[Elemental] Fixing Lava Burst

Phlis · 12/12/08, 1:26 PM

Starting a new topic on the problems with Lava Burst and how to fix them, as the other thread is starting to get cluttered up.

Lava Burst, our most damaging spell has problems. It doesn't scale with crit. It has a long cooldown, 8 seconds, which devalues haste for Elemental Shaman because haste only becomes good at the points where you can fit another spell into the 8 second Lava Burst cooldown without pushing back the cast of Lava Burst by too much. Otherwise we actually loose DPS by taking too much haste/crit. While I think Lava Burst is a fun spell, and I like playing around with rotations, not scaling well with two of the four major caster stats is hurting Elemental Shaman DPS.

This needs to be changed. Elemental Shaman spells should scale with Haste. The problem is that many proposed solutions will also make us over powered in PvP, which would be a bad thing and cause further future nerfs. I'll list major proposed solutions here in this thread.

So far we have three, I believe:

A) Charges:

Mechanics: On every cast of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning you gain a charge, when you reach 4-5 charges you are able to use Lava Burst.

Pros: Haste scaling improves, as the faster you are able to cast LB and CL, the more often you can get a LvB out. This solution makes the rotation a lot easier.

Cons: Bursty in PvP, scales with crit the same as Live. May be too good in PvP? Reactive Playstyle, need to pay attention to charges and availability of LvB.

B) Lightning Capacitor:

Mechanics: On every LB and CL critical you gain a charge, when you reach 3 Charges, you automatically cast an LvB with no cast time.

Pros: Scales with Haste and Crit, the faster and more often you crit the more quickly you throw out an LvB. Simplifies Rotations.

Cons: We go back to being a 2(1) button class. Too Bursty for PvP(chance of LB Crit, LO Crit, LvB Crit instantly against a target for 15-20k), Streaky, going too long without a crit causes no Lava Bursts to be cast, negatively affecting DPS on shorter fights.

C) Pyroblast:

Mechanics: Lava Burst's cooldown taken away, instead the spell is given a 5.5 second cast time. New talent, everytime you cast an LB or CL, 1 second is taken off of Lava Burst's cast time, stacks up to 4 times.

Pros: Scales with Haste, won't overpower PvP as Lava Burst cannot be used with Nature's Swiftness, Lava Burst hits even harder because of long base cast time and scales much better with spell power. Interacts well with Lightning Overload. Simplifies rotations.

Cons: Lava Burst becomes semi useless in Solo PvE content. Also may be overpowered in 5-10 man content, as the spell becomes even more powerful there.

Those are the current ideas for helping our dps by fixing the mechanics of Lava Burst. Currently I favor the Pyroblast idea, but other people's thoughts on the subject would be appreciated. Perhaps putting together a well worded post, with testing done on each of these ideas to see how it would affect our DPS numbers would be a good idea?

Donjo · 12/12/08, 2:04 PM

I think option 3 sounds really good. What do you think about a talent or glyph that also refreshed flame shock? Do you think it would be too overpowered?

Darian_TruBlade · 12/12/08, 2:38 PM

I think the Pyroblast option is very powerful. Piggybacking off of the Arcane Blast Buff, you could make it dispellable were it to be proven overpowered in PvP.

I still think it may be simpler to allow Lava Burst's cooldown to be affected by haste, but I suppose that might open up a can of worms Blizzard isn't interested in pursuing.

Ezareth · 12/12/08, 2:56 PM

Originally Posted by Phlis

Starting a new topic on the problems with Lava Burst and how to fix them, as the other thread is starting to get cluttered up.

Lava Burst, our most damaging spell has problems. It doesn't scale with crit. It has a long cooldown, 8 seconds, which devalues haste for Elemental Shaman because haste only becomes good at the points where you can fit another spell into the 8 second Lava Burst cooldown without pushing back the cast of Lava Burst by too much. Otherwise we actually loose DPS by taking too much haste/crit. While I think Lava Burst is a fun spell, and I like playing around with rotations, not scaling well with two of the four major caster stats is hurting Elemental Shaman DPS.

This needs to be changed. Elemental Shaman spells should scale with Haste. The problem is that many proposed solutions will also make us over powered in PvP, which would be a bad thing and cause further future nerfs. I'll list major proposed solutions here in this thread.

So far we have three, I believe:

A) Charges:

Mechanics: On every cast of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning you gain a charge, when you reach 4-5 charges you are able to use Lava Burst.

Pros: Haste scaling improves, as the faster you are able to cast LB and CL, the more often you can get a LvB out. This solution makes the rotation a lot easier.

