WotLK Elemental shaman ReviewFollow

So I just got my elemental shaman to 75 today and finaly got to experience Lava Burst and I msut admit I like what they are going for with shaman. Prior to 75 I noticed single target dps was nothing too special and felt like it had not gone up or down really from what I did at 70, but I felt improved fire nova, thunder earth and fire, and thunderstorm make shaman pretty good at AoE grinding, handling 3-5 enemies at once is no real big deal and can be a good amount of fun. Now with Lava Burst I also feel I can compete better and hopefully groups will invite me for instances not just to heal anymore.

Lava Burst really makes PvE dps quite enjoyable, the rotation is much more fun then the old one, throwing flame shock and lava burst in with lightning bolt and chain lightning almost gives it a rogue type of feel, always trying to keep my dots up and making little combos with my spells to optimize burst on trash or steady dps on boss fights, but it will take some time to perfect getting out of the lightning bolt spamming is almost hard to do, i am so use to it, but whatever it is fun right.

With changes to elemental we did lose 9% hit, Lava burst also allows us to rely less on critical strike rating and make room for hit rating this is good, don't feel bad about losing your precious crit after 75, spec right you will have 18% crit from talents still (including ToW and Ele Oath). For gear stat priority for me is Spell Power> Hit> Crit> Int (have not messed around with haste yet).

Now my experience is only up to 75, and while I enjoy it a lot so far, just looking at other caster trees I can see where shamans will fall short and hopefully Blizzard will come through with those changes they mentioned recently (changes that will be necessary for elemental to compete for spots in higher end content should they chose to be elemental).

So overall kudos to blizzard for changing up elemental shaman and making it fun, I just hope it stays as fun as it is at 75 at 80!

Haste is almost a TERRIBLE stat now for elemental. Since LvB is such a huge chunk of your dps... you are screwed with the wrong amounts of haste by either having to wait 0.2s for the cooldown or casting another spell and letting LvB sit there unused for 0.3s.

It's going to be that certain tiers of haste are good whereas other tiers will actually lower your dps. I'm sure people at Elitist Jerks are having fun with that one. :/

So in your 8sec CD of Lava Burst(LvB) you need to fit in a couple of Lightning Bolts(LB). With zero haste rating you got 4 LB's. To fit in another, putting the total number of LB at 5, you need 20% extra speed through haste rating. Thats 656 haste rating. Quite impossible isn't it?
So keep it 0?

It's a bit more complicated than that because Faster casting = faster GCD for shocks. It's also faster LvB casting which means you can start your LB/CL spam faster. Then if you factor in CL use (which is a faster cast) you end up with different values of haste being beneficial. Haste IS a beneficial stat, but it works in tiers where certain values are better and adding more than X will actually be detrimental until you reach another higher tier.

Well, maybe they could do the same thing to Lightning Overload as they did for Storm Reach? Rename it to Elemental Overload and include LavaBurst under the talent effect?

I am afraid I do not follow. There are plenty of mail gear with caster stats for elementals. And the change to the way shamans gain AP from agi and str also ensured that hunter gears are highly sought after by enhancements.

Is there some variable that I may have overlooked that you may care to elaborate further on?

Enhancement is a gear wonderland at the moment. There are all kinds of pieces to choose from so you can more or less balance hit, crit, and haste to your liking, and your AP is going to get cranked up no matter what from the AGI and INT in addition to any AP that may be on the gear. Then there's the fact that we can now make use of fast off-hands with Flametongue to a certain extent. It's worlds easier to put a set together. I was putting out 1000-1200 average DPS and topping out as high as 1800 in a hodge-podge of quest and dungeon blues and greens at 75-77.

Jiade's got the right idea for Elemental. You need to diversify your stats a little more instead of just grabbing a little hit and then pouring everything into crit and spell power.

Any idea what's our hit cap now? And what's the 'minimum' haste threshold to get some benefit out of it?

In BC I skipped haste because I could not achieve the amount needed in order to change my spell rotation. Now there's no real spell rotation, things gonna get complicated to compute.

BTW, do you guys use the glyph that make Flame Shock stay after lava burst? There is also a glyph that makes flame shock last longer, but I presume this does not make it do more DPS? (it just stretches out the damage?)

14% hit plus 3% with talents I believe gets you capped, with certain classes in a raid you may be able to run with just 11% from gear.

May be wrong though if someone could verify.

The Tier gear doesn't have str because str no longer gives 2 ap per point, it now gives only 1:1.

Since Agi also gives 1:1 and also gives crit and dodge/armor it is by far the superior stat. Int also gives AP if specced correctly.

Consider me schooled.

Seeing MP5 on tier gear for Ele is sort of disheartening. As is the 2 piece set bonus.