TrongaMonga
Grumpy Old Grandpa
So I joined a new guild, and they won't let me raid as elemental (yes, I'm resto now). So, this is something I made in the Revelations forum after doing a Brutallus fight as elemental. Have fun reading:
Allright, as you all should know by now, I’m a weirdo that likes an underrated spec and actually believes it to be quite viable. But because we’re all pros, I don’t expect you to believe me without any kind of empirical evidence.
That being said, there are some circumstances that need to be attained. First thing, the usual ‘elemental does not provide much more buffs than a resto and more DPS than a warlock’. The keyword that invalidates this sentence as a proper logical counter-argument is and. No, Elementals can’t do both, at the same time.
What do I mean with this? I’ll illustrate it with three cases of a group setup.
For argument reasons, consider each Warlock DPS as 2200 DPS, the Shadow Priest DPS as 1500, and the Elemental Shaman DPS as 1750. Then, let’s consider that Resto shamans and Elemental shamans total contribution value to the party is exactly the same, for this illustration only. Let’s say, that value is x.
Now, let us imagine we have three different group setups, and let us consider how much raid DPS that is. Consider raid full, full tank spots, full healer spots, and full DPS spots, and two different groups with these setups:
Being SP = Shadow Priest, Wl = Warlock, ES = Elemental Shaman and RS = Resto Shaman.
Setup 1 –
Group 1: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | ES
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS1: (1500 + 3 x 2200 + 1750 + x) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 1750 + 2x = 17950 + 2x
Setup 2 -
Now the raid leaders decide they need another healer, so they take a resto shaman instead of the elemental:
Group 1: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS2: (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x ) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 2x = 16200 + 2x
Obviously, the loss here is the DPS of that elemental shaman. No matter what, it will always be less DPS than Setup 1.
Setup 3 –
The raid leaders decide that elemental sucks and swap him out for a warlock:
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | Wl
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS3: (1500 + 4 x 2200) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 2200 + x = 18400 + x
So what is the necessary condition to have DPS1 > DPS2?
Let’s see.
17950 + 2x > 18400 + x <2x> 18400 – 17950 <color> 450[/color]
Now, 450 is exactly the difference between that Warlocks DPS and the Elemental Shaman DPS (2200 – 1750 = 450). What this means is, that in order for the Elemental to be worth his spot, his DPS added to his contribution to that group must be higher than the Warlocks DPS.
Now, what is this contribution? People keep insisting that it is only Totem of Wrath, but that is a fallacy. In order for this to happen, you would have to have a single group setup with both a resto shaman and an elemental shaman. And that’s just fail. No, the buffs elemental shamans bring to the table are Totem of Wrath, Wrath of Air, Mana Spring and Heroism.
Now, let me show you that this premise can actually be achieved, by using last Wednesday’s WWS Logs of Brutallus death (June 25th 2008):
Link - Wow Web Stats
Screenshot (if outdated) – http://xs328.xs.to/xs328/08266/raid499.jpg
One thing we need to considerate here, is that WWS shows active DPS and not effective DPS. It does not take into consideration the time you’re moving if you get burn, or spell pushbacks, etc. No, it only counts the time you’re actually DPSing. This being said, and considering the group constituted by Mexes, Moop, Quteone, Pouille and Trivial, let us calculate the effective DPS done by each:
Effective DPS = Damage Done / Fight time
Fight time being of six minutes and six seconds, or 366 seconds.
Mexes DPS = 495499/366 = 1353.82
Moop DPS = 840363/366 = 2296.07
Quteone DPS = 837593/366 = 2288.51
Pouille DPS = 767459/366 = 2096.88
Trivial DPS = 619281/366 =1692.02
Total DPS = 9727.3
Now, I could calculate the DPS I gave to each person, but I will only do the warlocks contributions. This is because Mexes contribution is a pain in the ass (as he uses like 6 spells, and some crit, some don’t, but I’ll address this later). You will see, however, that without even adding my contribution to Mexes, I already pass the average effective DPS a warlock does.
