PvP Ele, no dmg

[shell]

Unleash Fury has some damn good PvP potential. The problem is, it's cumbersome. You need to have 3 weapons with different imbues on each (4 for resto). Then create weapon swap macros for each. It also takes a GCD when switching weapons. It has a higher skill cap than most abilities/talents and needs some love to make it less cumbersome though.

*edit*
Also he was talking about Primal Elementalist talent, not UF.

Oh I realize he was writing about PE but the part I was referring to, in his quote, wasn't about that talent, it was just about pvp damage in general, that's why I bolded it .

The only reason UF is avoided in PvE is because it's essentially a rotating buff; you're adding a new spell into your rotation every 15 seconds or so, which provides a buff that improves damage elsewhere. In that, it's not THAT immensely different from Elemental Blast. EB hits a little harder, and the buff's a little less, but they're essentially the same kind of tool. And on the numbers, EB tends to win out for pure DPS, marginally. UF also provides additional utility, but requires weapon swapping or imbue swapping to use it, which is an additional complication some people would rather avoid in PvP (understandably).

I'm just going off what the guide said, and it said its damage contribution was lower along with making the rotation more complicated. I don't want to buff the talent I'm just trying to argue for a buff to lightning bolt to make the talent more viable, and mostly because I frankly think it(lb) should hit harder in pvp. However, the problem is just as Blitond and you have noted, even if the damage contribution is on par, the talent still might not be picked. I'm not even sure its higher skill cap really, I think the talent is just perhaps flawed.

[Thalais]

If blizzard wanted to help out Elemental Shamans; using Endus example of Frost Shock:
Bonus 2: Your Frost Shock replaces Earth Shock to trigger Fulmination; (NEW CHANGE) Every 2 seconds your lightning shield creates a lightning orb that maxes at 7.
Bonus 4: {Remove T-Storm CD reduction and make it a flat 20 second cd} (NEW CHANGE) Your Flame Shocks can not be dispelled and places a debuff increasing spell damage on that target by 10% from the shaman for the duration of the Flame Shock.

Now if Blizzard wanted to help the Shaman class as a whole:
Shamanistic Rage is a core ability for Elemental and Enhancement Only as Restoration shouldn't be enraged.
Elemental and Enhancement should have a level 85 spec bonus that removes the shared CD of all shocks and lowers Flame Shock & Earth Shock for Elemental Shamans to 4 seconds and Lowers Earth Shock and Frost Shock to 4 seconds for Enhancement Shamans. Slight Buff to PvE (which they need) and major burst buff needed for PvP.
Astral Shift lasts for 5 seconds and gives 30% damage reduction and cant be CC during the duration. WHY THE NO CC? Simple, you are not fully in the current realm. You should be able to not only reduce damage but be immune to CC's like stuns, Incaps, Silences and Interrupts. Things like Poly and Hex could still work however since your body is still physically there.

[Blitond]

If blizzard wanted to help out Elemental Shamans; using Endus example of Frost Shock:
Bonus 2: Your Frost Shock replaces Earth Shock to trigger Fulmination; (NEW CHANGE) Every 2 seconds your lightning shield creates a lightning orb that maxes at 7.
Bonus 4: {Remove T-Storm CD reduction and make it a flat 20 second cd} (NEW CHANGE) Your Flame Shocks can not be dispelled and places a debuff increasing spell damage on that target by 10% from the shaman for the duration of the Flame Shock.

Now if Blizzard wanted to help the Shaman class as a whole:
Shamanistic Rage is a core ability for Elemental and Enhancement Only as Restoration shouldn't be enraged.
Elemental and Enhancement should have a level 85 spec bonus that removes the shared CD of all shocks and lowers Flame Shock & Earth Shock for Elemental Shamans to 4 seconds and Lowers Earth Shock and Frost Shock to 4 seconds for Enhancement Shamans. Slight Buff to PvE (which they need) and major burst buff needed for PvP.
Astral Shift lasts for 5 seconds and gives 30% damage reduction and cant be CC during the duration. WHY THE NO CC? Simple, you are not fully in the current realm. You should be able to not only reduce damage but be immune to CC's like stuns, Incaps, Silences and Interrupts. Things like Poly and Hex could still work however since your body is still physically there.

