DPS issue - Elemental Shaman

[batmanstrange]

i was using the ring and the bracers. just recently got the shoulders and then had to start healing for raid so im not sure what im at for this point. i have also been working on gearing for icefury build.

[Deleted]

It will almost always cost you a cast. Lightning Rod is too unpredictable to try and line up casts. You're just setting yourself up for bad RNG.

No, you are not. Rod has a 30% chance. In a 10 second window you would usually cast ~3-4 lightning bolts, so let's go with 3. This means for you to wait more than 10 seconds before the next one is up you would need 6 casts without proccing (3 during rod and 3 after rod) that is a (1-0.3)^6 =0.117 chance for it to not be up within 10 seconds of the last one. If you wait 16 seconds, you'd get another 2 casts in so you'd have (1-0.3)^8 = 0.057 chance for it to not be up.

Now when is it better or worse to wait? Let's assume you'd roll that 5,7% chance EVERYTIME in a fight and delay every stormbringer cast for 16 seconds.

in a fight <60s it would be better to wait as you only have one cast anyway.
in a fight >60s but <92s you would loose a cast, it would have been better to cast it right away
in a fight >92s but <120s it would be better to wait as you have two casts anyway
in a fight >120s but <168s you would loose a cast and dmg again
in any fight >168s you would get at least 3 casts meaing the 3*40% dmg from lightning rod would ALWAYS be better, even if you would loose a cast in the process.

So even if you draw the absolute shortest stick in terms of rod procs 45,2% of all fight lengths below and 100% of all fight lengths above 2 min 48s would favor wating for a proc.

Only the absolute fastest raid kills of the like of ursoc fall below that threshold, so every normal raid boss kill favors waiting. Dungeon bosses can be tricky but if i have to miss 2-3 94,3% chances and then still a 45,2% chance on top of that for waiting to be worse, i'd usually be waiting for a proc.

This of course does not factor in if you have to move and could use stormbringer instead of losing casts or temporary dmg buffs/debuffs. Just use it if such a case falls into your waiting time.

[Antilurker77]

No, you are not. Rod has a 30% chance. In a 10 second window you would usually cast ~3-4 lightning bolts, so let's go with 3. This means for you to wait more than 10 seconds before the next one is up you would need 6 casts without proccing (3 during rod and 3 after rod) that is a (1-0.3)^6 =0.117 chance for it to not be up within 10 seconds of the last one. If you wait 16 seconds, you'd get another 2 casts in so you'd have (1-0.3)^8 = 0.057 chance for it to not be up.

Now when is it better or worse to wait? Let's assume you'd roll that 5,7% chance EVERYTIME in a fight and delay every stormbringer cast for 16 seconds.

in a fight <60s it would be better to wait as you only have one cast anyway.
in a fight >60s but <92s you would loose a cast, it would have been better to cast it right away
in a fight >92s but <120s it would be better to wait as you have two casts anyway
in a fight >120s but <168s you would loose a cast and dmg again
in any fight >168s you would get at least 3 casts meaing the 3*40% dmg from lightning rod would ALWAYS be better, even if you would loose a cast in the process.

So even if you draw the absolute shortest stick in terms of rod procs 45,2% of all fight lengths below and 100% of all fight lengths above 2 min 48s would favor wating for a proc.

Only the absolute fastest raid kills of the like of ursoc fall below that threshold, so every normal raid boss kill favors waiting. Dungeon bosses can be tricky but if i have to miss 2-3 94,3% chances and then still a 45,2% chance on top of that for waiting to be worse, i'd usually be waiting for a proc.

This of course does not factor in if you have to move and could use stormbringer instead of losing casts or temporary dmg buffs/debuffs. Just use it if such a case falls into your waiting time.

A 16 second delay is a pretty conservative estimate. 20+ second gaps are not uncommon not just because of LR RNG but mastery / Lava Surge procs pushing LB further down. And that doesn't factor in mechanics at all.

This was discussed a while ago (along with holding for PotM) and it was a DPS loss. Fight time doesn't matter, it's averages out to a DPS loss in basically every situation:

80-120s:


168-252s:


240-360s:


360-540s:


And even then, short fights favor Ascendance anyways.

