That would be not including the totem - i still need to calculate which totem is best as with these rotations only 2 out of 4 spells would have a chance of proccing the totem.

Which totem are you talking about proccing?

Sorry - the Skycall Totem: Chance on LB cast to proc 100 haste for 10 secs.

@ Agash: it seems that the Earth Shock glyph needs 400 Inscription therefor I doubt we'll have it available before WotLK.

With this in mind are you suggesting a FS-LBx6 rotation? Did your tests include the t6 4 set bonus and the reduced CL cooldown?

confused aswell about what rotations to check ><

edit: what's with the 4 ticks on FS?

That makes more sense - I thought you were trying to refer to a physical totem. But still, given that our DPS heavily relies on a smooth cast rotation, I have always preferred the Totem of The Void (or the one off Teron Gorefiend if your lucky enough to see it drop) over a spell haste proc. I rarely watch my cast bar as I have become accustomed to the timing in my head. Also, 100 haste on your LB is going to cut off approx .1 sec and going to leave you with a few brief moments where you will either be waiting for the cool down on your Lava Burst, CL and FS spells or just tossing in another LB. Either way, you are more than likely reducing your DPS. However, with the new talents reducing the cool down on the CL as well as throwing in the possibility of maintaining a FS and Lava Burst in your rotation at 75, I will be looking at how much haste it is going to take to make the cast rotation perfect. Too much or too little haste and your going to run into issues with overlapping cool downs.

This is something I have been trying to look into. According to WoWHead, it appears that the glyph is usable at level 15 but is only available in Dalaran and requires 400 inscription. This doesn't really seem to add up so I'm not sure what the final situation will be once the patch goes live (still an hour to go in the UK).

The 4 ticks on Flame Shock simply indicates that the DoT component is being allowed to run it's full duration. I also did calcs checking the effect of clipping a tick or 2 off the DoTs and using the Flame Shock Glyph to take it to a maximum of 5 ticks. I just needed a way to differentiate between them.

The calcs posted do not include the 4 piece bonus as I do not have that yet - I have, however, performed calcs taking that into account and whilst it closes the gap slightly, it is not significant.

I did do several examples trying to use the reduced CL CD (one of the ones listed requires it to work) but it doesn't make a huge difference to DPS (on single target) but adds considerably to mana useage and to the complexity of the rotation.

If the Earth Shock Glyph is not available, the highest DPS rotation appears to be to use a Glyphed Flame Shock (with maxed S,E&F) and spamming LB/CL until the DoT drops off after 5 ticks before renewing the Flame Shock.

The Flame Shock Glyph requires level 15 and 75 inscription but is again only available in Dalaran according to WoWHead so again it needs looking into.

All glyphs require level 15, because that's the lowest level glyph slot is available at. Some glyphs require a higher level simply because spells that those glyphs affect are not available before that level.

So basically pre WOTLK

We are looking at it so that our best dps would come from having a rotation of

FS and LB until the DoT component runs out (and more DPS with the FS glyhph)?

No?

Flame SHock is only viable if you are consuming the dot for lava burst

Yes, Flame Shock has never been viable as part of a rotation on it's own. At 80 it is only viable because it acts as basically a +50% crit rate modifier for Lava Burst. At 70, no such reason to ever cast it.

That's not true FS was viable as a dps increase over LB (even with 4pct6) if you had enough regen from a spriest, had CoE, and 5 stacks of file vulnerability (and had no or low storm strike up time). However since CoE now affects nature and fire vulnerability is out there is no longer a reason to do this.

Now that the patch has arrived, could we conclude this thread on what template is the best (48/13 or 51/10) and what rotation we should make during this month ?
according to the last posts we have to forget FS until 75, so the best rotation would be LB/CL (the number of LB depending on haste and SEF )?

This is not true anymore. With +50% DoT damage in S,E&F, using FS does give a DPS increase over a straight LB spam.

After rigorous testing I've come up with 2 good cast rotations. These also came with some drastic changes to my gear setup and gems.

The first rotation:

FS>CL>LBx2>CL>LBx2> Rinse and Repeat

This works well with the Flame Shock Glyph for the extra tick that extends another 3 sec on to the FS. Also to do this you want to get about 160 haste which, along with your WoA totem will reduce the cast on your LB to ~1.75 sec allowing a perfect rotation filling the 3.5 sec CD of the CL. This cast rotation is a pretty insufficient use of mana tho. If you decide to use this rotation, be sure to drop Thunderstrike from the Ele Tree and put a point into shamanistic focus which will reduce the cost of the FS by 45%.

The 2nd and easier rotation:

CL>LBx2> Rinse and repeat.

Have ~160 haste again to make it a smooth rotation.

Using the test dummies in IF and Recount for a couple hours I've found that not using the FS in the rotation actually increased my DPS slightly. But, the test dummies are too close and the CL hits 2 targets. In most boss fights, there is only one target, therefore reducing the DPS from the CL a bit. So I'm guessing that using the FS will in fact do more damage on the boss than what the test dummy results show. I'll know in 2 weeks when I've done the same boss fights twice and can compare the WWS reports. I will also be testing an LB/FS spam to see if the CL is even worth having in the rotation at all.


