I would love for that to happen, they are nerfing our PvP a bit, while we still aren't that over powered compared to so many other classes in PvP... How ever for us to be a better raiding spec, instead of more damage we need another utility, as you said 3% crit is basically all we bring, 3% hit is sometimes taken advantage of but because it's on a stick it's too unreliable, I wish they would make the 41 Point talent just 3% spell critical strike on the totem, and then the 3% hit more of an aura type effect radiating from you regardless

I had several idea's in the form of utility, in the form of new or modified talents.

A stand alone one.
Elemental Totems: 2/2 Increase the effects of Wrath of Air and Totem of Wrath by 10/20% (10/20 spell damage, .3/.6 crit and hit) And whenever Tremor totem pulses, party members within 40 yards receive 15/30% chance to resist push back while casting spells for the next 4 seconds.


And two talents that work together.
Shock Mastery: 3/3 Your Earth Shock spell will silence the target for 3 seconds. Your frost shock spell has a 17/34/50% chance to freeze (root) your target for 2 seconds and a 17/34/50% chance to freeze the target again every 2 seconds the debuff is active. Your Flame Shock increases all damage to the target by 1/2/3% while the debuff is active.

Natural Combustion: 3/3 Every time you gain a critical strike with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or Earth Shock, you have a 10/20/30% chance of casting Flame Shock for no additional cost.



Basically I agree we need utility and I was bored enough to try and come up with new, and interesting, AND possibly overpowered talents >.<.

Overall I would prefer a little more utility over more DPS.

100 casts = 20 overloads
110 casts (10% haste) = 22 overloads
120 casts (20% haste) = 24 overloads.

20/100 = 22/110 = 24/120 = 20% of your casts are expected to be overloads, which at 50% damage will be... surprisingly... a 10% damage increase!

Yes that is true, it made more sense in my head than I guess on paper. My point is, you fire off MORE lightning bolts in the same allocated time (and even more thanks to lightning overload) so have more chance to proc items withing the allocated time than other classes...

It's WAY too hot right now to be thinking >.<

Maybe the rest of my casters are just worse at button

No that isn't true. Faster casts do not mean more damage from Lightning Overload. If you do the math on it it is basically 20% of your spells do an extra one with 50% dmg. What it boils down to is a 10% increase to our dps. It doesn't matter that we cast more often. Cast time is completely independant of our LO damage.

Yes TLC does proc more when more casts are done, but this is balanced by the fact that a lot of this haste gear has lower spell crit. The additional casts won't affect the proc rate of Sextant to any meaningful degree. Plus like myself and others have said, we find Sextant to be an inferior trinket since you are unable to time it to stack with heroism/drums/etc. Since it is purely luck based when it goes off, the effects while strong are uncontrollable, something that can be bad on fights like Naj or Illidan or Archi.

Edit: Oops looks like Bink got to it first. The fun of replying while in Kara.

Untill they make Spell haste affect DoT timers, haste will be more effective for Elemental Shaman and Boomkin than for any other DPS class that has any DoT using in their rotation.... on paper. In reality having such a short cast time ends up being worse than longer cast times. With any latency, every cast costs you a few milliseconds, which adds up quickly especially if you are talking about 1.5sec Lbolts and 1.0 sec Chainlightnings compared to a Warloc using 2.0 sec Shadow bolts. We do get extra procs on TLC, but the latency factor hurts some of this "fast cast" potential. Elemental Shaman wont be able to compete in max DPS against equally geared, equally skilled Mages / Warlocs untill we gain some synergy in a raid setting. In a solo or even 5 man setting I can dish out more burst damage than our best Locks / Mages, but factor in the raid debuffs / buffs and it's over. Mages / Warlocs are full of %dmg increase talents and debuffs which only get better as your gear also improves. Elemental shaman have static improvments, with the exceptions of L.O. which technically scales up with our gear. I mean comon, CoS + Misery + Shadow Weaving + Shadow and Flame + Imp Shadow Bolt + Fel Armor + Demonic Sacrifice Succubus? GFG.

