Essex23, the question was dismissed because the Flametongue glyph is obviously superior for general purpose DPS, and the Elemental Mastery glyph clearly serves a wholly different purpose, namely more frequent on-demand burst for PvP applications. One is for DPS and one is for controlled burst, and that's really all that could be said about the two glyphs.
Pretty much what Vernichter said. In addition, though, the math should be fairly simple to compare the two. EM glyph would give you 100% crit every 2.5 minutes for roughly 1.5 seconds (roughly one global-cooldown's worth). So you could do an estimated 100% * 1.5/(2.5 * 60) ~= 100% * 1.5/150 ~= 100% * .01 = 1%. So given no haste, the EM glyph is effectively 1% crit if you use it every cooldown. Haste of course would lower its value, wheras when you add haste to the FT glyph, the value increases.
Now...tell me how that is a silly question. Please.....I'm all ears.
As other's have stated, it's a silly question because the answer is so ridiculously obvious. Is a 2% all the time crit bonus worth more than a 30second advantage in a on-use talent? Of course it is, stop fagging up my thread about it.
Hey guys, for raid dps, is the water walking reagent glyph better than the glyph that adds one more hop to chain lightning?
PS. Consider editing your post to remove the elipsis. I won't infract you, since I'm debating you, but it's probably going to get reported and infracted.
This is mostly a time for the people who want to be a part of the theorycrafting solutions to talk, and for those who want to ask a lot of questions about the best this or that to shut up. If you think something is good/better, think it through and justify it so it can be discussed. Showing up and asking for the best rotation right now is just silly.
Against my better judgement I've started work on a WotLK version of the TTT entry, and on my list of things to do is a comparison of "waiting for the cooldown" vs "fill in time" for LvB/FS/LBx? and LvB/FS/CL/Lbx? for various haste percentages. I'll add in some damage and crit scaling as well, hopefully (all with DPS as the Y axis), and try to produce some standard stat values & loot rank links, but I have less time to worry about these things atm, so I won't have it done any time soon.
Against my better judgement I've started work on a WotLK version of the TTT entry, and on my list of things to do is a comparison of "waiting for the cooldown" vs "fill in time" for LvB/FS/LBx? and LvB/FS/CL/Lbx? for various haste percentages. I'll add in some damage and crit scaling as well, hopefully (all with DPS as the Y axis), and try to produce some standard stat values & loot rank links, but I have less time to worry about these things atm, so I won't have it done any time soon.
This is on my todo list for my ele sheet. Between work the resto sheet and the ele sheet it till take awhile. However in my BC sheet I automatically changed the number of LBs depending on hase if you used a LB/LB/LC/CL rotation (showing both fill-in and wait until rotations) so I intend on doing the same for WotLK
Sorry. If I make 10 posts a day in each of 10 class threads, that's 100 posts a day. Make a mistake like I did a couple of times yesterday from typing too fast, and it takes another hour trying to repair the damage.
We think Elemental single-target damage is good once you can use your fire spells. It is up there with Moonkin and Shadow Priests and similar specs. We have looked at this issue a lot, because it is something we were really worried about.
Your damage may be low at 70 and this is something we're evaluating. We're not sure it is worth the changes it would take to fix it, because it risks messing with the balance between Lightning and Fire that we have now. Your damage is still plenty high enough to level and to do 5-player instances. I don't mean to suggest Elemental is catastrophically broken, or then we would do a major intervention to fix it. At the moment, the level 70 raids are so easy that we're not very worried about you getting benched for the next couple of weeks until LK goes live. Once LK goes live, very few people are going to be doing competitive raiding or PvP at level 70.
Your AE damage is too low. This is something of a design change for us, because we were always satisfied with elemental not being a big AE class. But as I have posted a few times recently, we now think that was a mistake and we want to make some changes. We're not sure yet whether the best way to do that is through new mechanics, or changes to existing mechanics. After all, your totems are supposed to supply some AE damage and it's not hard to imagine the changes it would take to get them there. Thunderstorm is somewhere else we could hit it.
The only benefit I see it having is the situations like Hyjal when your AoE pally tank would end up with too many aboms and get roflstomped. Thunderstorm could save the pally if you were close enough to use it. Other than that it will just end up being a huge source of frustration for raid leaders while at the same time amusing ele shaman.
As far as glyphs go, it seems the best setup is:
Glyph of Flame Weapon
Glyph of Water Mastery (assuming your not using flame shock in your rotation)
Given our crit is very high at 70, it doesn't seem important to get thunderstorm unless your already getting SEF, and even then it's questionable. Personally I've chosen to go with 48/13/0 without using flame shock for the time being. I am the process of testing LB spam vs LBx3/4, CL as many people I've spoken with have argued the point again.