Now keep in mind that it is also very important for us Ele Shammy's to crit often. It's is our source of saving mana through Elemental Focus. Before 3.0 I generally used no haste. This is mainly due to the fact that I never had the benefit of an Spriest in the group or the T6 gear that has haste and crit. So I relied on criting and mana pots to make it thru a long fight. Also, using a 3LB>1CL spam was a good smooth rotation. Since 3.0, however, we have actually gained crit thru talents. We get the same 5% from the Ele tree and can now pick up the 5% we got from the resto tree in the Enh tree instead. Only difference is that it is now 5% for all melee and spells. Then we still get the 3% crit from ToW. In addition to those, we have a new talent (Elemental Oath) that increases part/raid crit by 5% for 15 sec every time we crit. Sure I'm down 5% crit from where I was at on my first cast, but once I get that first crit off, I have no trouble keeping Elemental Oath refreshed. So what I did is figure that instead of needing 27% crit outside of talents and totems to hit the goal of ~40% crit, I now only need 22%. But wait, there is a glyph for flame tongue weapon that adds another 2% crit leaving me 7% leeway in my gear! So I was able to move things around and stack the haste (Careful not to reduce hit rating as we got screwed on that) and added more spell power. After changing gear and gems, I am up ~40 spell power, 160 haste plus the 5% from ToW and maintained the same crit. Until level 75, this seems like it will work out the best for me. Once the Lava Burst spell is put into the equation, I'll have to play around with that too.

I think I am missing something because the Glyph of flame shock I can see on live and on several websites just increases the range of the shock and not its duration...

[Glyph of Flame Shock]

It extends the DoT, adding one more tick.

My Wrath dps sheet is almost complete but I need to spend some time polishing it up. In the mean time I'll hack my old dps sheet a little so that some of the major changes we can use at 70 are incorporated. Checking out the numbers FS is better dps than LB (but not CL) if you have SEF even with 4pct6 and CSD.

I spent an hour shooting a target dummy this morning and never had the Flame Shock/Lightning Bolts ever come close to only Lightning Bolts. It was always around 90% as much dps.

I usually try to avoid QQ but the nerfbat was worse that what i was expecting. Our dps didn't change at all while the rest of the classes/specs are talking about +200 dps at least.

Ran a FS/LB rotation on the dummies, 1750 dps selfbuffed, tried also LB spam with 4 t6 bonus was around 1700. At the same time our enhancement shaman was doing 2000 on the dummies. Seems I have to lvlup with my personal warlock or something, but honestly this sucks.

Will come back with proper tests and screenshots.

Hmm not sure what wrong my calculations or the dps meter. Can you report what your stats were how much an average LB hit for and what FS hit and ticked for?

edit: corrected for; T6 bonus, bad FlS math, FT Glyph

Flame shock or not in the level 70 cast sequence?

Right now (going to use some typical Sunwell-gear ratings)

Lightning Bolt
628 - 717 base damage
Modifiers
1415 spell power
29 (gear) + 5 (CoT) + 5 (EO) + 5 (TS) + 3 (ToW) = 47% crit rate
+10% Lightning Overload
+5% T6 4/8 set bonus
1.61 second cast time*
(672 + (1415*.714) * 1.47 * 1.1 * 1.05)) / 1.61 = 1774

vs

Flame Shock
396 + 650 base damage (with 5/5 Storm Earth Fire talent)
Modifiers
1330 spell power
29 (gear) + 5 (TS) + 5 (EO) + 3 (ToW) + 10 (Imp. Scorch) = 52% crit rate for direct damage portion / 0% for damage over time
1.21 second GCD time**
((396 + (1330*.21) * 1.52)) + (812 + (1330*.49))) / 1.21 = 2057 damage

Flame Shock at 70 is DPS benefit for Elemental Shaman assuming SE&F and Glyph of Flametongue when casting on a target with improved scorch?

*(100 / (100 + (366 haste / 15.6))) * 2.0 LB cast time = 1.61 second cast time
**(100 / (100 + (366 haste / 15.6))) * 1.5s GCD = 1.21 second GCD time

edit:
It seems like it, for ~1.21 seconds GCD usage you put out a total of ~2503 damage. By comparison the Lightning Bolt in question may average well over 2800 damage per cast, but for the time usage of ~1.2 seconds only puts out ~1700 damage.

Factors to consider:
1) Can a build including Lava Flows be viable for level 70 without "gimping" the overall talent build? http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000 Was the best I could think of, 20 yard range limitation just isn't viable for raiding.
2) if you have higher latency numbers (looking at you, Australians), Flame Shock might not gain any benefit over spamming LBs due to the latency penalty (my latency is usually in the 40-70 range so I don't have any experience on how extreme latency can affect rotations)?

Great information so far gang, thanks a ton as it's really helped many fellow Shaman. One thing I'd like to add is towards the necessity for more +hit. As mentioned above there are quite a few items out there than can give you +hit, but I'd say the biggest "bang for the buck" would be the Skyshatter T6 gloves. From those you get +19 hit, you can add +15 more with the newly renammed Precise Strikes enchant and another +10 with a epic yellow gem (for a grand total of +44 hit on one item).

I know many of you who are in Sunwell will have better gloves, but for the majority I think these gloves will be the easiest way to get to 10% (vs the old 4%).

With that +44 you can likely just regem a few other items or if you have other high end items like the Loop of Forged power (+19), Translucent Spellthread Necklace (+15), or the awesome Skull of Gul'dan (+25) then the gloves won't be as big an issue.

But, this change for many is a big surprise so they haven't been after the high end items like above (and there are more). So, what can you do to get your +hit higher so that you can actually hit things again until you get those items? Well, you can pick up items like Ruby Drape of the Mysticant (+18) from Kara or the Hammer of Judgement (+22) from Hyjal if you don't have something much better already.

The key is: this change stinks, but there are ways around it to still be able to contribute to raids. I've only listed a few of the items available, but I hope it helps.