Since last post, which I apologize for being a considerable amount of time ago, I have not been playing as much as I would have liked. My beloved laptop that has served me well over the past 4 years was finally showing its age and the lacking framerate was taking to great of a toll on my performance (at times I was averaging a mere 6-8fps during raids). I took the hint and made the decision to build a new computer which I had not done before and was rather daunted by the thought of. I am pleased to say it was a success however, and I am now playing on a beastly new machine that makes the game look completely different. Who knew you could see the Mine from the Lumber Mill in AB? Maybe you all did and I have been the one missing out all this time, if so forgive my childlike facination. I am yet to raid with the new setup, but I am excited to see the difference in a 25-man environment.
With my reduced playtime over the last two weeks I have not been regularly collecting Emblem of Triumph tokens (*tisk tisk*, I know...) and, as such, have not been able to purchase any of the token gear. Not that there is exactly a plethora of selection for us, but I am leaving the spiteful comments behind with the last post; I appreciate your feedback on that by the way. Yesterday I was finally fortunate enough to have saved enough to get a hold of the new totem slot item, the Totem of Electrifying Wind. By this point most of the more hardcore readers would have already seen the conclusions/done their own research but I still feel I should post about it because that is what this blog is all about.
From the PTR studies prior to 3.2, it showed the totem to have an extremely high percentage of uptime but for a long period no one confirmed these numbers once the patch was live. Well, now the numbers are all verified and the totem has a proc chance (i.e.: chance to activate) of 70% and an internal cooldown (or 'ICD', time delay after activation before it can activate again) of 6 seconds.
These numbers are very kind to us. Essentially this means it likes proccing and, because the buff lasts 12 seconds but can refresh after only 6, it will refresh itself a good percentage of time. Conclusion? Very high uptime.
I grabbed my new totem after the daily yesterday and took it to do some of my own testing. On pure Lightning Bolt spamming I never lost the buff once it first activated in 3 tests from full mana to OOM. When performing my rotation (i.e.: inclusion of Flame Shock and Lava Bursts), in a stand-and-deliver situation it still had a very high uptime, well over 90% for the vast majority of the testing.
From my own number punching (using my personal stats and such) I found this to be around a 155-165 DPS boost. Haste is unfortunately a difficult stat to come to rock-solid conclusions on, however, because there are certain points where a little extra haste will allow you to complete your rotation and integrate an extra spell cast. Not to make this post about stat comparisons, but basically there is points where haste can outweigh spellpower, although not on a regular basis. This means the benefit will be slightly different for your particular situations, but this is a reasonable ballpark estimate.
So how does this compare to our existing BiS, the Totem of Hex? I am happy to say that we have finally found an upgrade, as Hex only equated to roughly a 95-100 DPS increase. The immense uptime of Electrifying Wind makes it a practically constant buff which I am sure many of you will be thankful for.
I have not had a chance to try it out on high-movement bosses in a raid situation as yet which may be the times where the buff does fall off for short periods but I doubt it will be too much of a factor. I am sure the situations where you have trinket procs and bloodlust/heroism going in conjunction with the totem buff will make you forget about those momentary lapses.
In summary: The Totem of Electrifying Winds is a great little upgrade from our previous best-in-slot; and only takes a few days of raiding and running daily heroics to get your hands on. Enjoy!
-Puut
Showing posts with label Spell Power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spell Power. Show all posts
Friday, 28 August 2009
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Understanding Stats
Elemental Shaman are casters. We cast spells that do damage to the enemy: Lightning Bolts and Lava Bursts and alike. It is the most important thing for us to make these spells as powerful as they can be and we achieve this by stats. All the gear you wear contributes to your stats.
The two tabs most that contain all the stats and numbers I am referring to are located under the Base Stats and Spell tabs on your armory page and in-game on your gear page.
Base Stats:
The majority of the gear we wear will have Armor, Stamina and Intellect and to a lesser extent Spirit. Armor and Stamina is not of much concern to us as they only affect how much of a beating we can take. In PvE we should not be tanking (shammy-tanking may be talked about later down the road but don't hold your breath) or taking much direct damage at all, so never aim to increase these stats. If you gear yourself reasonably these will always be at a healthy level.
Intellect (Int) is the only base stat that will directly affect your damage output. Firstly, and most importantly, Intellect will determine your mana pool. Mana is used to cast your spells and as such more mana = more spell casts available before you need to refresh. Every point of Intellect = 15 mana. Intellect also affects some of your spell stats: 1 Int = 0.00602% Crit Chance, or in a more user friendly form 166 Int = 1% Crit. Intellect also boosts your Mana Regeneration. Mana Regen. is commonly referred to as mp5 (Mana regenerated every 5 seconds), and is not really useful for us elementals as we generally have plenty of mana due to various abilities and features of our talent trees that provide us with abundant amounts of mana.
Finally, Spirit is sometimes attached to gear we will use. Spirit increases health and mana regeneration rates. This stat is awful for us in that, unlike almost every other caster class, we have absolutely no benefit from spirit. It should be avoided wherever possible; If you are wearing any gear with this keep your eyes peeled for comparable gear without this wasted stat as there is usually a better alternative out there.
