5.2 Shaman changes

[Endus]

Just because the placement may agree at times (plenty of times I've agreed with where they placed enhance approx) with how you feel, doesn't make the sim worth anything. The sims being fundamentally flawed because they are designed by people who don't have any real expertise or understanding of the spec they are creating the sim for (not saying this IS the same for elemental - I have no idea who their simdev is, but definitely used to be for enhance), just means that they're about as much evidence as a psychic predicting your girlfriend breaking up with you on a monday would be.

It'll be right sometimes (or in the analogy for some people), doesn't mean the psychic's predictions can be used as evidence.

Upping quality of sims is extremely important because it helps the people who are less mathy (but may still be willing to do the brunt work of testing mechanics) actually have something worthwhile to contribute to. If a simulationcraft dev is pure shit, then it should be brought to simcrafts attention and then people using it after. If the dev doesn't want to budge then more power too him, but it's then deceitful.

TL;DR independent sims work better, then a site like simcraft could collate the results using agreed formatting of different fight durations, iterations, and 'types'.

While much of that is something I've said myself before, the big issue with independent sims like the now-defunct Enhsim is that they can't be used for cross-class comparisons. Their model is going to be different in fundamental ways, and that's one thing simulationcraft does right; within the artificial constraints of their model, the specs SHOULD be roughly comparable, given equal attention and focus by their developers.

As I said; it's a tool. You can't look at simulationcraft results (or raidbot overall results) and say "this is class balance". They're evidence and resources, but actually getting a concrete grasp of balance is more nuanced and involves parsing both with their own relative biases.

Independent sims are often better for personal stuff, like optimizing gear and talent picks, but for the greater issue of comparative class balance concerns, they're not as useful.

[Nitwit]

Do you have an up to date on list on which specs have dedicated developers? Back in cata enhance was being handled by a mage/spriest where the mage said flame shock is the most important spell as it's a dot and the spriest put 69 seconds of spells in a 60 second timeframe due to not understanding the spec - who's doing it now?

The shaman modules (ele + enhancement) both have a developer, and they also both have theorycrafting support.

The rogue and death knight modules have a dedicated developer (same as the shaman developer), but they receive substantially less theorycrafting support from the community, because those communities have their own tools that they focus on (shadowcraft / euliat's sim + DK IRC chat). This is the same problem enhancement used to have with SimC, but that isn't the case anymore because EnhSim died out with MoP. The DKs still hop in from time to time and make sure the sims are agreeing with each other. Rogues less so.

Hunters have a developer, but again a large part of the community likes to focus on their own tool. The author of said tool is frequently in the SimC IRC, though, cross-checking assumptions with the SimC developer, so it's probably still pretty good.

Warlocks have a developer and I believe they still get some theorycrafting support from the community. The developer seems to be less active now than he used to be, but he's still around (yes, affliction is still the powerhouse spec it used to be and it's going to require additional nerfs after 5.2 goes live).

Monks have a somewhat inactive developer and they're a new class, so I'd question the numbers SimC spits out for them for the time being.

Warriors seem to have picked up an active developer recently, and there's community discussion in their EJ thread regarding ways to improve things. So, in the past I'd call their modules less accurate, but they're probably shaping up to be pretty good for 5.2

Not sure on the status of the ret paladin developer or its level of community/theorycrafting support. At the very least, I don't think he hangs out in the SimC IRC channel much. Anecdotally, I'm pretty sure ret is stronger in practice than SimC suggests.

I know feral druids have an active developer/theorycrafting support. Less certain about balance, but I think they have one, too.

The original shadow priest developer has disappeared, but I think another person has recently come forward to take his place, so work is still being done for them.

Not sure if mages have a developer at all anymore. They still get actionlist updates to their profiles, but I'm not sure how often people try to eliminate bugs from the system or anything like that.

Upping quality of sims is extremely important because it helps the people who are less mathy (but may still be willing to do the brunt work of testing mechanics) actually have something worthwhile to contribute to. If a simulationcraft dev is pure shit, then it should be brought to simcrafts attention and then people using it after. If the dev doesn't want to budge then more power too him, but it's then deceitful.