In order to do this, we must go trough phases. Let us consider Moop as a guinea pig, and keep in mind that the effective DPS calculated there already considers misses, partial resists and moving.
First step would be to calculate exactly how much of his damage came from my Heroism.
Heroism damage for this fight is calculated trough (40 x 1.3 + 326 x 1) / 366, or, explaining, 40 seconds of 1.3 damage plus the rest of fight worth 1 damage, divided by full duration of the fight to get a percentage.
This will give us a heroism power of 1.033, or 3.3% DPS increase for the whole fight.
Meaning, that if Moop did 840363 DPS with Heroism included, 3.3% of that is from Heroism alone. Therefore,
840363 x 0.033 = 27732
Or, in terms of DPS, 27732 / 366 = 75.77 DPS
Now, we must go for Totem of Wrath. In order to do this, we must understand exactly how crit benefits the DPSer. Let us consider, according WWS, that Moop uses Shadowbolt and Shadowbolt only (http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08266/moop381.jpg). The formula for damage would then be:
Damage = Spell damage x Spell Coefficient x Spell Bonus (raid debuffs, additive) x Spell Hit x Mitigation x Crit Value
Evidently, the only thing I care about is to calculate ToW’s worth in Crit Value, so I can consider doing a relative difference between the Crit Value with ToW and Crit Value without ToW. Therefore, I can literally scrap all of the other parts and get to this formula:
Damage from ToW = Total Damage – (Total Damage/(Damage (with ToW)/Damage (without ToW))
Or, damage from ToW is the difference between total value of the damage and the damage that would exist if ToW was not there.
Now, what exactly is Crit Value? Simply put, it is the coefficient involving damage done by crits and damage done by normal hits.
In the case of a Warlock, with Ruin and Chaotic Skyfire Diamond, a critical score hits for 2.09 times more than a normal hit. Here’s the logic behind this:
With Ruin, warlock’s critical strike damage bonus is 100% more than what your critical strikes are without it, so you take the damage increase from a critical strike and multiply it by 2. Now the gem says 3% increased critical damage, which doesn't mean +3% bonus damage it means 3% more total, so you take the damage a critical strike would do and then add 3% to that value.
However, I am not adding the crit value of Improved Shadowbolt (as it is a debuff that works with crit), but I am including it further below considering that, with 3 destruction warlocks, that debuff is up 100% of the time.
Thus
150% x 1.03 = 154.5% (Total damage from a crit with this gem but without ruin)
154.5% - 100% = 54.5% (Bonus damage from a crit with this gem but without ruin)
54.5% X 2 = 109% (bonus damage with ruin and gem)
100%+109% = 209% (damage done by a critical with gem and ruin)
So what does this all mean? It means that the formula to calculate Crit Value is exactly equal to:
(2.09 x crit%) + 1 x (100% - crit%). Do notice that the sum of both parcels is 100%. Meaning, this formula indicates the damage crit is responsible for, and adds it the rest.
That being said, let us take a look at Moop’s armory, where we can see he has 30.97% Shadow Bolt critical chance, let us consider raid buffs, which includes 40 intellect from mages, 19 from talented druids and 10% intellect from kings. These 3 alone gives, and considering that 1% crit = 81.92 int for a level 70 warlock (Attributes - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft), a total of 65 intellect. Add this to the bonus he gets from BoK and his base intellect, 485. Total is 113, or 113/81.92 = 1.38% crit. This adds his crit, with raid buffs only, up to 32.35%. Now, we add Imp Judgement of the Crusader, which I assume was up. That’s 35.35% crit without ToW.
So we calculate Crit Value without ToW:
(2.09 x 0.3535) + (1 - 0.3535) = 1.385
Now, we calculate Crit Value with ToW:
(2.09 x 0.3835) + (1 - 0.3835) = 1.418
So, using the formula up there, we get, and considering we had already calculated damage contribution from Heroism, thus we only use damage that would have been done without heroism (840363 - 27732 = 812631), we have:
Damage from ToW = 812631 - (812631/(1.418/1.385)) = 18912 damage, or 51.67 DPS
Now let us go further, and calculate how much DPS Wrath of Air gives.
As I said up there,
Damage = Spell damage x Spell Coefficient x Spell Bonus (raid debuffs, additive) x Spell Hit x Mitigation x Crit Value
This being said, let’s go to http://www.wowwiki.com/Spell_Damage_Coeffi...ck_Coefficients and see that Shadow Bolt has 85.71% (105.71% with Shadow and Flame) of Spell coefficient.
Therefore, considering he is hit capped, that, according to WWS, mitigation was of 3.5%, that the raid debuffs are Curse of Shadows (0.10 value), Improved Shadow Bolt (0.20 value), Demonic Sacrifice (0.15 value), Misery (0.05 value) and Shadow Weaving (0.10 value), and finally considering that ToW value was already calculated, so the crit value here is without ToW, this is what we expect:
Damage = 101 x 1.0571 x (1 + (0.10 + 0.20 + 0.15 + 0.05 + 0.10) x 0.99 x (1 – 0.035) x 1.385 = 226.031
Now, to calculate DPS, we need to consider that this is damage done by each Shadow Bolt. It has a base cast time of 2.5 seconds (talented), but we need to take haste into consideration. Now, Moop has 159 base haste, Gul'dan gives him an averaged value of 29.16 haste. Drums last 30 seconds, we had 6 drums in 366 seconds. Hence: (6 x 30 / 366) x 80 = 39.34 haste. Grand total, 227.5 haste, equaling 14.49% spell cast increase.
From Casting speed - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft, we get this formula:
New Casting Time = Base Casting Time / (1 + (Spell Haste Rating/1570))
Using those values, we have
New Casting time = 2.5 / (1 + (227.5/1570)) = 2.18
Average cast equals 2.18 seconds, so this is what we divide our value above with and get 103.68 dps gain from WoA.
Now, we sum it all up:
Heroism gain + ToW gain + WoA gain = 75.77 + 51.67 + 103.68 = 231.12
This value was obtained by using a calculator, and rounding up a lot of numbers. However, I did this in Excel, and without rounds, and the true result I obtained was of 227.70 DPS Moop gained from me.
A little note here: I am not considering Mana Spring for this effect because, even though it has uses, the fact that our group had a shadow priest, and that warlocks can Life Pact, pretty much throws down whatever contribution this gave to the warlocks. However, for argument's sake, if we consider that, in order to have mana tide on this group, we would be facing Setup 2 (as listed in the top), Raid DPS would always be inferior.
Now let’s see Quteone:
From armory, we can see he has 28.76% base crit, 468 intellect and 161 spell haste rating. Also, 3.5% Shadow Bolt mitigation from WWS. Taking this into consideration, we obtain Quteone DPS as equal to 227.30.
Pouille:
26.14% base crit, 501 intellect, 109 spell haste and 2% Shadow Bolt mitigation. Therefore, Pouille’s DPS is 217.57.
Adding up all the contribution from the 3 warlocks, I did extra 672.57 DPS, hidden from the caremeters. Adding that to my 1692.02 DPS from my effective DPS, I did 2364.59 actual DPS, without considering Mexes.
If we would want to consider having a fourth Warlock instead of me, and considering as what his DPS would be the average value of Moop, Quteone and Pouille’s DPS without my contribution (because we’re considering here that we’re getting rid of one shaman, which would involve that even if he was in another group, he wouldn’t get totems), the obtained result is as follows:
Moop = 2296.07 – 227.70 = 2068.37
Quteone = 2288.51 – 227.30 = 2061.21
Pouille = 2096.88 – 217.57 = 1879.31
Average = 2002.96
Difference between my actual DPS (without Mexes) and this is 361.63 DPS.
