It's going to be ridiculous for mana if we're not worried about dropping magma every 15-20 seconds. I was a little worried about where Fire Nova would end up fitting in to that whole scenario, but 950 mana every 2 mins compared to ~6684-8912(20-15 second intervals) alleviates any worries of that. It is, however, really contingent on the glyph remaining unchanged.

At the guy above me: I don't think it's intentional. The 2 minute thing is shared by the elementals to prevent you from dropping both at the same time and it probably forces a blanket cooldown on all of the spells that includes the elemental that you just dropped.

I think the far sweeter part of the Fire Ele on a 2 minute cooldown (or permanent pet for stationary fights) is all the GCDs that it frees up not having to recast magma all the time.
I know on live, when I use my Fire Elemental, I notice a LOT more free GCDs available while I'm DPS'ing. GCDs that I'll happily use to cast Fire Nova if everything stays the way it is now. As Rava said, without dropping Magma totem, the mana for Fire Nova spam is not a problem.

However, the second that the boss needs to be moved fire nova will become useless since it is centered around the totem. This makes the glyph likely very good for stationary fights but much worse for any type of movement fight (which depending on strategy, is the norm in TotC). In addition, the fire elemental would need a 4 minute uptime to be worth it during the fight (as shown by Rouncer earlier in the thread). So we will need to see which fights (if any) this glyph would be useful for in ICC. Likely there could be a few, but I would place my money on several fights where this is not the case.

Ok... first off I don't beileve that their going to leave the glyph as is, but assuming they do AND by some miracle you can drop your Fire Ele and the totem itself remains within range of the boss 100% of the fight the glyph would look like this for a 10min fight as normalized by the BiS thread....

(1300-725) * 480 / 600 = 460dps

Fire ele dps - magma totem dps * uptime gained by glyph in seconds / time of fight in seconds

Yea... I don't think blizz is going to just give us 460dps along with Fire Nova..... expect a change.

Wow, if that glyph goes live at an 8 minute cooldown reduction, that would be amazing. Granted, there will be very mobile fights that would still call for Magma Totem, but what I think I might do is create a spec for Fire Ele that replaces Glyph of Windfury, and a spec for Fire Ele for immobile fights like Jaraxxus and Twins.

I think some calculations might need to be done for those that don't want to dual-spec PvE Enhancement. Replacing a glyph (which will be WF/LS/FS, as Feral Spirit and SS have been proven to be the two definite glyphs) will set a requirement on the amount of time the Fire Ele will have to be hitting the boss in order to break even with the glyph you replace.

Using the data from the previous page (1300 DPS Fire Ele, 725 DPS Magma Totem) 100% uptime and effective attacking time of fire ele would be:

1300 - 725 = 575 dps increase.

Now in order to do this, you'd need to replace a glyph. Let's assume Windfury, and that it's roughly 80 DPS:

575 - 80 = 495 DPS.

That's a really strong glyph. Almost so strong that I don't see it getting to live, but if it did it might possibly bring us up to par with the meter topping DPS classes. Now, at a more in depth look, let's assume the fight is mobile and the ele might not be hitting the target for a certain period. In order to allow the glyph to be worthwhile, it would have to be in combat for:

80 / 575 = 13.9%, or 16.7 seconds.

Wow. 16.7 second uptime out of 120 seconds? That's incredible and easily attainable. And then if the boss has moved away from the fire ele and probably won't move back for more than 16.7 second uptime (which I find hard to believe), you can just put down Magma Totem and proceed as usual until the cooldown is up.

Also keep in mind, this is assuming the fire ele is only hitting one target the entire time. How often does he fire nova? and what does the DPS from his fire nova seem to be? We would need this data to figure out if Fire Ele would be best in an AoE situation, and if not, at what amount of mobs would it be better to place MT instead of GFE.


Now keep in mind these are ONE PERSON'S NUMBERS, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO DO YOUR OWN CALCULATIONS WITH YOUR OWN NUMBERS TO FIGURE OUT YOUR OWN STATISTICS, JUST LIKE EP VALUES. Also, I don't know quite what the exact value of the WF glyph is but this value seemed to pop into my head, and if it's wrong just plug the value in and fix the equation.