Not really feeling these changes.

1) If they free up the shock system (a number of ideas floating around) then tying frost shock to earth shock isn't a good idea for PvP. If they did this then you would immune your target to roots (if you took frozen power) just by doing damage, which would be bad.

2) I don't mind as much healers dispelling flameshock. The issue I have is shocks are on the shared CD. Dispelling FS also takes away use of ES and FrS. I would be happy with something along the lines of if a healer dispels FS then your shock CD is reset.

3) No to blanket immunity to all CC. There needs to be some counter. I would be more sympathetic to something that makes us immune to silences/interrupts OR stuns/snares/roots. Having immunity to everything is cheesy and stupid.

[Thalais]

Not really feeling these changes.

1) If they free up the shock system (a number of ideas floating around) then tying frost shock to earth shock isn't a good idea for PvP. If they did this then you would immune your target to roots (if you took frozen power) just by doing damage, which would be bad.

2) I don't mind as much healers dispelling flameshock. The issue I have is shocks are on the shared CD. Dispelling FS also takes away use of ES and FrS. I would be happy with something along the lines of if a healer dispels FS then your shock CD is reset.

3) No to blanket immunity to all CC. There needs to be some counter. I would be more sympathetic to something that makes us immune to silences/interrupts OR stuns/snares/roots. Having immunity to everything is cheesy and stupid.

I did say that you could be CC by poly and hex and could include elemental bind. So many classes have immunity to almost all things: take rogues for example, immune to all magic, same as dks. So many of those things are counter to almost all magics CC: No poly/hex, no magic stuns, no roots, almost all snares minus Warriors, Immunity to some incaps such as blind. It is in the game and there isn't a reason that other classes cant use the same effect and give flat damage reduction.
Immunity to silence and interrupts isn't enough in current wow, you need it all or don't take at all cause it wont matter if you're immune to silence or interrupts when almost everyone has 1-2 stuns and can either spam another CC such as cyclone or Poly on you to waste your only burst CD that isn't tied to a totem.

All shocks have to be removed from the shared CD.

You would use Earth Shock for normal damage and then use a powered up Frost shock to root and deal more damage.
Having them on 5 second CD's wouldn't matter cause you would it the 10 second ICD of the shared DR of the Frozen Power Root by the 3rd Frost Shock.

Overall, So many basic things that were never and most likely never going to happen is all the Shaman DPS specs need to succeeded in Arena. They wont be viable and wont ever be easy 2200 class/spec like every season a warrior gets to be at. Am I the only one that hates the fact that Warriors almost always find a way to make a 1 shot macro and then go almost the entire season or full season with that 1 shot macro before Blizzard finally destroy's it, just to re-open another 1 shot macro from OP PvE gear (Yes, PvE gear will out scale PvP gear at the end of the expansion every time no matter what blizzard thinks or tells you cause this is a PvE game and they will make PvE gear OP to kill dragons/bosses that have 1000 times more health than the players toon.)

[Taalyn]

I've found I'm screwed against a warrior, I can occasionally kill a rogue, everything else is fairly even. I do have trouble with Warlocks at times. Of course, this is all in random BGs so it's pretty hit or miss.

What I'm not sure of is what to gem and reforge for. I still don't totally get PvP Power and Resilience, so I don't know if there is a reason to gem for it, and it stamina matters anymore.

[Deleted]

I've found I'm screwed against a warrior, I can occasionally kill a rogue, everything else is fairly even. I do have trouble with Warlocks at times. Of course, this is all in random BGs so it's pretty hit or miss.

What I'm not sure of is what to gem and reforge for. I still don't totally get PvP Power and Resilience, so I don't know if there is a reason to gem for it, and it stamina matters anymore.

PvP Power increases your damage done, Resilience reduces your damage taken. Simple as that. Everyone starts with 40% Resilience baseline (ie 40% reduced damage taken from players). If you feel your squishy build Resilience. If you need more damage build PvP Power (think Intellect but on crack). Resilience has deminishing returns (to stop you getting to 100% Resilience or something and being permanently immune to all damage!!!) so there will be some point where its not much use, but I don't think that point will be reached in this season.

