Stealth Nerf to Elemental?

We have not made a change to Lava Burst at this time. I feel like I have to offer "at this time" or if we ever do decide to nerf it, we'll be accused of breaking promises. It's just been that kind of week. :)

As I posted in the bug forum, we're looking into this. It's too early to confirm if there is a bug.

We actually are not able to find a bug. We'll keep looking though.

Let's try to keep this focused on whether something happened to lower your dps in between 3.09 and 3.1. Getting into how the class is designed broadens the scope of the discussion too much. It only becomes relevant if scaling is too blame. But since nobody really upgraded their gear between 3.09 and 3.1 I find that explanation unsatisfactory.

Q u o t e:
Elemental DPS problem summary

1) Many people believe they are seeing a drop in DPS with the 3.1 patch (mostly on LvB crits, some with LB)

2) I see more people complain about seeing this loss in a raid setting

3) A smaller amount of people see the dps drop on test dummies and solo questing.

4) Many people point to problems with Dual Spec. Switching specs causes talents or glyphs to drop. Logging brings back correct talents and glyphs.

5) As far as I can see, all Theorycrafters and Math fanatics say there is no bug. Most of them point to test dummy testing (not raiding data)

6) Blue says they see nothing wrong, but will continue to look.

7) For most people Recount data shows a drop in dps ranking for pre-3.1 raids as well as Ulduar raids.

8) Many people point to Raid buff changes (like Scorch) as being the problem.

So is this problem:
1) A bug?
2) Raid buff problem?
3) Elemental design (scaling) problem?
4) All in our heads, L2P noob

It doesn't really matter what you call it. As I said, I don't think your #3 is to blame because you're talking about walking into Ulduar, not three months after Ulduar when everyone has improved their gear. Number 2 could be a problem if the crit loss really accounted for that much. Having 5% crit translate into 1000 or more dps loss is hard to explan though. I don't think it's #4 -- in your heads -- or you'd see this kind of thread for every class. (And while there are plenty of "Was me stealth nerfed?" this feels a little different). So far we just can't detect anything that would account for a change, other than occasional weirdness that results from switching dual-specs, but we believe most of those problems have been fixed.

Please keep investigating the issue and so will we. Since we can't find anything different in the data (and one thing our data is very good at is showing revision history), it's not sufficient to post "It feels like we dropped. Fix it."

Please don't bump threads. You are just going to keep hitting the post limit and you increase the chance that other players (shamans even) are just going to give up on the thread when they have to wade through so many wasted posts.

We don't think there is a bug, but it does seem like Elemental dps dropped inexplicably. We don't think the Scorch change would have affected them so much more than other casters, but that is a possibility.

What will help the most from any of you are theories about what might have changed. Bumping does not help.

Q u o t e:
Can't we assume at this point that Ele Shamans need a DPS boost and leave it at that? Asking for theories from the player base seems like a weak way to pursue a glitch if it does exist anyway. So many shamans are bumping this and leaving the theories to you and yours for a reason. As much as they want their spec to be functional, they expect you to be the ones to something about it (quickly I might add).

Yes, but other shamans are reporting no noticable change. So it isn't as simple as "Shaman low. Buff us." We need to figure out what are the conditions (boss, glyphs, buffs, gear, rotation, skill) that are causing the issue. Blindly changing numbers when we don't know what the problem is or what it will do is one of the things players complain about the most (even though we don't really do it that much).

I would not at all try and turn bump frequency or persistence into some kind of measurement of severity or you are going to see every class in the game start a "bump for buffs" thread.

I'm going to make one more attempt to get this thread back on track. What we would like to see is evidence or speculation of what the problem is. Generic "I feel like my dps is lower" is useful, but only slighty. Just filling up an already long thread with shaman jokes or more bumps will only encourage us to lock the thread.

We still cannot find any bugs with Elemental, and from our research we don't even think Elemental has fallen from 3.09 to 3.1 except for the Scorch nerf.

Nonetheless, we do think Elemental is a little low so there is likely to be a small buff coming.

We recently made a sticky announcing a change to Lightning Overload to give Elemental a little bit of a dps boost. If it's not sufficient, more may follow.