[Deleted]

A 16 second delay is a pretty conservative estimate. 20+ second gaps are not uncommon not just because of LR RNG but mastery / Lava Surge procs pushing LB further down. And that doesn't factor in mechanics at all.

This was discussed a while ago (along with holding for PotM) and it was a DPS loss. Fight time doesn't matter, it's averages out to a DPS loss in basically every situation:

80-120s:


168-252s:


240-360s:


360-540s:


And even then, short fights favor Ascendance anyways.

Can you provide me with the math behind your findings or the settings used for the simcraft results you posted?

It just does not make sense to me why the damage should be lower on average. Unlikely outliers sure, but not on average. I mean my calculations were between the two extremes of always firing with or without rod proc, just to clarify.

But even then, going back to the premise of delaying just one stormbringer proc and even taking a 20 sec no proc window which of course can happen. This would bring us back to the case of a 20second fight length window were it would be worse because you lose a proc and a 40 sec window were it would be better. So still 2/3 of all fights assuming random fight lengths.
If we are assuming several of those high time windows without uptime then we are again within an unlikely outlier.
If you would have 3 of those windows then there is the case again of 3 rod stormbringers are better than 4 non rod stormbringer procs.

These assumptions do not factor in fight mechanics. I already touched upon that with the movement but of course other fight mechanics can also highly influence this. (e.g. having to have stormbringer ready for known movement or burn phases or needed burst)

[Dahti]

Chimming in here,

300k dps on normal ursoc is doable with <870 as ele, I got there without a flask and only prolonged powers. Only one legendary but it is the twisting ring.

[jayheals]

www warcraftlogs com/reports/rHdjTfpLbnkq1QY2/#fight=7&type=resources&source=8&spell=111

trying to link to his maelstrom resource tab, looks like they wasted over 200 maelstrom, and they let flame shock drop off multiple times (83% uptime or somesuch?), they had several lava bursts not crit on ursoc (flame shock dropped off). this also results in fewer elemental focus buffs

i'm similarly geared to him (879 w/ leggo boots, crap weapon n trinkets) and usually end up around 360-400k dps, depending on how much i have to move. Proper potions contribute a lot, and they could also try out ascendance for a 4:10s ursoc kill. They'll get 2 full ascendance uses and the extra lava bursts will refresh his fire elemental earlier to get a near-full duration second cast off.

[Deleted]

-Flame Shock: Uptime is rather bad in the usroc fight, he even only had 90% crit on lavaburst which is really bad. There is no reason to not have flamehock rolling on the ursoc and the nightmares live about exactly the length of a flamehock also, so dot them both up

-lightning rod: the lightning rod damage is quite low, he had an uptime of 63.80% making the maximum dmg possible 10,3M from lightning bolt and 4,15M from chain lightning. He has 5,22/14,45 possible which would lead to him doing something else than lb+cl about 64% of the time during rod on average.
Yet 53% of his casts are lb/cl. This means he either uses stormkeeper without rod being up or really games rod badly.
Just to clearify he should have done around 7-7.5M with rod while somehow doing only 5,22M

Just trying to come at this from a different angle:

These are things that can be made easier with a few UI tweaks. Its easy to spot e.g: instant lava burst procs with the standard UI but if he struggles noticing the other things above, he should look at using TellMeWhen or WeakAuras to set up a visual cue for missing or less than 2 secs flame shock on target/focus, and lightning rod on target/focus.

You don't have to do everything yourself in game, your UI and addons are there to help, especially for a DPS. Whilst this may be overkill for some, it seems like it would really help this guy learn.

[Dahti]

Maybe I'll get around to posting my WAs for others to look at..

[Croga]

Why do we still look at iLevel at all?

You can have all the iLevel you want, if it's all Versatility gear you'll be nowhere near someone with the same iLevel in Crit gear. The difference is in the double-digit percents.
~850 ilevels of optimized gear out-DPS' ~880 ilevels of average gear.

Don't be fooled by iLevels. Maybe they'll count for something with the 7.1.5 secondary stat nerf but at the moment they are just epeen numbers, nothing else.