Cons: Bursty in PvP, scales with crit the same as Live. May be too good in PvP? Reactive Playstyle, need to pay attention to charges and availability of LvB.

B) Lightning Capacitor:

Mechanics: On every LB and CL critical you gain a charge, when you reach 3 Charges, you automatically cast an LvB with no cast time.

Pros: Scales with Haste and Crit, the faster and more often you crit the more quickly you throw out an LvB. Simplifies Rotations.

Cons: We go back to being a 2(1) button class. Too Bursty for PvP(chance of LB Crit, LO Crit, LvB Crit instantly against a target for 15-20k), Streaky, going too long without a crit causes no Lava Bursts to be cast, negatively affecting DPS on shorter fights.

C) Pyroblast:

Mechanics: Lava Burst's cooldown taken away, instead the spell is given a 5.5 second cast time. New talent, everytime you cast an LB or CL, 1 second is taken off of Lava Burst's cast time, stacks up to 4 times.

Pros: Scales with Haste, won't overpower PvP as Lava Burst cannot be used with Nature's Swiftness, Lava Burst hits even harder because of long base cast time and scales much better with spell power. Interacts well with Lightning Overload. Simplifies rotations.

Cons: Lava Burst becomes semi useless in Solo PvE content. Also may be overpowered in 5-10 man content, as the spell becomes even more powerful there.

Those are the current ideas for helping our dps by fixing the mechanics of Lava Burst. Currently I favor the Pyroblast idea, but other people's thoughts on the subject would be appreciated. Perhaps putting together a well worded post, with testing done on each of these ideas to see how it would affect our DPS numbers would be a good idea?

I don't think any of these changes are overpowered for PVP. In fact I think they nerf Lava Burst for PVP. One the best things about having a guaranteed massive crit in lava burst is the fact we can use it when we need it. Having a prequalification for "charges" is a limitation that decreases the usefulness of lava burst in PVP.

Rarely in PVP are we chain casting ANY spell as this usually ends with us being, pummeled, CCed, or counterspelled.

Those three suggestions are definately PVE oriented and I think they make our case in PVP worse.

What whe need is a change that not only helps us in PVE with our scaling issues, but helps balance us in PVP as well.

What we need is SEF to make Lava Burst Instant Cast. In PVP our #1 issue is our main damage comes from casting, and we have no defenses against interrupts and silence, and counterspells.

The solution to this is to give us another instant cast spell that isn't a shock which we usually have to save as our interrupt.

Instant Cast Lava burst will not help us with the haste issue. The only way I honestly see Blizzard fixing haste is by making haste affect all cooldowns as well. Shaman are not the only class affected by negative haste, therefor they need to make the change to ALL spells/abilities.

fandros · 12/12/08, 3:29 PM

Haste will ALWAYS be a dps increase although we don't scale as well with it as other casters.

Njald · 12/12/08, 3:30 PM

While I agree with the premise of this thread that Lava Burst lack of scaling from two of the common stats on caster gear I think a discussion of how to fix it would at best be a interesting mindgame unless we get any sort of indication that the developers share our sentiment.

With the 3.08 changes incoming you might be able to read into the changes to spellpower that the 20% added to Lava Burst as opposed to the 10% on lightning is such an acknowledging from developers. It could be their attempt for a solution in that these changes could be seen as a way to compensate for the lack of critical strike rating scaling on Lava Burst with added spellpower scaling.

The core issue with lack-of or negative hastescaling still remains though and will be even more pronounced when Lava Bursts new spell power conversion rating makes it an even bigger "must-cast" when cooldown is up.

Getting Blizzard attention will require some good mathcraft. A lot of classes have itemstats that do less for them in certain situations and haste being less than perfect will not raise any eyebrows.
If the issue ever will be adressed I would urge the conversation to start with the problem that elementalshamans top dps strategy will be waiting instead of casting in certain situations. And these situations need to occur for enough different gear levels and in enough formats (pvp,5man,10man etc) for it to be a general issue.

lordfafoin · 12/12/08, 4:05 PM

Fandros, haste currently does NOT always yield a DPS increase. Refer to Bink's graphs. At certain points in the haste curve we actually lose DPS because of clipping and / or waiting for cooldowns.

Icashizzle · 12/12/08, 4:37 PM

Haste certainly doesn't always increase your DPS, but I'm confused as to how we keep saying it can decrease your DPS.

If all you've done to your gear is increase the haste on it (w/o giving up any other stat) then you'll never lose DPS from clipping or waiting on cooldowns: you can always perform precisely the same rotation you were doing before hand and put out precisely the same dps you used to in that 18 (-ish) second rotation. You just sit on your thumbs more during your rotation.