At 80, best glyph setup seems:
Glyph of Flame Weapon
Glyph of Lava - Your Lava Burst spell gains an additional 10% of your spellpower
Glyph of Flame Shock - Increases the duration of your Flame Shock ability by 6 sec and it is not consumed by casting Lava Burst. (Old - 3 seconds, didn't prevent Lava Burst from consuming it)
It seems for certain that blizzard is going to basically force elemental shaman to make use of flame shock and Lava Burst to hit top dps at raids once at 80. I think it's a safe assumption.
DPS rotations are hard to say at this point because, rotations will be a bit different for everyone who doesn't share the same haste. As Haste can greatly effect a rotation, it is very difficult to evaluate a overall DPS rotation. It seems to me that if verying amounts of haste will kind of prevent us from having a solid dps rotation to rely on.
My plan for 80 would be to use the 3 glyphs listed above while:
Keeping flame shock on the target
Using Lava Burst as often as the CD permits
Lightning Bolt Spam the rest of the time (up for comfirmation, due to some saying LB spam>LBx3, CL)
As blizzard makes changes, who knows how things will go, but it is my belief with people varying in haste in this forum from ~10% to 25% haste, it will be extremely difficult to come with a dps rotation that will cope with the varying amounts of haste.
Currently, Ele Shamans still have crap for AoE. Thunderstorm is a pvp item mostly with the bonus of restoring 8% mana if used during PvE. Honestly the AoE damage doesn't seem like it meshes well with PvE. Basically it seems like Blizzard is waiting to answer AoE for elemental shaman.
Blizzard overall has made some positive efforts towards forcing us to use Lava Burst and Flame Shock. Their latest changes seem like they are working well to buff the dps generated through LvB and Flame Shock.
Last edited by sleepcontrol : 10/22/08 at 6:55 PM.
Reason: discussing AoE
As blizzard makes changes, who knows how things will go, but it is my belief with people varying in haste in this forum from ~10% to 25% haste, it will be extremely difficult to come with a dps rotation that will cope with the varying amounts of haste.
While this is absolutely true, I think things will change as we get into Wrath. I plumbed some figures into my spread sheets to determine which gems are best to socket for me at 70 and at 80.
At 70 with 1100 SP, 10% haste and 17% crit it showed:
(I used the level 70 gems in 80 gear because that helped with another part of what I was trying to evaluate)
It appears that haste will be significantly worse for us than spell power due to our biggest damage spells all being either on Cool Downs or having a DoT component and crit becomes a very poor stat due to the automatic crit on our highest damage spell and again the DoT component of FS.
So I think we will see most shaman only taking the haste and crit that happens to come with the gear and socketting/enchanting for spell power. I'm just hoping that we don't have too much of our item budget spent on haste.
With the new wrath of air totem it seems massive haste is starting to become a bit of a problem for me. I usually run with 300 haste or so and about 1740 nature damage (buffed and counting the relic).
During bloodlusts with drums going im very close to the GCD cap and my LB are so fast its becoming hard to cast them without interruption. Even when i use the mouse wheel to spam LB it seems to "hiccup" and i lose some cast time between the casts. I also play with on average 40-50 ms lag.
Im actually thinking about regemming all my haste+dmg gems to pure spelldamage.
Also as we all know our raid dps isnt the best atm. Im pushing 2400 on brut whereas my best pre patch was 2300. I know this will get fixed ones we get fire going but im still worried. Hunters in my guild are doing 3500 dps on brutalus and i cant see how we can possibly compete with that.
I've always prided myself in being able to do great dps on my elemental, always pushig out ever last bit of damage i can to stay competitive but nowdays i just cant. Not that it matter anymore though since all raids have become a joke.
With the new wrath of air totem it seems massive haste is starting to become a bit of a problem for me. I usually run with 300 haste or so and about 1740 nature damage (buffed and counting the relic).
During bloodlusts with drums going im very close to the GCD cap and my LB are so fast its becoming hard to cast them without interruption. Even when i use the mouse wheel to spam LB it seems to "hiccup" and i lose some cast time between the casts. I also play with on average 40-50 ms lag.
Im actually thinking about regemming all my haste+dmg gems to pure spelldamage.
Also as we all know our raid dps isnt the best atm. Im pushing 2400 on brut whereas my best pre patch was 2300. I know this will get fixed ones we get fire going but im still worried. Hunters in my guild are doing 3500 dps on brutalus and i cant see how we can possibly compete with that.
