Help with our Ele Shamans DPS?

[Bubnick]

Hello all,

After a night of wipes on Feng, I decided to take a look at our WoL parses for the night. The thing I noticed was our Ele shaman was consistently low on DPS (30-35k), usually below one of our tanks (yes I know vengeance is OP but our other DPS was still above). Now, I don't main elemental but I do know the basic ins and outs of it so I came up with some theories that I'm not sure are correct.

Firstly, I noticed that his flame shock had a fairly low uptime (70-85% usually), checking some other logs of ele shamans I noticed they are usually at 90+%.

Secondly, his Lava Burst count seemed lower then quite a few elemental shamans, sometimes as bad as half the amount of the other. Now I know he uses a macro for his Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt that casts Bolt unless Lava Burst is off cooldown, but it takes a few seconds to go through.

Lastly, he is putting down healing rain a few times a fight, is this considered a major DPS loss? I personally wouldn't do it as the healing is negligible but if it's not a huge DPS loss I don't see it being too much of an issue.

You can find a link to our parses here. Our longest attempt was attempt nine and our best attempt was attempt seventeen.

Thanks for your guys' help in advance

[Deleted]

I looked through the logs for you, heres the analysis I can give - I'm using attempt 17 by the way

Elementals: His Fire Elemental had a 35.3 second uptime, this mean it was wasted for 25 seconds, and also the fight lasted 7 minutes so he should have actually used it twice. His Fire Elemental uptime should have been 120 seconds not 35. This is a very significant DPS loss. Earth Elemental the same, but at least that had a 58.3 second uptime so he only missed out on the second Elemental.

Searing Totem: Searing Totem should be up for the whole fight whenever Fire Elemental isn't, yet it was only up for 228 seconds (3 minutes 48 seconds). This means that with the 35 seconds added on from the Fire Elemental he had ~3minutes of no fire Totem at all. Again, lots of lost DPS

Flame Shock: Your right, his Flame Shock uptime is indeed low, 89.2% on this attempt, anything lower than 99% is a loss because of Lava Burst.

Lava Burst: He had 1 non-crit, due to the low uptime of Flame Shock. Also he only cast it 62 times over the fight. He used Ascendance 3 times in the fight which is ~12 Lava Bursts per 15 seconds. So if you minus 45 seconds from the fight and 36 Lava Bursts from his total that means 26 Lava Bursts over 6:23 that means he cast one every 14.73 seconds. This is very bad. Even if you are nice to him and say that he had 0 procs of Lava Surge in the entire fight (which he didn't by the way, he had 35) and say he has 0 haste, that means there was 10 Lava Bursts per Ascendance leaving 32 over the 6:23 and each Lava Burst after that had a 9.5 second interval between them he should have cast 40 Lava Bursts, yet he only cast 32. His Lava Burst usage REALLY needs work. Its a good 30-40% Lower than it should be I think. In reality your Lava Bursts outside of Ascendance should be ~8 seconds apart and you should get ~12 casts per Ascendance.

Healing Rain Usage: Whilst obviously a DPS loss its not THAT big. It is less than the cast time of 1 Lightning Bolt but even if you assume he loses exactly 1 LB for it that is only the loss of ~45k damage (assuming 10% crit chance and 40% Mastery).

Arcane Resonance: Not a DPS thing, but I thought I'd point it out. He did HELLA damage to your raid with Arcane Resonance. Your raid should split up into camps of 2 or 3 members in each around the boss during the arcane phase, all as close to the boss as you can get as long as each pack is 6 yards away from the one next to it. This way if someone gets Arcane Resonance they are only near 2 other players and will hurt them less whilst they go to run out. It also means that everyone who doesn't get it never has to move for the whole of the Arcane Phase because they are already in close enough range for the Arcane Volley-thing ability. This will increase the DPS uptime of your raid as well as MASSIVELY reduce the damage your taking from Resonance. It was this Shaman's 3rd item on his damage done meter, doing a total of 2.8 MILLION damage to your raid over a total of 13 ticks. If you use the tactic mentioned here it will tick maybe twice if your players are slow before they get out, hitting only themselves and two others on the first couple of ticks plus 10k to himself for the rest of the duration.

[Glyphtics]

Undefetter pretty much covered everything, however your elemental shaman did not use Spiritwalkers Grace at all during the fight, considering you have to move for Lightning Fists, Epicentre, Wildfire Spark, Arcane Resonance and more general movements, there should be at least some use of Spiritwalkers, as I assume one of the reasons why Lava Burst usage was so low, was because of movement, this will also help with her 95.5% uptime on the boss.

Edit:

Additionally, they used 4 Lava Bursts during Epicentre, that's about 320k damage they lost because they casted while the boss has a 75% increased chance to avoid attacks / spells, on top of this, they used 2 Elemental Blasts so they lost out on 16 seconds of bonus stats (Not including the Elemental Blasts that they didn't cast).

Also your raid only had 3 stormlash totem uses, two of which were at the same time, which means that one of your shamans didn't use their stormlash totem twice, and since the stormlash effect does not stack, you effectively wasted ~150k damage per DPS, when they were stacked.