[shell]

Right now I have,

Spell Power: 17,219
Haste: 27.42% (including Elemental Oath and Ancenstral Swiftness)
Mastery: 38.26%
PvP Resilience: 56.58%
PvP Power: 26.34%

I've been pretty happy with this so far. I've never been one to just stack resilience but even if I did they would be hybrids. Right now I have no resilience gems, hybrid or otherwise. If I did I think I would have somewhere in the vicinity of 3.5% more resilience (with hybrid gems). That might be a big deal to some people but its not a major one to me.

I tried playing around with crit for a bit (like a minute, haha) because I really like the damage EB and Lightning Bolt do when they crit. So I had an equal amount of haste and crit but the problem is you can't get enough of it, and you can't get enough without sacrificing too much of something else. So I'll just have to wait till the end of the expansion to play around with that stat.

But for me personally I really like haste, right now.

[Taalyn]

PvP Power increases your damage done, Resilience reduces your damage taken. Simple as that. Everyone starts with 40% Resilience baseline (ie 40% reduced damage taken from players). If you feel your squishy build Resilience. If you need more damage build PvP Power (think Intellect but on crack). Resilience has deminishing returns (to stop you getting to 100% Resilience or something and being permanently immune to all damage!!!) so there will be some point where its not much use, but I don't think that point will be reached in this season.

What I don't understand is if I'm supposed to get a certain amount of PvP Power to counteract the Resilience and if so, to what end? If I want more defense but I hit like a wet noodle, what's the point and is there anything I can do about it?

[Northy]

Dakkroth is playing ele sham this exp it seems. Here's his stream, plenty of footage to look at. http://www.own3d.tv/Dakkroth

His vids look warrior to me. I'm sick of warrior streams.

All mages, hunters, and warriors streaming....UGH!

[zenga]

Resilience has deminishing returns (to stop you getting to 100% Resilience or something and being permanently immune to all damage!!!) so there will be some point where its not much use, but I don't think that point will be reached in this season.

Resilience rating has diminishing returns (i.e. the more resilience rating you have, the less dmg mitigation you get for each extra resilience rating point). The value of dmg reduction becomes bigger the more you have (e.g. going from 0% dmg reduction to 1% means that you have reduced the incoming dmg by 1%, if however you are at 90% dmg reduction, adding 1% means that you reduce the incoming dmg by 10% relative to your previous situation).

At lvl 90 the diminishing returns on resilience rating happen at a slower pace than the value of damage mitigation increases, meaning that dmg mitigation has basically increasing returns. The question whether you should stack more resilience or more damage can't be answered by math, as it depends on your opponent, playstyle, class and comp. It's personal decision. But stacking extra resilience never becomes pointless due to the increasing returns dmg mitigation has.

---------- Post added 2012-10-21 at 06:28 AM ----------

What I don't understand is if I'm supposed to get a certain amount of PvP Power to counteract the Resilience and if so, to what end? If I want more defense but I hit like a wet noodle, what's the point and is there anything I can do about it?

A max geared resilience player with this seasons bis pvp gear will always 'cancel out' the extra damage that a max geared pvp power player gains from the pvp power, unless when a player equips both the on use and the proc dmg pvp trinket (thus skip the escape cc trinket like humans do) or a fury warrior dual wielding 2H weapons. But it's a personal matter if you want to do that or not.

[Eliot123]

How do you people deal with ret paladins as ele? :S

[zenga]

How do you people deal with ret paladins as ele? :S

Try to get an instant hex on them / thunderstorm / stun and run like a motherfucker.

[shell]

How do you people deal with ret paladins as ele? :S

Try as much as possible to keep them purged and drop grounding on cooldown, is what I do. Their damage outside of their wings is okay I guess but its not really anything you can't heal through. So the wings are what you mostly have to worry about, in terms of damage. If I'm facing toward them and I see anything pop up above their head or below their feet, I'm purging it. Yeah, they have ways of keeping on top of you but if I'm not mistaken Emancipate is the only one of those that can't be purged. It removes 1 movement impairing effect and it costs them 15% of their mana with no cooldown but given the mana cost they typically don't spam it. Hand of Freedom can be purged, if they have a particular talent they can use it twice before incurring a cd, so be aware of that. I say drop grounding on cd because you can get lucky and ground their Fists of Justice. If I don't ground it, I don't bother trinketing, it lines up almost exactly with Thunderstorm. Hex when their wings pop. I do use earthgrab even though they can escape it because at the very least you may get them to use hand of freedom. Because of their freedoms it can be a little more tricky to get capacitor to land on them, so sometimes I'll just stand on top of it. More than a few time its happened to me where we are both stunned at the same time.