I've always prided myself in being able to do great dps on my elemental, always pushig out ever last bit of damage i can to stay competitive but nowdays i just cant. Not that it matter anymore though since all raids have become a joke.
Bliz has said that hunter and some melee dps is too high and its one of the reasons they are increasing the armor on bosses. Another issue is that we most likely won't stack as much haste even with t9 as we did in sunwell. At a certain inflection point spell power becomes better than haste even in sunwell gear so now with wrath of air totem that point will e reacher even faster. Also there might be sweet spots of haste where we have a "perfect" rotaion so I'm not all all surprised that ele sham in full sunwell gear have haste related issues.
I hate to display my ignorance, but do we have a source for information like "What is the current LB Coef"? I had to dig back a number of pages to find a formula using 0.714. I found it, and that is good, but I also got lucky.
Sit back and think about it for a minute. We're in a massive state of flux with regard to everything theorycraft related. Everything is on the table to be changed - absolutely everything. Why would anyone spend the time to compile known information right now? It doesn't make sense. The coefficient might be 0.714 right now, but tomorrow it could be changed to 0.750. Today we don't have competitive AE capabilities, but tomorrow we might.
To make matters worse, there's a post on this very page about Bink taking on the updates to the TTT (Theorycraft Think Tank):
Against my better judgement I've started work on a WotLK version of the TTT entry, and on my list of things to do is a comparison of "waiting for the cooldown" vs "fill in time" for LvB/FS/LBx? and LvB/FS/CL/Lbx? for various haste percentages. I'll add in some damage and crit scaling as well, hopefully (all with DPS as the Y axis), and try to produce some standard stat values & loot rank links, but I have less time to worry about these things atm, so I won't have it done any time soon.
So, in short, no there's no central compilation of data for build 9506 or whatever blizzard is on right now on the PTR. Nor should you expect there to ever be a compilation like that. If you are so hungry for data, you will search these threads. If you can stand to wait for things to settle down, the data will eventually be centralized and spreadsheets will be created. At that time, keep an eye on our Theorycraft Think Tank forum.
The only benefit I see it having is the situations like Hyjal when your AoE pally tank would end up with too many aboms and get roflstomped. Thunderstorm could save the pally if you were close enough to use it. Other than that it will just end up being a huge source of frustration for raid leaders while at the same time amusing ele shaman.
There's always the possibility of a Glyph which removes the knockback while buffing the spell for raid/group AoE.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity.
Man the worst thing about the new changes and trying to model dps is far and away spell hastes effectiveness.
I mean you can per specific optimal rotation breakdown the % of damage on average that will come from LvB, CL, LB... (FS has no benefit so you can't just judge from raw damage) then based on those percentages of damage come up with a haste scaling weight for that rotation specifically based on increases in DPS for averages of damage... but then you quickly hit a tipping point where it becomes beneficial to add in another CL or change a CL to a LB, destorying your perfect rotation and sending your model into uselessness.
Ahh well I suppose other classes have had the same issues for ever now, it's just our turn.
Ancedotally on a model that i spent the morning on:
It's looking like just from a spell haste of ~16% that a good 73% of our damage is still lightning, raid buffed it goes up to 76%, which bodes poorly for scaling.
*edited* I don't know what value I transposed to get that 50% fire damage scaling thing... but yeah lightning benefits a lot more from raid buffs do to increased crit/haste etc. which fire really doesnt get any benefit from.
McBeefy, a modeling of how much of our damage comes from Nature at this point is ephemeral. The GC post on our AOE leaves intense questions. There are essentially 3 options other than buffing Fire Nova/Magma (which removes Totem of Wrath...).
1) A new spell. The pros of this method would be that there would be no single target changes to our proposed rotations involving the 4 nuke spells. However, the time frame required to test out an entire new spell in two weeks is unlikely.
2) Thunderstorm mechanics change. With the Knockback and cooldown, this spell cannot be considered viable AOE. It would require a complete overhaul and change to something like Hurricane. The outrage of removing Elemental's knockback would be severe, and I honestly do not see this option happening.
3) Chain Lightning Mechanics change. I strongly feel this is going to be the ultimate answer. I can see Chain Lightning being manipulated to something more reminiscent of the Sunwell Protector's where it jumps as many times as possible. They would be forced to nerf the base damage and remove the jump penalty, but it would allow an already available spell to be used. Again, testing would be necessary, but it seems less intensive than option 1.
As a result, if they do make a change to Elemental Shaman AoE ability, I think it will be a complete overhaul of chain lightning. The result would be a removal of chain lightning from our DPS rotation. While it may not drastically reduce the % of damage from Nature that we see, it will be significant enough to change the models and cast timers.
