Elemental Shaman, Math, and Strange Ramblings
December 2, 2011 Leave a comment
Being a spreadsheet guy, I build sheets for tracking stuff. For the last two expansions I’ve made a Jewelcrafter organisation sheet, so people can see who has what cut (at least, in the early days where cuts are limited). Early in 4.2 I also made a Legendary Progress sheet as well, if only to avoid the constant “how many cinders do you have?” questions.
I’ve made “blank” copies of each, for interested people to copy & use.
November 30, 2011 Leave a comment
One of the common questions that come up when dealing with stat weights is how to handle going over a particular break point, soft cap, or hard cap. In most cases, going over the break point is advisable, over/under the soft cap depends on the case, and going over the hard cap is not advisable.
However, when you’re looking at a hard cap for a stat that is your most valuable, then things start to get tricky. Some people will say that going over a hard cap like hit or expertise is a bad thing, and should never be done. While this may be true in some cases, it’s not true for all of them.
The better way to figure out if you should go over the cap is to do some simple algebra: value of capped stat under the cap multiplied by the quantity remaining until capped, compared to the value of the other stat multiplied by the total quantity, and then pick the largest of the two.
Using Elemental as an example, we have rough stat weights of Hit: 4, Haste: 2, Mastery: 1.8, Crit: 1.3. Obviously the question is between Haste and Hit. To work out how far over the hit cap we can go before haste is better, we just take the ratio of the two values, ie: 2:1. While this means that hit is worth twice as much as haste, it also means that when comparing stats for reforging, enchants or gems, you can go over the hit cap by half of that amount before it’s better to use haste instead.
eg: You are 12 hit rating short of the cap. You can either gem for 20 hit, or 20 haste. 12 hit * 4 ep = 48. 20 haste * 2 ep = 40. Hit wins out.
Often you’ll find smaller differences due to re-forging, but the same principle applies.
One site that assumes that over the hit cap is bad is www.askmrrobot.com. The following is how they tell me I should reforge with their default stat weights.
| Raid Buffed | Optimized | Difference | |
| Total Score | 43578 | 43596 | +19 |
| Intellect | 7603.58 | 7603.58 | |
| Spirit | 1333.00 | 1311.00 | -22.00 |
| Mastery | 1305.00 | 1205.00 | -100.00 |
| Spell Power | 11428.53 | 11428.53 | |
| Spell Hit | 472.00 | 480.00 | +8.00 |
| Spell Crit | 620.00 | 620.00 | |
| Spell Haste | 2492.00 | 2606.00 | +114.00 |
As you can see, we’re trading a net 14 hit (22 less 8) for 14 haste, and I’m currently 7 rating over the hit cap. Using their “modified” stat weights of Hit: 2.7 and Haste: 1.73, we can see that hit = 7 * 2.7 = 18.9 vs haste = 14 * 1.73 = 24.22, and haste wins. However it is noted that they manually modify their stat weights so that Int > Hit, in order to make gem/enchant selection work correctly.
Using my own stat weights generated via SimCraft using my current gear I obtained different results: Hit: 4.475, Int: 3.8562, Haste: 2.0297, Mastery: 1.8153, and Crit: 1.2781. Doing the same calculation we get 4.471 * 7 = 31.297 vs 28.4158, in favour of Hit again. To make Mr Robot do what I’m expecting, I need to over-ride their default values, and set the hit cap to 17.1%. The new results match perfectly with my gear as it’s set up (I use www.wowreforge.com to manage my reforging with a minimum hit cap).
In short, going slightly over a cap can be a good thing, as long as you consider it in context.
March 21, 2011 7 Comments
Interrupts. You know, those things that stop bad spellcasts. Apparently they’re important on a number of fights (Omnitron, Heroic Atramedes, Maloriak, Halfus, Council, Cho’gall from what I can remember) and on all bar Council I’ve been assigned the job of interrupting those spells. Previously you’d have interrupt rotations with the Rogues or Mages to make sure that every cast was interrupted, but now you get any Elemental or Enhancement assigned to the job.
The reasons that Shaman get the short stick on interrupts is because of the short cooldown and the fact that there will be no resource issues. These two reason make Wind Shear “superior” to Counterspell and Kick/Pummel respectively. However, on any fight with critical interrupts not having enough resources available to use your interrupt is Very Bad, even if your DPS suffers from doing so (hint: ranged interrupts require cancelling your existing cast to use your interrupt, which is also a DPS loss). Likewise, having a long cooldown (ie: 24 seconds) does not make it impossible for you to interrupt either. It just means that you either need to have a rotation team set up to handle it, or it’s a long enough gap between casts that one mage can handle things on their own.
