5.2 Shaman changes

[Deleted]

Oooh, nice, thanks for that.

Also a note for my elemental brothers to keep in mind for shammy rage use: Unlike Astral Shift, Shamanistic Rage is on the GCD so you have take that under account. Also, its a 1 minute coold down so its ok to use it a lot AND you can cast it while stunned... for what its worth XD. Casting them together is an excelent defense imo and if you couple it with a healing totem its pretty stong.

Rage away shamans!

SR is not on the GCD anymore.

[Michelangelo]

Has anyone been on the PTR and seen how their Shaman is performing? I'm especially curious about the talent changes.

[Slappyjoe]

That doesn't mean logs are bad and you should feel bad for quoting them. But they're only part of the picture for DPS. And a much smaller part of it for healers. You can't use them as your sole point of argument, since you're just looking at HPS, not effective healing. And no, there's no easy metric I can link you for "effective healing". That doesn't mean it's not the proper measure, it just means it's a difficult one to quantify.

I'm unsure if you misinterpreted my post or if you were simply elaborating on the point I was trying to make. Either way, I agree with everything you've said. I just go bonkers when people judge a class solely by the numbers they see on the various ranking sites and form their entire opinion about its effectiveness without considering the bigger picture. Especially since, even when using the logs, oftentimes the difference between specs is so miniscule as to not even matter for 99% of the playerbase.

[Deleted]

I'm unsure if you misinterpreted my post or if you were simply elaborating on the point I was trying to make. Either way, I agree with everything you've said. I just go bonkers when people judge a class solely by the numbers they see on the various ranking sites and form their entire opinion about its effectiveness without considering the bigger picture. Especially since, even when using the logs, oftentimes the difference between specs is so miniscule as to not even matter for 99% of the playerbase.

The difference is more like 20% on average and more than 50% on some fights.

You see it and you feel it. It's pretty easy: warlocks always top 5, often top 2. Elemental always in the last 5, except for other people dying or being undergeared.

Especially in 25m raids, we had 5 elemental shamans (meber and trials) since MOP, now we have zero. A lof of them got kicked because of low dps or quit. One rerolled warrior.

How many warlocks did fail in the same time? Well, we had 1, now we have 5 in our raiding pool. I beleive all of them got through trial.

And we even have two enhancer (me and another). We are always taken on progress raids.

So elementals simply getting kicked or losing fun because of being always bad? Yeah, it happened a lot of times. The other enhancer and me considered going elemental at the beginning of mop, didn't because dps sucks. In the end, we had 7 potential elemental shaman trials or member, all of them didn't pass trial or quit on their own or rerolled.

Well. Don't tell anyone that low DPS is just some theoretical number. I told the raid lead that it'S not the elementa shamans fault that they are out dpsed by warlocks, but didn't help a lot. Elemental progress was only possible if too many ranged are missing and ranged were a lot more favorable than melees.

[Endus]

I'm unsure if you misinterpreted my post or if you were simply elaborating on the point I was trying to make.

Sorry, I was elaborating, not contradicting.

The difference is more like 20% on average and more than 50% on some fights.

If you're talking Elemental, you're just flat-out wrong, and you should go look up actual parses because the actual numbers aren't anywhere close to that bad.

If you ignore the two outliers (combat rogues and survival hunters), Elemental is about 15% behind the #3 slot. The only reason I say to exclude those two is because EVERYONE is way behind them; the gap between Combat Rogues and Arcane Mages (#1 and #3 overall on 25H) is greater than the relative difference between Arcane Mages and Elemental Shaman. Plus, it only seems to be true in 25H, so I think there's other factors in play there.

And nowhere are we 50% behind the top spot.

Elemental is struggling, but there's no need to exaggerate the values like that, it just makes you look dishonest.

[Slappyjoe]

@Klatar: Well, for starters, my post was about Resto. But as for you issue, that sounds like a raid leader problem and/or some extraordinarily bad luck on the choice of Elemental recruits. I won't say Elemental's dps is stellar at the moment, but it's not nearly so dramatically bad as to hinder raid progress. Your post suggests Elemental Shaman are too terrible to even be considered and that's, quite frankly, ridiculous.

[elicko]

I think it is awesome that they boosted elemental shaman

[Deleted]

@Klatar: Well, for starters, my post was about Resto. But as for you issue, that sounds like a raid leader problem and/or some extraordinarily bad luck on the choice of Elemental recruits. I won't say Elemental's dps is stellar at the moment, but it's not nearly so dramatically bad as to hinder raid progress. Your post suggests Elemental Shaman are too terrible to even be considered and that's, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Well the problem stays:

we are a heroic raid (10/16 heroic) and we can't effort pulling low dps speccs thorugh those bosses.