All talent ideas aside, all I see needing to be done is give Lighting Shield as secondary purvasive buff as they did to Water shield, like Concentration or +dmg (akin to mage / warloc armors) and make Flametongue / Frost Brand / Rockbiter actually do somthing other than fill up spell book space in a PvE raid environment.

PS: Who has ever used Flametongue weapon totem? curious.

Yeah it would be more helpful for us if not for the fact that warlocks and mages in raids now don't need to cast any dots at all. Mages do have to pay the scorch penalty, and warlocks do need to curse occasionally, but our issue is that we really do have some dots in our rotation. 4 2 minute dots and 1 40-60 second dot in water shield. These will always scale horribly with haste, so until they do something about our totem issues we're a bit hosed in comparison to warlocks and mages who can spend far more time nuking.

And no, never used flametongue weapon totem. Would be nice if it was a windfury for casters though. Although then it would get in the way of our totem of wrath. If they're going to give us a caster totem, it needs to be earth.

True true, staying hit capped without the totem is a good thing (on certain occasions) but it's a wast of itemization in my opinion.
I'd rather lose 1.5 sec GCD due to dropping totem of wrath again then to run around with an extra abbundance of hit rating that could have been dmg/haste/crit.

But, I do see your point though

I drop Strength of Earth unless I need tremor because I'm in a group with a shadow priest all the time. This means my mana is never an issue anymore with 2p T6 and water shield. I literally can't run oom unless I spam healing wave on fel raged targets or take a ton of mana drains (kaz, mother, archi). I figure the bonus it gives the shadow priest's shadowfiend is worth more than the cheesy amount of mana I would save.

And for raid synergy, yeah our enhancement shaman went inactive. I know that hunter pets can burn the buff, but does anyone know anything about rogue poisons? It would be a decent buff if not everything ate it. How about SS instead of being 20% for 2 spells have it be 10% nature dmg for its duration (or half its duration even?)

I think I read somewhere that Romulo's Poison Vial can steal the SS buff, so, I think we can assume (not confirmed by me though) that rogue poisons can actually do the same...

I was under the impression instant poisons, including wounding (which can't be avoided on some bosses) consume the debuff

As a primarily enh shaman, I can confirm that both Romulo's Poison Vial and instant poison consume SS charges. Deadly Poison, however, does not.

Recently? Not at all. However, back in the days of BWL, I was usually the shaman assigned to follow the melee group around and make sure the rogues & DPS warriors always had WF, etc. When we'd get fire-vulnerable dragonkin, I'd switch to flametongue. At first I did it for laughs, then the rogues were like "WHAT IS THAT AND CAN YOU DO IT MORE PLZ KTHX!" because it was adding several hundred fire damage to every hit.

It's just another stupid shaman skill that's utterly pointless 99.9% of the time, and hilariously awesome in very very few cases.

I've been reading through this thread and am a bit confused on a couple points:

I read that the +85 LB/CL totem was better than the skycall totem in terms of dps. Yet I see a lot of talk about the skycall totem. Does the skycall totem become the best choice again for 2.4?

Also, I may have missed it, but is the darkmoon faire Crusader card not a good trinket choice in terms of dps? I currently use TLC and Quag's eye and have been collecting the cards for the Crusader trinket and had planned on replacing Quag's eye with it.

Crusader card is indeed a good trinket for our DPS, well, it currently is. We don't exactly know what Sunwell will bring and how much the haste benefit "might" impact Quag's.

I have when I had to have grace of air down and I wanted to give the tank a little more threat.. but yeah its terrible.


They EJ mods don't like people signing thier posts so you should stop doing that. As far a totems skycall is just more interesting (complex) from a theorycraft standpoint so there was alot more debate about it. I think ancestral is better in most situations but many guilds have terrible luck getting it to drop (it took me 5 months of teron kills before I got mine). So with it being non-trivial to theorycraft and being easily availible on top of it being really quite good there was alot of talk about it. I havne't rerun my sim with the changes to the GCD.. I guess I should get around to that but I've been pretty busy at work.