The downside of Wind Shear is that it has a 25 yard range. This means that if you’re an Elemental, like me, you’ll be running more or taking special steps to make sure that you’re in range for your interrupt to work (why we can’t have an extra 15 yards on this spell too I have no idea), which is an issue on anything with much movement. This is the reason why Elementals shouldn’t be the sole interrupter on some fights.
So, a quick run down of the fights I’ve seen so far (3/13 HM).
Omnitrom: Frequent interrupts are needed, which makes Shaman ideal for this.
Atramedes (Heroic): The Obnoxious Fiends can be locked out, which means that you want your long lockout interrupts used. In other words: Wind Shear = Bad.
Maloriak: Both Release Abberations and Arcane Storm are on long cooldowns, which mean that anyone can and should be part of the interrupt team, especially the latter. Just make sure of your range Elementals, especially on the Green Phase. Watch positioning on Blue so you don’t crowd the Melee.
Nefarian: The shorter cooldown on Blast Nova from the Chromatic Prototypes means that Shaman should be able to interrupt all of them.
Halfus: Shadow Nova has a medium cooldown, but there’s no reason why any interrupt setup couldn’t manage it.
Ascendant Council: There’s not really any restriction on interrupts here either.
Cho’gall: The big adds can and should be interrupted by everyone, although the high frequency and no lockout means that Shaman are usually better.
So that’s 2 fights where Shaman should be your interrupters, 1 where they shouldn’t, and 4 where it makes no difference. Once you’ve convinced your raid team that there isn’t any special reason why you’re assigned the interrupt job all the time, the biggest task is making them all re-learn how to interrupt.
January 21, 2011 2 Comments
It’s time for another exciting (personal) blog post from Binks! I know you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat since the last one… ok, maybe not, but still, here’s another one.
So it’s nearly 6 months after the Sept 4 earthquake, and we’re still getting aftershocks. Some of these aftershocks are so big that there are now ~5 different “events” that people can make claims through EQC about.
There are a few sites up to look at the quake data:
http://quake.crowe.co.nz/
http://www.geonet.org.nz/
http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/
The total quake count ranges from 4112 to 4459 depending on which site and how they track them.
There’s also some information on GeoNet about how strong the quakes have been.
The epicentre of the quake was 10 km south-west of Christchurch city at a depth of 10 km. It is the first aftershock of the Darfield (Canterbury) earthquake over magnitude 5 since October 19.
The strongest ground shaking today was measured at Lincoln (LINC), and this earthquake has crept in at number 5 in the list of its top 5 shakes for Lincoln:
| Date | Magnitude | Peak Ground Acceleration |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Sep 2010 4:35 am | 7.1 | 91.426 %g |
| 4 Sep 2010 7:56 am | 5.2 | 21.83 %g |
| 5 Sep 2010 1:04 pm | 5.0 | 15.473 %g |
| 6 Sep 2010 11:24 pm | 5.2 | 15.116 %g |
| 20 Jan 2011 6:03 am | 5.1 | 14.189 %g |
The top 5 shakes as recorded at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens (CBGS) seismograph, close to the city centre, are:
| Date | Magnitude | Peak Ground Acceleration |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Dec 2010 10:30 am | 4.9 | 48.455 %g |
| 4 Sep 2010 4:35 am | 7.1 | 18.124 %g |
| 8 Sep 2010 7:49 am | 5.1 | 15.685 %g |
| 19 Oct 2010 11:32 am | 5.0 | 7.229 %g |
| 25 Sep 2010 7:58 pm | 4.1 | 4.132 %g |
For those that are wondering, “g” = gravity, aka 9.81 meters per second squared. The Sept 4 quake went for around 40 seconds which is why it did so much damage, but you can see why the ~5 second quake on Boxing Day (what we call the Dec 26th holiday over here) did additional damage. There’s brick building facings that have gaps about 1 cm wide in the brickwork where the top section has moved to the left, and yet more fencing in town.
The 4.0.3 guide is up, alive, and suffering from multiple edits as I keep updating stuff. The Wiki linking is pretty damn awesome, although I still need to do a lot of work to fill out the pages (wtb more content peons). I did put a submission in for the MMO-C guide contest, but I didn’t win anything (Bibi commented that I had no pictures. Pictures? Me? Pfft. I try to make things accurate, not pretty). It has since popped up in the “Rare” category, although I can’t edit any of my posts over there for some weird reason, but I’ve already tried the maintain-multiple-copes-of-a-guide thing before so I’m not really worried.