Our best Elemental was top after thirty seconds of fight lenghts, but at the end he was always at the bottom. He just quit.

The problem for most trials is that their dps is one of their criterias. It's very difficult for a raidleader to take the elemental with 90k dps, thpugh the other, equally skilled warlock does 110k.

A little difference would've been okay. But it's not just little.

I beleive we really took every single warlock trial und none of the elemental trials made it.

And yeah, it's 10-20% behind warlocks on nearly all fights, neither you take median or whatso ever. There are few fights where it's perhaps a little less.

---------- Post added 2013-01-05 at 12:41 AM ----------

Elemental is struggling, but there's no need to exaggerate the values like that, it just makes you look dishonest.

Taking Median (for me, the best average), we get on heroic 25m:
HOF:
1: elemental 14% behind affli (high mobility single target fight - our biggest strength!)
2: 14%
3: 15.4%
4: 2% (though many warlocks respecc demo, whic is 12.1% ahead)
5: 11.6%
6: 24.7% (one of the hardest hardmodes ingame, very important progress boss for top raids)

MSV:
1: 20.6%
2: 10.3%
3: 16.6%
4: 28.6%
5: 27.6%
6: 29.5%

On average, perhaps a little than 20% behind. I'm not comparing to melees (but i don't have to mention that on some bosses, that difference would be a lot bigger).

And average is just where elemental shines compared to Affli.

Affli is getting a 2% dps nerf. Elemental perhaps a 2% buff ( i don't see EM going live like that, many shamans will stay with EB, so i doubt it will be more than 2% AT BEST). After they bring EM again in line, we will hopyfully see a really substantial dps buff - as for now, i just see a little fs buff and highly missbalanced T4 Talents.

[Taalyn]

Who cares if the Elemental did 90k and the Warlock did 110k, did the 20k DPS make the difference between a dead boss or a wipe? Higher DPS means more room for mistakes. Play better and it wont matter who does more DPS.

[Cairm]

Lately in raids iv'e been finding myself doing lower dps, but at the profit of beter healing on some heroic boss fights. I'd trow some healing rain and healing surge just to help a little. I think it might have made the difference sometimes.

[nazrakin]

Who cares if the Elemental did 90k and the Warlock did 110k, did the 20k DPS make the difference between a dead boss or a wipe? Higher DPS means more room for mistakes. Play better and it wont matter who does more DPS.

For progression minded guilds, it absolutely matters. 20k is a huge difference for two classes that occupy the same space.

[Kralljin]

6: 24.7% (one of the hardest hardmodes ingame, very important progress boss for top raids)

The difficulty of Empress is highly discussable.

The only hard thing about this Encounter has nothing to do with Dps, you just need to find way how your grp survives those phases with corrupted Dissonance fields, this is ONLY thing that makes this Encounter "hard".

Dps suffices as long as pull enough dps to it with max 2 Add Phases, which isn't very hard.


The Dps Race on Empress is a joke because it's not really existing, Sha of Fear Heroic on the other hand is a serious dps race during P2 because you got to beat the Boss before the AoE dmg of those Adds beat your healer.

Who cares if the Elemental did 90k and the Warlock did 110k, did the 20k DPS make the difference between a dead boss or a wipe? Higher DPS means more room for mistakes. Play better and it wont matter who does more DPS.

You won't say this again if you wiped twice on a boss below 1%.

[Endus]

Taking Median (for me, the best average), we get on heroic 25m:
HOF:
1: elemental 14% behind affli (high mobility single target fight - our biggest strength!)
2: 14%
3: 15.4%
4: 2% (though many warlocks respecc demo, whic is 12.1% ahead)
5: 11.6%
6: 24.7% (one of the hardest hardmodes ingame, very important progress boss for top raids)

MSV:
1: 20.6%
2: 10.3%
3: 16.6%
4: 28.6%
5: 27.6%
6: 29.5%

On average, perhaps a little than 20% behind. I'm not comparing to melees (but i don't have to mention that on some bosses, that difference would be a lot bigger).

And you said "20% on average and more than 50% on some fights". And when you actually RAN the numbers, found that you were exaggerating the first a bit, and grossly exaggerating the latter, since the biggest differential you found was under 30%.

Like I said; Elemental needs some buffs, probably more than we've seen on the PTR. That doesn't mean you should be exaggerating how badly they're performing for the sake of shock value or alarmism or whatever other shortsighted reason you have. And it's worse if you hadn't even bothered to run the numbers before making those kinds of claims.

[Taalyn]

You won't say this again if you wiped twice on a boss below 1%.