You can't just take difference between the fire ele and magma totem and call it day due to the fact that we will always now get 1 fire ele, the glyph doesn't modify that. So if you were in a 2min fight the dps value of the glyph would be 0 because you would have been able to cast that elemental w/o it.

However you are close to 1 thing as my previous numbers had shown, If the glyph itself allows you to recast your elemental once in the fight and he's only on target with the totem inrange of the boss for 50% of the time (meaning you cast magma totem at 1min left cause he's off fucking around) its still a dps increase over WF or LS glyphs.

(1300 - 725) * 120 / 240 = 287.5dps

EDIT: Oh wait, I see what you mean. For any time after the initial 2 minutes, it's a DPS increase, because the glyph doesn't affect having the fire ele up for the first 2 minutes of every 10. So for a 6 minute fight, it would be (1300 - 725 - 80) * (240 / 360) = 330 DPS. I gotcha =) but as you get closer to 10 minutes, that value gets closer to the perfect value of 495. (EDIT: Perfect is actually 396)

Or actually, it wouldn't be 495. For a 10 minute fight, it would be 495 * 4 / 5, or 396 DPS increase. You're right, my math was a bit flawed.

EDIT2: Just a forethought, in order or this glyph to equal a WF glyph @ 80 dps assuming these numbers, the fire ele would have to be active for exactly 13.9% of the time past 2 minutes the fight lasts, plus a little extra to make up for it being "useless" the first two minutes. So about 10, maybe a bit more, seconds per minute. Easily attainable still.

What is the divergence on AoE between the Ele and Magma? Not that I would think anyone would pop it on simple AoE, but as we know there are fights where AoE actually plays in. Of course in general some AoE and better boss DPS tends to be better for classes that are weak in the AoE department, but still. Wouldn't want to expend a Fire Ele only to have it decrease the overall contribution.

I can easily just bump Magma up, but I have been bad at noticing the value of Fire Nova from the Ele. Wowhead doesn't list a cooldown so I can't even crease a baseline for how often it will be used.

Ok instead of doing the pure math I'm going to use Heroic Anubarak's numbers from my WoL's to give a Real Fight Example though you must keep in mind that every fight is different. Anubarak and his adds make 5 targets for my Magma totem / Fire ele to hit though its not 100% as the adds die before the new wave comes in. However the boss is stationary and I almost always hit all 5 targets while the boss is up (we use 1 tank for adds).

Here are some recent parses of a heroic anub kill with the only data seleted being 1 section of when he is being dps'd with 2 waves before he submerges. This shows the Magma Totems dps in that part of the fight only, I'm sure its alot less when your killing all those little bugs, but since my fire ele was used in p3 we want to compare apples to apples here.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis - 1698 Active DPS for Magma Totem

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis - 1667 Active DPS for Magma Totem

Here's the overall fight which shows a "Greater Fire Elemental" listed under my name with an uptime of 118.3 seconds (I cast him exactly at 30% so the fight must have ended 1.7 seconds before he would have despawned)

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis - 2431 Active DPS for Greater Fire Elemental

So to answer the question, for ME on one parse of MY Heroic Anub'arak, the difference in AoE is 2431 - (1698 + 1667) / 2 = 748.5dps

Thank you, and very interesting.

It seems that the Ele is actually better at AoE than Magma. The difference for the previous people appear to be around 5-600 DPS on single target, but on several adds it jumps to about 1k.
While we are all different (me being lesser geared since my Shaman is only my main alt), I doubt that gear and difference of scaling can change totemvalues to such an extent as to make it a reverse of your results.
I was sure Magma was better on AoE.

Use Kibler's Bits instead since you could farm stacks and stacks of that in no time.

Good point - does the sim need an extra option - Pet food!

I suppose before we add that we should do some through testing and check what buff the wolves actually get? Is it just one wolf or both that get the buff? Might need assistance of a hunter for Beast Lore to check what their stats are as you only see the stats of one on Pet tab.

Cross posting this from mmo-champ as it pertains to this discussion:

A few notes on this as I have way too many northern spices.

Using the pet food does not trigger the GCD.

It (on glance) seems to only affect one wolf. At least the buff only shows up on one wolf. It only uses one. I didn't test trying to use two treats.

