At low levels of gear, would Elemental Precision ever be worth it? Obviously the spirit to hit conversion is worthless, but unless blizzard changes the spell hit cap, we're going to need 17% spell hit and only 8% melee hit. I know pre T10 this was one of the things that annoyed me most about enh gearing in LK.

I've got three questions for somebody in the Cata beta. First, does the Searing Totem targetting mechanic also effect or Fire Elemental? And second, are our weapon imbues now unique? And lastly, did they remove or reduce the ICD of Windfury?

I'll check when I get home (fire ele)
Not unique as of last patch will confirm when I get home (imbues)
Hard to confirm either way but I went WF/WF against a dummy for awhile last patch with twin 1.3 daggers and all the haste I can muster and couldn't get two WF's closer then 3 seconds apart in the combat log (ICD)

Sad to hear about the status of the Windfury ICD. Was hoping they would do the unique imbues so we could get some kind of reduction/removal of the ICD. I'll make a post over on the official forums and see if I can get some kind of comment from the crab on this.

I'm fine either way to be honest, Brynmor. Depends on what they are going for in terms of our priority list. I would have assumed LB then UF-LvB but when they swapped masteries it confused the issue a bit. I think we need to see level 85 stats and get the sim working to know for sure what will be best.

By the way, welcome back Hothgor. Nice post in the DD forums. Looking forward to more like that here and seeing you over on the beta forums.

Maelstrom weapon doesn't necessarily need to be used right away. It needs to be used where ever it falls on the priority list which I think is going to end up being right under SS, LL and UW from what I can tell. It's still a great ability/mechanic even if it doesn't have top priority just by nature of it's incredible versatility.

As a general rule of thumb, any class that gets 2 ap per point of agil/str tends to want to stack that stat over all others once certain conditions are met. Usually, those conditions are set benchmarks such as hit rating, armor pen (gone now in Cata) and expertise. I honestly can't think of a single class that wants to stack haste at the expense of any other like we do currently. For that reason, I feel its pretty likely that we will end up working for our spell hit cap, then expertise, and then pushing agility to the max. We MIGHT want to put points into beefing up mastery, but with the overall reduction in our expected spell damage, this seems an unlikely outcome. More testing will be needed to nail down these numbers of course.

However, I think it is safe to say that we will not be stacking haste much if at all, and will probably have about as much haste as Frost DKs have (maybe 5-10%). With those kinds of numbers, we won't be seeing many stacks faster than roughly every 6.5 seconds or so with end Cataclysm ratings. Of course, certain circumstances such as lust/warp, haste pots or just plain luck could give us a full stack relatively quickly, leading to a lot of frustration on figuring out if we should cast a MW_LB or not.

You may be right though, that we should focus on increasing the duration of Elemental Devastation form its current 10 second duration to perhaps 15 seconds. Blizzard doesn't like to buff talents that are already considered very good as is. If the duration were increased, then we would just use whichever ability is currently off CD for our MW stacks.

While what Rouncer says is valid, I think some things we have to consider are, firstly, we don't know exactly what mechanic Blizzard has in mind for shifting the hit cap through Tiers yet and, secondly, we also haven't seen any of the high level gear (other than some craftables), so it's impossible to know for the moment exactly how much hit we have to work with baseline going from Dungeon to T11 in Cat nor the number of gem slots to work with. With that in mind, what we do know is that +hit buffs are dead (with the assumption that the Drae aura is gone too), the conversion rates for hit at level 85 and the initial values for the baseline blue hit gems.

Looking at that, the 3% Hit offered by Elemental Precision is roughly equivalent to ~11.5 +40 hit Rigid Ocean Saphires (153.645*3/40); a value that would be a little over half the Gem slots in current LK gear to my recollection but still likely manageable if that was all you had to do. However, lets attack the low end. Assuming, for the moment only 8% melee hit from gear we have ~1536.4 hit rating baseline (192.056 * 8), which works out to ~10% Spell Hit. If we assume we still need 17% spell hit for T11 raids, this means we need gear or gems to push 7% (1075.5 hit rating), and to hit that with Gems alone we need ~27 +40 Gems; 7 more slots than we would have in full LK Heroic gear and extremely prohibitive when you also consider that it's a safe assumption we'll need to get Expertise Capped in there somehow as well.

Realistically, it's likely the middle of that 10-17% gap will be achievable in at least T11 gear and there's still enchants and JC gems to counterbalance. But, when looking at numbers like that, it strikes me that the likely answer to the value of Elemental Precision is going to come down to the answers to the two unknowns from my first paragraph and the most probable outcome is going to be: "use it to cap until you don't need it anymore", if possible. Especially when considering that the last bit of discussion about the necessity of LvB critting to keep Elemental Devastation up makes the prospect of missing either your LvB or your FlS less than optimal in my eyes. Long term, assuming you could gem/gear entirely to the spell hit cap, I could also see it being a good way to quick bridge the proposed Hit Cap increases between tiers without regemming until you upgrade your gear considering that, if you were at the spell hit cap from gear/gems/etc, then it's still fairly unlikely an upwards shift in the melee/specials cap is going to put you under anytime soon.

Before Unleashed Rage was made into a static 'aura', it was a procing ability. Once we got to about 30% melee crit (in Naxx gear mind you) it essentially had 100% up-time. They didn't nerf that ability, more so acknowledged that it was pretty much up always and dealt with it accordingly. In Wrath, the actual design direction was for us to have LvB on auto crit for the explicit purpose of having 100% ED up-time. We have even less starting crit now, so ED is needed now more than ever. I would seriously lose faith in Blizzard if they took a different stance now and ham-stringed us some more.

That change is actually rather indicative of my point. By the same logic why not just make ED static melee crit if it's going to be up 100% of the time anyway? If we're using LvB at every opportunity to keep 100% uptime on ED to the player ED ceases to be a fun proc and just becomes something that's always there. It's there by default, it's a given, you'll notice if when you don't have it rather than when you do. To me that sounds more like a static buff and less like a proc.

If it does end up being 100% uptime in PvE that's one thing but the uptime in PvP will be a very different story. Even if you gain the buff with every lava burst how often do you actually get to use the MW charges for that as opposed to using them for healing. Also dispels could make the autocrit a lot less reliable as well, although not sure why a healer would prefer to dispel the FS dot as opposed to throwing a heal but it is something that could affect the ED uptime.

The difference between ED and UR is that we had no direct control over whether or not we proc'd UR while we can control our ED uptime to keep it at 100%.

You have a point about it distinguishing superior play though. I didn't think of it that way until you stated it. It is more intuitive to simply use every MW5 stack immediately, it is less intuitive (but potentially better DPS) to save it for a few seconds so you can LvB to keep ED up. I can agree to that.

Though my follow up question would be; if we do only use LvB should the SS debuff be altered in some fashion?