I posted this in the Blue Post about the 10/29 changes, but I figured I’d toss it here for better visibility to stir the pot. The following is a post made in the Earthshrine discord, the Shaman theory-crafting discord, and was written by HawkCorrigan, the Elemental Shaman Wowhead guide writer. The current estimates and discussions were made with the combined effort of multiple theory crafters and dedicated players such as Stormy, the Icy Veins Elemental Shaman guide writer, Bloodmallet (yes, THAT Bloodmallet), and many other players (I myself am just a loser reposting it here for copium). The post was copied and pasted directly from Discord with tiny formatting done by myself for readability. If you wish to review it on the Discord Server, Hawk’s post can be found in the “ele-ptr-rework” channel (latest post).
Balance changes referenced can be found after the write up so you don’t have to flip flop between different posts/tabs.
Hello and Welcome to my Soapbox
In today episode, we will look at balancing, bugs and numbers. (Shocking I know)
I want to have a look at the coming balancing, the balancing we already received and some of the relevant bugs and their impact.
We are going to start with Single Target, taking some (Mythic) Kyveza logs as source, and then move over the Mythic+, looking at dungeons around a +11.
Previous Balancing:
On the 23rd Blizzard nerfed Lightning Rod by 50% and announced a fix for a bug with ascendance.
Lightning Rod contributed roughly 5-7% to our damage, making this a ~3% nerf.
The Ascendance bug is still active in-game. A conservative estimate puts this at 7% in pure damage and 2% in resource generation.
Balancing on reset (10/29)
Arc Discharge to 1 stack: roughly 1.8% nerf
Echo Chamber halved: roughly 4.5%
Asc change: 3.75% nerf after adjusting for the Echo Chamber nerf
Preeminence: Ignoring all haste caps it comes out as 0.7% nerf
TLDR:
When you log in on Tuesday/Wednesday, your character will be at least 10% weaker.
If Blizzard actually fixes the Asc bug, your character will be 19% weaker.
What about second (breakfast) LR nerf?
This is a weird one. When looking at logs, LR was doing less and more than the intended 10% in a lot of cases.
The logs I looked at had it at about 11-12% of the amount of Lightning damage, so this came out as roughly a 1.5% nerf.
So adding all of those adjustments and fixes puts us at a 24% Single Target nerf roughly, since release.
Let’s look at Mythic+ now.
Here it is much, much harder to actually keep these changes separated in a way that we could just sum up the numbers at the end.
As such the result here will most likely be slightly overshooting (1-2%). This wont be significant in the greater scheme of things.
These are numbers taken from dungeon logs. While that approach isnt perfect, given the volatility of dungeons, it should still paint a rough picture.
Previous Changes
First LR nerf at the start of the week comes out as a 10% nerf on average.
10/29 Coming changes:
-Ascendance nerf: 5.1%
-Echo Chamber: 5.1%
-Arc Discharge: 2.1%
-Voltaic Surge: 3.8%
In sum: 16% nerf in M+
On top of these 16% we need to add the fix to the Asc bug.
If they fix Asc to work correctly in AoE, it gains us about 5 Lava Bursts per activation. If they fix it we will lose 10 Overloads and 80 Maelstrom per activation in Single Target. Essentially, we gain AoE damage and lose Boss damage. Considering that significantly more Maelstrom is spent in AoE, this comes out roughly damage neutral.
The problem here is that “damage neutral” doesnt mean “DPS neutral” and “Time neutral”. Gaining the same absolute damage on bosses is worth significantly more than the same amount of damage, spread out, in AoE.
TLDR
If you log in on Tuesday you will lose about 16% in Mythic+, with significant losses in burst.
On top of that you will also lose the roughly 9% Boss damage, traded for some AoE, whenever Ascendance gets fixed.
But what about Stats?!?
Well.
Mastery doesn’t become awful.
It certainly loses some value, but still seems like the best stat for Single Target.
The surprise is that the loss of Asc damage, lead to a drop in the value of haste, because fitting in more spells into the cooldown is just not as important anymore. Chances are a good few of you will need to recraft Mastery+Haste to Mastery+Crit and play with lower haste than you currently do.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Usual Disclaimer applies: Be nice and civil to each other and the devs and use this data to provide constructive Feedback through the appropriate channels.
Good Night
Please correct me if there are errors and I can edit this section.
10/23 - Initial Lighting Rod Hotfix nerf:
10/24 Ascendance Bug fix mention (not yet implemented):
10/25 - The Second (Breakfast) LR Nerf/Hotfix:
Upcoming Balance Changes for next reset (10/29):