Hey guys, gearing choice question here.

First off, here's my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

Now, I have 51 conq badges at the moment. I don't run 10man ulduar often, but my guild is starting our first attempts on Yogg25 tonight. Even if we did down him, unless we got dual protector for shoulders, i sincerely doubt I'd get it.

I DO have 3 piece t8 though. Pants/Chest/Gloves. Next week, I'll have enough badges to buy a helm. And this is where my trouble starts.

I have 310 hit rating at the moment. I want my 4piece. I can either buy the Ele helm, and sub out a Dying Curse for an Embrace of the Spider, or buy the resto helm, and wait on shoulders to complete fourpiece?

As it stands, my guild won't be doing certain hardmodes for a bit. And even if we did hardmode Freya, my guild usually runs 2-3 mages, 2 warlocks, and 1-2 spriests every raid (And the GM is a mage, no less), so the odds of me getting the BiS cloth legs anytime soon are wayyy out there.

So should I try to minmax my stats with the resto helm, and pray for protector shoulders to drop soon, or should I run 5piece ele and drop the dying curse?

I would go for the elem helm. You can't tell for sure when Yogg-Saron is gonna be downed by your guild, when it's gonna down reliably enough to get everyone shoulders, when the Shaman tokens will drop, and when you will be the "next in list" to get theses. That's hypothetically quite some time without the 4pc bonus, which is pretty neat (or looks like it).

If your guild reliably clears all of ulduar up to vezax included + emalon on each reset, that's 3 resets before you get enough badges for buying your second (resto) T8 helm. By then the odds you've gotten the shoulders (+eventual needed hit on other pieces) to keep 4pc bonus (or soon will) and be able to replace the helm by the resto one are pretty higher than they are now. Of course that's somehow 58 badges thrown to waste, but chances are that in half a dozen weeks from now you'll be getting orbs with your badges and feeding them to the AH unless you're mad for offspec gearing.

At least that's my reasonning, some might think differently and your mileage may vary depending on your raid comp, loot distribution policies, offspec gear need, and ability to attend all raids.

I switched to Elemental from Restoration not too terribly long ago and I am having a lot of trouble putting out the level of DPS I know I should be able to. Unfortunately I'm at work and I logged out in resto gear/spec, but my stats in Ele are around 20% crit, 259 hit, 502 haste and 2400 Spell Damage with raid buffs.

Here's a link to a recent Ignis kill of ours which is a pretty good "punching bag" fight I for gauging uninterrupted DPS:

Wow Web Stats

My spell rotation is Lava Burst with Lightning Bolt filler (no Chain Lightning unless there's multiple targets to hit) and from my reading and testing, that rotation produces my highest DPS, but on the average fight, I only bounce between 2200 to 2700 DPS. From looking at other Elemental shamans and their DPS, I can only conjecture that the limiting factor is the raw spell power. I seem to be a couple hundred lower than them. Am I right in thinking that if I just pack on a couple more hundred SP I will see an increase in DPS of about ~1k? I can't see 200 SP translating into that kind of DPS.

I'm not seeing Wrath of Air Totem buff (+5% spell haste) in your parse. Was the buff not covered, or am I missing something?

I'm going to say this once, and once only: Look at your spell ratios.

31 LvB to 28 FS is just bad, and the fact that you have 1 LvB cast every 12 seconds is also bad. This also suggests that you've failed at flame jets multiple times (hint: avoiding interrupts is the best way to improve your dps)

Edit: I thought about this some more and I disagree with your assessment, Binkenstein.

Regarding the Lava Burst once every almost 12 seconds, that may be a little high, but with Lava Burst taking a little over a second to cast, around a second to travel, and usually getting delayed by, say, half a second due to latency on the preceding Lightning Bolts (I average around 350 ms latency most of the time), 12 seconds per I can't really see Lava Burst being cast all that much more rapidly. I could shave about 1-1.5 seconds off of that.

Secondly, I don't entirely buy the "It's a bad spell ratio" explaination. My reasoning is based on looking at another shaman's WWS data from one page earlier in this thread: Other Shaman's WWS. In this log, I see the Shabbaz has a ratio of 1.3 Lava Bursts per Flame Shock (25:18) which is not that much greater than my 1.1 per 1 (31:28). At any rate, I know that I am not refreshing Flame Shock except when it runs out so the culprit here is does not appear to be my Lava Burst to Flame Shock ratio. Not entirely, at least. Besides, I think data is a little skewed. I know I use the air time during Flame Jets to refresh Flame Shock and I suspect that is what Shabbaz is doing, too, so our flame shock ratio is a little over represented.

The other Shaman's WWS suggests, actually, that the problem lies with Lightning Bolt and haste. Shabbaz is getting off 5 Lightning Bolts per Lava Burst (contrary to the 4:1 he claims =P) so it appears the answer to my problem is actually "MOAR HASTE!"

I'm fairly certain that I've said something on this fairly recently...

