I took a gander at the PTR patch notes, and saw some things that interested me, but when the changes go through it may change the class mechanics quite a bit.
-New Talent:Shamanism- lightning bolt gets an additional 2%/4%/6%/8%/10% and lava burst gains an additional 4%/8%/12%/16%/20% of your bonus damage effects.
-Storm, Earth and Fire: Moved up in the tree, talent points reduced to 3 from 5, and wind shock is included in the range. Flame shock bonus damage increased to 20%/40%/60%.
-Unrelenting storm:Point cost reduced to 3 from 5, now does 4%/8%/12%.

At quick glance, this is great. Making LB do more damage should take away chain lightning on boss fights, and lava burst getting an additional 20% from bonus damage is great too, since it helps to fix the problem it gives us by not scaling with crit and devaluing haste. The extra flam shock damage is somewhat trivial, but the increased wind shock range is nice, no more pulling aggro. Finally, condensing talents will make for less points spent in useless talents. My question is how is this going to affect our dps? it will go up, obviously, but will we be able to compete with all the other casters now?

a) For gawd's sake at least try and avoid typo's in the thread title.
b) At least some theorycraft has already been done on these changes and how they will affect Ele DPS. Look around a little.
c) You are missing out this - World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Please answer Elemental Shaman concerns

well, those aren't in the PTR patch notes right now, so until they are added they shouldn't be taken into consideration.

They were posted by Ghostcrawler. When we first heard about the current PTR changes, it was from him, so I'd say it's highly likely that they are accurate.

Any thoughts on how good the Elemental Oath/Mastery changes might be? I'm afraid that the Oath buff will only work for any spells that lands when then buff if active, and only work on the first of the two charges and thus be very minor.

Doubtful. Considering how the Lavaburst mechanic and similar mechanics (Shatter, for instance) work, it'd be when the spell is released not when it lands.

We'll absolutely pass that 50-60% mark with Elemental Mastery active. Obviously the proposed changes (20% more crit for 30 seconds) will make it a vast improvement over its current incarnation, but we have a buttload of crit already without adding 20% on top of that.

I'm typically horrendous at math, hence why I just sit back and enjoy the theorycrafting that others do... but am I correct in thinking that the new Lightning Bolt glyph (4% more damage) will be better than the Flametongue Weapon glyph in all situations post-Shamanism addition, especially in single target situations?

Related random thought - whoever can get around to it first when glyph changes goes through, I'm curious if the LB one also increases LO procs.

Yes, it is, and it will.

The odd thing though is that Glyph of Flametongue is actually better than Glyph of Lava.

So is CL now dead for single target DPS?

Not quite dead yet. It will still give a minor DPS increase (though probably not worth the mana cost) but it's main use now is really to make things fit into that LvB CD.

I think the EM/EO change is great. 80-90% uptime on 10% increased damage with maybe 70% crits through most of the duration of a Bloodlust is going to be pretty effective.

New issue - based on some limited PTR testing, they increased the damage of magma totem but the cap appears to be set incredibly low. Capped at 1554 damage with a base of 414 per tick and scaling set at 10% spellpower per tick. Is 1554 the current AE cap for Magma or is Magma totem supposed to start capping out at 3 mobs?

The no aggro component of the new totem is functioning though so that's a good thing.

Lava is 10% more spellpower for Lava Burst, while Flametongue is 2% more crit. So even though the actual bonuses of each put Lava ahead, since we use LB more than LvB, FT comes out ahead.
Of course, Lava scales better with Spellpower, FT scales better with haste. To be completely honest though, it's probably going to be a case of "six of one, half a dozen of the other" (ie: the differences are really minor).

I appreciate where you are coming from. For me 2% crit just seems quite weak right now, and whilst Lava Burst does only make up a minor % of our damage, with its scaling I think Glyph of Lava does better. I would still be interested to see specific DEP values if you have the time/inclination to produce them.

Of course things are probably going to change, and crit looks like it might be a much better stat. Which brings me to:

a) Is there a reliable way to see uptime of clearcasting on WWS, as I can only seem to see the number of times it refreshes the buff (a problem with modelling the old Skycall Totem too, I remember)?
b) Is stacking crit now going to be attractive to get the new Ele Oath damage bonus? Or, given the way clearcasting works, are most Eles already near to the point where diminishing returns from extra crit apply heavily to the uptime of clearcasting?