Of course this will be different in a raiding scenario, but to give an idea, wolves did (for me) ~507 DPS on the dummy without the treats or any other buffs/cds, ~534 DPS with them. Both were averaged over 4 trials each. There was VERY little variance. I entered combat by wind shearing followed by having auto-attack on but was too far away to hit the heroic dummy. So 0 buffs, 0 dps from me.

Take what you will from this silly test. Perhaps something to look into.

one more note though: 30 dps seems very very high. I can only assume that both wolves are getting the buff. Levva, perhaps we do need some best lore action to look at it.

Yup extra testing with a hunter and viewing pet tab to see primary wolves stats would be useful. If you have ShockAndAwe installed it auto activates the pet tab, so you can see wolves stats & also view the more interesting info in the tooltips.

I'm heading to bed now though as it's 2:30am here I'll try to get my hunter mate to test things tomorrow unless someone else manages to get some interesting stuff whilst I sleep.

Agreed that the quoted 30dps improvement seems way way too high. A recount issue? I think we need a /combatlog to verify figures.

PS. The MMO-Champion thread is at spirit wolves and pet food?

So I went back to the heroic dummy and did 5 tests with and without food and recorded a combatlog.

You can find the data here: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Again it was impossible to see if both wolves were getting the food buff. But the results are interesting. Ignore time 982s-983s I screwed up. Here is a short summary:

No Food:

432s-475s: 524 dps

619s-662s: 536 dps

801s-845s: 521 dps

1005s-1049s: 512 dps

1189s-1231s: 524 dps

Average no food: 523.4 dps

With Food:

1372s-1414s: 533 dps

1552s-1595s: 553 dps

1736s-1778s: 535 dps

1921s-1963s: 536 dps

2103s-2145s: 571 dps

Average with food: 545.6 dps


So, at a quick glance, a 22 dps difference. Again, no buffs, no combat from me other than wind shear (in this case, for the treat tests, wind shear was macro'd to the spiced mammoth treats) to start the wolves to the dummy once they were summoned.

Going a bit further, 571 dps on the last try seemed very high compared to the others. If you do not include that data point then you get 539.3 dps, which is still a 16 dps difference. Though I am inclined to include it for such a small sample size.

So again, disclaimer, this is ONLY a test dummy with NO BUFFS OR DEBUFFS on the target or myself. My AP was constant at 4761 for the entire time.

Cross posted this on MMO.

Has the sim implemented the new Fire Nova yet? I've been curious if the new Fire Nova would make Searing Totem preferable over Magma Totem for single target fights. (If of course which I expect the new Fire Ele glyph to be changed from the 8 minutes cooldown reduction which it is now)

Searing totem would free up some global cooldowns to be used on Fire Nova instead of Magma Totem refreshes, and iirc the dps difference between Searing and Magma is rather minimal,

Shaman T10 preview seems to be up on EU site

World of Warcraft Europe > Game Info > Tier 10 Armor Sets

First Shaman armor set I haven't liked in a long time. WTF is up with that helmet?

Maybe it will look better when it's not on a human model.

So now that Black Magic gives 250 haste proc on spellcast, has anyone done any testing as to what would be the best enchant combo? Will it be 2x BM, Berserking/BM, or 2x Berserking? I assume it would be a rather simple addition to Enhsim, but I can't really speak because I know nothing about programming.

[Enhancement] Patch 3.3

That pretty much rules out 2 BM, and beyond that there haven't been any sim updates to include 3.3 abilities as of yet. With a 10 sec duration/35 sec ICD you average 71.43 haste from the enchant, and berserking(according to Shaman: Enhancement ) is worth around 160 ep. Unless you have haste ep exceeding 2.24 berserking looks superior on paper. The simulator may suggest otherwise, so until that's updated it's all speculation.

Added Black Magic to Rawr ready for v2.2.27. Details... 250 haste for 10 seconds 35% proc chance 45 sec ICD. Details from Black Magic - Spell - World of Warcraft and Black Magic - Spell - World of Warcraft

Edit: For every character I tested it on it was significantly behind Berserking.

How well is the 45 sec ICD confirmed? I didn't expect it to be that high.