Warning for Thrones12: 1. All posters are to make an effort to communicate clearly.

• Jessamy · 02/16/11, 8:33 AM

Post: [Elemental] Cataclysm Discussion - Patch 4.0.6
User: Thrones12
Infraction: 1. All posters are to make an effort to communicate clearly.
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Original Post:

Just a thought. Regarding Glyph of Lightning Shield, it doesn't seem to be a "required" glyph anymore, due to the changes with our mastery and Rolling Thunder. Even right after we cast a Fulmination and drop to 3 charges only, it's very unlikely that we'll be hit by additional boss abilities frequent enough to drop the remainder charges to 0. The fact that we'll be immediately casting LB to replenish our shield charges also prevents 3 charges dropping to 0. Also, you can only lose 1 charge every few seconds. All that seems to lead to the conclusion this glyph is useless now (for ele at least).
Just wondering what do you guys think about this?

I just finished 11/12N without the glyph, and never had to recast Lightning Shield once on any boss fights. Don't know about heroic modes, but I can't imagine there's an unpreventable boss mechanic that will make you unable to cast any LB for a good 7-10s... o_0"?

The problem of taking the Totemic Focus talent, is that you will lose out on Ancestral Swiftness and Imrpoved Shields. Ancientral Swiftness can be a dps increase in any fight that has a decent move phrase as well as being a life saver (Atramedez air phrase target for example), and losing out on Improved Shield will lose dps on Fulmination (especially now we can use it more due to the Mastery change), the 40% duration on Fire Elemental really isn't worth it.

Back to the topic of Fire Elemental, I checked out several shamans' DPS on World of Logs and their total damage dealt with Fulmination + Lightning Shield on a 25M Argaloth fight (fully raid buffed/debuffed) is roughly 250-280k, and lasted roughly 2min. Therefore the the 15% damage increase from Improve Shields only accounted for ~34k extra damage. Multiplying that by 3 since an average raid fight would be longer - that's still only ~100k extra damage for a 6min fight. Letting a Fire Elemental hit a Raider's Training Dummy for 2min without doing anything else and it yielded ~300k damage. Just from comparing these numbers alone, the 40% (48sec) extra duration from Totemic Focus seem more appealing (especially if there are multiple targets for your elemental to hit).

Regarding the relocation of points in the resto tree to get Totemic Focus. Arguably Ancestral Swiftness is indeed a very nice talent, but being 22/7% faster than others (assuming they have 8% minor speed bonus from enchant) shouldn't be keeping you out of life/death situations. I'm not saying it's bad, but 10% less damage taken while casting and 15% increase in healing received combined seems "nicer". Especially for heroic contents with heavier unavoidable raid damage.

Perhaps something like this would be viable?
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft