr

Even if we say: 800 intellect and 350 spirit and only 1500 spell power

Shaman: 218 spell power head start

Destruction Warlock: +671 = 234 (Fel Armor spell power head start) + 137 (39% of spirit converted to spell power) + 300 (20% bonus to spell power Shadow and Flame)

Balance Druid: +584 = 96 (12% of Intellect converted to spell power) + 53 (15% of Spirit converted to spell power) + 435 (29% bonus to spell power (Wrath of Cenarius + Earth and Moon + Master Shapeshifter))

So Elemental Shaman don't have any baked in spell power advantage, they have a baked in spell power disadvantage

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Huge Disconnect Worth a read

 

Laupen

Ok, so we get a head start... But as you say, as everyone gears up, our static +dmg won't compete with other classes conversion factors.

I just have no idea why Blizz decided to always increase shaman base damage and add static damage to our talents when *everyone* else gets scaling talents.

I'd far rather that Flametongue was a % of spell damage, or Int or MP5 even? It may mean that we aren't at the top of the tables in levelling gear, but it would mean that we could compete later on in progression. Would be nice if totems scaled, but I'm not that delusional that they might someday fix them...

 

• Juice

Along with everyone else, I'm confused by Blizzards seemly lack of awareness of our low relative DPS to other DPS classes.

In all likelihood, Blizzard is using an internal build we aren't seeing that includes corrections to other classes DPS capabilities. Or, blizzard is specifically just using spreadsheets and formulas to calculate DPS, and they're doing it wrong.

I like the internal build explanation because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy, like it's all going to be OK. However, they've been talking as if there's an internal build difference for a while now, and that magically internal build hasn't yet hit the Beta realms, so I have less and less confidence that is the case. Then again, I don't really trust the random posters who regurgitate DPS parses that may be a month old as justification that we're broken. It appears that it is what it's going to be at patch - we'll know very soon if we're balanced or not. The Sunwell parses will be clear.

On the up side, 10% more damage on Lava burst is a boost to PvP performance.

 

Lintra

Posts like that one just convince me there is something we don't know ... there is no way the dev's could let such a huge discrepency pass. So I am going with the warm and fuzzy approach ... GC must be talking off a build we don't have access to.

However, I also believe in being prepared, so I spent a few hours last night compiliing total damage done and dps for our last 6 weeks of bt raids. Seeing as how my gear has not changed much (nor has the gear of the other top damage doers) I hope to be able to use this as a base line when comparing damage post patch 3.0. I figured that since our raid group is pretty static (aside from the boomkin flaking out on me every other week) this is a good base line. Same bosses, same trash, same raid. Now all I have to do is convince them to run the same bosses in the same order after the patch <grin>

I suggest the rest of you do something similar. IF we are given a totally gimped build we have to have the numbers to back it up. But this is just a back up. Until then I, for one, will put my faith in the developers who appear to approach the design more like artists crafting a masterpiece than 9-5 slave wagers slogging through the day slinging burgers.

 

Laupen

I think we'll find that we're actually performing better at 70 than some other classes. With straight LB spam, I'm doing hundreds more DPS on the PTR than I do on live. I know that other classes will see a DPS boost as well, so I think we'll all be roughly the same relatively in 3.0. The problem occurs when we start changing into lvl 80 epics that other classes will just fly away from us.

Sadly this means that all the WWS of Sunwell in the world isn't going to help, and in fact it could just serve as confirmation to the GMs that they've done the right thing. What we need are Naxx parses to show how far behind we are at that stage of gear and that the problem will only worsen as we progress into the next tier raids.

 

• Juice

If that's the case, people on the wow boards have been overreacting. This shouldn't be a surprise to any of us, but we can stop worrying that we're going to become worthless in 3.0.2. That said, relative DPS is important. If we go up 200dps while everyone else goes up 800 (made up numbers), that's a problem we'll have to voice.

There's nothing we can do about this except play it out and hope they aren't being downright ignorant. I think they're tuning us out on the wow boards, as they haven't acknowledged our scaling concerns in their latest "moonkin type polish pass."

