Elemental FAQ (updated for 4.3)

[PhattWobblez]

so what is the optimal 4p and offp items

[Yourgrounded]

so what is the optimal 4p and offp items

Although I am not 100% sure it is the absolute BiS, I am going for Ultraxion shoulders as my offpiece, mainly because I would be the only person interested in them, and the stats are really good.

[Deleted]

All the elem gear is so well itemised that it doesn't matter much. Mastery seems to be slightly better than haste with higher gear and it doesn't cap gcd as easily on madness so I'd prio mastery (you'll still end up with loads of haste which is no bad thing).

With that in mind I would go 4 set elem + resto chest. All the offspec stuff is pretty obvious. There's no overly complicated choices to make this expansion except trinkets and weap.

[Endus]

There's no point in trying to establish an "optimal" BiS list, since whether those particular upgrades are currently BiS is going to depend on your other gear, and using suboptimal gear in the hopes that you'll eventually get the perfect set is basically irrelevant. You need to sim your stuff if you want specific answers, and you'll need to keep running sims as you get more gear. There's no magic simple answer.

[Shampache]

I've just added in the new Simulationcraft and WoL mini-guide into the FAQ, in post 8. Hopefully that can help make those somewhat intimidating tools a bit less intimidating to a new user.

Thank you for this. I've tried to use other sims before and they were pretty complicated, but simcraft is easy to use.

Anyways, I tool a break from WoW and came back recently. I was asked to heal for my old guild which I reluctantly accepted with the notion that I would go back DPS when they found another healer. I've been gearing up as resto, but am switching back to ele main spec.

I've simmed my current gear and am pulling around 32,000 DPS (without the 7% magic damage debuff in our raid) and my sim said around 37,000 is what I should be doing; which is fairly good considering I have a crappy computer and connection.

Here is my current gear: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...3%A1che/simple (I know I'm over hit cap, but I've reforged everything)

I'm working on switching for the ele tier, but my main concern is trinkets. I was wondering if I would have to sim each trinket independently (sim took over an hour) of if there was an easier way (or if anyone had done trinket comparisons independently to see what is best).

Any other advice would be appreciated.

Also on a side note. Does the trinket from spine proc of healing steam, like the old ones used to?

*NVM about the trinket, found a sim for trinket comparisons.*

[Deleted]

I have a shaman in my raid group who has decent gear. 385 ilvl. However, on Ultraxion, he's always pulling 14k dps. That's half as much as me and I have the same gear. 84% of his damage is from Lightning bolt. Is his rotation shit?

[Endus]

I have a shaman in my raid group who has decent gear. 385 ilvl. However, on Ultraxion, he's always pulling 14k dps. That's half as much as me and I have the same gear. 84% of his damage is from Lightning bolt. Is his rotation shit?

I don't even need a log to absolutely confidently say "yes". My best Ultraxion run on 10-man, I was just over 39k. 41.4% of my DPS was LB. 10 more average ilvl and DTR isn't an explanation for why my DPS is more than 2.5x his.

[Paf]

I have a shaman in my raid group who has decent gear. 385 ilvl. However, on Ultraxion, he's always pulling 14k dps. That's half as much as me and I have the same gear. 84% of his damage is from Lightning bolt. Is his rotation shit?

Nope that's 100% normal to be pulling 14k dps. His damage is fine, and he's actually above average. If anything, we could probably stand to take a page from his book.

ie: 14k holy shit I honestly didn't think you could do that bad with even a 359 ilvl.

[Deleted]

@Endus and Paf

This is his armory link: Here.

This was the latest run:
It was a rather good one where he did 16k dps. He also did 30% less lightning bolt casts than he normally does.

His recount data:
1. Lightning Bolt: 44: 781,890: 49.7%
2. Lava Burst: 14: 502,278: 31.9%
3. FS DOT: 41:123,412: 7.8%
4. Fulmination: 1: 58,186: 3.7%
5. Flame Shock: 9: 45,104: 2.9%
6. Earth Shock: 1: 6683: 0.4%

Also, every single lava burst is a crit. That seems to me like he's saving it for a proc or something. I'm not familiar with shamans at all, but should this be the case?

Can anyone see if he's missing any damagin abilities?

[Deleted]

@Endus and Paf

This is his armory link: Here.

