GC: More Elemental Shaman Numbers

#0 - Dec. 19, 2008, 10:33 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I can't speak towards the PTR specifically. It takes awhile to create a build, so they are often a few days (or longer) behind our changes. I can say that in our internal testing all of the changes together gave Elemental something like a 10 to 12% dps increase for Naxx 25 geared characters in full raid buffs. Elemental dps should be very close to Balance druid dps, which we used as the standard we wanted to reach.

We discussed several of the concerns that have come up over the last few days and ran some additional tests, but we are still satisfied with the numbers produced by the new changes.

I did patchwerk on tuesday. It was a 3 Minute and 23 second kill and I hit 3686 DPS.

http://wowwebstats.com/5tyxobyjedanq?s=144705-173219

Now increase this damage by 10 to 12% and I'll be 4054-4128

Now I'm going to link the WWS parse from a guild on my server whose members I am familiar with.

http://wowwebstats.com/r16zvq4v3n3z5?s=509173-550575

Their Elemental Shaman has the Same DPS as me on Patchwerk at 3664, yet their Moonkin is pushing 5114 DPS which no Shaman I've seen has yet to come even close to reaching even 10-12% of.

I have to disagree that we are "close" to moonkin DPS. Futhermore I think it is somewhat risky to balance once class off another class that is balanced against another class.

Shouldn't all classes be balanced against a single target?

Blizzard has addressed one of the major issues affecting Elemental Shaman, and that is Spell Damage Scaling, however we still need to find a way to balance Crit and Haste Scaling which accounts for 100% of our Non hit/spell power stats.

I started off doing 25 man nax and scoring in the 5-10 DPS range.

Now I can rarely if ever break the #10 DPS range as our guild (and myself) gear up.

I really wish you would revisit these numbers, and instead of making a % based adjustment, make a fundamental change to the class or spell mechanics in general.

Haste and Critical Strike need to scale better with our class or we are going to move further down the ladder of our continued last place in DPS.

#16 - Dec. 22, 2008, 6 p.m.

This is why I am often reluctant to post actual numbers. I think they end up launching more questions than actually providing answers.

The 10 to 12% number I quoted was the additional amount we wanted to add with the changes post-Shamanism. If you recall, we did two rounds of buffs on Elemental. The first juggled the talent tree a little bit (and introduced Shamanism). The second changed a couple of additional talents (Elemental Oath, Elemental Mastery and the change to the Lightning Bolt glyph).

For an Elemental in Naxx 25 gear, *each* of these rounds should have increased dps by about 10% between patch 3.0.3 and patch 3.0.8, for a total of about 20%. If you are in heroic blues and don't have as much spellpower, then you won't see quite such a lift from the first (Shamanism) round of changes.

Note that the build on the PTR only contains the first round of changes, IIRC.

Sorry for the confusion.