The structure isn't as rigid as you're implying. SimC is an open-source project. Anyone can contribute to the accuracy of the models by opening a ticket and complaining about whatever it is that's not lining up with the reality of in-game mechanics, and, if they want to go the full mile, they can request commit access for submitting their own code.

People just tend to not contribute.

[Raiju]

Maybe it's different now, I can respect that. In cata complaints were made (citing comparisons to enhsims very different numbers) and it was thrown back in our faces in firelands.

@Endus that's why I suggested for separate sim creators to come to certain standards that can be compared to some extent. The same with mod developers often do in other games - see forgecraft in minecraft.

I also see that if one person is managing multiple classes by almost definition they're going to fall behind significantly on the one they favour less, or both if they try to split. Open source or otherwise (feels more like asking ghostcrawler for a buff because his head is shiny from past experience), it's so far gone I personally put it on a similar level to anecdotal evidence.

You can't force developers to change to something and expect them all to stick, assuming they even stick around in teh first place (main problem with enhance theorycraft these days), you just give them some standards to work by for compatibility.

To explain the minecraft example, forge adds a load of features for modders to add cross compatibility in minecraft - if 2 mods add copper, forge allows you to interchange the ores for use in the game. It'd be a lot simpler as a community if people just said (or simcraft devs just said to people!), could you please give some sim outputs in X format where Y duration, Z iterations, and T type of fight where the options for each are 1, 2, 3 etc.

If ziff had continued to work on enhsim, simcraft would still be an easy proof of how inaccurate it is. It's harder without a comparison since then you have to create your own example of how it runs differently and it just becomes too much effort. You can take this point as a reflection of my feelings to other things earlier in the thread. It's too much effort to prove someone's wrong so you just let them go about, tell them it's wrong and hope they will take a look at it themselves instead of being arrogant.

Why do I know it's wrong? That's then a circular argument, sorry. Take it with a grain of salt but that is the problem with enhance right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few other specs were in similar spots.

[Nitwit]

Why do I know it's wrong? That's then a circular argument, sorry. Take it with a grain of salt but that is the problem with enhance right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few other specs were in similar spots.

?

To the best of our knoweldge, the enhancement module is one of the more accurate ones right now. There are no known conflicts between the way it's modeling our spells/abilities and how they behave in-game. The best ways to improve it, at the moment, are through things like actionlist changes or modifications to its gemming/reforging strategy - neither of which require any programming knowledge.

[Michelangelo]

I am Enh main spec. But i was wondering if there are any fights in the new raid that will "require" me to go ele? Id prefer to stay Enh, but i dont mind a fight or 2 to go ele and have a little pew pew fun haha.

Top of my head I'd say no, unless a fight is truly devastating for melee and stacking ranged is the best option.

[Raiju]

?

To the best of our knoweldge, the enhancement module is one of the more accurate ones right now. There are no known conflicts between the way it's modeling our spells/abilities and how they behave in-game. The best ways to improve it, at the moment, are through things like actionlist changes or modifications to its gemming/reforging strategy - neither of which require any programming knowledge.

I was told the same in firelands when windfury wasn't working even near correctly in the sim.

[Deleted]

MG's dot component is unaffected by GoSac, GoSac only effects MG's dmg itself.

No, it doesn't. Just no.

[Nitwit]

I was told the same in firelands when windfury wasn't working even near correctly in the sim.

I think you're making stuff up now. The main point of contention between SimC and EnhSim in Firelands was that SimC thought hardcasting w/ lava burst was a bigger gain than EnhSim did. This didn't have anything to do with the way the abilities themselves were modeled - it had to do with the assumptions the sims made about the skill of the player and his/her latency.

[Raiju]

I think you're making stuff up now. The main point of contention between SimC and EnhSim in Firelands was that SimC thought hardcasting w/ lava burst was a bigger gain than EnhSim did. This didn't have anything to do with the way the abilities themselves were modeled - it had to do with the assumptions the sims made about the skill of the player and his/her latency.

I am not, there was both a bug with windfury and a bug that caused more spells than physically possible to be cast in a minute on the SimC profile when firelands was released. I have no reason to make this stuff up.

