For someone who doesn't arena (in your own words) you hit the nail on the head. If Imp SS solves mana regeneration issues, SR needs to have it's defensive aspect increased and the mana regen removed. Either take it off the GCD and give it the ability to break CC (without continued immunity) or leave it on the GCD and give it CC immunity (similar to BM hunter enrage)...

Also, as far as Frostbrand Weapon goes, why was it never included in the elemental weapons talent? (Elemental Weapons - Spell - World of Warcraft), While I am not a whiz at math, if it were given a 40% increase there, combined with the new Frozen Power talent, this would bring Frostbrands damage up to the point where it might be an acceptable main hand weapon enchant for PvP. As is, even with the new talent, I would continue to keep it on my offhand (the physical snare is just too handy against people who can cleanse/remove magic) and run with WF on my main hand.

Side note: I think it is abundantly clear that earthbind totem has been a huge failure for helping the survivability of the enhancement shaman in arena. However that is a discussion for another thread. I don't want to derail this one with how crappy enh shaman are in arena's and that we need spectral transformation back.

I'm probably going to hate myself for posting this but I was just playing with the Sim to try and see if I could get it to tell me how much dps adding Lava Burst back in would really be (Pit, your numbers are great btw) and I got some interesting results.

So I told the Sim to hard cast a Lava Burst whenever it was off cooldown provided Flame Shock was on the target and I told it to only use Flame Shock if there was 1 DoT tick or less left. The Priority list going like this

Flame Shock
Lava Burst
M5-LB
ES
all the rest

With that rotation (and Flame Shock glyph instead of WF) dps was 5907. Normal rotation 5924. A bit close but livable. Then I replaced the LS Glyph with Glyph of Lava and the Hard Casting rotation went to 5930. Swap in a Wrathstrike (with zerker enchant) for the Calamities Grasp and it rose to 6151.

Not good, but made even worse with the other change coming in 3.1. Imp Scorch and assoc spell crit debuffs are dropping to 5%. That puts our normal rotation/glyphs at 5812dps while Hardcast LvB with CG is 5848dps. Swap in a Wrathstrike and Hardcast is at 6057.

EP values are still basically normal except for spellpower which goes from ~1 to ~1.3 which isn't even enough to make gemming for Spellpower advisable.

True those numbers don't address what happens if you take damage while trying to hardcast Lava Burst but they seem compelling enough that the developers really should just stick Lava Burst back onto Maelstrom Weapon and balance us around it. Not only is it a more interesting rotation but the idea that hard casting a spell as Enhancement could possibly be more overall dps just strikes me as silly.

When you say 'hardcast' are you talking about that 'Slam-Casting' that Hothgor was so enthralled with?

Basically (which is also why I gave the post that title).

It's a little different now then it was then since then the swingtimer actually paused when you cast a spell, now when you have at least one stack of MW active the swingtimer is actually clipped by the cast timer (cast time overlaps when a swing should hit then that swing is skipped and the swingtimer just keeps running).

I called it Hard casting since you are literally stopping your melee to force/hard cast a spell. It actually could be even more dps (or could be less) then I posted since I don't know how the sim is actually set up to deal with what I am asking it to do. Whether it is simply restarting both swingtimers when the LvB cast finishes or if it is pausing them while the cast is going off. Guess we need some more info about how the sim is handling it but it certainly looks like it could be an issue.

Last time I looked at it the sim pauses the swingtimer while casting with a MW buff.

My intuition is that the dps comes out the same if you cast at a random spot relative to your swingtimer, but if there's some correlation between your swing and cast it could be better or worse.

Let me give the math a shot.

The melee dps loss is dependent on the % of swings clipped. If you chose a random spot to start the cast, the swing timer is W and the spell cast time is P. Average number of swings clipped per spell cast is P/W

The sim's melee dps loss is also dependent on the amount of time casting. The way I think of it is how many swings could we have added to our dps while we were casting. Number of swings lost per spell cast is also P/W.

So as long as you aren't timing your spell cast for maximum dps, or you have some bad correlation between your swing timer and spell cast the sim will match the real world dps.

Best time to cast is right after your main weapon hits. Good shaman timing the cast would do better, and poor shaman timing the cast would probably do worse. Also timing the cast would benefit in phase weapons more than out of phase.

Rounced, you said that spell power EP went from 1 to ~1.3, what about haste EP? At a glance, it seems that haste would go up by a significant margin as well. Crit rating would suffer by an equal amount, and there IS a glyph for LvB thats 10% more damage. Replace WF AND LS for FS and LvB?

How are you making that conclusion? I came to the opposite conclusion that the sim is under reporting the dps you can do if you add lava burst to your rotation (with well timed casts).

I did replace those, reread the post. Started with just replacing WF with FS and then replaced LS with Lava since it was even more dps.

Haste basically stayed the same even with the hard casting aspect.

Pretty much. Since it seems like a lot of things are in flux for 3.1 and there is a lot of rebalancing going on maybe this would be a good time to give them a way to reincorporate Lava Burst back into Maelstrom Weapon.

Lets all hash this around a bit and then someone (voting Malan since he has the most e-fame) can post something and draw GC's attention to the potential issue and maybe get us Lava Burst back (I really miss that spell - Lightning bolt is ok but LvB is just so much cooler especially when used at melee range, almost has a splash-like graphical effect even the sound effects are better then LB).