It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to run the numbers on just how Haste can influence your rotation, and it's true certain numbers are required to allow a certain number of casts within a LvB cooldown. However the problem with haste is that it's high subject to human influence, it's the stat where the numbers meet the meat, so having a little extra is rarely "wasted" or "bad".
In a perfect vacuum 9.8%, 15.58%, 27.14%, 32.92%, and 38.7% (from gear alone) are the relative tiers at which a new rotation element becomes available (when raid buffed). However you are neither perfect nor in a vacuum so I don't recommend going to great lengths to hit those values dead-on.

The travel time point is entirely invalid. It might make all your Lava Bursts arrive x seconds later, but it won't change how often you cast.

Having looked over a lot of WWS reports from Patch (see earlier in this thread) I can say with some certainty that a good LvB frequency is just a shade under 10s. Anything much above 10.5s and you are using a sub-optimal rotation, anything below 9.5s and you probably have dead time casting nothing. Whilst Flame Jets will undoubtedly push this higher, 12s is probably still not ideal. Flame Jets are also a good time to refresh FlS, but a ratio of almost 1:1 seems very high.

Oh and in response to your previous post, unless you have full Ulduar gear, using CL would be beneficial, either as a straight - albeit small - DPS boost, or as a rotation filler.

Whilst I totally agree that is not worth going all-out to hit specific haste "perfect" values, part of the reason for that is that they really are not so perfect anyway. I am just going to quote something Agash said 2 days ago, but which people still do not seem to get:

I do understand the quote, but there are 2 sides to the "lol 5 LB's!" coin. While focusing specifically on the first half of your rotation isn't a good practice one must keep in mind that the cooldown 8 seconds per cast, not 16 per 2 casts, so if you miss time on the first half, you miss it on third, fifth, seventh, etc.

Also in the event you can actually beat 27.14% (890) the point is moot until you hit the 6 LB 38.7% (1269) mark.

Last night was kind of a downer. Hit up Ulduar 25 with an additional pug in the raid who happened to be an elemental shaman. My stats are superior to his but on practically every fight with the exception of Kologarn, he absolutely demolished my output by a good 500 DPS consistently. Trash, bosses, everything. I am pretty befuddled and, to be honest, a little demoralized. It made me feel like a fuggin' terrible shaman. (Thankfully, he was a really nice guy.) He said he was pushing CL every time it was up. Is there something I'm missing here? That shouldn't account for 500 DPS, I wouldn't imagine.

My gear, well, I don't feel like my gear is too bad. There are some upgrades (I've had to bag my Benefactors' because of being way under hitcap) to be had but I'm comfortable that the potential with my SP, haste and crit is there to step up my game.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of myself and this other shaman on overall stats.

Here is a drilldown of my Dmg. Out. I know no one likes digging through WWS logs but I'm hoping there's something simple that jumps out in the side-by-side that's an "aha!" discovery.

(Oh, here's his armory.)

One big difference between us is that he has the LvB Glyph, I have ToW.
Thanks for your time.

Looking at Lightning Bolt Damage on Ignis, the most obvious reason would be that you are downranking without realising.

Even a 500 SP discrepancy between yourself and Mottya couldn't account for the huge difference in average hits I'm seeing in the log file.

Since WWS even specifies exactly what rank you use, it's easy to see you were using rank 12 and he was using rank 14.

I wonder if I should go with [Furious Gladiator's Spellblade] instead of [Torch of Holy Fire]

It's a 49 sp and 36 crit gain for a 48 haste loss.

My haste is already low, so.

49 SP and 36 crit are easily better.

It sounds like a problem we all wish we had.

Your haste is 20%, how do you figure that to be low o.O. I would def go with the Gladiator's Spellblade like Ez said, put a 19 spell power gem on it and you're set.

Wow, oh my God. I have a do-it-all macro I wrote years ago to either cast LB or LHW depending on the target... I never changed it to Rank 14. I'm completely embarassed.

In general, you should never use more than the two blue gems required for the Chaotic meta gem. Piddling amounts of extra stamina on your primary DPS gear won't contribute meaningfully to your survival, and especially since our damage is low in Ulduar you really don't want to sacrifice spellpower.

I don't personally have survival problems in Ulduar, though as a Tauren I'm packing more HP than most Shamans. My recommendation is if there are particular fights you're having trouble with, be prepared to swap in a piece or two of well-itemized PvP gear (especially in a slot where you don't need hit) or other high-stamina gear. That's a better solution than sub-optimal gemming on your primary DPS set. For example, I use [Icy Scale Belt] socketed with 3 24-Stam gems on Thorim hard-mode because of the massive Frost-based raid damage.

That explains a lot. I'm surprised I didn't notice that when I looked at your DPS long ago.

I'd personally stick with Torch. Albeit while dropping the haste will strain the first half of a 5LB rotation, you wont notice a loss on the back half, so ultimately it's up to personal preference.

Granted my math-fu is about on the same level as a brain damaged armadillo, but am I correct in thinking that [Sundial of the Exiled] is better than [Dying Curse], [Elemental Focus Stone], and [Living Flame] if you have no use for the +hit? From what I can discover on their respective proc rates and equivalent spell power normalization, I think so.

Yes.

Although given the trade-off I would think swapping a Sundial for a Dying Curse would have to be the absolute last resort to drop +hit, after you have exhausted all other possibilities.