Now, you could argue this warlock would bring an extra curse. However, seeing there are three warlocks already, this means we have Curse of Elements, Curse of Recklessness and Curse of Shadows covered. Meaning, this fourth warlock's raid DPS contribution would be null, and he would bring in Curse of Agony. Would it be enough? I don’t think so. Even because there are two things to consider:
a) I did not use Mexes contribution. However, I asked in WoW Shaman forums for some help, and this awesome guy made some maths for me (actually, I asked him by logging into his server and sending him a mail).
Thread - http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=1&pageNo=1
His maths:
Moop: 227,97
Quteone: 227,64
Pouille: 221,88
Mexes: 199,63
As you can see, his results were quite similar, but for argument’s sake let’s say Mexes did about 195 more thanks to me. That final result goes up to 556.63.
b) My gear is not in pair with this guild’s DPSers. If you check that thread, you will see some WWS logs and Recount screenshots of shamans doing up to 2150 Active DPS. Considering mine was 1750, this means that, with proper gear, I could do between 300-400 more DPS, pre-Muru. This heightens my actual DPS to nearly 3000 (2364.59 + 195 + 350 = 2909.59). Which isn’t bad at all.
In conclusion:
No matter what the care meters say, this example of one Brutallus kill (even though it’s only one, it is the prime DPS example fight) shows mathematic evidence that elemental shamans are not only quite viable, but also a very good addition to the raid composition when DPS is required.
Elemental shamans can not be considered as a possible healer, but rather as a DPS slot that is not only quite decent DPS alone, but also brings a lot of contribution to the table. Also, it’s an amazing kiter (99% chance to hit with a 6 seconds cooldown instant double threat 50% slow spell), a decent off-healer, and an armoured caster that can even come back to life if things go bogus.
I hope this thread served to at least make people think. I will still do what the raid leaders want me to, restoration or elemental, but at least I tried to defend the spec I literally love. This means that I can not only provide the buffs to the casters at the right time (like in Supremus, I kept casting totems even while we were moving), but I will also not fail with gearing up my shaman, because, as elemental shamans scale quite well with gear, any minor mistake is unforgiving.
Any questions, comments, feel free to shoot.
No, I’m not a nerd, thanks.
Allright, as you all should know by now, I’m a weirdo that likes an underrated spec and actually believes it to be quite viable. But because we’re all pros, I don’t expect you to believe me without any kind of empirical evidence.
That being said, there are some circumstances that need to be attained. First thing, the usual ‘elemental does not provide much more buffs than a resto and more DPS than a warlock’. The keyword that invalidates this sentence as a proper logical counter-argument is and. No, Elementals can’t do both, at the same time.
What do I mean with this? I’ll illustrate it with three cases of a group setup.
For argument reasons, consider each Warlock DPS as 2200 DPS, the Shadow Priest DPS as 1500, and the Elemental Shaman DPS as 1750. Then, let’s consider that Resto shamans and Elemental shamans total contribution value to the party is exactly the same, for this illustration only. Let’s say, that value is x.
Now, let us imagine we have three different group setups, and let us consider how much raid DPS that is. Consider raid full, full tank spots, full healer spots, and full DPS spots, and two different groups with these setups:
Being SP = Shadow Priest, Wl = Warlock, ES = Elemental Shaman and RS = Resto Shaman.
Setup 1 –
Group 1: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | ES
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS1: (1500 + 3 x 2200 + 1750 + x) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 1750 + 2x = 17950 + 2x
Setup 2 -
Now the raid leaders decide they need another healer, so they take a resto shaman instead of the elemental:
Group 1: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS2: (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x ) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 2x = 16200 + 2x
Obviously, the loss here is the DPS of that elemental shaman. No matter what, it will always be less DPS than Setup 1.
Setup 3 –
The raid leaders decide that elemental sucks and swap him out for a warlock:
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | Wl
Group 2: SP | Wl | Wl | Wl | RS
DPS3: (1500 + 4 x 2200) + (1500 + 3 x 2200 + x) = 2 x (1500 + 3 x 2200) + 2200 + x = 18400 + x
So what is the necessary condition to have DPS1 > DPS2?
Let’s see.