This was the latest run:
It was a rather good one where he did 16k dps. He also did 30% less lightning bolt casts than he normally does.

His recount data:
1. Lightning Bolt: 44: 781,890: 49.7%
2. Lava Burst: 14: 502,278: 31.9%
3. FS DOT: 41:123,412: 7.8%
4. Fulmination: 1: 58,186: 3.7%
5. Flame Shock: 9: 45,104: 2.9%
6. Earth Shock: 1: 6683: 0.4%

Also, every single lava burst is a crit. That seems to me like he's saving it for a proc or something. I'm not familiar with shamans at all, but should this be the case?

Can anyone see if he's missing any damagin abilities?

He should be able to do close, if not that much DPS only pressing Lightning Bolt. What fight is this on? He isn't using Earth Shock nearly enough, and the reason Lava Burst always crits is because thats what it does, when Flame Shock is up LvB always crits.

I get the feeling this is on like Hagara or something and he isn't doing any DPS at all during the movement phases then AFKing or something during the burn phase. Tanks can do more DPS than that. Telling us the duration of the fight would be helpful too.

[Deleted]

The one I posted was on Ultraxion and we got him to approximately half health before both tanks decided to exit the twilight realm holding hands.

When should he use Earth Shock?

[Deleted]

The one I posted was on Ultraxion and we got him to approximately half health before both tanks decided to exit the twilight realm holding hands.

When should he use Earth Shock?

On Ultraxion that DPS is just plain bad. To get a real idea of whats going on we need logs, but I would bet that he has the following problems

1 - Pressing Heroic Will far to early, meaning he is sat in the Twilight Realm doing nothing for 3-4 seconds at a time

2 - No Flametounge Weapon buff (his Lightning Bolt averages at 17,770.2 damage, on a dummy with only self buffs, mine - not crit - hits for ~18.5k, even with better gear, if you factor in crits, his average LB should be much higher than that)

3 - Low Uptime on Fire Totem, cant see how much amage it did as you didn't include it, but this is the main culprit for most people

4 - Low Uptime on Flame Shock

5 - Poor use of Earth Shock. He should use it whenever his Lightning Shield stacks go over 7 and Flame Shock has over 5 seconds remaining.

[Jenerena]

At first I thought it was a typo.

14k is pretty apalling, yes. Something is definitely wrong there.

[Weerra]

The one I posted was on Ultraxion and we got him to approximately half health before both tanks decided to exit the twilight realm holding hands.

When should he use Earth Shock?

Don't tell health, tell minutes
How is he doing on other bosses? If he's better on them than on Ultr, I suspect that he may have horrible lag or fps issues due to all the aoe going around.

And really the most solid answer you'd get from recording and showing some logs.

[Deleted]

Also on a side note. Does the trinket from spine proc of healing stream, like the old ones used to?

Nope, it only procs from direct heals (ghw, hw, hs, once for each jump of chain heal, initial heal of riptide) and one stack for putting down healing rain. No stacks for hots, procs and no stacks for unleash elements (which is a direct heal in my opinion).

[kaikoraimi]

I'm wondering how consistent my stat weights from sims are with the average raiding Elemental sim results. Since I got 4pT13 bonus, I've been getting that mastery is better than haste, but only slightly. (At first, it was a larger disparity, about 1.95-2 mastery to 1.7-1.75 haste, but I regemmed from int/haste gems to int/mastery in yellow slots and now am getting consistent weights of about 1.9-1.95 mastery and about 1.8-1.85 haste). I'm also wondering if my Insignia of Corrupted Mind has anything to do with my numbers. (My Armory.)

Does anyone know if mastery is coming out ahead for most 4pT13 shaman, and if so, to what degree?

[Deleted]

I'm wondering how consistent my stat weights from sims are with the average raiding Elemental sim results. Since I got 4pT13 bonus, I've been getting that mastery is better than haste, but only slightly. (At first, it was a larger disparity, about 1.95-2 mastery to 1.7-1.75 haste, but I regemmed from int/haste gems to int/mastery in yellow slots and now am getting consistent weights of about 1.9-1.95 mastery and about 1.8-1.85 haste). I'm also wondering if my Insignia of Corrupted Mind has anything to do with my numbers. (My Armory.)

Does anyone know if mastery is coming out ahead for most 4pT13 shaman, and if so, to what degree?

