Elemental Glyphs & Totems

The most common questions arising from my blog post a few days ago about Elemental & 3.1 have been about Glyphs, and Totems. There's still some confusion about how some of these work, so I'm going to try to clear these up.

To begin, I need to make one point clear. Anything affecting Lava Burst has a reduced dps effectiveness in comparison to something affecting Lightning Bolt, Flame Shock, or stats in general. Assuming that you have Glyph of Flame Shock (more on that later), a typical rotation will have ~9 LB, 2 LvB and 1 FS casts, and last around 20 seconds. What this means is that anything that only affects Lava Burst will have it's single spell effectiveness multiplied by 2 (spell count) and then divided by 20 (rotation duration).



This results in 10% for Lava Burst, compared with 45% for Lightning Bolt. This means that if we were to increase the damage of both spells by 100, we would see increases of 10 dps if we only buffed Lava Burst, and 45 dps for Lightning Bolt. So even though Lava increases LvB by around 900 per spell, and each Lightning Bolt cast gets ~300, these turn out to be ~90 dps for Lava and ~135 for LB.

Ranking: LB > Lava

Ok, so we've established that Lightning Bolt is better than Lava, the next thing is to look at Flame Shock. A typical rotation without the Flame Shock Glyph will be 1 FS, X LB, 1 LvB, and repeating around that. In this you will most likely get 2 ticks of the DoT (the third may tick though as well, but it will be 1 second after your LvB cooldown comes up so it's fairly unlikely). If you have the glyph, you're removing a FS cast from what would have been viewed as every second rotation, freeing up a GCD that can be spent on LB instead. So if we have ~3.5k dps from LB spam, we're getting ~5000 extra damage for the rotation, plus another 3 FS ticks (say 700 per tick) and we have an extra 7300 damage over that 20 second rotation (365 dps). This approximation is a bit higher than what I've calculated in SEIC, but you see the general point now.

Ranking: FS > LB > Lava

Now for the two stat glyphs. Flametongue gives 2% crit, which is 91.8 crit rating. Without T8 bonuses, you'll have a rough dps figure of 0.6 per rating, but with it goes up to 1. Even then, FT is worth 55-92 dps, which means it's sitting around Lava.
Totem of Wrath gives a flat 84 spellpower, and since that scales so well, we get 1.2-1.4 dps per point (100-117 dps). Obviously better than Lava & FT, not quite as good as LB though.

Ranking: FS > LB > ToW > Lava/FT

And that covers the five main glyphs.

Next: Totems
The question is whether the new T8 totem, [Thunderfall Totem], is better than the T7 totem, [Totem of Hex]. For Thunderfall, we get 215*1.11*2.208*1.16 = 611 damage per cast, or 61 dps (multiplying damage by 0.1 as we discussed earlier). Hex gets 165*0.714*1.09*(1+0.4*1.09)*1.1*1.16 = 234 damage or 105 dps (The co-efficient is 0.714 because Totems are not currently affected by Shamanism, the 1.09 figure is Concussion + Glyph of LB, 1+0.4*1.09 is the crit damage bonus assuming 40% crit, and the 1.1 figure is to account for Overload).

Obviously, 105 trumps 61, so Hex is the better totem to use. I would still pick one up though, as there's always a chance it will get changed later on.

The TL;DR Version
Glyphs: FS > LB > ToW > Lava/FT
Totems: Hex > Thunderfall