I'm considering making the spellstrike hat, the pants are nice, but im going to stick with the ones from heroic UB. I'm currently using second sight, which i have to stick blue gems in to get the socket bonus, Spellstrike with 3 Potent Noble Topaz would be very hot indeed.

I'm currently specced full PvE damage so the hit doesn't help me at the moment, but im sure ill spec out of natures guidance again soon.

edit: Also what do people think of

Lightning Crown
Costs probably 300g
Head Mail
550 Armor
Durability 85 / 85
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 42.
Equip: Increases damage done by Nature spells and effects by up to 66.

vs

Spellstrike Hood with 3 Potent Noble Topaz
Costs 1200g (500g for mights, 550 for Spellcloth, 150 for 3x topaz)
Head Cloth
145 Armor
+16 Stamina
+12 Intellect
Durability 60 / 60
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves spell hit rating by 16.
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 36.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 61.

Cyclone Faceguard With spirit shard gem and Potent Noble Topaz
Cost - Kill Prince 8 spirit shards and 50g for a nobal topaz
also may be buffed in the future?

Head Mail
604 Armor
+24 Stamina
+27 Intellect
+Run Speed
Durability 85 / 85
Classes: Shaman
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 25.
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 56.
Equip: Restores 6 mana per 5 sec.

Cyclone helm. The 2 peice bonus is a 100damage/healing upgrade for your group, and this is one of the 2 best peices of the set.

Lightning Crown is trash.

You have an odd definition of cheap. My LW set cost me ~2400g to fully construct.

http://groups.google.com/group/wowshamanclass

--the threads and spreadsheets here might be of interest to those in this thread

^_^

I can see your point about the 5% mana from enhancement. Even if at the point we are (Kara cleared, but not that much 25 raid attempts for the moment), long fights aren't that frequent and 500 mana are indeed quite usefull compared to mana regen due to said fight lentgh. I can also see your point about elemental warding, what annoys me is the need to "waste" 5 points for the +5% damage which is nearly useless for me. (i just use shocks for interrupt, and frequently rank 1 anyway...) So that makes it a 8 points talent... Except for curator and aran now, it isn't that usefull, but i'm willing to believe it might become more important in next fights.

I see your point and i think i'll give it a try (maybe after some days as elem for fun and farming...). Looking at your talent build, i saw you left totemic focus, and that surprised me as i always took this talent. But after some very basic thinking, let's say 3 totem at 250 mana every other minute, that 375 mana/minute, so that 92 mana saved per minute. roughly 8 mp5. For 5 points. I can see your point ^^

I will definitely swap totemic focus for nature guardian, and i'll give a try at switching +5% mana and 15% resist for elemental warding, and we'll see.

Thanks for the tip.

PS: by the way, when you give the agro reduction numbers, is that just as an example, or is the effect in fact a 10% reduction?

http://www.thottbot.com/s39301

It's a permanent 10% threat reduction every time it procs.

At least on my server, Primal Fires sell exceptionally well. I paid for my set by farming them and either trading for Airs and Manas or selling them at comparable prices.

I have a quick question for my fellow pvp shaman kin/warlocks that would like to shed some light on this. How do you deal with Felhunters and Spell lock? Specifically, how does Spell lock work as a spell? Is it an automatic cast? How can or would one fake it out?

Warlocks with felhunters and CoT have been giving me a bad run of late, so I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it in a more proactive fashion.

Hit Vent PTT: "Kill the felhunter first."

I use CoS on the Felhunter (b/c it has 70 to all resists) then banish. The doggy has 4000 armor and 4000 health, since it has no Holy Resists, try Exorcism, consecration, and than have a warrior/rogue take a few swings.

Spell lock is a 30 second cd shadow spell that is triggered by the Lock clicking on the button. You can fake out to try to make the Lock click it early, but still it is a silence if it lands.

To further counter a Felhunter, run Heroic HH to get the 15% to resist silence neck.

CoT sucks, get a Druid or Mage on your team.

This is a good point that I hadn't really considered. I guess I normally have an 'ignore the pet' mindset from days gone by. But with only 4k HP, my mostly physical DPS team could take it out. That raises the question though, what are the rules on when/how fast a warlock can resummon the pet?

If he's partly Demo, he can use Fel Domination once to pop it back out, but only once. Other than that, it's a long cast time that he shouldn't be allowed to complete.

The team I'm on is very much built for longevity (2x warrior + healers) and we actively kill warlock and hunter pets right away. No one really prioritizes them for healing, and they have low enough HP that they die very quickly to a couple of windfury-powered melee. Aside from felhunters, few things are more annoying than a hunter scorpid that stacks 5 scorpid poisons on you so you can't dispel the hunter's Viper Sting effectively. So annoying.