There actually is no way to time the cast well enough. You should still only cast Lava Burst when there is at least 1 stack of MW active but other then that under full haste effects both weapons will be too fast to not clip the LvB cast.

I actually think if the sim is pausing that it would work out to roughly the same effect as clipping. Hopefully we won't have to worry about it and they will just put LvB back on MW.

If you cast at a random point in the swing it comes out the same as the sim. Sometimes you'll clip 2 swings, but most of the time you will only clip one swing (I'm talking main hand only for the moment).

If you cast right after your main hand hits, you will still clip one melee hit, but you won't clip 2 melee hits. This will give you a result better than the sim.

If you're bad at timing the spell you could end up clipping 2 melee swings every time you cast. In this case you would perform worse than the sim.

For example, you have a spell cast that is 1.8 seconds, and a weapon swing that is 1.5 seconds. If you time it so the spell cast happens right before you swing you weapon, you will clip 2 swings. If you time it to happen right after the weapon swing you will only clip one.
Bad timing:
Good timing:
If you don't time your cast at all you will on average clip 1.8/1.5 = 1.2 swings per spell cast. In the good timing case you always clip 1 weapon swing, an improvment over what the sim calculates.

NM - just saw your edit and it explains what you mean much better.

Guess we should ask Tukez to reprogram the sim to take the clipping aspect of Lava Burst into account so we can get some real comparison numbers to bring to GC and the developers.

Have any of you actually tried in game to see what happens to your weapon swings when Hothgor 'slam-casting' Lava Burst?

Yes that's where we found the clipping mechanic. ~Someone~ tested it pretty extensively a few months ago.

[e] Rounce you should probably take the @GC out of the thread title.

My previous math didn't even calculate 8s cooldown. So we only would gain 140dps if maelstorm can be calculated by every 5s cast and we would rotate lava burst/lightning bolt. Maybe Maelstorm weapon could add some penalty to Lava burst?

I don't think they wish to increase our DPS at this time. With 3/6/9 expertise from UR, I actually already see them finally fixing the Flurry anomaly in our tree and nerfing it down to 25%. This would counter-balance the UR buff quite nicely for them.

Eh they could always just take it outta the Stormstrike debuff/glyph since those are almost too strong anyway. They could even make it a more elegant debuff and have it affect Nature/Fire/Frost but at more like 5% with a 2-3% glyph (just throwing numbers there).

Didn't even realize we were the only one with a 30% Flurry. Although if they nerf that down to 25% that actually is more of a nerf then 9 expertise would give back. Maybe it would be enough to counterbalance giving us back Lava Burst as well?

Simed this idea a while ago and I gained 1 DPS from such change.

Just simed it again, with a WS/AD setup:
Flurry 5/5, 142 ER = 5694 DPS
Flurry 4/5, 214 ER = 5704 DPS

Pit, I hope you don't mind but I posted your concept in that thread cause I really love it. That debuff has been bothering me since it became just a self buff. I don't mind the damage increase but I liked buffing my Elemental Shaman's damage more and it just didn't seem to fit with the design of the class. Your idea fits incredibly well though.

I also loved Lava Burst criticals while playing Beta, but I don't want that spell back to our rotation. Even now i can't play the rotation anytime perfectly if there is a lot movement involved. I bet "casual players" can't handle two more extra buttons(FS+LvB) and follow straight a clean rotation.

Lava Burst matches entirely into the Elemental playstyle. It's not our business imho.

What rotations? Just get castrandom macro and bind autohotkey. Even if you do worst possible first come first goes sequency you do 99% of best possible dps. This is why our dps is high becouse there is no skill involved. Two more spells is option not must. But this is possibly dead horse before we get some feedback from Blizzard.

Lava Burst is our classes level 75 spell. If it was only meant to be for Elemental then it should be their 51 point talent. As for matching the Elemental Playstyle they have poked and prodded the Elemental Tree to force them to want to use it in the first place.

Two extra buttons? Are you actually being serious? We have the easiest rotation in the game. Literally can be handled by a single castrandom macro. Bringing Lava Burst back into the rotation just means you watch a single DoT which only needs to be refreshed every 8 seconds and when you get to MW 5 stack you choose to either hit LB or you hit LvB or you really lazy it up and make a macro like Hothgor posted on the damage-dealing forums and it does it for you.

/cast Lava Burst
/cast Lightning Bolt
/stopcasting

But what would be great about that is that using that macro definitely won't be your best play which means skill is back in the equation. If you really think that is too complicated then I think these are the wrong forums for you since the idea here is to maximize your classes potential and right now our class has no maximizing since it can all be handled just as well by a macro.

(e) e,fb by Pitbuller

Please don't be foolish. If you want to play enhance near as optimum it's the hardest rotation following an UA Lock rotation. If I hit the keys the wrong way, I'll lose a quite margin of my DPS. I don't want to go into great detail.

I already played several DPS classes these days and they are fuckin easy compared with enhance. Even the Death Knight playstyle behaves like a facerolling wicked sick.

Honestly you can't be serious. Did you forget Elemental Devastation? Lava Burst would just change too many mechanics again.

Can you elaborate, please? I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, but when someone comes up and makes statements contrary to established testing, simming, and theory, they really do need to go into some detail to be taken seriously.

And if you were being sarcastic, woosh, way over my head.