17950 + 2x > 18400 + x <2x> 18400 – 17950 <color> 450[/color]
Now, 450 is exactly the difference between that Warlocks DPS and the Elemental Shaman DPS (2200 – 1750 = 450). What this means is, that in order for the Elemental to be worth his spot, his DPS added to his contribution to that group must be higher than the Warlocks DPS.
Now, what is this contribution? People keep insisting that it is only Totem of Wrath, but that is a fallacy. In order for this to happen, you would have to have a single group setup with both a resto shaman and an elemental shaman. And that’s just fail. No, the buffs elemental shamans bring to the table are Totem of Wrath, Wrath of Air, Mana Spring and Heroism.
Now, let me show you that this premise can actually be achieved, by using last Wednesday’s WWS Logs of Brutallus death (June 25th 2008):
Link - Wow Web Stats
Screenshot (if outdated) – http://xs328.xs.to/xs328/08266/raid499.jpg
One thing we need to considerate here, is that WWS shows active DPS and not effective DPS. It does not take into consideration the time you’re moving if you get burn, or spell pushbacks, etc. No, it only counts the time you’re actually DPSing. This being said, and considering the group constituted by Mexes, Moop, Quteone, Pouille and Trivial, let us calculate the effective DPS done by each:
Effective DPS = Damage Done / Fight time
Fight time being of six minutes and six seconds, or 366 seconds.
Mexes DPS = 495499/366 = 1353.82
Moop DPS = 840363/366 = 2296.07
Quteone DPS = 837593/366 = 2288.51
Pouille DPS = 767459/366 = 2096.88
Trivial DPS = 619281/366 =1692.02
Total DPS = 9727.3
Now, I could calculate the DPS I gave to each person, but I will only do the warlocks contributions. This is because Mexes contribution is a pain in the ass (as he uses like 6 spells, and some crit, some don’t, but I’ll address this later). You will see, however, that without even adding my contribution to Mexes, I already pass the average effective DPS a warlock does.
In order to do this, we must go trough phases. Let us consider Moop as a guinea pig, and keep in mind that the effective DPS calculated there already considers misses, partial resists and moving.
First step would be to calculate exactly how much of his damage came from my Heroism.
Heroism damage for this fight is calculated trough (40 x 1.3 + 326 x 1) / 366, or, explaining, 40 seconds of 1.3 damage plus the rest of fight worth 1 damage, divided by full duration of the fight to get a percentage.
This will give us a heroism power of 1.033, or 3.3% DPS increase for the whole fight.
Meaning, that if Moop did 840363 DPS with Heroism included, 3.3% of that is from Heroism alone. Therefore,
840363 x 0.033 = 27732
Or, in terms of DPS, 27732 / 366 = 75.77 DPS
Now, we must go for Totem of Wrath. In order to do this, we must understand exactly how crit benefits the DPSer. Let us consider, according WWS, that Moop uses Shadowbolt and Shadowbolt only (http://xs128.xs.to/xs128/08266/moop381.jpg). The formula for damage would then be:
Damage = Spell damage x Spell Coefficient x Spell Bonus (raid debuffs, additive) x Spell Hit x Mitigation x Crit Value
Evidently, the only thing I care about is to calculate ToW’s worth in Crit Value, so I can consider doing a relative difference between the Crit Value with ToW and Crit Value without ToW. Therefore, I can literally scrap all of the other parts and get to this formula:
Damage from ToW = Total Damage – (Total Damage/(Damage (with ToW)/Damage (without ToW))
Or, damage from ToW is the difference between total value of the damage and the damage that would exist if ToW was not there.
Now, what exactly is Crit Value? Simply put, it is the coefficient involving damage done by crits and damage done by normal hits.
In the case of a Warlock, with Ruin and Chaotic Skyfire Diamond, a critical score hits for 2.09 times more than a normal hit. Here’s the logic behind this:
With Ruin, warlock’s critical strike damage bonus is 100% more than what your critical strikes are without it, so you take the damage increase from a critical strike and multiply it by 2. Now the gem says 3% increased critical damage, which doesn't mean +3% bonus damage it means 3% more total, so you take the damage a critical strike would do and then add 3% to that value.