I realise its unlikely there will be a definitive answer to b) yet, but interested to know thoughts.


Edit: Very simple comparison on the FT/Lava Glyph tradeoff - feel free to dissect

- Lava Burst makes up 20-25% of our dmg output
- Glyph of Lava adds ~9% to the damage of Lava Burst
- Glyph of Lava therefore adds ~2% overall damage
- 2% additional crit will always add less than 2% to overall damage output, as 25-30% of Ele DPS is unaffected by crit. (In fact probably closer to 1% DPS increase from 2% crit).
- Therefore Glyph of Lava > Glyph of FT

a) We never had a decent model behind Skycall iirc
b) Not really. There's a bit of crit on our gear already, we get more from talents/buffs/debuffs, so it probably won't make much of a difference. I might try doing some CC uptime math later.

Did some work on haste, 10-29.5% in 0.5% incriments. Result: 12-22dps increases across the board. Appears that the priority system is a) the way to go, and b) solves those nasty haste scaling issues we thought we had.

a) The average can be calculated, though it's a pretty shitty calculation. It's easier to do for clearcasting than for skycall, though, as the values are fairly static. As for WWS, the log file registers elemental oath refreshes, combined with time of refresh (or gain) you can calculate the uptime, but I can't be arsed :p

b) We get 18% crit from talents / totems and now 20% crit on elemental mastery for 30 sec. Gear should bring another 15-20%, plus 10% from Imp. Scorch and 2% from Flametongue, we're sitting at 50% base crit, 70% with EM for 30 sec. I'll dare say that's enough :p

c) I agree with Mmootimus, calculated for my raid gear, raid buffed, I'm getting about 2.53% dps increase from Glyph of Lava, once Shamanism is added, it should be even better. 4% Lightning Bolt increase will likewise be very close to 2%, perhaps a tiny bit over it, depending how much AoE was included, as CL tends to massively take over in such situations. It seems to me those glyphs are so close to eachother that it doesn't really matter which one you take unless you're minmaxing it hardcore style (in which case FT will be superior on trash with CL and LB will be superior on single target bosses).

I have had no luck on PTR! I really wanted to post some WWS. After the transfer was complete it said my shammy was locked and to contact billing dept.

I'm going to have to disagree there.
LB & FS are no-brainers for the first two glyphs.
The choice is down to Lava & Flametongue.

FT is an easy depcrit*ratingcrit*2 = 49
Lava is a little harder. Using =(1230+(2/3.5)*(B4*(1+Shamanism*2+0.1)))*(1+concussion)*B9*(1+E15) and subtracting =(1230+(2/3.5)*(B4*(1+Shamanism*2)))*(1+concussion)*B9*(1+E15) I get a 462 difference. The problem is that I only cast 36 Lava Bursts in a 6 minute fight, and thus the overall dps contribution is lower (462*36)/360=46

Reason being, if you did not have a Beta key you do not have access to any of the WoTLK content. It apparently has nothing to do with your actual accounts access.

Source: WoWinsider

With the two so close I will probably go for the Lava Glyph as during more mobile fights it will be the LBs that are dropped from the rotation reducing the effectiveness off the FT Glyph while you will still do your best to get your 6 LvB/minute in even in the most mobile fights.

On the other hand, the FT Glyph will increase the uptime of the EO buff slightly which is more difficult to calculate.

SampleOutput - simulationcraft - Google Code has been updated for patch 3.0.8

No new download is currently available..... waiting on details regarding Judgement of Wisdom.

EDIT: Includes proposed changes to Elemental Oath, Elemental Mastery, and Glyph of LB

Oh, I forgot to include the 4pc bonus too.

dedmon, may want to use a 57/14/0 build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...h=000000000000
Also, did you adjust for the 1.5 sec CL cd reduction, down from 2.5 seconds?
CL appears to lack a overload option, does the damage/time for LB take into account overload as well, and are you using a set rotation, or a priority system? (FS, FS if dot has less than 1.5 seconds remaining and LvB is <1.5 seconds on CD, LvB, CL, LB)