I didn't see any Skull Banners from your warrior DPS / Tank either, don't know if that's the log messing up, but that is also a fairly important cooldown that was not used. (Sorry if this is wrong)

You might want to take a look at your Enhancement shaman also, I'm a 25 man raider, but killed Feng on 10 man this week (Had no idea wtf to do, so parse was pretty shit), I pulled 60k DPS compared to your Enhances' 46k, below is the log of my kill if you want to get him to take a look at it; granted I didn't do as well as I should have, but it should be a good starting point for what they need to improve on. (We used bloodlust to push Feng through phase 2 with only one flaming spear use, so DPS would be higher if we lusted at the start)

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/6...e=7095#Defines

If you want I'll outline aspects that your Enhance can improve on. *^*

[Bubnick]

Thanks for the help guys, I will talk to him about this tomorrow. I did not know that stormlash didn't stack so I'll be fixing that too.
As for the skull banners I'm thinking that is bugged cause I know we had atleast one dropped at the start of the fight.

Also the arcane resonance I know was an issue because he somehow managed to stutter step and clip just about everyone with it, but I think with your tactic that should help clean it up a bit too.

[Glyphtics]

Thanks for the help guys, I will talk to him about this tomorrow. I did not know that stormlash didn't stack so I'll be fixing that too.
As for the skull banners I'm thinking that is bugged cause I know we had atleast one dropped at the start of the fight.

Also the arcane resonance I know was an issue because he somehow managed to stutter step and clip just about everyone with it, but I think with your tactic that should help clean it up a bit too.

For arcane resonance, what we did was start the phase spread, wait for arcane resonance to go out, then move in for Arcane Velocity, with our strategy we used tank shell / barrier for the first Velocity, healer CD's for the second, barrier third, I can't remember if we got a 4th, but we would have used remaining cd's / personals / health stones.

Also, I'm not 100% sure for elemental, but your enhancement shaman should be using the Ancestral Guidance talent, it heals for absolutely stupid amounts, for example I managed to do 2.3m healing with it on our kill attempt, compared to the 800k healing from healing tide totem. The healing from Ancestral Guidance is also very bursty, I was able to do between 55k and 60k HPS during ancestral guidance.

[Tomikadzi]

Elementals: His Fire Elemental had a 35.3 second uptime, this mean it was wasted for 25 seconds, and also the fight lasted 7 minutes so he should have actually used it twice. His Fire Elemental uptime should have been 120 seconds not 35. This is a very significant DPS loss. Earth Elemental the same, but at least that had a 58.3 second uptime so he only missed out on the second Elemental.

He might had FET glyph, used it once and forgot about it afterwards.

And yeah, LvB usage is really awful....
We had pretty same time on our kill (7:05 to 7:07 on your 17th try) and I had 98 LvBs, 50% more then your elem had

[Deleted]

Undefetter pretty much covered everything, however your elemental shaman did not use Spiritwalkers Grace at all during the fight, considering you have to move for Lightning Fists, Epicentre, Wildfire Spark, Arcane Resonance and more general movements, there should be at least some use of Spiritwalkers, as I assume one of the reasons why Lava Burst usage was so low, was because of movement, this will also help with her 95.5% uptime on the boss.

My raid might have been super lucky but it *seemed* like Lightning Fist only ever went infront of the boss, our ranged never had to move for it. We put all the ranged in the middle of the room, boss at the edge. We used the nullzone tank spell every other Epicentre and the other tank ability - the copy spell - to copy the Lightning Fist and use that to stun the boss during the other epicentre. This meant that the raid never took any damage from the epicentre for more than the first 1 or 2 ticks and it meant the ranged and healers didn't have to move at any point in this phase either, melee dps just had to run to middle every other epicentre for the nullzone. On top of this, in the arcane phase - using the strat above - the only movement in that phase is to move to your camp and to move if you get arcane resonance. I got lucky and never got resonance or wildfire the whole fight and as such I only moved 2 steps the entire fight, from the middle of the room too the camp spot (we move boss to middle in arcane phase).

This maximises raid DPS by minimising movement.

For arcane resonance, what we did was start the phase spread, wait for arcane resonance to go out, then move in for Arcane Velocity, with our strategy we used tank shell / barrier for the first Velocity, healer CD's for the second, barrier third, I can't remember if we got a 4th, but we would have used remaining cd's / personals / health stones.

Whilst this tactic works, it means your ENTIRE raid has to move. If you use the tactic I said - we did it on 25 man in groups of 6 or 7 so on 10 man in groups of 3 it should be very easy - it means only the people people with the debuff have to move, dramatically increasing raid DPS. Put the camps close enough too the boss so if you put a HR on the boss everyone will be right on the edge of it and your spread out enough for the camps to not get hit (we did 5 camps in a pentagon shape around the boss). This maximises DPS, it just requires raid members to watch their debuffs, but because they don't have to move unless they have the debuff it also means this is ALL they have to do in this phase so should not be a problem.

[Navitas]

The level of help and quickness to offer it continues to astound me on these boards (Shaman especially, although I don't really use the other parts of the forum much).