Elemental Shaman at the bottom of raid DPS now?

[Bollwerk]

Ran across this while evaluating my raid DPS history....

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Overall_DPS/10N/all/14/60/default/

On one hand, it makes me sad, but on the other hand it makes me feel a little vindicated at my frustration of trailing most of the DPS, despite my best efforts.
Hopefully Blizzard will take note and do something about it.

[JohnGabriel]

They are out-dpsing MM and BM hunters.

It looks to be the bottom 3/4th of the list is all very close, within 4% of each other, so consider all of those as equal. There is about a 17% difference between top and bottom dps, which I kindof feel is as close as you can balance these things but yes you are correct that is a noticeable difference.

What is more noticeable is the poor shaman healing, that doesn't seem fair.

[zenga]

Honestly it's been like this since tier 10, with the sole exception of firelands where an OP 2 piece setbonus boosted ele. Though I must say that how ele performs is totally different in 25m vs 10m, and in heroics they are even better. Some fights on 10m hc have adds phases, or have simply adds with higher health pools. Ele is just crazy for certain fights (like durumu hc) due to lava beam and chain lightning. On top of that the 2p and 4p set bonus are really good, so the data for normal mode might contain a fair set of ele without those. So contrary to former tiers, ele does have fights where it can shine at the moment.

That being said, 2 major complaints I have about ele this tier:

1) Stats and talents: it's insane how stats interact with eachother at the moment. You have to min max the entire time, based on talents and based on your gear. And then every fight another stat will pull ahead. Haste is ridiculous at the moment for ele. In certain situations (with the legendary meta gem that is available to everyone and gives 30% haste for roughly half of the time), I'm casting lava bursts and chain lightning at 0.7s, and haste is still the best stat (since it influences the proc rate of the meta gem). Whenever there is a fight with AOE, crit becomes often twice as strong as int and mastery, and haste becomes almost worth nothing. So you need to constantly reforge and regem. Quite often one piece of gear means that you will have to switch all yellow sockets from int/haste into full mastery gems, etc etc. It's one big clusterfuck. With my best simming gear (ilvl 528) i sit at 19% hit (no way to reforge it away) and and casts lvb/cl at 0.7s (note that everything under 1s is pointless).

2) The new rppm system that replaces the internal cooldown, on procs (rppm stands for real procs per minute) and how it interacts with ele vs other casters. Before this change trinkets had an internal cooldown, so as an ele you could guess when the icd was over and decide to wait to pop cooldowns. That was a major skill decider between good and very good ele shamans. Now it has become a total passive experience, more prone to rng than ever before.

The main reason for this is that we don't have dots. Back in the day dots would update on the fly, whereas the fire elemental totem would take a snapshot of your stats while you would pop it, and retain it for its entire duration. Now it's the other way around (except for boomkins iirc): fire ele updates on the fly and dots take a snapshot. Which basically means that the legendary meta gem (30% haste), the lei shen trinket (4s 100% crit rating) and trinket procs are massive for dot based classes (fire mage, spriest, warlock and boomkins). Whereas for ele it's a completely passive experience, and 90% rng. Lei shen trinket can proc back to back during ascendance and become worthless, int trinkets can proc back to back outside of your cds, same for the meta gem. Most fights have timeframes nowadays where you want to use cd's (for various reasons), so unless you want to use cds when you really shouldn't (due to fight mechanics) to line up cds with procs, it becomes a totally rng experience. Whereas if the world procs for dot classes, they can simply recast dots and take the full benefit of that, which is a really fun play style.

Next patch ele will get the unleashed lightning glyph as a baseline spell (casting lightning bolt on the move) without the 5% slower cast, which is a small dps buff, and there will be a new glyph that gives you a short 10% dmg reduction whenever lightning shield is triggered. But seeing how my gear (with still like 20 ilvls to go with valor upgraded gear) already fucks up haste and spiritm there is gonna have to be some serious reworking to be done for the next raiding tier.