I've read on WoWWiki and tested on Live that the 2.5s "cooldown" does not trigger after each and every single charge gained but rather it applies after the trinket fires a bolt when 3 charges is reached. The article explains it far better than I can but essentially the LC nerf wasn't as harsh as it's tooltip makes it out to be. Assuming Reign of the Unliving/Reign of the Dead has the same mechanic (and not re-implemented to match the tooltip wording), the proc portion of this trinket could be decent. Of course all judgments are reserved until some PTR testing is done. I'd do it myself but I'm blocked because of a patching error at the moment.

Because of the massive haste gain you receive you're casting a greater percentage of LBs increasing the [Totem of Hex]'s value as well.

Still, I'd like to see you do a 50k+ Lightning Bolt. That doesn't exactly happen, so what's your point?

Lets put it this way.

Because LB is cast more frequently, Thunderfall needs to be X times better than Hex for it to be practical to use. X is ~9:2 or 4.5 because a typical rotation will use 9 LB for every 2 LvB. Putting it into some quantifiable figures, Thunderfall gives around 630 damage per cast vs the 295 for Hex. Multiplying these by the previously mentioned ratio, we see that Thunderfall gives 1260 vs 2655 from Hex.

The biggest point is, that you can't spam LvB, it's only ~26% of my dmg, LB is about 50% in the most fights.

With Thunderfall you've only some nice critspikes

You can easily see how the ratio would vary depending upon the mobility of the fight. For Thunderfall to be better, you would need to get the ratio to 1:1, or in other words, reduce the number of LBs in the rotation by 2655/1260. The stated ratio was 4.5:1 so the ratio of LB:LvB required to make Thunderfall more effective would be 2.13:1. To get a ratio this low, you would have to be moving for over 50% of the fight (more for fights with haste buffs like Hodir or Vezax) and to be honest, if you are losing that much time to movment, you have bigger problems than totem choice. When I am doing my calcs, I use a movement time of 10% for mobile fights and 25% for extremely mobile fights. The numbers are arbitrary but seem to work out about right.

That's my point exactly. Crit spikes. On Hodir, the crit is what makes the man, not the hit.

Thanks for the answer - sure makes more sense than what previous people posted.
I'd really just like to know how much DMG/DPS you do during mobile fights like these - perhaps you could PM me a WWS or something, so that I would have something to compare to.
I realize that the math speaks clearly to you guys, but you have to take that "random" effect in to account when you talk about MMO's. There's always a facit, but you should never base your playstyle on what a bunch of strangers (who's really good at math) tell you. You have to figure that out for yourself.

There's nothing random about it (really, there isn't). Those big crits on Hodir may seem awesome and better, but it's just instant gratification vs. overall damage. With a (at minimum) 4:1 ratio of LB to LvB casts and a (low-end) 40% crit rate, Hex and Glyph of ToW have been shown to be far and away better than a buffed LvB over the course of everything in Ulduar, even gimmick fights with inflated crit damage like Hodir.

If you really want to change the community's mind about this you've got to give us something better than "my numbers look bigger." Give us consistent parses over several weeks compared to each other that will show us clearly that your way is better. Otherwise you're just telling us it's better because you feel it's better, in which case you're posting this in the wrong forums.

For someone allergic to the math behind this stuff, you sure are making a lot of ascertations which can only be substantiated with numbers. You don't know what is insignificant until you show it quantifiably. And "common sense" means something different to you than it does to the rest of us. We've all participated in these fights too, and I can tell you that the damage I do on Hodir is scattered until I plant my feet in a moonbeam with a stormcloud buff, pop timers and bloodlust and go to town. And when that happens, LvB's 8 second cooldown means 8 lightning bolts to 1 LvB. There is no common sense in my mind that supports your assumptions, and since you can't back it up with math you're just blathering. So either bring something new to the conversation or stop talking about it (this is a direct statement that you should not proceed to repeat yourself in posts, we've heard what you have to say - bring something new).

Both of these fights LB outperforms LvB on a scale larger than usual. In fact, it would seem that letting FS fall off when not moving (happens very often on Vezax, not so often on Hodir) and instead spamming LBs is more DPS.

It might be cool to see those big LvB hits, but it's still less overall damage.

What is this assertion based on? Yes, there were some posts about LB spam doing more dps than the normal rotation. But none of them were proven by some numbers. When I tried spamming LB on Hodir und Vezax, I ended up doing less DPS than I used to.

I have to admit that I am not such a heavy theorycrafter that I can easily calculate the numbers from scratch. However, SEIC thankfully has a comparison of the normal rotation's dps and LB spam. The only advantage of LB that I can think of are its longer cast time (and therefore better scaling with huge numbers of haste) and 4-piece T8. And even when enabling 4-piece T8 and setting haste to a number where all spells are capped, the normal rotation's dps is greater than LB spam dps (by about 5.7%). If I am not mistaken, all other Hodir and Vezax bonuses are at least equally beneficial to LvB as they are to LB.