The only way I can see losing dps is by giving up other stats in order to increase your haste. I'm not defending our current haste situation here, but merely not understanding how we could actively lose dps as opposed to merely plateauing.

Ghando · 12/12/08, 4:41 PM

I don't think there's such a big mountain to climb to convince devs that the spec and associated mechanics need work. They know our damage is really low. They can see the numbers just like we can. We've determined (we think) why our scaling sucks and it's ultimately because Lava Burst mechanics make haste rating (and crit rating to a lesser extent) just not that valuable. A substantial part of the problem is spellpower scaling badly as a result of fast-casting nukes and repeated nerfs to the coefficients of those nukes, and the Shamanism changes will address that. We believe those changes will ultimately fall short unless Lava Burst mechanics are altered to allow better haste scaling. Crit scaling is probably okay, since 65-70% of our damage DOES benefit from it.

I like some of these suggestions for various reasons, especially the "Pyroblast" suggestion, and I acknowledge that many of these won't work for reasons like PvP balance, keeping Lava Burst usable as on-demand burst damage for Resto and Enhancement specs, that sort of thing. What I just thought of, though, is along the lines of the new Thunderstorm minor glyph (2% extra mana returned, removes the knockback). What if Blizzard devs used glyphs to balance broken mechanics for certain specs? Glyph of Lava could be changed to accomodate this, and its bonus spellpower could be applied to Shamanism to compensate. Glyph of Lava would implement, say, the Pyroblast idea: removing the cooldown but jacking up the cast time, causing successful Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning casts to reduce the cast time.

fandros · 12/12/08, 4:41 PM

The dead zones are a myth. The difficulty is modeling this is that the ideal wait time is hard to calculate.

If you use something like this.

LvB Damage / (Wait Time + Cast Time LvB) = (LvB Damage + LB Damage)/(LvB cast time + LB cast time)

You will calculate a wait time in which you have equal dps over an period of time in which your dps is greater then your average.
Why does that matter?

Simplified numbers for this example.

LvB does 1k
LB does 500 dmg
.25 secs before you can cast LvB

Option A
LvB DMG / (LvB Cast Time + Wait) = 444.4 dps
Option B
(LvB DMG + LB DMG) / (LvB Cast Time + LB Cast Time) = 428.5 dps

but wait after the LvB both cast 5 LB = 2500 dmg over 7.5 secs
Option A Totals 3500 dmg over 9.75 scs = 359.0 dps
Option B Totals 4000 dmg over 11 secs = 363.6 dps

His graph shows dips because the perfect wait time is hard to calculate and can't be determined by just comparing "high points" in a rotation. Haste scales pretty linearly tell a friend.

Phlis · 12/12/08, 4:47 PM

Originally Posted by Ghando

What if Blizzard devs used glyphs to balance broken mechanics for certain specs? Glyph of Lava could be changed to accomodate this, and its bonus spellpower could be applied to Shamanism to compensate. Glyph of Lava would implement, say, the Pyroblast idea: removing the cooldown but jacking up the cast time, causing successful Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning casts to reduce the cast time.

I don't know, that seems like something pretty complicated to be added as a Glyph, it really feels like a Talent too me.

Also, yes, I mainly care about PvE here. I really could not care about PvP concerns in this discussion. If you wish to talk about PvP things, make a different thread please.

Santillan · 12/12/08, 5:22 PM

My idea is much more simple:

Add a talent that converts crit% to crit bonus damage to Lava Burst.

Ezareth · 12/12/08, 5:29 PM

Latest Elemental Changes Just in:
Hopefully this won't get buried here.

Here is what we are thinking about to try on the PTR for Elemental:

Elemental Oath -- In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.

Elemental Mastery -- Overhauled. Now increases the Shaman’s critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains 3 minutes. We recognize this might be a slight nerf in certain PvP situations where players relied on the shaman to nuke an injured person to death. Still, I'm betting most shamans will prefer the new design.

Glyph of Lightning Bolt -- No longer affects cost. Now increases damage by 4%.

/facepalm

I don't like the Glyph at all, it is almost a wash with the FT glyph, and Elemental Mastery change while nice in PVE will be is terrible for PVP as it will purged/dispell or worse spell-stolen.

Tarwin · 12/12/08, 5:44 PM

I like the reduce cast time idea, but it would essentially take the spell away from restos which I'm sure would cause a whole nother thread of QQs.

The idea I had originally was have Lave Burst crits place a debuff on us that causes Lava Burst not to crit until 8 seconds have passed or 5 other spells have been cast... something like that. That would make the Earth Shock glyph interesting at least, and we would have a spell to cast, even if it won't crit, against nature immune mobs. It would still make LB, CL and shocks the spells of choice between LvB casts in PvE, and it should have little effect on PvP.