Talented and cooldown it takes 1.5 seconds - Talented 6 seconds - 10 seconds normal, thats a lot of mana to burn in mid combat if your not talented though. In most situations it probably would be worth killling even the second one. Depends if your the only healer or not.

EDIT: bah the reply typed out but not hitting reply >_>

Yeah I always let the hunter pet chase me around a pillar where I kill it in a few seconds and if he tries to recall it I frost shock it and finish it with a lightning bolt.

Even as elemental I do the same with a warlock. First I always use water shield while leting the felhunter chase me around a pillar keeping the warlock or his teammates out of LOS. Depending on my teams composition we'll take it out pretty quick.

If the warlock tries to resummon the pet with a slow cast, let him IMO, that is enough time for you to kill his team mates. Demonology warlocks almost always use a Fel Guard, those are the ones you KNOW will instantly resummon a pet.

As a shaman always remember to use water shield with pets, if the felhunter eats it, recast it and you'll make more mana in the long run while costing him his devour cooldown(just don't let him eat anything while you are trying to kill it as it will heal him).

Eww, so much cloth . Your stats are great, but personally I have an issue with wearing anything but mail. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and ignore the armor class when it comes to PvE gear.

It's been a mystery to me why mail caster gear in general is not as nice as cloth, especially after seeing the silly amount of stats that can be on plate for warriors and paladins.

I was about to ask how the hell that happened, but then I remembered you've previously said you're not a skinner and I know how inflated the knothide prices got for the first 2 months after TBC hit due to how terrible the LW grind is to 375.

At least the nether dragonscales are a dead easy farm. I was foreboding that step when doing my 375 grind, got to the celestial ridge, and found that nether dragons are ridiculously easy kills and have an excellent skinning rate on scales. So if you're paying high prices for those, the skinner is having you on.

For 95% of LWs, who are also skinners, the LW set is cheap to construct. ~1000g even if you buy all the primals (and you really should buy at least the air; farming water and selling that to buy air is going to be a lot faster than farming air as elemental!).

Ez: why do you say the Lightning Crown is trash? I'm not saying I won't happily take my tier 4 helm off Prince when my turn comes (if nothing else, I can use it for set bonuses and for when I need the stamina), but whenever I can afford to be a glass cannon it seems that Lightning Crown is the #1 choice available. Am I missing something?

I don't know if this question really fits in this thread, but I can't seem to find an answer. Did Blizzard fix the non-stacking bug of mp5 enchants on already mp5 itemised items ?

There was a blue about it 1-2 days ago. "It will be fixed."

So no, it's not fixed yet for all items.

I might have missed it but I couldn't find anything using the search function.

Smooth Dawnstone vs. Potent Noble Topaz - has anyone done the math for a elemental shaman? Which one is the most useful with Elemental Focus?

I assume you mean the Gleaming Dawnstone, Smooth is the physical crit one. Anyway, both are nice. Dawnstones are yellow only and Topaz are yellow/red, so both get some good use due to that difference. My personal preference is Gleaming Dawnstone in yellow slots and Potent Noble Topaz in red slots. Blue sockets are the trickier ones for us. Figure in if you're going for a certain meta gem as well, they can complicate things. I guess the reply is - there's not a clearcut better one.

Yeah, my bad, it was kinda late and I was really tired, Gleaming Dawnstone is of course the gem I was thinking about.

On another point about blue slots, I think people highly overrate the socket bonuses, going for crappy gems such as 5 spell damage and 6 stamina in PvE, when you could just aswell go for dawnstones in every slot and you would gain important crit rating.

Emphasizing crit to that extreme extent seems a bit excessive to me. For me, Potent Noble Topaz was my gem of choice in virtually all sockets. Crit has diminishing returns, although the more +dam you have the better +crit becomes. But the more +crit you have, the better +dam becomes by comparison. Once you hit a point where you aren't really running out of mana, +dam over +crit is better for maximizing your DPS. I have a 31% base crit rate with ToW, gear, and talents. That's enough for me.

Also, to follow up on my questions from last page, I grabbed Baba's and a better trinket, and managed to snag t4 gloves as well, so here's what I now have, for reference:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...is&n=Gurgthock

I respecced for the weekend to try out the new set in instances and such, and am definitely impressed so far. Threat was my limiting factor in almost all cases. It'll be fun to try this out in a raid environment on Gruul with Salv and a higher-threat tank.

Also, fun fact: multiple Totems of Wrath stack if you have two elemental shamans in a group.