Elemental FAQ (updated for 4.3)

[Radux]

With the recent buff, should CL be worked into our rotation?

No. The Spell Coefficient of LB is much much higher than CL. You would only use CL in a single target situation if you had less than, like, 1k spell power (i.e. T7 content).

[Deleted]

With the recent buff, should CL be worked into our rotation?

LB and LvB were buffed at the same rate CL was, so in comparison, there should be no change of priority.

[Deleted]

With the recent should we drop FS glyph for LB ? (Assuming 1st choice of glyph is FS LvB and UL).

[Endus]

The recent hotfix to Shamanism should have basically no effect on gearing, priority, or glyphing. The FS glyph is almost twice as strong as the LB and LvB glyphs, and UL can be significantly better if there's any movement at all, and both glyphs have quality of life factors as well. It's still FS/UL and either LB or LvB.

[Phaild0rf]

Nevermind. I misread the hotfix notes!

[ajåx]

I dont get why they make our rotation/priority so hard to manage(the 2 shocks and same CD problem), it has tons of solutions, eg: lava burst refreshs flame shock DoT, flame shock without CD , ...

Shaman priority list is not very difficult when you look at other specs such as affliction locks all we have to manage is one dot and one long cooldown the hardest part of our priority list is watching for lava surge procs and managing our shocks. making lava burst refresh the dot makes it to easy and require no thought i think they should find a way to make Unleash Elements reset the dot duration which would still require us the mange the dot but would remove it from our shock cooldown, would actually let us use UE since it would actually make us use the spell since almost no one uses it since the GoUL makes using ita dps loss and it is possible that that mechanic could give us a nice little dps bost

[binkenstein]

We just hashed this out in another thread, when someone posted a sim profile which was showing Haste being almost 25% better than Mastery; ~1.95 dps per point with Mastery at ~1.45 (going from memory). I ran some sims with that and the actual BiS profile, and managed to figure out that he was a few points away from the next haste plateau for Flame Shock. The problem is, unless you're simming with your exact raid buff setup and current gear, it's not possible to state precisely where those are (you can as a percent of haste, but not how much you need to be sitting there in the raid, if you see the difference). And even then, it only affects the value of haste for that narrow window; if you could Reforge a piece of Mastery gear to add enough Haste to hit that breakpoint, it's probably worthwhile, but reforging multiple pieces to achieve it isn't going to help; it's not that the value of haste is that much higher, it's that when you're ~20 points from the cap, the value is that much higher.

In the current BiS sims, which have our Haste rating sitting at 28% (above the 27.78% plateau I'm talking about), the value for Haste and Mastery is still so close that they're basically equal. The next FS plateau will be at 38.89%, and there's no way we're hitting that this tier. Past that, you're looking at 50%, which would be a golden point both because of how it affects our spellcasts vs gcd, and it's the next FS breakpoint too.

And if you're not butting up against those caps in-raid, they don't matter for gearing purposes.

Reviewing SimC results suggests that we have the opposite behaviour for what few/small break points we have. With 27.64% haste (or 2761 rating) adding an extra 20 to 80 haste results in a higher dps gain than stacking 20 to 80 int. After that point it drops away, and it doesn't look like subtracting haste has any change in the normal linear plot we'd normally expect.

Previously what you'd see would be certain values of haste being desirable, and if you went over them you'd want to reduce your haste to keep at or just under that value. For us it's the reverse, haste gets more valuable up to a point where it's worth more than int, then drops off again back to second place. Eventually we'll get to a point where it dips under Mastery but that may only happen in T13.

[Andon]

Just wanted to say thanks to Endus, just recently started again as my ele shammy and your guide was very helpful!

[Gunjo]

First of all, thank you Endus for helping me to become a decent ele shamman (ranked on H Rhy and H Alyz wooot on first kills woooot). But the reason I am posting is to ask your opinion on something that I can't seem to find an answer for that everyone agrees on. Here is my armory link (kind of).

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Gojo/advanced

The situation is that I have heroic T12 legs sitting in my bank. Assuming I get another piece next week, is it worth it to drop my 4 pc T11 bonus (even if both pieces dropped are heroic) for T12 2 pc (with at least one of the pieces heroic.)
Furthermore, would it be beneficial to use my 4 pc anyways on fights such as H Shannox where (at least the way my guild does it) my fire ele is pretty much useless over the 2pc T12 (again only 1 for sure heroic piece). Without doing any math myself I'm almost certain that the stats alone wouldn't outweigh 10% haste to my main (glyphed) nuke assuming that my fire ele has very minimal uptime (because of having to constantly outrange totems). Am I correct in my thinking?

