Lightning Bolt cast time

[LyskaWF]

Lightning Bolt now has a 2.5 sec cast time, up from 1.5 sec.

I thought I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that this was not, in fact, the case. My toon is bugged on the Beta so I can't get on to test it. If this is the case, this is a huge buff for enhancement that has been overlooked (?) by myself at least.
Confirm/deny? Thoughts?

[Cyros]

Im quite sure i read a post about blizz wanting to make spells less likely to be hastecapped, same thing happend to wrath for boomkins and quite a few differnt healing spells for all healing classes.

[Deleted]

Not sure, but I think it's intended.

Though there are talents to increase its damage:
-Elemental Precision now increases your Fire Frost and Nature damage by 1/2/3% (Old - Spell hit) blah blah blah
-Increases the damage done by your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Thunderstorm, Lava Burst and Shock spells by 2/4/6%. (Up from 1/2/3/4/5%)
but also this nasty change:
-Lightning Mastery has been removed from the tree.

But we got:
Totemic Wrath - Causes your Fire totems to increase the spell power of party and raid members within 100 yards by 10%.
with Searing Totem now lasts 1 min, up from 30 secs.

And many other changes to make up that lighting bolt change.

[Gilian]

Maybe we have to put CL in our rotation then?

[LyskaWF]

I meant this for enhancement, but was just wanted to make sure it was intended.

[Gilian]

It doesn't do more damage for enhancement? So it has no impact on enhancement, I guess.

[Novarium]

well they would up the damage most likely to compensate for the 1 second of cast time, which makes LyskaWF's concern valid, seeing that when enhance shamans use this in rotation, It is either instant, or the shaman is simply a dumb-dumb

[LyskaWF]

It doesn't do more damage for enhancement? So it has no impact on enhancement, I guess.

Spellpower coefficients are directly related to cast time. The spellpower coefficient on a 1.5 second spell is roughly 42.9%. The spellpower coefficient on a 2.5 second cast is roughly 71.4%. Given that the actual cast time, with five stacks of Maelstrom Weapon, for enhancement shaman is 0 seconds, we gain 28.5% spellpower on LBs. How is this not a damage increase?

[Sodia]

they lower the CD for CL fom 6 to 3 so yes now we gona use it in our rotation with ES so it mins no more LBLBLBLB like a retard now we can hit more then one buton :P if thats to hard to understand for someone well whot can i say i'm happy with this we can go back to good ols TBC rotation

[Kagdar]

they lower the CD for CL fom 6 to 3 so yes now we gona use it in our rotation with ES so it mins no more LBLBLBLB like a retard now we can hit more then one buton :P if thats to hard to understand for someone well whot can i say i'm happy with this we can go back to good ols TBC rotation

I don't see where you can make that connection.

Check this out
LB = 2.5 sec cast base.
Shamanism (Passive): -0.5 sec cast time on LB/CL/LvB so LB is reduced to 2 sec.
More haste in Wrath with BiS gear, LB for elem was near the 1 sec cast, even lower than that is you had heroism/bloodlust + haste procs etc. So you where casting LB faster than your GCD.
LB will do a lot more damage than CL on a single target with it scaling more. In wrath the difference wasn't really noticable, thats why guides told you to cast CL after your LvB. It won't be the same again.

Casting CL on a single target was, is and will always be stupid. But the numbers where not tweaked to reflect this. Now they are (i hope)

[Sodia]

you forgot one thing that now we gona use fulmination as well so you will se CL after LvB + fulmination and then another 2 or 3 LB now we have from 1,2 to 1,4 cast time so corect me if i'm wrong but wasent LB 2 sec cast not 1,5??

[Northy]

CL will not be used in single target rotations.

[Rifee]

I thought I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that this was not, in fact, the case. My toon is bugged on the Beta so I can't get on to test it. If this is the case, this is a huge buff for enhancement that has been overlooked (?) by myself at least.
Confirm/deny? Thoughts?

uhm...lightningbolt has allways been 2,5 seconds cast....exept for elementals

[Kagdar]

Just saw on wowwiki that lvl1 LB is 1.5sec cast, 2 sec for lvl 2 and 2.5 for all other levels.

And the wowwiki table for LB state that it's a 1.5sec cast at lvl 1 for cata table. They might have change it back to 2.5 sec cast.

---------- Post added 2010-10-11 at 09:16 PM ----------

you forgot one thing that now we gona use fulmination as well so you will se CL after LvB + fulmination and then another 2 or 3 LB now we have from 1,2 to 1,4 cast time so corect me if i'm wrong but wasent LB 2 sec cast not 1,5??

I still fail to see how LvB + Fulmination are somehow linked to CL in a single target fight.

[twinkleblur]

the spell doesnt really make a difference at the moment ur nuke is still lvb and all LB is there for is as a filler and to get ur fulmination stacks up. also ur rotation is full now so there will be even less room for chain lightning because ur really gonna wanna do unleash weapon right before a LvB to get that sucker hitting its hardest.

[LyskaWF]

uhm...lightningbolt has allways been 2,5 seconds cast....exept for elementals

Thanks. I figured I missed something pretty obvious like that. I've never specced ele so I suppose that's why QQ. Silly me thinking they'd give us a buff.

[Deleted]

Took a lot of shamans to notice that nothing changed >_>
CL will NOT be in our single target "rotation".
The reason for that is quite simple:
It won't really do more DPS.. it might possibly deal 100 to 200 DPS more at low cata gear levels, but it has a huge problem:
It costs a SHITLOAD of mana. Without any talents, your CL will cost 6091.8 mana, as long as Elemental Focus isn't active. And seeing as we're losing a ton of crit too, you'll not want to waste your precious mana on CL. (base mana is 23430, compared to our 4396 now - that's ~5.33 times as high mana costs)

[Marakara]

A) Lightning Bolt is a 2.5 second cast time base. You can confirm this on the ptr, or by checking http://cata.wowhead.com/spell=403
B) Chain Lightning is being nerfed (again) to make it noncompetitive in terms of single target dps, with an additional glyph to make it better for aoe and worse for single target (http://cata.wowhead.com/item=41518). Chain lightning USED to be better for single target dps during different points of wotlk: early on in wrath when spellpower was low, and when Shamanism boosted Chain Lightning's coefficient by 20% (adding a .2 coefficient to a 2 second spell made it scale way better than a 2.5, that should be obvious), but then it got nerfed. Anyone who claims that Chain Lightning wasn't worth using in wotlk didn't do any theorycrafting.
C) What started this rumor was probably that the original ptr copy function applied talent tree bonuses twice, so Lightning Bolt's 2.5 base time was reduced by .5 seconds twice making it a 1.5 cast time.

[Baabinator]

It's a good thing this is done tbh.

Higher spellpower co-efficiency. And more in-between-each-cast-time to react to Lava Surge procs.

[Kagdar]

I hate them. I hate them all. Fast spellcasts is one of the reasons why my shaman entertains me.

You clearly didn't read the last posts. LB don't lose any casting time, it was 2.5 in wrath and is still 2.5. Might be a mistake from Boubouille of some type from Blizzard. Or a change that got change back to it's original state during Beta.