 

Aanzeijar

Should not be the case. In an early build I killed Dr.Boom with about 2400 dps with gear that is hardly worth 1600 dps on live. Granted that was before the coef nerf, and I didn't bother to regem for hit, but there should be still enough left for us.

From what our warlock class leader tells me, their dps will actually go down with 3.0.0, as they don't have enough points to get all the mandatory points for a real affliction spec, and shadow destro is nerfed into oblivion. I'm no expert on warlocks myself, but Jimad mentioned 2200 dps average on Dr.Boom in this post in the warlock thread.

 

Ocyr

edit: changing this to be less snarky: A beta tester using this mornings patch most likely provides better comparative data than a 1+ month old PTR Dr. Boom test. A lot of changes have occurred to every class since then.

As has been pointed out, even if we end up with a (making up numbers) 200 DPS increase, if everyone else gets a 600 DPS increase the spec is sunk. And today was supposed to be the "release candidate" patch, so going by what beta testers are reporting today, it looks like there might be an iceberg straight ahead.

 

Durnitol

Edit - meh. I didn't say anything, really.

 

anyakaschala

These are the Naxx parses.

WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!!


Mainly patchwerk, but also sort by date for the latest.
Simply put, these show pretty convincingly that we fall way behind the curve.
What also seems to be telling is that in the many I've looked at it does seem like elementals are becoming a very rare species.

 

◊ Praetorian

To me that more seems to indicate that some other classes are kind of messed up.

Can someone explain how the balance druid and arms warrior high on those meters had 60%+ crit rates over the entire fight? The arms warrior crit 62% of his white hits, 54% of his executes, etc....

 

• Juice

Something is obviously out of wack. Combat logs from today's date had hunters at 4.0-4.4k dps while elemental shaman were rolling 2.4k.

 

gothic

I had a similar personal issue while LB spamming the target dummies in SW on PTR. I was not in a party, and had ToW, WoA, and Mana totems down.

The only visible debuffs on the dummy was the feral druid +dmg to bleed effects, and the rogue DoTs (Along with my ToW debuff).

With my 23% base crit rate, I was getting 59.5% crit in my very limited "tests". I decided someone had to be polluting the mob with a debuff I could not see for some reason, so I traveled to Theramore to beat on their level 1 dummies. There I was only getting a ~40% crit, which seemed to be more on-par. 10% crit from talents, 5% from Oath, and 3% from ToW.

I wondered if another class's skill/talent was debuffing the mob without my knowledge, but I'm admittedly not up to par with all the new changes to other buffs. And if that were the case, maybe that buff is broken and causing too much crit to be added to the mob. On the flip side, the buff would have to be "leaking" to nonparty members, or it would have to be a mob debuff. Are there any other mob debuffs similiar to Totem of Wrath?

 

tukez

EnhSim is now somewhat usable to elemental shaman also:

1.3.0
-Lava Burst base damage buffed by 10%.
-Added mh_auto_attack and oh_auto_attack config options.


1.2.9
-REDs and CSDs affect both melee and spell crits.
-You can define the maximum number of LS charges to cast LS. Config option is cast_ls_only_if_charges_left.
-Glyph of Flame Shock added.
-Added talents: Lightning Mastery, Elemental Oath, Lightning Overload, Lava Flows, Storm Earth and Fire.
-Fixed bug with Flame Shock dotting one time too many.
-Lava Burst casting logic with Flame Shock dots now take casting time into account.
-You can change the base ep stat with ep_base_stat. Options are ap or sp.

enhsim - Google Code


EnhSim does not simulate mana usage completely. It only calculates how much mana you actually use.

I don't know how would I implement Elemental Mastery exactly. Any ideas? Do you use it every cd? Do you want to choose the spell to use it with, or is it always the same(which one)?

This is how I did Lightning Overload:
-Can proc on miss.
-50% damage penalty is for base damage.
-Can proc from another LO.
-LO spell misses, crits etc. independently from the base spell it procced from.

Please, give me some feedback.

 

Ranghar

Being a moonkin myself, I think PTR may be a bit buggy when it comes to spell crit. My tests showed that .my crit rate on taget dummies is usually around 50%, peaking 70% every now and then (usually 2 min sessions). These figures are way above my expectations.