How complex should DPS rotations be?

[Therastos]

Funny, you see if you had actually done that the sim would be using lightning shield every other GCD. When I attempted to replicate your experiment I got 8700 DPS. Did you perhaps think the priority queue listed in Rawr actually did something?

In order to avoid casting lightning shield over and over, I handled the abilities with no cooldown a bit differently. I skipped "refresh if there's nothing else to do" (which would have been top priority, and thus caused recasting) and put "refresh if shield expired" as lowest, and kept fire elemental and flame shock as part of priority system, because otherwise they would never be used. The "new" priority system means that fire nova, lava lash and the like go above in priority to refreshing flame shock DoT if it runs out and so on.

The old priority was:

1) Maelstrom Weapon x 5 stacks - Lightning Bolt
2) Flame Shock
3) Stormstrike if debuff not active
4) Lightning Shield if not active
5) Fire Elemental
6) Magma Totem if not active
7) Spirit Wolves
8) Shamanistic Rage
9) Earthshock
10) Stormstrike
11) Lava Lash
12) Fire Nova
13) Magma Totem
14) Lightning Shield

and the new one something like. I don't remember accurately what I did, and as said, I might have made mistakes on reversing the order:

12) Fire Nova
11) Lava Lash
8) Shamanistic Rage
7) Spirit Wolves
5) Fire Elemental (The same as flame shock<->earth shock. I didn't want to completely ignore fire elemental, so it is above magma totem in priority)
6) Magma Totem if not active
4) Lightning Shield if not active
3) Stormstrike (There is now no distinction whether to use stormstrike with debuff up or not. The priority is reverse to having no debuff up)
2) Flame Shock
9) Earthshock (In order to still use earth shock and put flame shock DoT refresh as low priority, I had to put earth shock down here)
1) Maelstrom Weapon x 5 stacks - Lightning Bolt

I admit, it is true my explanation on what I actually did was very vague, and I did priority switching done with EnhSim GUI without a much thought put in it.

I now ran the simulation with priorities shown above (still using enhancement BiS gear simulation profile only changing priorities), and the result was 12055dps. Looks like I ended up completely skipping abilities in my previous simulation, seeing this is actually higher DPS. I then removed fire elemental and flame shock (and put earth shock just above shamanistic rage in priority) and the result was 10950dps: now much closer to the 11239dps I previously received. I just don't know how to make a worst possible abomination of enhancement priorities while still using all the abilities or having free GCDs (delaying stormstrike until debuff runs out, for instance). *shrugs*

Anyhow, this doesn't have any relevance to the topic whatsoever (not that most of the topic did) and I hope that with this explanation I can refrain from addressing this again.