[Blitond]

Try as much as possible to keep them purged and drop grounding on cooldown, is what I do.

Very bad advice. You should save grounding for when he is likely to use FoJ. It takes practice and some luck to get good at it, but wasting grounding totem on something like exorcism is bad. Good ret paladins will not waste FoJ while they are 15 yards away.

back to topic.

As elemental you won't beat most classes 1v1, assuming equal gear and skilled opponent. Elemental is not very strong in 1v1, but the game isn't balanced around 1v1 either.

Against ret here are some basic tips:

1) Swap to frostbrand when you need to kite. This gives you an extra snare (and sprint if you use the 90 talent). Use Earthbind/earthgrad when needed for roots/snares. Keep them frustrated with snares. Yes they can remove them but every global they are using getting out of snares is a global they aren't hitting you with.

2) Rets have 3 DPS cooldowns to look for: Wings (obvious), Guardian of the ancient Kings (the pet that runs around), and Zealotry (forgot the new name for this, but its basically the same spell). Most Rets will combine 2+ of these cooldowns to try and get a kill. When they pop these, Hex/grounding/trinket/Tstorm/capacitor/kite. You cannot let them get free damage on you wile CD's are up or you're dead. Outside cooldowns ret is nothing to worry about.

3) Open with purges so you get all the buffs off. This will allow fast purge if they get frustrated and use hand of freedom.

[shell]

Very bad advice.You should save grounding for when he is likely to use FoJ.

I literally wrote,

I say drop grounding on cd because you can get lucky and ground their Fists of Justice.

And everything you wrote is the same as what I did except you put numbers in front of it, so I'm curious how it's bad advice.

[zenga]

To the gentlemen above me, I still think both of your in-depth answers can be summarized as: cc and run like a mofo.

[shell]

LoL, well if by run you mean kite, yeah . Their damage outside of their wings is manageable. In that respect they're a lot like us, in that our damage outside of Ascendance is manageable. Even if what I'm doing is wrong by opening with grounding and it fails on the stun, I'll Thunderstorm it, then I can use the timer on my Thunderstorm to give me a pretty close estimation for when I should be using my grounding again. Honestly, this is not hyperbole, if there was ranking of most difficult melee classes to kill, they would be at the bottom.

Somewhat related topic just different class, I'm discovering more and more that I'm having difficulty with rogues again. When I look them up or inspect them, they'e all assassination. Initially, I was like yay rogues can't beat me but those are sub rogues. They seem to be shifting away from sub. Part of it may be that I'm so used to trying to run away from them that I may be playing too defensive. And maybe the other thing is I need to use call of the elements against them, so that I can reset capacitor. It's a physical stun so even with cloak you can get a stun on them, as far as I know. So what are other people doing/using against rogues?

[Northy]

Saw this idea from the official forums and think it's solid: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...5157?page=1#14

Earthquake - Redesigned for PvP. It's garbage as it is now and no one uses it. My idea (An Earthquake emanates from the shaman in a x-yard radius for x seconds with the first tick knocking down enemies for x seconds. 30-45 sec cd?

[Deleted]

Warriors and rouges can be pain in ass, other than that it's even fight.

[zenga]

Warriors and rouges can be pain in ass, other than that it's even fight.

Add BM hunters who can global you with their silly macro, which is true for every class.
Add a RET Paladin who can easily kill you within his wings,
Add a frost dk who can prevent getting stunned/thunderstormed, takes no damage through his shell with an interrupt, silence and death grip.
Add warlocks who are frigging tanks.

And I don't really see us being the better from boomkins, fire mages and shadow priests either.

Yes ele counters a frost mage pretty well in a 1v1 fight.