[Nitwit]

I am not, there was both a bug with windfury and a bug that caused more spells than physically possible to be cast in a minute on the SimC profile when firelands was released. I have no reason to make this stuff up.

Okay, I think I've found what you're referring to now. There were two points of contention regarding windfury between EnhSim and SimC:

1. EnhSim assumed that windfury's proc was delayed by ~750ms +/- ~250ms, resulting in it being somewhat less predictable in combat and the possibility of some wasted maelstrom charges. Combat log analysis suggested that this was the case, and it was added to SimC (see revisions posted below). The effects of this change were somewhat minor.

2. EnhSim assumed windfury's ICD was better represented as a normal distribution (e.g. 3 seconds +/- 0.3 seconds) rather than as a fixed 3 second cooldown. This had no meaningful impact on windfury's actual DPS contribution in the sim - it just made haste scaling less choppy (haste was our worst stat at the time, and we avoided it like the plague, so again this change was inconsequential). SimC actually implemented the variable windfury ICD in response to feedback from the EnhSim people, and during the MoP beta it was removed because the actual Blizzard devs told us during one of those feedback threads that windfury's ICD had always been a fixed 3 second cooldown (in other words, EnhSim was wrong about this one, and SimC was right).

see:
firelands - https://code.google.com/p/simulation.../detail?r=9036
mop beta - https://code.google.com/p/simulation...detail?r=13192

The "bug" you're talking about regarding "more spells than physically possible" is exactly what I said it was - differences in assumptions between EnhSim and SimC regarding player skill and latency. This was really just an issue of Rouncer not believing that people could get as many hardcasts off as SimC was doing (differences in assumptions). At the end of the day, EnhSim figured the hardcast/lvb priority with a caster weapon was perhaps 400-500 dps better than traditional enhancement, SimC figured it was more like 1.4-1.5k better, and the top ~20 hardcast parses from the time were ~1.2-1.3k higher, on average, than the top 20 traditional parses, indicating that SimC had the better model there, too.

[shell]

So basically what I'm getting from all this is that there's too much pebcak involved in simulations to get an accurate reading of where we stand in relation to other specs. Sims are good for figuring out the (theoretically) best spell priority, talents, glyphs, and reforging but beyond that (i.e. dps rankings) it means jack. We could take 10 people 'who know what they're doing' and get 10 different dps rankings.

For example,
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...4#post20407154
http://i.imgur.com/412acA2.png
http://warcraft.twintop-tahoe.com/re...-20130222.html

Those are the most recent ones that I've seen of which 2 are patchwerk and don't mean anything since there aren't any patchwerk fights(?). And I have no idea how the dk moderator came up with the sim linked in the first one.

The only way to know where you rank in dps is to actually do the raid. The dev keeps saying this and we(everyone not just shaman) keep not listening.

[acerrr]

Sry dont know if im in the right spot to say this but it does kinda have to do with class changes (or more so the concerns people have with the changes to classes). I was just wondering why when GC responses to any class other than shamans he is normally civil or gives some sort of a helpfull respons where on the other side all the responses ive seen him post in the class changes section towards shamans is either a beat around the bush response, that we are just complaining, or saying we are weak (and that the nerfs we want reverted are over power and make us annoying while other classes get to keep there spells cuz they are unique even though our spells that were unique get reverted anyways. Any responses would be helpfull because honestly i think im just gonna stop reading blue postes on shamans because they always inrage me not because its a nerf per say but because we seem to get very disrespectfull responses compaired to all the other respones posted toward other classes regaurdeing thier changes.

[Endus]

Sry dont know if im in the right spot to say this but it does kinda have to do with class changes (or more so the concerns people have with the changes to classes). I was just wondering why when GC responses to any class other than shamans he is normally civil or gives some sort of a helpfull respons where on the other side all the responses ive seen him post in the class changes section towards shamans is either a beat around the bush response, that we are just complaining, or saying we are weak (and that the nerfs we want reverted are over power and make us annoying while other classes get to keep there spells cuz they are unique even though our spells that were unique get reverted anyways. Any responses would be helpfull because honestly i think im just gonna stop reading blue postes on shamans because they always inrage me not because its a nerf per say but because we seem to get very disrespectfull responses compaired to all the other respones posted toward other classes regaurdeing thier changes.

