The mana cost of Chain Lightning should not really have bearing on whether or not it is used.

I have yet to find a fight pre 3.0.8 that I ended with less than half mana in a 25 man raid setting and I used CL every time the cooldown was up. Now post 3.0.8 we have even more MP5 as well as Elemental Mastery. Last night I never dropped below 80% mana in any fight going full go with CL.

I didn't get any exact number on my TPS tonight, but I did do A SHITLOAD more threat than I've ever done before.
So I got to really watch Omen now, but I'm not complaining to say the least :P

I'm having a absolute blast, wreacking the damage meters for once.

Today I tried raiding without any points in Unrelenting Storm and my mana was fine for all bosses. Only at trash it got low some times, but I dont consider that to bad since we pulled pretty fast and trash isn't that important. The additional 3 points can be spent to Elemental Warding or Improved Fire Nova Totem, what I would recomment. It's very nice to have your own AE-Stun prior to Thunderstorm.

Damage seems pretty good, got 4,5k DPS at Patchwerk (place 4). Considering my equipment it's not bad... got some first places too (Gothik, 4 Horsemen...)

(PM, if someone wants WWS link...)

I have never raided with points in Unrelenting Storm ... very very rarely in 10mans without a replenishment I have had to use a mana pot ... in 25man mana is a none issue. The 3 points are much better spent in Elemental Warding (particularly now in 3.0.8) from a PvE point of view.

Hear, hear! Tonight was our first raid night and we cleared Naxx and Malygos and I am extremely pleased with where I came out overall. When I saw my first 10k+ lightning bolt crit, I admit, I giggled like a school girl. (Though, in the balance, that's something I know other casters have seen plenty of already and we're simply getting what we should have had all along.) I didn't have 4 T7 (until after the raid) and still managed a respectable 4600 dps on patchwerk. -That's up from my previous best of 3600. Some fights I did better or worse depending, but by the time we got to Sapp and KT, I was in the groove -and my flask had even worn off.

After a little napkin math, and having experienced the inability to use up my mana prior to 3.0.8, I dropped nearly all of my points from convection. I figured that 3/3 in unrelenting storm for me was roughly equivalent to 5/5 convection and that I would prefer to have the savings in the form of a constant regen vs selected casts. In trade, I picked up warding and improved fire nova totem. (The latter for the 'fun' factor mostly outside of raiding.) Anyway, the point is I still had zero mana trouble on bosses. (We are fortunate in having very balanced raids, class-wise. I wonder if we won't see a nerf to refreshment effects yet.) Sure, I had to stop and drink for a bit during the marathon packs of mobs in the construct quarter, but that's a very small matter imo.

I'm very much looking forward to our OS raid tomorrow now that I've upgraded both my trinkets tonight and picked up a 4th T7.

Yea I managed a 12k Lightning bolt, and a 15k lava burst. Mind blowing, completely mindblowing

Did a quick check on these findings with Bink's SEIC 3.0.8.5 summing up the mana usage of 100 secs of casttime in the model sheet. I am not sure whats exactly calculated in these cells, but I assume it represents the mana consumption of the spells after talents and factors like Elemental Focus.

So for 100 secs casttime without BL I get with

5 points in Convection: 21868 mana
2 points in Convection: 23421 mana
0 points in Convection: 24456 mana

So lets assume I have 1k int raidbuffed. With Unrelenting Storm, this would give me 120 mp5, repectively 2400 mana in 100 secs.

If I spend 0 point in Convection I lose 2588 mana
If I spend 2 point in Convection I lose 1553 mana

So I think its ok to say, that it is better to spend 2 points on Convection and 3 Points on Unrelenting Storm than 5 points to Convection and 0 points to Unrelenting Storm. If you are still better off, if you dont spend any points to convection is difficult to say, I think it depends on your haste, because the more haste you have, the better Convection gets, compared to Unrelenting Storm. Since I didn't take BL in to account, the numbers are actually a bit worse.

Please correct me, if I was wrong using the mana column in the model sheet in Bink's SEIC...

Dont forget, that Convection scales with haste...

Where/How do you get your mp5 value from Shamanism? More dmg/mana? Or do you mean Shamanistic Focus?

hopefully a guildmate of mine is going to be able to get the wws going; I did 5628 dps on patchwerk last night, which was a really nice feeling after being not able to get more than 4,3k pre 3.0.8 ;D

Mana is not even a minor issue anymore, I too was never below 80% and with almost no cl never even below 95%, which is pretty sick. Expecting some nerfs concerning this actually, but we'll see that in a bit.

Also, Blizz fixed the chainlightning (display?) bug, I get 3 correctly shown hits on trashpacks now in Naxx.

Yeah I've been expecting a mana nerf for some time....which is surprising that they gave us a better unrelenting storm instead of making it a damage-only talent as well as 2% more mana from thunderstorm glyph.

I never witnessed the CL bug with default UI.

Every person in the forums and in game that I've talked to about bugs with CL have different UIs. I'm glad the issue seems to have gone away.

Has anyone done high iteration testing on CL against single targets to determine lightning overload procs?

Some of these changes feel too good to last.