Still need to get some Enhancement & Restoration guide writers for TotemSpot, as most of them do their own sites or wow forums, and get some active web development going (for I am code illiterate, and both Pewter & masanbol have very little free time to do anything at the moment). We might get some ads on there to get the site self funded, and then explore getting a vB licence and other stuff.
There’s still the unfortunate impression out there that people are “entitled” to help from people like myself. I’ve been told that I’m wrong, unhelpful, arrogant, and going the wrong way about getting feedback. I’ll listen to people if they make a valid case, but more often then not it’s a case of “I have this awesome idea” with no actual reasoning behind it.
I will admit that I’m rather blunt, and the way I write is conducive to people thinking I’m angry etc, but that’s just me. My job is to help people with software, so I don’t want to have to continue doing the same thing at home either.
As such, I think I should limit my forum use to ElitistJerks & TotemSpot, purely because the former has awesome moderation, and the latter has a good little community that’s ticking along well. Other sites like MMO-C, Wowhead, Manaflask etc all have the same irritating feel to them. Well, they irritate me somewhat with the QQ threads (Oh noes, Paragon didn’t use any shaman on their first Sinestra kill), wishlisting (Here’s my awesome idea of how to fix Shaman number eleventy billion) and endless repetition of help me threads (I don’t mind them, but when there are multiple threads going for the same issues, and guides that answer questions already it just makes me go “arrrggg!”).
That last bit gets me sometimes. I put a lot of effort into the guides, and every time someone starts a thread or asks a question where I can go “Read the fracking guide!” it makes me think that guide writing is pointless, and what I should really do is quit my day job so I can hand-hold people through playing their Elemental Shaman.
But only if I got paid lots to do it.
Seriously, who doesn’t have a macro to go /y when you hit the button? (handy tip: a macro to prevent it from being cast outside of combat is useful).
My latest creation is “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”. Previously I was using another Monty Python joke, yelling “Charge!” when it was used, then “Run away!” 40 seconds later.
Of course, every mage needs a /y Lets do the time warp aagaaaainn! macro.
October 17, 2010 4 Comments
The TL;DR version.
September 27, 2010 2 Comments
So this time around I’m looking at the DPS breakdowns of the various specs in ICC normal & hardmode. The “raw” data was obtained from the Kamigami Tools hosted at Stratfu.
Rather than comparing absolute values, I’m using the average dps divided by the top DPS percentages that are provided on each page. This means that high dps fights like Blood Queen or Saurfang don’t skew the results. Gunship isn’t listed, and I’ve dropped out Dreamwalker because the DPS side is as hectic and variable as Gunship. I also dropped out Subtlety Rogues, Frost Mages, and Beast Mastery Hunters because their results were lower and based on fewer data points, mostly because nobody raids as those specs.
September 22, 2010 3 Comments
Yeah ok, I’ve been slack lately. Well… slack in terms of blogging anyway, I’ve been fairly busy with Real Life stuff lately.
If you watch/read/listen to the news on a regular basis, you’ll have heard of the 7.1 earthquake that hit Christchurch at the start of the month. Guess where I live? Yep. Fortunately there was no major damage (I successfully dodged the quakes Make Massive Wooden Bookcases Fall Over attack) although since I’d gone out the night before I had about 3 hours sleep between 9am Friday and 1am Sunday. This resulted in me doing a zombie impression for a few days, but fortunately I had the Monday off.
A good site to see information on the quakes is Geonet (if you want a specific seismograph drum, the MacQueen Valley one is closest to me), although the animations on Christchurch Quake Map is also pretty good (you can see the quakes as circles for magnitude, coloured by depth, and it initially looks like a whole bunch of bubbles).
July 14, 2010 1 Comment
Hello dear readers,
Obviously I’ve been a bit slack in posting stuff lately, but I have been doing stuff, honest ‘guv! So here’s a short summary of what I’ve been up to:
Operation TotemSpot
The site concept is progressing (there should be a little plug about it in the Totem Recall podcast). We’re still trying to think of a new name that doesn’t sound like we just ripped off TankSpot, while also being non-class specific. Pewter is playing with some website systems to see what does & doesn’t work, and we need to get that stuff sorted before we begin. For more information, read her post here.
We’ve already had expressions of interest from a few of the well known Enhancement & Restoration names out there, so it won’t just be an Elemental site. If you’re interested in participating in the running/maintenance/etc of the site (don’t be offended if your offer of help isn’t accepted, everyone can participate once the site goes “live”), or have a possible name for us to use, flick an email to totemspot at gmail dot com (I hate email crawling spam bots), with some references if you want to help out.