Icashizzle · 12/12/08, 5:57 PM

Originally Posted by Tarwin

...place a debuff on us that causes Lava Burst not to crit until 8 seconds have passed or 5 other spells have been cast...

It would have to be # of spell casts or some such because if it's just an 8 second debuff, that would be effectively identical to the current situation except for the off case you're fighting nature immune mobs. You would still avoid casting LvB for those 8 seconds in favor of a LB that could crit and those 8 seconds would not be affected by haste or any other stat so it may as well be a cool down.

Ezareth · 12/12/08, 6:03 PM

Originally Posted by Phlis

I don't know, that seems like something pretty complicated to be added as a Glyph, it really feels like a Talent too me.

Also, yes, I mainly care about PvE here. I really could not care about PvP concerns in this discussion. If you wish to talk about PvP things, make a different thread please.

It doesn't make sense to fork a discussion of an ability into 2 different threads because you care no to talk about the other side of the coin.

Blizzard has repeated stated one of the difficulties in balancing PVE is ensuring things do not become unbalanced in PVP. If you have ideas/suggestions to balance Elemental it must take into consideration both aspects of the spec, otherwise you are wasting all of our time.

My main concerns lie with PVE right now too, but I enjoy PVP as well, and understand that if the greatest shaman minds are to come up with viable solutions, it must include all of our flock.

Tarwin · 12/12/08, 6:18 PM

Originally Posted by Icashizzle

It would have to be # of spell casts or some such because if it's just an 8 second debuff, that would be effectively identical to the current situation except for the off case you're fighting nature immune mobs. You would still avoid casting LvB for those 8 seconds in favor of a LB that could crit and those 8 seconds would not be affected by haste or any other stat so it may as well be a cool down.

The 8 seconds was more of a way for the debuff to expire if nothing happens for a little while. The debuff either expires after 8 seconds or 5 spells are cast. It's still just an idea, not entirely different from the Pyroblast one. I'm just trying to find a way to keep the spell as an option for Restos for both farming, PvP and the occasional dps on a boss.

Ghando · 12/12/08, 6:25 PM

Originally Posted by Ezareth

I don't like the Glyph at all, it is almost a wash with the FT glyph, and Elemental Mastery change while nice in PVE will be is terrible for PVP as it will purged/dispell or worse spell-stolen.

Not to be blunt, but this thread and this discussion have never been about PvP. We really have no idea how PvP balance will turn out once the arena season starts, and in any case you don't model and discuss PvP damage the same way you do PvE. Finally, since Elemental Shamans don't bring anything new or special to the table in PvP and interrupts are now off the GCD, I don't see the spec being a serious PvP force.

I don't have numbers as to how much damage the new Lightning Bolt glyph will do compared to Flametongue Weapon's glyph, I expect those will be forthcoming. The EM change is nice, especially combined with other cooldowns and the Elemental Oath change.

The Oath change is obviously the centerpiece of all this. I'm interested to know whether a spell that consumes your last Elemental Focus charge will benefit from this change, or only the first charge. If it benefits fully from all Elemental Focus uptime, then we're probably in good shape. This allows us to scale better with crit, but the poor scaling from haste will remain and continue to be a pain when figuring out rotations as time goes on. And regarding the haste discussion, yes it basically scales linearly. That doesn't mean that the slope of that line is correct.

Moshne · 12/13/08, 2:53 AM

I know they had a talent for shadowpriests that intended to increase their DoTs from crit rating by upping the damage they dealt.

They can go two directions with this:
1) Directly: Increase the LvB coefficient with our crit rating.
2) New Direction: Increase our critical strike bonus with our crit rating.

I'm sure all of us would happily stop "wasting" talents in Ghost Wolf, Imp. Fire Nova totems, or whatever throwaway you choose to take the 2-3 talents we'd have to spend to make crit rating affect LvB.

Pitbuller · 12/13/08, 7:30 AM

Somehow bake Shadowform to there Lava Flows

It would lool like this:

Increases the range of your Flame Shock by 15 yards,
and increases the critical strike damage bonus of your
Lava Burst spell by an additional percentage equal to your spell critical stike chance.

No big problems in pvp and some crit scaling to lava burst. Maybe even add crit->damage bonus to flame shock dot.
Haste scaling is little tougher issue.

Moshne · 12/13/08, 11:03 AM

Exactly what I had in mind, I couldn't recall what talent it was they scaled it with. It seems like a pretty easy solution as it requires less reworking of the existing spell. It might be nice to have some sort of effect on FS as well. While it has the best coefficient atm, its scaling is rather poor with both haste and crit as well.

