Post by Fulgurah
http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t57116-elemental_optimal_gear_item_discussion/http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t76510-elemental_patch_3_3_now_more_fire_nova/Start there. Also, not a "madam." And I think your answer provides enough clues as to why you were seeing such a "dps increase." Test dummies are absolute junk for actually testing your dps. Use them to learn a rotation and all of that, but don't cite numbers as though they show something. You were testing it out on the lvl 80 dummy (not the heroic 83 one) and you were probably hitting more than one of them with Fire Nova. That explains it, in a nutshell.
Read the stickies here and EJ for the math and all of that. Bottom line: Elemental rotation did not change. Don't use Frost Shock in your rotation. Stick to Flame Shock > LvB > LB with the occasional CL when you have less than 2 seconds until LvB is off CD. Easy.
Post by Sihmm
The math is very simple and I'll post some here when I've got more time. But the basic story is:
- Frost Shock and Fire Nova have a high base damage but low coefficients. This means they benefit very little from spellpower and from raidbuffs compared to our Lightning and Lava Spells.
- Far more talents prop up Lightning and Lava than our shocks/fire nova.
- LB and LvB are far more mana efficient and have a much higher range.
There's an explanation of when is a good time to use Frost Shock or Fire Nova in a single target rotation
here. Otherwise, stick to using Flame Shock, Lava Burst and Lightning.
Post by Sihmm
OK, a quick look at how we work out a spell's DPS for comparison purposes.
(Purely for interest's sake - while each step is quite simple and putting them together fairly straightforward, it can be quite complicated to actually
do it, especially if you don't really know how all the talents and whatnot interact. I'm really just posting this to say "look, see, there are numbers behind all this and they do make sense!")
First you find the base damage of the spell and average it out. You have to do this by checking the in-game tooltip without any talents or glyphs that affect the spell active. So for example Frost Shock's average base damage is 835.
Second, you work out the coefficient which is how much benefit the spell gets from spellpower. This is base cast time divided by 3.5 for a single target spell, or divided by 7 for an AoE. Spells with additional effects (such as snares) suffer a 5% penalty off the total coefficient for each effect. Then you add to that coefficient any talents or effects which say they affect it (such as
Shamanism).
Then you work out how much extra damage it gets from talents and glyphs and whatnot (not raid buffs, those come later).
Next you work out the crit damage multiplier, factoring in talents and meta gems and whatnot.
Then you multiply everything so far by the spell's crit chance times its total crit damage to get the average damage per hit, including critical strikes.
Finally you work out its effective cast time, by dividing the cast time including talents by your haste percentage (including the 100% base casting speed you have innately).
This looks like:
( basedamage + (coefficient * spellpower) ) * (1 + talents + glyphs + etc) * ( 1 + critchance * critmodifier ) / EffectiveCastTime
Let's use 2500 spellpower, 30% haste and 40% crit to generate some sample numbers.
Frost Shock:
( 835 + (38.57% * 2500 ) ) * (100% + 5% + 20% ) * ( 100% + 40% * 109% ) / (1.5 / 130% )
= 2799 DPS
Fire Nova:
( 945 + (21.43% * 2500) ) * (1 + 5% + 15% + 20% ) * ( 1 + 40% * 109% ) / (1.5/130%)
= 2580 DPS (single target, remember)
(Edit: Fire Nova doesn't actually benefit from Concussion, so the number would be even lower)
Lightning Bolt is more complicated as you have to work out the damage done by Lightning Overloads, then add 33% of that to the final damage of the spell. I won't go through the math here but it works out as 3670 DPS. Similarly Earth Shock works out as 2400 DPS. And so forth. So you can see that LB > Frost Shock > Fire Nova > Earth Shock.
(If the numbers seem low, remember that I'm using very low stats and none of the damage modifying raid buffs)
Is Frost Shock really better than Earth Shock thanks to Booming Echoes? Or does the slow have some kind of synergy?
Yeah, it's because of (a) the extra damage and (b) the lower cooldown from Booming Echoes that Frost Shock is better for damage than Earth Shock. Earth Shock hits for less and triggers a longer linked shock cooldown, so there's no reason to use it.