This is what you want. You want it so that when you reforge and regem, your stat weights come out even, because it means your getting the maximum possible DPS as you can't make any changes that will give more DPS. 4pt13 does tend to lead towards Mastery being slightly better but not much. Its a purely player by player thing.

[Deleted]

Yesterday I had to specc ele on ultraxion since we we're lacking damage dealer (4 healer, 4 dps, 2 tanks...). Has been a while since I did damage in a "real raid-fight". And my dps was rather low for my itemlevel of 395 (though its mostly resto gear, see below.)

This is the specc I've used: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...lent/secondary
My Gear is 90% resto, so there's not much I can do about the 17.4% hit or the high crit rating. The T13P4 bonus is very nice for ele though.
I do hope I'll be able to heal tonight on our next tries.

I switched to ele somewhere at the 4th try, but it took some time to get into the rhythm and getting used to fading twilight.

Here's one log: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h...=11490&e=11777 (you can switch to the other tries as well).
The mage was logging, so it might not be 100% accurate.

I do know that my flame shock uptime was not perfect. And on most tries I did not use the 2nd volcanic potion (I was delaying it for a second fire elemental.)

Looking at the logs I wonder if using thunderstorm for damage was stupid on a single target fight.

What I did:
- prepot
- use EM at pull, even though we had heroism as well. but delaying it for ~45s is a waste I think.
- drop fire ele and if available earth ele once power torrent + dmc:v procced
- normal rotation
- use EM and the T13P4 Resto whenever off cooldown, but not at the same time and not when a hour of twilight was imminent
- in the macro for the action button I had /cast earth shock and /cast unleash elements, though that didn't really work according to the logs (or the mage always switched earlier than me)

[Deleted]

Yesterday I had to specc ele on ultraxion since we we're lacking damage dealer (4 healer, 4 dps, 2 tanks...). Has been a while since I did damage in a "real raid-fight". And my dps was rather low for my itemlevel of 395 (though its mostly resto gear, see below.)

This is the specc I've used: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...lent/secondary
My Gear is 90% resto, so there's not much I can do about the 17.4% hit or the high crit rating. The T13P4 bonus is very nice for ele though.
I do hope I'll be able to heal tonight on our next tries.

I switched to ele somewhere at the 4th try, but it took some time to get into the rhythm and getting used to fading twilight.

Here's one log: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h...=11490&e=11777 (you can switch to the other tries as well).
The mage was logging, so it might not be 100% accurate.

I do know that my flame shock uptime was not perfect. And on most tries I did not use the 2nd volcanic potion (I was delaying it for a second fire elemental.)

Looking at the logs I wonder if using thunderstorm for damage was stupid on a single target fight.

What I did:
- prepot
- use EM at pull, even though we had heroism as well. but delaying it for ~45s is a waste I think.
- drop fire ele and if available earth ele once power torrent + dmc:v procced
- normal rotation
- use EM and the T13P4 Resto whenever off cooldown, but not at the same time and not when a hour of twilight was imminent
- in the macro for the action button I had /cast earth shock and /cast unleash elements, though that didn't really work according to the logs (or the mage always switched earlier than me)

Dont think of EM as a Haste cooldown. You shouldn't stack haste cooldowns, you SHOULD stack EM + Haste cooldowns. Its the Damage modifier of EM that you want, not the Haste. Never delay EM because of a haste proc.

[Deleted]

This is what you want. You want it so that when you reforge and regem, your stat weights come out even, because it means your getting the maximum possible DPS as you can't make any changes that will give more DPS. 4pt13 does tend to lead towards Mastery being slightly better but not much. Its a purely player by player thing.

I thought that if SimC tells you - for argument's sake - that if mastery outweighs haste, then thats the direction you need to be reforging/regemming in or have I misunderstood? Reason I say that is because - again, unless I've misunderstood your post - surely if you are regemming away from one stat to another (i.e. haste to mastery) aren't those stat weights going to move further away from each other rather than move closer together? As an example, on a patchwerk style fight my normalized numbers come out as 0.5148 for haste and 0.5868 for mastery; that suggests to me that mastery is still the more favoured stat so I'm going to still want to reforge mastery over haste.

Can you clarify please?

PS - Socialhealer, I found your advice for HC Yors very helpful; helped me rank about 42nd the other week so ty