Confirmation bias, basically. Believe me, just about everyone else is seeing similarly dismissive tweets, and are angry about it. Everyone sees issues they want addressed, and anything but complete agreement from the dev team will tend to come off as them dismissing your concerns. Because you focus more on Shaman, those are the tweets you notice. Just looking at the tweets in the most recent news post, I see ones that are just as "bad"as the Shaman ones aimed at Mages, Hunters, Paladins, arguably Priests and Warlocks and Warriors as well.

[Michelangelo]

Confirmation bias, basically. Believe me, just about everyone else is seeing similarly dismissive tweets, and are angry about it. Everyone sees issues they want addressed, and anything but complete agreement from the dev team will tend to come off as them dismissing your concerns. Because you focus more on Shaman, those are the tweets you notice. Just looking at the tweets in the most recent news post, I see ones that are just as "bad"as the Shaman ones aimed at Mages, Hunters, Paladins, arguably Priests and Warlocks and Warriors as well.

On that note, it is actually somewhat frightening to venture to some of the other class forums and read how much they complain compared to us, and some of them been high-ranking specs for a while

Seeing as patch is live on Tuesday, looks like 5.2 Shaman Changes (the purpose of this thread) are finished, with the possible exception of last-minute number changes tomorrow or hotfixes after the patch are live. At the very least, Elemental got buffs and PE and UF should perform a lot closer to EB now, potentially better with higher Haste numbers. For the first couple of Throne fights at least, however, I'm probably going to run Elemental Mastery and Fire Elemental Glyph. Every 3 min = EM + Fire Ele + Ascendance, should be nice until I get the 4-pc that breaks EM's synchronization with Asendance.

As well, can we once again do a post with Shaman glyphs/tips for the new bosses from first impressions on live? It was really useful in MSV.

[Tomikadzi]

first off, this is very reassuring:
"We are still tweaking those gems. Agree that Ele doesn't benefit enough yet. "

1 day till patch. Do you still believe they fixed it?
The gem needs to be reworked completely for elem. Doing numbers with RPPM procs as they did to melees won't change anything a lot unless they make it like 40%+ uptime which isn't going to be fun: 40% time with LvB casting time less then 1 sec.
Hope meter is on 2% now.

[Laurean]

Unless lots of Elementals reroll I don't expect any changes to Ele anytime soon.
With one exception we have been bottom of the meters for years - Blizz once stated that's where they want us. So be it, I am still not sure wether I reroll lock or holy paladin.
Maybe with 6.0 they will make Ele a specc that you want to bring to your raid because they are awesome.

So long, until 6.0...maybe.

[Nebria]

Don´t fret, the gem wont be available right away. You still have to do the quest line to get it and that takes rep grinding and some raiding. The patch is tomorrow, but no one is getting that gem this month.

that's it. they have some more time to fix the gem if they want. fortunately we are not the only spec with the meta issue so it is not something they con totally ignore.

[Vulcanasm]

Unless lots of Elementals reroll I don't expect any changes to Ele anytime soon.
With one exception we have been bottom of the meters for years - Blizz once stated that's where they want us. So be it, I am still not sure wether I reroll lock or holy paladin.
Maybe with 6.0 they will make Ele a specc that you want to bring to your raid because they are awesome.

So long, until 6.0...maybe.

Sadly, this is how I feel, too.

"Smooth mechanics" or "suitable DPS" isn't a choice players should have to make. My main has been my Troll Shaman Engineer since 3.2, and was my first ever character (April 2005). Tomorrow, I switch mains to my Monk permanently. Farewell, dps Shamans; my sympathies.

[Spacepunch]

People are so negative in this thread.

[Deleted]

we might be "crappy specc" in dps terms compared to others, but well i can still do stuff others cant soloing the new zandalari rares with 21mil hp and same with the thunder king iland ones, nearly soloed that Eel boss with 42mil hp which hits for 300k on mail with shield and drop pet if i didnt kite him on some small iland and he got stuck there and evaded (its the one that swim around Shan'ze Dao iland in townlong steppes in 5.2)