Elemental shaman dps tests.

[Kaynin]

I'm currently sitting at these stats.

1830 spellpower selfbuffed (flametongue + ToW)
240 haste rating
34% crit chance (ToW, Elemental Oath, Talents)

I've started to do unbloodlusted sequences and I've noticed one particular thing. It's important to not even waste a second on the Lava Burst CD. Also, Flame Shock Glyph is a must for maximum dps. Also, despite I made different castsequences to best fit bloodlusted sequences, my dps hardly improves when bloodlusted. Which makes me doubt usefulness of haste in general. Here's the stats I recorded:

Trash DPS macro:
Unbloodlusted, optimal Lavaburst Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt rotation on multiple targets (L70 dummies in TB)
2400 dps average

Single target DPS macro:
Lava Burst/Lightning Bolt Mana conservative rotation:
2000 dps average

Altered macro's for when bloodlusted to fit in more Lightning Bolts. (The only non-cd using filler we can use in our rotation to cope with haste)
2500 dps average on multi
2100 dps average on single

I'm not joking here. I seriously only had about a 100dps increase when using bloodlust. I'm continueing my search for possible error in macro's on my side tonight, see if I can fit the castsequences better even. But in both situations I didn't have a moments pause in the rotation and lava burst always casts right when the cd is up.

I expected bloodlust, which counts as a whopping 30% haste, to have a serious impact on my dps. This however is not the case. So truly, is there a point for us to get haste gear, when spelldamage scales our dps much much more then haste?

PS, tests based on 3 hours long of bursting through mana pools and nting figures while trying out different castsequences, trying to fit all the cd's in place to not have a single one wasted.

(Also, this was all recorded on 70 dummies, so I did not take hit into account, effective dps in heroics would probably be ~500 lower. As I only have 44 hit rating or so at the moment and 3% from talents.)

[pinotnoir]

It's sad to see how bad our dps is. People at 70 were hitting numbers similar to your test. The bloodlust issue is something I have been trying to figure out. If you put 3 LB in between the Lava burst cooldown that works great. If you are bloodlust you may need a 4th LB or your Lava cooldown wont be ready. So far I have not come up with a good way to macro it.

[Schwarz]

Any Idea what the numbers are for just lightning bolt spam?

Is there a hard cap on how low the gcd can go down? With a 30% haste boost we have to be getting close to 1 second gcd. Really sucks that bloodlusted only increases your dps by ~100.

Well with this patch magma totem is getting buffed!!!!!!!!! This could seriously be pretty good a small buff turns into a pretty big buff if you take it *4 or *5. And a big buff will be freakin huge when you take it *4 or *5.

[Kaynin]

Lb spam I'm sitting around 1300-1400 dps. Lava burst and flame shock glyph is the way to go.

My main concern is the minimal effect bloodlust has on my dps. As it is now I have 250 haste rating on gear.

It seems that roughly, 1 spellpower equals 1 dps for elemental shamans, obviously it scales and this isn't exact. But 250 more spellpower would possible give me 200-300 more dps. Whilest a 30% hste buff gives me 100dps, and thus 250 haste rating will be around 20-30 more dps which isn't noteworthy.

I'm going to test how much crit rating influence our dps tonight and see if I should just stick with crit. Which seems likely.

[Creazil]

About haste and rotations ..

http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t37210-elemental_rotations/

[pinotnoir]

Something I found while playing with target dummies in Irnoforge.

I could not get any castsequence macro to perform as well as a castrandom macro when bloodlust/heroism was up.

With Lava Burst, I'd be tempted to try:

Button 1 (opener)
/cast Flame Shock

Button 2 (main dps)
/cast Lava Burst
/castrandom lightning bolt, chain lightning

And throw in trinkets or whatever.

This is what I will prob change my macro to. I think its the only way around the 8 second cooldown and bloodlust.

[Ellay]

Hmm, does

/cast Lava Burst
/cast Lightning Bolt

work as you would think it does? whenever Lava Burst is up it will cast, else LB will go off?

[Kaynin]

Basicly, we are stuck with an 8 second cooldown on Lava Burst and we have to fit inside whatever possible.

I don't think /castrandom is good by the way. Here's a little example, fgures not exact.

Suppose these cast times are correct

Lava Burst 1.5 sec
Lightning Bolt 2.5 sec
Chain Lightning 2 sec
Earth Shock instant
GCD 1 sec

You start off with Flame Shock and Lava Burst, then the CD starts running.

FS->LvB->CL->LB->LB->LB->LvB continue rotation

Ok, so after your first LvB, you casted 2 sec cl, 2.5 sec lb, 2.5 sec lb After these three there is still 1 sec until LvB is up, the only spell you should use then should be earth shock, 1 sec gcd and then right after that, LvB is up again and you use that. Using castrandom could very well pick Lightning Bolt instead of Earth Shock and suddenly your second Lava Burst will start after 9.5 seconds, instead of the 8 second cooldown. In a long fight, your loss of dps for using LB instead of ES here, would be immense.




To run this down, ideally you want to spam LvB always right when the cd is back again, and with the other spells you have, you want to best fill the time inbetween with the casts you have. So if above figures were correct (which they arent but I'm just example while being at work. :P ) you should do CL->LB->LB->ES inbetween the first two LvB's Then you would put the max possible inbetween without delaying your next LvB spell.

Which is why I think it is essential to come up with a fixed rotation based on your haste, and a seperate rotation for when bloodlusted. Instead of using a /castrandom which might add extra delays on Lava Bursts

[Tdog]

Curious, Could you type out the different /castsequence macros you used for your initial testing? I'd like to look them over, perhaps I can offer some thoughts.

It's sad to see how bad our dps is. People at 70 were hitting numbers similar to your test. The bloodlust issue is something I have been trying to figure out. If you put 3 LB in between the Lava burst cooldown that works great. If you are bloodlust you may need a 4th LB or your Lava cooldown wont be ready. So far I have not come up with a good way to macro it.

2100-2400 dps non-raid buffed at level 70 was only being acheived by rather decked out toons. I'm assuming Kaynin is still largely in quest gear with a few normal instance drops and a few heroic drops. Which actually brings up the question Kaynin, what's your gear look like? Could I see an amory link please?

Edit: Just noticed Kaynin's sig with links to her armories. Basically a mix of quest blues and crafted blues with a instance drop and a couple of level 70 pieces. My point isn't to rag on gear (as it looks fine considering how long wotlk has been out) but to point out that it's still early on in the expac. I'm not saying shaman dps didn't take a hit but this dps range doesnt seem that awful to me. Maybe I'll have a better understanding at 80.

[Schwarz]

I was only able to achieve 2100-2400dps for short bursts by poping trinkets and bloodlust pre wotlk. And I think my gear is pretty damn good.

One thing that I would take into effect with a cast sequence macro is you are never going to start out with a flameshock. If you cast this then the mob/boss is instantly going to come running after you. I would think almost always you would start with a lightning bolt followed by a chain lightning then get into your cast sequence.

Also if you have a flameshock that is going to stay up there for ~18seconds doesn't this allow you to throw another shock in there at some point?