Spell Stats:
Increasingly with top-end gear there will be 'green stats' or 'equip bonuses' on your gear (found under the base stats and all that other junk, preceded with the word Equip:). These will directly affect your spell stats.
Bonus Damage is the key stat that increases the amount of damage every spell does when it hits an enemy. It will be listed as spell power on your gear (ie. Equip: Increases spell power by x). This is a hugely important stat for us! As you become increasingly geared and we get to gemming and enchanting we will aim to increase this stat as much as possible. This spell power stat also increases your bonus healing which increases the amount every heal does, but this is only important for restos.
Hit Rating is the chance you will hit your target when you cast a spell. We can 'cap' this stat, meaning we have a 100% chance to hit our target. I will talk about this stat in the coming posts as I need a whole post to explain the calculations. Until we are capped this is by far our most important stat.
Crit chance, mentioned briefly earlier, is the chance we will deliver a critically damaging strike to our target. Critical Strikes (or simply 'crits') deal 150% damage. This stat is valuable to us as inherent talents in our tree make crits help conserve mana, and the bonus damage is pretty nice too!
Finally, haste rating increases the speed at which we can cast our spells. More spells = more damage, so this is pretty valuable to us. Back in the Burning Crusade expansion lots of top end elementals would stack this stat, although it is now not as beneficial.
So, in summary:
This concludes my basic overview of the stats you will see in your various elemental gear. These numbers will be used repeatedly in this blog as they control how good we can be.
For further info about these stats, check out WoWWiki (link in sidebar). They are a great resource for understanding all these numbers.
-Puut
The two tabs most that contain all the stats and numbers I am referring to are located under the Base Stats and Spell tabs on your armory page and in-game on your gear page.
Base Stats:
The majority of the gear we wear will have Armor, Stamina and Intellect and to a lesser extent Spirit. Armor and Stamina is not of much concern to us as they only affect how much of a beating we can take. In PvE we should not be tanking (shammy-tanking may be talked about later down the road but don't hold your breath) or taking much direct damage at all, so never aim to increase these stats. If you gear yourself reasonably these will always be at a healthy level.
Intellect (Int) is the only base stat that will directly affect your damage output. Firstly, and most importantly, Intellect will determine your mana pool. Mana is used to cast your spells and as such more mana = more spell casts available before you need to refresh. Every point of Intellect = 15 mana. Intellect also affects some of your spell stats: 1 Int = 0.00602% Crit Chance, or in a more user friendly form 166 Int = 1% Crit. Intellect also boosts your Mana Regeneration. Mana Regen. is commonly referred to as mp5 (Mana regenerated every 5 seconds), and is not really useful for us elementals as we generally have plenty of mana due to various abilities and features of our talent trees that provide us with abundant amounts of mana.
Finally, Spirit is sometimes attached to gear we will use. Spirit increases health and mana regeneration rates. This stat is awful for us in that, unlike almost every other caster class, we have absolutely no benefit from spirit. It should be avoided wherever possible; If you are wearing any gear with this keep your eyes peeled for comparable gear without this wasted stat as there is usually a better alternative out there.
Spell Stats:
Increasingly with top-end gear there will be 'green stats' or 'equip bonuses' on your gear (found under the base stats and all that other junk, preceded with the word Equip:). These will directly affect your spell stats.
Bonus Damage is the key stat that increases the amount of damage every spell does when it hits an enemy. It will be listed as spell power on your gear (ie. Equip: Increases spell power by x). This is a hugely important stat for us! As you become increasingly geared and we get to gemming and enchanting we will aim to increase this stat as much as possible. This spell power stat also increases your bonus healing which increases the amount every heal does, but this is only important for restos.
Hit Rating is the chance you will hit your target when you cast a spell. We can 'cap' this stat, meaning we have a 100% chance to hit our target. I will talk about this stat in the coming posts as I need a whole post to explain the calculations. Until we are capped this is by far our most important stat.
Crit chance, mentioned briefly earlier, is the chance we will deliver a critically damaging strike to our target. Critical Strikes (or simply 'crits') deal 150% damage. This stat is valuable to us as inherent talents in our tree make crits help conserve mana, and the bonus damage is pretty nice too!
Finally, haste rating increases the speed at which we can cast our spells. More spells = more damage, so this is pretty valuable to us. Back in the Burning Crusade expansion lots of top end elementals would stack this stat, although it is now not as beneficial.
So, in summary:
- Armor and Stamina increase survivability.
- Intellect increases mana pool; mp5 and crit to an extent.
- Spirit is bad!
- Spell power increases bonus damage, meaning more damage with every hit.
- Hit increases chance our spell will hit their target.
- Crit increases the chance we deal a critical strike.
- Haste increases the speed of our spell casting.
This concludes my basic overview of the stats you will see in your various elemental gear. These numbers will be used repeatedly in this blog as they control how good we can be.
For further info about these stats, check out WoWWiki (link in sidebar). They are a great resource for understanding all these numbers.
-Puut
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