Hey ho,

these hotfixes took us by surprise. If you can read this post all guide pages are as up to date as currently possible. So check them out to answer your gameplay questions.

The primary issue for this blog post is the nerf to Echo of the Elementals and why we’re telling you in Discord, that this trait is dead. The 33% reduction certainly wouldn’t be enough to really kill it. The main issue is, we discovered in parallel to this hotfix that SimulationCraft accidentally heavily overvalued the trait.

So what’s the issue?

SimulationCraft uses spelldata from World of Warcraft to model casts. Ember Elemental and Spark Elemental (the tiny elementals from Echo of the Elementals). The spelldata of their casts (Ember Blast and Shocking Blast) suggests cast times of 3 and 2 seconds. So assuming those values are correct SimulationCraft made the pets cast these spells subsequently. And that was wrong.

If you check out for example this log you’ll notice big gaps between the finished casts (“Ember Elemental (Stormil) casts Ember Blast on Ra’wani Kanae”) and the following new cast (“Ember Elemental (Stormil) begins casting Ember Blast”).

While we could start guessing why that is, I don’t want to bother you with that. The main issue is: casts seemingly always happen on a fixed clock of ~2.4 seconds. Or rather…multiples of 1.2 seconds. So if a cast takes 2.5 seconds to finish the pet idles for 1.1 seconds until it starts a new cast again (3.6 seconds after the prior cast started in this example).

The result

This yields a rough overestimation of the trait in SimulationCraft by another 33%. Give or take. So in our charts this trait now drops by ~33% twice.

It’s dead. Let it rest. Or fix the casting bug.

Yours sincerely,
Bloodmallet(EU)

PS: By the way, our Fire and Storm Elemental had the same issue during Legion. We only discovered that during Antorus…