why is echo of the elements frowned upon

[demonardvark 556]

Checking this site and many others, almost universally, it is agreed that the echo of the elements talent is not to be chosen. Why is this? The bonus of ascendance is that you can spam lava burst and now in 6.02 echo triggers constantly. I am able to cast lava burst on average 2-3 times without ever causing a CD. In my recounts the first source of my damage is my mastery and the seconds is lava burst. So, why with lava burst being so strong, is echo of the elements not desired?

 

PS.

Even in aoe, I can get like 3 earthquakes up and wrecking havoc.

[Stoove 347]

That turns out to be a complicated question.

 

I can't find any proc chance data for EotE from a simple Google, but let's assume that it's proccing roughly five time a minute (which wouldn't be entirely unreasonable from what I've played of Ele on Live). Using the spellpower coefficient data from wod.wowhead.com, I'd esitmate that casting a second Lava Burst instead of a Lightning Bolt would net you approximately the damage equivalent of 1.6 Lightning Bolts; equivalent to about 8 LB's per minute at that proc rate. (It might be significantly different if I've overestimated the proc rate!)

 

Now let's look at Elemental Mastery in comparison. It gives you 30% Haste for 20sec on a 2min cooldown; you can fit 8 LB's in a 20sec window with the base 2.5sec cast time, and with 30% Haste that gains you an extra 3 LB's over the base cast speed, which is 1.5 LB's per minute. So, from this point of view and assuming my statement of 5 ppm of EotE is correct, EotE looks like the stronger talent.

 

However, that doesn't really take into account the real strength of Elemental Mastery. If you stack EM with Heroism, you get to cast an additional seven LvB's during Ascendance, which is equal to the damage from 12 LB's, or 6 LB's per minute for just that one. This is a lot closer, and on a 6min fight assuming one Heroism cast and three EM casts, you get roughly 3 LB's per minute of effective damage. Taking it further, and assuming you have EM synced with Ascendance, that's 12 LB's in your first Ascendance and 6 in your second, and another 3 on minute 5 when you get to EM without Ascendance - 21 LB effective damage in 6 minutes is still 3.5 LB's per minute.

 

We've made a lot of simplifications during this analysis, but perhaps the most glaring one is that EM affects HoT tick speeds (thereby Lava Surge procs!) and therefore even more massively favors its use during Ascendance. As a burst talent, it's insanely good.

 

So, to summarize from my point of view as a Restoration player; I have no idea why one is explicitly better than the other. Sorry! *shrugs*

[Aktzini 0]

I was messing around with my shaman the other day and came across something interesting. It's quite probable someone has already considered this approach, but as I was wondering the same thing about EotE I'll throw this out here.

When specc'd into EotE, you arrive at a situation where both your Lava Surge and EotE proc at the same time, allowing you to cast 2 consecutive LvB (either instant > cast or vica versa, the procs happen frequently either way). Now if you were to cast 2 consecutive LvB you would consume both LvS and EotE, putting LvB on cd for ~7 sec unless refreshed by a future proc of LvS.

However, if instead of immediately casting 2 consecutive LvB putting LvB on cd, you cast only one LvB, then cast Lb (or any other spell in your rotation except FrS, EQ, or LvB). Only casting LvB again before another EotE proc if LvS proc forces you to. The general philosophy here is that by NOT casting a 2nd consecutive LvB you give EotE a chance to proc again thereby "continuing the chain" and effectively avoiding LvB going on cd for an extended period of time. When putting this method into practice I have commonly been able to cast 4-5 LvB (staggered) before unluckiness with procs forced me to put LvB on cd. On a few occasions I have managed to string together an insane amount of LvB with this method. When I was testing this usually the most time I would "wait" for another EotE proc before casting an available LvB was 1-2 LB's or 1 LB + 1 GCD.

The $64 million question is: do the extra LvB gained by the above method offset the dpa loss of intentionally not casting an available LvB for 2-3 sec? In addition to the dps lost by not taking Elemental Mastery and stacking it as Stoove described above. I tend to think there is definitely a dps gain in the former, but I am skeptical of the latter. I hope I explained my thought process clearly enough.

Let me know your thoughts guys.

[demonardvark 556]

I'm thinking you almost have to be "built" into it and work a slightly different rotation. So, running heroic soo on sha over and over i played around with the talent selection. I was going with elemental blast as my level 90 talent and pulled about 5k (im not geared great oh well :P). I then switched from elemental mastery to echo and pulled about 4.8k, so clearly a straight up loss there, not huge, but a loss. However, I then retried using unleashed fury as my lvl 90 talent and adding in unleash flame to the rotation. I used it mostly to stagger as suggested, echo proc, lava burst, unleash flame, lava burst. After the fight low and behold I was actually about 5.2k. What was interesting about this is unleash flame can actually proc echo. So it would go proc, lava burst, unleash flame - would proc lava burst again, lava burst, lava burst. So you can actually get a pretty decent chain going, with a flame shock thrown in to help proc, i got about a 5-6 lava burst chain. This happened frequently, in fact on recount lava burst beat out my 180% mastery. 

 

So, that adds to the question, why isn't echo more popular/recommended? I admit you get off fewer lighting bolts and fewer 15 stack eshield earth shocks, but the damage is higher. Lighting bolt does always hit more than a lava burst (even with flameshock on enemy) however, when you are crapping 4-5 in the same time as 2 lighting bolts the dps gain is obvious. So, rather interesting to play around with.