Thank you for any time you put into giving me your educated opinion, and again, thanks for being my bastion of shamman knowledge.

[Alzagor]

I just got the VPLC on my alt shaman and after a small bit of testing, it looks to me that the lightning bolt proc is the same spell ID as our normal lightning bolt

Is there anyone who can confirm or deny that this procs gets benefit from talents/baseline elemental bonusses?

[Buckshater]

Can someone help as I am looking at a variety of shamans who have topped the heroic levels at their gearing... Gunjo above, Tricity etc. and the haste and crit numbers they are shooting for are vastly different.

What is the haste cap? Or at what point should you start reforging it to mastery?

[Endus]

You should probably read the FAQ, since there's a section in there all about haste levels and caps.

[Andon]

On use trinkets, should you do your best to time them with EM? If I'm not mistaken EM will be random due to the reduction in CD when you LB...from what I understand you are just supposed to blow EM every chance its up for instant dmg and haste buff and try to not overlap with Heroism if possible.

[Buckshater]

You should probably read the FAQ, since there's a section in there all about haste levels and caps.

My apologies... Let me rephrase it since I had read the faq... U stated the plateaus not a set cap.. since there has been a variety of different work on plateau 2 and 3 which one do u all prefer to shoot for as I have seen people at 16% and 20 something percent.

[Endus]

There are no "caps", per se, just plateaus where the value spikes or decreases. The first practical "cap" you'd see that would heavily reduce Haste's value is at 50% Haste, when an LB's cast time is reduced to the same length as the GCD, 1 second.

[Mr.Pineapple]

Reviewing SimC results suggests that we have the opposite behaviour for what few/small break points we have. With 27.64% haste (or 2761 rating) adding an extra 20 to 80 haste results in a higher dps gain than stacking 20 to 80 int. After that point it drops away, and it doesn't look like subtracting haste has any change in the normal linear plot we'd normally expect.

Previously what you'd see would be certain values of haste being desirable, and if you went over them you'd want to reduce your haste to keep at or just under that value. For us it's the reverse, haste gets more valuable up to a point where it's worth more than int, then drops off again back to second place. Eventually we'll get to a point where it dips under Mastery but that may only happen in T13.

Is it safe to assume, that within ~50 points of the other (lower) caps this would happen as well?

[Paf]

No. The Spell Coefficient of LB is much much higher than CL. You would only use CL in a single target situation if you had less than, like, 1k spell power (i.e. T7 content).

Actually, Chain Lightning post-patch is now worth about 150-200 more DPS than an unglyphed Lightning Bolt (after bugged CL mastery is taken into account). It's still completely not worth it, but it's also not a DPS loss.

Oh, and that post actually reminded me. Glyph of Lava Burst is near strictly better than Lightning Bolt post-T11. Even before the T12 set bonus is achieved. Both live logs and simcraft agree. If you decide to check live logs, remember that neither glyph impacts mastery procs. You'd just be looking at the initial cast damage.

[Radux]

Wait... what changed with CL in the patch? I didn't think anything did what-so-ever (could be wrong, just don't remember anything involving CL). The only buff to CL would be the Shamanism change, which also buffed LB, so I don't see any difference.

Also, are you saying that a CL+CL-overload = 1 LB (no overload)? Because that's kind of a ridiculous thing to compare. If I'm misunderstanding then please let me know.

Finally, I'm not sure where I was saying anything comparing LB/LvB glyphs?

[Paf]

Wait... what changed with CL in the patch? I didn't think anything did what-so-ever (could be wrong, just don't remember anything involving CL). The only buff to CL would be the Shamanism change, which also buffed LB, so I don't see any difference.

Also, are you saying that a CL+CL-overload = 1 LB (no overload)? Because that's kind of a ridiculous thing to compare. If I'm misunderstanding then please let me know.

The 12% buff didn't differ between spells, it was a flat out +12% to everything. So, my fully raid buffed spell damage is roughly 11k. 12% of that 11k is 1320.

Lightning Bolt cast time: 1.62sec w/ 1320dmg - 815dps
Chain Lightning cast time: 1.22sec w/ 1320dmg - 1082dps

Sim it if you feel like checking. And just now I was informed that the mastery bug was fixed.

Finally, I'm not sure where I was saying anything comparing LB/LvB glyphs?

I'm sorry. That wasn't directed toward you. My own saying "Glyph of Lightning Bolt" reminded me of the OP's rather indifferent glyph section. A complete tangent that I probably should've separated a bit better.

[Radux]

So, again, for my clarification --

Are you suggesting that we weave CL in at every cooldown to yield higher dps?