5.4 Gearing Issues (scaling?), Impossible to fix?

[Angrysteel]

Elemental Shaman are going to be GCD capped, and mastery capped very quickly in 5.4. My PTR shaman has my 5.3 raid gear along with the normal 5/5 new 5.4 tier set and 2 new trinkets (amp and cleave).

With just the normal mode trinkets, the normal mode 5/5 set, and my old raid gear i am sitting at 99.09% mastery, while remaining hit capped, and enough haste to keep my Chain Lightning at a 1.1 second cast, and Lava Burst / Lightning Bolt / EB all sitting at 1.45 second casts. These are 1.1 second casts while under the effects of meta or bloodlust and well under GCD with both up.


So, what exactly are we suppose to do? They didnt allow us to scale with crit, so stacking crit has very minimum gains. We can stack INT again, but we will still be GCD capped and mastery capped even stacking INT. If there are any bosses similar to Primo, we will literally gain 0 dps from the buffs. We currently gain ZERO dps for cleaving / aoe under the effects of Lust or Meta, infact we are probably going to be losing damage on cleave heavy fights by not using the old non legendary meta.


This also has the horrible side effect of making Elemental Blast a 100% unusable talent. A big part of EBs appeal is its +haste/mastery/crit but when you are capped on 2/3 of these things and the 3rd is a very slight increase or no increase at all (get crit buff right before ascendance), its simply going to be a dead talent.


Its definitely fun running around on PTR with all my spells casting doubles of themselves at a 100% rate, but there are too many negatives that come with this. Its just very upsetting to know we will soon see 0 damage increases during lust / meta procs, while every other caster will continue to gain dps and dont deal with being severely GCD capped. With all procs, my chain lighting on PTR is at a .650 cast time... and thats WITH being 100% mastery capped and not having the extra 6-7k or more haste we will have with full 5.4 gear.


Not really sure how this can be fixed. Maybe give elemental a .5 GCD cap instead of 1.0? I cant see them increasing base cast time of all our spells again. We really need crit scaling before 6.0

[Deleted]

They are for sure going to nerf the 14% stats trinket, it's just absurdly OP right now.

[Designate]

At least for mastery, they could solve the hard cap by making it so mastery over 100% let's you fire off a second overload. So at 110% mastery you'd have a 100% chance to proc one overload, and a 10% chance to proc a second.

[Angrysteel]

At least for mastery, they could solve the hard cap by making it so mastery over 100% let's you fire off a second overload. So at 110% mastery you'd have a 100% chance to proc one overload, and a 10% chance to proc a second.

Ya, currently if i use EB on PTR, i jump up to 113% mastery. So a 13% chance to fire off a 3rd spell sounds nice, but would probably be game breaking with EotE. Could you image hitting someone with like 9 lava bursts from procs at once. The wow forums would break from the pvp backlash (and rightfully so).

This is definitely a tricky issue to fix. We knew there was a good chance to cap both mastery / haste in 5.4, but i didnt realize it was going to come so quickly. Being at 100% mastery with only a few 5.4 items while still in mostly 5.3 gear and still having issues with GCD cap, its a pretty big deal.

When classes scale poorly, they get upset. When we as ele shamans hit a wall completely stopping us gaining any benefit from stats, its a major issue.

[Lavindar]

They could make mastery have a fixed chance to proc and make the stat increase the damage the proc do, for haste, I can't imagine a solution.

[R0ninX3ph]

They could make mastery have a fixed chance to proc and make the stat increase the damage the proc do, for haste, I can't imagine a solution.

I agree with this solution, give Mastery say a 50% chance to cause an overload and make the scaling part of the mastery be the damage the overload does rather than the chance to overload.

[Raugnaut]

For mastery, elemental isn't the only spec with a mastery hard cap (Arms warriors, Marksman hunters, Shadow Priests, WW monks next patch, combat rogues, tanking specs sans DK), so we arent the only one in this boat.

As for haste capping, we arent the only spec in this boat. Druids, Arcane Mages, Hunters, Destro locks, ect, are all going to be suffering from haste capping next patch.

Of course, you are right about one thing- crit, compared to its scaling for pretty much every single other spec, is REALLY bad scaling for Shamans, the main reason being the 100% crit chance on Lava Burst.

The best way, imo, would be to cause Lava Burst to scale with crit (100% crit = double damage), BUT also reduce its base damage by 20% or so. This would greatly increase the value of crit chance, potentially to the point that it goes above and beyond haste and mastery. This would also have the effect of reducing shaman damage at low gear levels (Not really relevant this patch), and help them to scale with more gear.

Other ways include causing Flame Shock crits to proc lava surge, increase Lava Burst base damage by x amount but remove its 100% crit chance (Possibly 50% extra chance to crit?), cause Lightning Bolt critical hits to generate twice the amount of lightning shield procs, or something similar to do with critical hits.

[Deleted]

They could make mastery have a fixed chance to proc and make the stat increase the damage the proc do, for haste, I can't imagine a solution.

This actually sounds spot on.

[mmines]

Maybe they could make elemental overload procs do 100% and reduce the proc chance to 1.6? As for the scaling I don't think there's any way to fix that other than to let the global cooldown go lower.

[Deleted]

In my sims, haste has a value of 2.74, mastery of 2.55, and crit of 2.14.

Why is crit considered to be "really really bad"? If you are capped on mastery and haste, you still gain reasonable damage from crit.

It is not like crit has only half of the value than haste. It is just not the best stat.

[Dribskram]

Only chance of stat capping is if you fully gem, reforge, and use double amp trinket on the ptr outside of fights like primordius. Everyone is on the mastery/haste train atm and seem to forget int is still there and int will be better when you hit those high capping amount where it will begin to sim for less and int for more.

[Angrysteel]

Only chance of stat capping is if you fully gem, reforge, and use double amp trinket on the ptr outside of fights like primordius.

No. As i said in my first post, i am fully mastery capped with 1 amp trinket + the cleave trinket. Yes i am mostly gemmed mastery. As far as reforging i hit capped, then capped mastery, then went into haste (haste up to 10,500). This is all in mostly 5.3 gear with 5/5 new tier and 2 new trinkets.

Everyone is on the mastery/haste train atm and seem to forget int is still there and int will be better when you hit those high capping amount where it will begin to sim for less and int for more.

Everyone is on the haste / mastery train because they give substantially better results over INT. Ofcourse we can go back to stacking INT but we will still fully cap secondaries with INT stacking.


Just for fun tho, i did buy the healing Amp trinket. They do stack together quite well. With both INT procs up from both amp trinkets, i was pushing nearly 50k int for 20 seconds, and my lava bursts were hitting for ~400k with 300k overloads (overloads 100% procing). Opening burst was around 760k with all procs up, and was able to hold 310k dps for a little over 3 minutes on test dummy solo.

I cant see them allowing double amp trinkets to be used. Pretty sure they will become unique equip like Ra-dens rings. Getting the healing trinket to proc wasnt that tough as ele. Healing Stream, Healing Tide, AG all proc'd it as well as Healing Rain with Conductivity. The HR / Conductivity combo keeps the healing trinket proc'ing regularly. Using AG / Healing Stream / Healing Tide wouldnt always proc it on first drops.

If the amp trinkets dont go unique, i can see double amp being BiS trinkets for ele, and we will have to stack INT. 400k Lava Bursts were nice to see, but thats a 700k (100% overload) hit every 1 second without EotE procs during ascendance. Pretty crazy stuff.