I've done it more than twice but it was always because 1) People died from stupid things 2) We needed to tweak our strategy
Ultraxion is the only fight where the raid I was in hit a DPS wall. We executed the fight perfectly but needed more DPS. I wasn't around for Brutallus or M'uru. Elegon we thought we needed more DPS since we would always wipe during the last phase, but with some changes to the strategy, we killed it, with everyone alive. The guild I'm in is fairly average but we have cleared most raid content on heroic before sweeping nerfs. Very, very, rarely, was the reason for not killing the boss due to a lack of DPS.

[Deleted]

Who cares if the Elemental did 90k and the Warlock did 110k, did the 20k DPS make the difference between a dead boss or a wipe? Higher DPS means more room for mistakes. Play better and it wont matter who does more DPS.

But why should the warlock do more mistakes than the elemental, when he's equally skilled?

We as a progress guidl raid with our best set up.

We had a 0.1% wipe on garalon.

Not to mention some of the utility warlocks bring like GS, SS, high damage reduction, even portals on some bosses that make everything easier (we use them on some bosses and we miss them they're not there) or banish elementals on Lei Shi. They have some very high utility on some fights.

Perhaps a more casual raid could choose an elemental because he's just a better player. But then again: if that player just rerolled, it would be a lot easier for him. The only caster hybrid that is reallyimportant is a shadow - for things like multidotting, dispersion, mass dispell.

We have 2-3 Resto shamans, 2 Enhancer and zero Eles - and that's a consequence of all this. We also have 5 warlocks and if we got a good 6th, we would take him.

Elemental would have to be a very good player to even get through trial.

So don't keep telling that it doesn't matter. Where Elementals are good is 10m raiding, where you can switch from resto to ele, depending on raid need (and where ranged ahre heavily favoured anyways).

---------- Post added 2013-01-05 at 10:27 AM ----------

And you said "20% on average and more than 50% on some fights". And when you actually RAN the numbers, found that you were exaggerating the first a bit, and grossly exaggerating the latter, since the biggest differential you found was under 30%.

Like I said; Elemental needs some buffs, probably more than we've seen on the PTR. That doesn't mean you should be exaggerating how badly they're performing for the sake of shock value or alarmism or whatever other shortsighted reason you have. And it's worse if you hadn't even bothered to run the numbers before making those kinds of claims.

Those 50% were targetted at cleaving fights like combat or fire mages earlier this tier. Comparing only a ranged specc to another, we are close to 30% on some fights, but average at about 20%. That's still huge and with all those ptr changes, it's still more than 15%.

Simcraft wasn't so wrong after all, was it?

---------- Post added 2013-01-05 at 10:38 AM ----------

Lately in raids iv'e been finding myself doing lower dps, but at the profit of beter healing on some heroic boss fights. I'd trow some healing rain and healing surge just to help a little. I think it might have made the difference sometimes.

You might believe so, we don't know your healers. But buffed HRs are more like the strength of enhancers mit Healing Storm Glyph.

But those are at best very few situations and only if your healers are struggling form some reason (undergeared or underskilled). I throw some HRs say on Blade Lord Talyak heroic in the end, when some ehalers are down ( they tend to die too often there). It has some use.

It can be beneficial in 10m, where perhaps 2 healers are too less healing, but 3 healers are too much, so a hybrid healer helps a little. But i don'T see a lot of situations for this.

---------- Post added 2013-01-05 at 10:43 AM ----------

I've done it more than twice but it was always because 1) People died from stupid things 2) We needed to tweak our strategy
Ultraxion is the only fight where the raid I was in hit a DPS wall. We executed the fight perfectly but needed more DPS. I wasn't around for Brutallus or M'uru. Elegon we thought we needed more DPS since we would always wipe during the last phase, but with some changes to the strategy, we killed it, with everyone alive. The guild I'm in is fairly average but we have cleared most raid content on heroic before sweeping nerfs. Very, very, rarely, was the reason for not killing the boss due to a lack of DPS.

But that's the reason you simply take a better dps. We really never had optimal first kills or somewhat like this.

We wiped on Garalon heroic though noone failed due to low dps. Having better dps (and healers!) let's you compensate some fails.

If every dd does 10% more damage on average, than healers have less damage too heal, their mana lasts longer, adds die faster, perhaps that one special attack doesn't come that often anymore ( i remember fang heroic where we were getting one AOE more or less, making that dps difference very important - or elegon heroic, where getting one more addphase is fight deciding)..

[Northy]

Has anyone been on the PTR and seen how their Shaman is performing? I'm especially curious about the talent changes.

I have played Elemental on PTR. I'm underwhelmed.

[zenga]

But that's the reason you simply take a better dps. We really never had optimal first kills or somewhat like this.

We wiped on Garalon heroic though noone failed due to low dps. Having better dps (and healers!) let's you compensate some fails.