However, I am not adding the crit value of Improved Shadowbolt (as it is a debuff that works with crit), but I am including it further below considering that, with 3 destruction warlocks, that debuff is up 100% of the time.
Thus
150% x 1.03 = 154.5% (Total damage from a crit with this gem but without ruin)
154.5% - 100% = 54.5% (Bonus damage from a crit with this gem but without ruin)
54.5% X 2 = 109% (bonus damage with ruin and gem)
100%+109% = 209% (damage done by a critical with gem and ruin)
So what does this all mean? It means that the formula to calculate Crit Value is exactly equal to:
(2.09 x crit%) + 1 x (100% - crit%). Do notice that the sum of both parcels is 100%. Meaning, this formula indicates the damage crit is responsible for, and adds it the rest.
That being said, let us take a look at Moop’s armory, where we can see he has 30.97% Shadow Bolt critical chance, let us consider raid buffs, which includes 40 intellect from mages, 19 from talented druids and 10% intellect from kings. These 3 alone gives, and considering that 1% crit = 81.92 int for a level 70 warlock (Attributes - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft), a total of 65 intellect. Add this to the bonus he gets from BoK and his base intellect, 485. Total is 113, or 113/81.92 = 1.38% crit. This adds his crit, with raid buffs only, up to 32.35%. Now, we add Imp Judgement of the Crusader, which I assume was up. That’s 35.35% crit without ToW.
So we calculate Crit Value without ToW:
(2.09 x 0.3535) + (1 - 0.3535) = 1.385
Now, we calculate Crit Value with ToW:
(2.09 x 0.3835) + (1 - 0.3835) = 1.418
So, using the formula up there, we get, and considering we had already calculated damage contribution from Heroism, thus we only use damage that would have been done without heroism (840363 - 27732 = 812631), we have:
Damage from ToW = 812631 - (812631/(1.418/1.385)) = 18912 damage, or 51.67 DPS
Now let us go further, and calculate how much DPS Wrath of Air gives.
As I said up there,
Damage = Spell damage x Spell Coefficient x Spell Bonus (raid debuffs, additive) x Spell Hit x Mitigation x Crit Value
This being said, let’s go to http://www.wowwiki.com/Spell_Damage_Coeffi...ck_Coefficients and see that Shadow Bolt has 85.71% (105.71% with Shadow and Flame) of Spell coefficient.
Therefore, considering he is hit capped, that, according to WWS, mitigation was of 3.5%, that the raid debuffs are Curse of Shadows (0.10 value), Improved Shadow Bolt (0.20 value), Demonic Sacrifice (0.15 value), Misery (0.05 value) and Shadow Weaving (0.10 value), and finally considering that ToW value was already calculated, so the crit value here is without ToW, this is what we expect:
Damage = 101 x 1.0571 x (1 + (0.10 + 0.20 + 0.15 + 0.05 + 0.10) x 0.99 x (1 – 0.035) x 1.385 = 226.031
Now, to calculate DPS, we need to consider that this is damage done by each Shadow Bolt. It has a base cast time of 2.5 seconds (talented), but we need to take haste into consideration. Now, Moop has 159 base haste, Gul'dan gives him an averaged value of 29.16 haste. Drums last 30 seconds, we had 6 drums in 366 seconds. Hence: (6 x 30 / 366) x 80 = 39.34 haste. Grand total, 227.5 haste, equaling 14.49% spell cast increase.
From Casting speed - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft, we get this formula:
New Casting Time = Base Casting Time / (1 + (Spell Haste Rating/1570))
Using those values, we have
New Casting time = 2.5 / (1 + (227.5/1570)) = 2.18
Average cast equals 2.18 seconds, so this is what we divide our value above with and get 103.68 dps gain from WoA.