It wouldn't solve the haste issues, but I'm not sure that haste is really that bad right now. No, its not perfect scaling, but our issue is that we don't scale well with haste OR crit.

Phlis · 12/13/08, 3:32 PM

Originally Posted by Moshne

It wouldn't solve the haste issues, but I'm not sure that haste is really that bad right now. No, its not perfect scaling, but our issue is that we don't scale well with haste OR crit.

Well, at the moment we do scale better with crit then haste. As people have said, already 60-70% of our damage(Lightning Bolt) does scale with Crit. The major issue, I believe, is haste scaling.

I made some change's to Bink's spreadsheet, only to compare the Pyroblast idea to the 3.08 changes. Obviously this doesn't include the Elemental Oath changes, or the Elemental Mastery changes. I changed how the spell choosing equations work, so that Lava Burst starts as a 6 second cast spell, -0.5 for lightning mastery to get to 5.5. Then, where the Lava Burst cooldown is, I changed it so that if the spell being cast is LB or CL it subtracts 1 second instead of subtracting the cast time. Finally the spell choosing equation goes with Flame Shock when the DoT is not up, and then when Lava Bursts cast time is equal to or below 1.5 it casts Lava Burst, Filling the rest of the spaces in with Lightning Bolt.

By only changing Lava burst's spell equation to be 3.5/3.5(ie full benefit from spell power, as I'm unsure how it works over that. If it actually becomes 6/3.5, then this way is very overpowered. But then I guess blizzard isn't against manually changing spell coeffiecents)

Stats: 1899 spell power, 100% hit, 21.61% crit, 9.76% haste, all unbuffed
DPS: 4321
DEP:
Spell Power: 1.195
Haste: 0.886
Crit: 0.429

If Lava Burst's coeffiecent was 6/3.5 then, with the same stats and same equations
DPS: 5064
Spell Power: 1.484
Haste: 1.051
Crit: 0.429

Obviously the DPS there is very high. Also this doesn't include chain lightning. I'm going to play with the spreadsheet a little bit more to see if I can get that working correctly. I'd expect a dps improvement by including Chain Lightning, if only because it allows Lava Burst to come out even faster in the rotations.

• Binkenstein · 12/13/08, 6:29 PM

Well, there's a 3.0.8 version now.

Re: LB vs CL, it's getting to the point where LB scales better, and is slightly behind on DPSC. I very much doubt that anyone will be able to make the split second decision to use CL in order to get LvB out faster.

Idk · 12/14/08, 4:09 AM

doh, nevermind

Phlis · 12/14/08, 4:44 AM

Originally Posted by Binkenstein

Well, there's a 3.0.8 version now.

Re: LB vs CL, it's getting to the point where LB scales better, and is slightly behind on DPSC. I very much doubt that anyone will be able to make the split second decision to use CL in order to get LvB out faster.

Yeah, I was messing around with the new version today. I got some weird numbers, comparitively actually. With the stats you have set up in it, changing it from LvB cooldown to the Pyroblast method, and also adding in Chain Lightning, I got these numbers:

6.0/3.5 Coeffient on LvB
DPS: 6977
Crit: 0.560
Haste: 1.574
Power: 1.776

3.5/3.5 Coeffient on LvB
DPS: 5941
Crit: 0.560
Haste: 0.511
Power: 1.428

A considerable drop in DEP for Haste and SP, mainly, I think, because with the changes to Lightning Bolt through shamanism and the new glyph, there is less of a damage difference between the two, LB's average damage, with the Bonus from elemental Oath, is 8671, while with a 3.5 coeffient LvB's damage also while under EO is 16066. This may seem like a large difference, but LB is actually probably critting for 10-11K ish, and you're getting more of them off in LvB's cooldown. It seems to be that with the Pyroblast method the best way to get Haste's DEP up is to increase the amount of damage done by Lava Burst, so it becomes a bigger part of DPS.

Also, some notes about CL/LB. In your newest spread sheet, if you edit some tables to include CL, and add a CL cooldown column, which works the same way as the LvB CD column, you get better DPS numbers. 4981 vs 4917 which you have in your version, Bink. Using CL still seems to be between 50-100 DPS greater then just LB spam inbetween Lava Bursts, even if you push LvB Back farther with it.

Also, just as a note, if the pyroblast mechanic is changed from reducing cast time by 1.0 to 0.5 per cast, I got these numbers:

DPS: 5305
Crit: 0.600
Haste: 1.600
Power: 1.264

Which changes all the numbers around essentially, and Haste becomes a huge dps increase.