After all, your totems are supposed to supply some AE damage and it's not hard to imagine the changes it would take to get them there. Thunderstorm is somewhere else we could hit it.
I hope they don't go with the totem route, ToW is definitely useful for buffing aoe packs for other casters, and rotating magma/fire nova around the fire nova cooldown is just plain awkward. The 45s cooldown on thunderstorm is what not only keeps it from being a viable aoe, but also keeps it from being game changing in any other aspect of the game, i.e. pvp, soloing.
Just give Totem of wrath effect to every fire totem with totem of wrath talent.
This would give small personal dps(searing/fire elemental) and large AoE damage benefit(magma/nova). No need for new spells. Totem of wrath is too powerfull against other fire totems.
McBeefy, a modeling of how much of our damage comes from Nature at this point is ephemeral. The GC post on our AOE leaves intense questions. There are essentially 3 options other than buffing Fire Nova/Magma (which removes Totem of Wrath...).
1) A new spell. The pros of this method would be that there would be no single target changes to our proposed rotations involving the 4 nuke spells. However, the time frame required to test out an entire new spell in two weeks is unlikely.
2) Thunderstorm mechanics change. With the Knockback and cooldown, this spell cannot be considered viable AOE. It would require a complete overhaul and change to something like Hurricane. The outrage of removing Elemental's knockback would be severe, and I honestly do not see this option happening.
3) Chain Lightning Mechanics change. I strongly feel this is going to be the ultimate answer. I can see Chain Lightning being manipulated to something more reminiscent of the Sunwell Protector's where it jumps as many times as possible. They would be forced to nerf the base damage and remove the jump penalty, but it would allow an already available spell to be used. Again, testing would be necessary, but it seems less intensive than option 1.
As a result, if they do make a change to Elemental Shaman AoE ability, I think it will be a complete overhaul of chain lightning. The result would be a removal of chain lightning from our DPS rotation. While it may not drastically reduce the % of damage from Nature that we see, it will be significant enough to change the models and cast timers.
I think option 2 is more likely than you might think. As I noted just a few posts up the page it's entirely possible to remove the knockback via a Glyph while boosting its performance. This isn't without its drawbacks, but it's unlikely to draw significant complaints from PvP Elemenal Shaman. It does, however, represent a further compounding of Elemental Glyph choices.
Option 3 is a nightmare for the simple reason that each jump of Chain Lightning has a chance to proc Lightning Overload. This could greatly upset AoE balance as all other multi-target spells have reduced damage the more targets they hit, while Chain Lightning would only get better and better.
I can't really speak for option 1 as Blizzard seems to be focused on how they can avoid it. It's likely they'll intend for Elemental Shaman to do point blank AoE via totems and Thunderstorm.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity.
Sit back and think about it for a minute. We're in a massive state of flux with regard to everything theorycraft related. Everything is on the table to be changed - absolutely everything. Why would anyone spend the time to compile known information right now? It doesn't make sense. The coefficient might be 0.714 right now, but tomorrow it could be changed to 0.750. Today we don't have competitive AE capabilities, but tomorrow we might.
To make matters worse, there's a post on this very page about Bink taking on the updates to the TTT (Theorycraft Think Tank):
So, in short, no there's no central compilation of data for build 9506 or whatever blizzard is on right now on the PTR. Nor should you expect there to ever be a compilation like that. If you are so hungry for data, you will search these threads. If you can stand to wait for things to settle down, the data will eventually be centralized and spreadsheets will be created. At that time, keep an eye on our Theorycraft Think Tank forum.
LoL. I realized it was kind of a silly question when I asked it, but there *might* have been a 'we try to keep this up to date' data thread I could not find. Hmmm ... I am assuming the 0.714 is on live now, no? NVM, I can test it when I get home. I was trying some things out on the test dummies (live, not ptr or beta) and was getting very odd results, so I wanted to see if I could figure out what was going on. I like to get my hands dirty with the models rather than just blindly accept a rule.
Ahhhhh, so that is what he meant by TTT. Got it.
Anyways, please delete this after reading it ... and my prior post too ... lets not clutter up this thread with off topic questions. I only asked here as I did not know where else to ask.
Again, thanks for the help. I'll go back to lurking for now.
I left your question and I'll leave your reply because it's possible others will read with the same questions and have them addressed from our discussion. We'll get things consolidated as soon as practicle, it just takes time to balance the work required with the potential for changes from Blizzard and with other life obligations.
10/22/08, 3:01 PM
If I make 10 posts a day in each of 10 class threads, that's 100 posts a day. Make a mistake like I did a couple of times yesterday from typing too fast, and it takes another hour trying to repair the damage.