Now, we sum it all up:
Heroism gain + ToW gain + WoA gain = 75.77 + 51.67 + 103.68 = 231.12
This value was obtained by using a calculator, and rounding up a lot of numbers. However, I did this in Excel, and without rounds, and the true result I obtained was of 227.70 DPS Moop gained from me.
A little note here: I am not considering Mana Spring for this effect because, even though it has uses, the fact that our group had a shadow priest, and that warlocks can Life Pact, pretty much throws down whatever contribution this gave to the warlocks. However, for argument's sake, if we consider that, in order to have mana tide on this group, we would be facing Setup 2 (as listed in the top), Raid DPS would always be inferior.
Now let’s see Quteone:
From armory, we can see he has 28.76% base crit, 468 intellect and 161 spell haste rating. Also, 3.5% Shadow Bolt mitigation from WWS. Taking this into consideration, we obtain Quteone DPS as equal to 227.30.
Pouille:
26.14% base crit, 501 intellect, 109 spell haste and 2% Shadow Bolt mitigation. Therefore, Pouille’s DPS is 217.57.
Adding up all the contribution from the 3 warlocks, I did extra 672.57 DPS, hidden from the caremeters. Adding that to my 1692.02 DPS from my effective DPS, I did 2364.59 actual DPS, without considering Mexes.
If we would want to consider having a fourth Warlock instead of me, and considering as what his DPS would be the average value of Moop, Quteone and Pouille’s DPS without my contribution (because we’re considering here that we’re getting rid of one shaman, which would involve that even if he was in another group, he wouldn’t get totems), the obtained result is as follows:
Moop = 2296.07 – 227.70 = 2068.37
Quteone = 2288.51 – 227.30 = 2061.21
Pouille = 2096.88 – 217.57 = 1879.31
Average = 2002.96
Difference between my actual DPS (without Mexes) and this is 361.63 DPS.
Now, you could argue this warlock would bring an extra curse. However, seeing there are three warlocks already, this means we have Curse of Elements, Curse of Recklessness and Curse of Shadows covered. Meaning, this fourth warlock's raid DPS contribution would be null, and he would bring in Curse of Agony. Would it be enough? I don’t think so. Even because there are two things to consider:
a) I did not use Mexes contribution. However, I asked in WoW Shaman forums for some help, and this awesome guy made some maths for me (actually, I asked him by logging into his server and sending him a mail).
Thread - http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=1&pageNo=1
His maths:
Moop: 227,97
Quteone: 227,64
Pouille: 221,88
Mexes: 199,63
As you can see, his results were quite similar, but for argument’s sake let’s say Mexes did about 195 more thanks to me. That final result goes up to 556.63.
b) My gear is not in pair with this guild’s DPSers. If you check that thread, you will see some WWS logs and Recount screenshots of shamans doing up to 2150 Active DPS. Considering mine was 1750, this means that, with proper gear, I could do between 300-400 more DPS, pre-Muru. This heightens my actual DPS to nearly 3000 (2364.59 + 195 + 350 = 2909.59). Which isn’t bad at all.
In conclusion:
No matter what the care meters say, this example of one Brutallus kill (even though it’s only one, it is the prime DPS example fight) shows mathematic evidence that elemental shamans are not only quite viable, but also a very good addition to the raid composition when DPS is required.
Elemental shamans can not be considered as a possible healer, but rather as a DPS slot that is not only quite decent DPS alone, but also brings a lot of contribution to the table. Also, it’s an amazing kiter (99% chance to hit with a 6 seconds cooldown instant double threat 50% slow spell), a decent off-healer, and an armoured caster that can even come back to life if things go bogus.
I hope this thread served to at least make people think. I will still do what the raid leaders want me to, restoration or elemental, but at least I tried to defend the spec I literally love. This means that I can not only provide the buffs to the casters at the right time (like in Supremus, I kept casting totems even while we were moving), but I will also not fail with gearing up my shaman, because, as elemental shamans scale quite well with gear, any minor mistake is unforgiving.
Any questions, comments, feel free to shoot.
No, I’m not a nerd, thanks.