If every dd does 10% more damage on average, than healers have less damage too heal, their mana lasts longer, adds die faster, perhaps that one special attack doesn't come that often anymore ( i remember fang heroic where we were getting one AOE more or less, making that dps difference very important - or elegon heroic, where getting one more addphase is fight deciding)..

Not trying to be a dick here, but if you are 10/16 heroic you are probably between #500 and #1000 in the world as a guild, depending on the order you killed the bosses in. For these kind of guilds it really doesn't matter to have an ele shaman at this stage (or whatever dps setup). People have plenty of gear that should give them enough dps to kill any boss. If you fail to kill a boss due to enrage/low dps then it's either a raid execution issue or non optimal play. Outside the first 20 maybe 30 guilds dps is way less of an issue to kill the really hard bosses. And don't forget that a well played ele shaman is still a very decent dps contributor on many fights, just check some of the logs of the absolute top guilds.

Not saying that ele is not in a fairly poor dps state on average, but you make it look like any random top 1000 guild can't have a shaman in their line up because else they will wipe to enrage.

[Laurean]

@ Zenga: Elemental might be a decent dps contributor, but when a Raidleader has the choice between equally skilled Elementals or Afflilocks/Boomkins, Ele almost always draws the short stick.
Afflilocks aren't just the best at multidotting and (almost? best) single target dps, they are also great at short time aoe, especially when the targets are not close together like Elegon or Unsok (Mannoroths Fury...)
No one really complains about Boomkins, maybe because it is probably the hardest ranged specc to play well. We have 16/16 heroic (10m), so our first kill of Blade Lord Tayak was quite a while ago; but I still remember both healers dying at 22% - the Boomkin just healed the rest of the fight with some support from me and the shadow. I maybe healed 3 million, shadow not so much - Boomkin healed 12 million during the last 20%...btw: Boomkin offhealing (Nature's Virgil) gets a big buff with 5.2...
Boomkin burst is the highest ingame - want some logs?

But back to topic:
GC said that Ele is not that bad, this tier was just no encounter where Ele could shine. So let me ask this question:
Whith all the different mechanics this tier, what would an encounter "for Eles" look like? 5 targets with shared hp standing close enough together to CL...sure...
Back in Cata we were probably the most mobile ranged specc. We aren't anymore.
Keeping FS up on two or three targets? Doable, but with 4pc you can either do that and waste lots of Fulmination procs or use ES instead. During BL I get 7 LS charges before ES comes off cd; especially with Essence of Terror proccs or Lei's Hope. That is something Blizzard should look into - give Elementals some kind of mechanic that uses LS proccs in some other way, when we already have 7 charges and Shocks are on CD. Maybe resetting Shock Cd when you reach 7 charges - that is not too op, but simplifies FS/ES management and results in better dps. But I guess that "would take away a core mechanic of the specc".
Another idea: Give LvB the same FS spread that LL has, maybe just on two other targets.

[Kralljin]

I've done it more than twice but it was always because 1) People died from stupid things 2) We needed to tweak our strategy
Ultraxion is the only fight where the raid I was in hit a DPS wall. We executed the fight perfectly but needed more DPS. I wasn't around for Brutallus or M'uru. Elegon we thought we needed more DPS since we would always wipe during the last phase, but with some changes to the strategy, we killed it, with everyone alive. The guild I'm in is fairly average but we have cleared most raid content on heroic before sweeping nerfs. Very, very, rarely, was the reason for not killing the boss due to a lack of DPS.

This Tier lacked a serious dps Gear check, but let's take Baleroc 25Hc and Staghelm 25Hc, some encounters simply don't leave much room for dps improvement in terms of strat.

And more dps = less healing required, it's true for almost any boss.

[Endus]

Those 50% were targetted at cleaving fights like combat or fire mages earlier this tier. Comparing only a ranged specc to another, we are close to 30% on some fights, but average at about 20%. That's still huge and with all those ptr changes, it's still more than 15%.

Simcraft wasn't so wrong after all, was it?

Nobody was saying it was. I've been saying Elemental needed about a 10% buff since before the launch. I was, at one point, arguing that the difference was "okay" in that we might be tuned around bringing Stormlash Totem, but then it was confirmed that this was not the case, and that was the point where I started to say we needed a buff because we were lagging, and I've been consistent in saying that since that point. That 10% would bring us in line with the median DPS, roughly speaking, since the 15-20% we're referencing is to people at the tops of the charts.

The point is there's no need to exaggerate the difference for effect. We're far enough behind that it's fairly obvious we need a bump up. We're nowhere close to 50% behind, though, anywhere, and claiming we are just means that anyone, including the devs, can check the actual stats and respond with "nope, you're wrong" and move on. If there's a real issue, you can stick to the actual facts. Being dishonest about the numbers helps noone.