I guess my point was that the extra hit isnt a complete waste, and that barring another stat change to the items, they are still better than other alternatives while maintaining 4 pc T6. If you swap any peice out because you are over hit cap, then you need to keep T6 shoulders (i guess) which takes a hit on your spell haste from the new uhh.. Sunwell shoulders. Yeah saying Blizzard overdid it on the hit on those items might be accurate, but there is 0 hit on all the new Sunwell armor sooo.. yeah. I don't want to have to start digging for spell hit rings/neck because I want to use the new Sunwell loot, which is what Mages / Warlocs will currently have to do.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...6v3_shaman.jpg

New changed shaman T6 again. So we went from maxed spell hit (51) on version 2 to 0 spell hit on version 3. This is rather odd, but hey, at least no wasted stats. Those items are very nice now.

Now if only they'd get rid of the mp5...

Ugh I preferred the other ones with +hit and zero MP/5.... I knew it was too good to be true.

So, hi. Arthas realm is down for a bit, so I wanted to bring a quick question to you guys.

For an extremely long time I lived by TLC, but I'm fairly certain my math was wrong... and now I'm reevaluating it.

Essentially, I'm attempting to decide whether to use Icon of the Silver Crescent or The Lightning Capacitor until a Skull of Gul'dan drops.

I'm assuming just a LB spam spell rotation. With my current amount of Spell Haste my lightning bolts require 1.89 seconds to cast. I have 42% Spell Crit with raid buffs.

I'm sure this math is pretty basic... just making sure I'm not overlooking anything drastic.

To compare the items I make an attempt to convert each into an equivalent +DPS based on averages.

Capacitor's average non-crit is 750 (694 + 806)/2, obviously.
Capacitor's average crit is 1125 (1.5 * 750).

TLC's average lightning bolt with 42% Spell Crit would be ((750 * .58) + (1125 *.42)) = 907.5 under the assumption that TLC's chance to crit is my chance to crit, please correct me if I am mistaken.

With 42% Spell Crit it will take me on average 2.38 Lightning Bolts to receive 1 TLC charge, thus, 3 charges would be 7.14 Lightning Bolts. At 1.89 seconds per cast this would equate to 13.5 seconds for 907.5 damage. Or, equivalently, 67.2 damage per second.

By comparison,

Icon of the Silver Crescent gives a passive +43 Spell Damage, and 155 Spell Damage for 20 seconds every 120 seconds. Essentially, this equates to +68.83 Spell Damage. Lightning Bolt receives a 79.4% coefficient from Spell Damage. This would equate to approximately +54.65 Spell Damage assuming Lightning Bolt never crit, but with a 42% Spell Crit we see...

54.65 * .58 + 109.31 *.42 = 77.61 DPS.

By this comparison, Icon of the Silver Crescent would generate ~10 DPS more than TLC... but this does not take into account LO. Not sure what other figures I'm missing.

When we had our protection paladin my crit rate was 50% (I'm a crit junky). I use this to keep maths simple.

10 casts should yield 12 lightning bolts, each having a 50% chance to crit, thats effectively 6 charges or 2 TLC lightning bolts.

(750 + 1125) / 2 = 937.5 damage on average.

I only use skycall totem which is 100 haste rating at a 15% chance to proc, lasting 10 seconds. within 10 seconds you should be able to get off 6 casts, 6 * 15% = roughly 90% chance it will be back up again... or it's up 90% of the time. (zero internal cooldown)
So that equals 90 haste rating profit. I believe that equals roughly 6% haste? which apparently equals 1.88 cast time (2*.94) although that sounds too much... but anyway I'll continue.

10 casts = 18.8 seconds within that time 2 lightning bolts from TLC = 1875. 1875 / 18.8 = 99.7ish DPS... from TLC. For me that seems to far out do the Icon.

However that is at 50% crit, I think I am at 45% now, changing around some gear and no protection paladin... We are possibly getting a Crit Chicken which would push me up to 50% again...

I mean if you just look at it, general rule of thumb is, faster casts and more critical strike rating, increases the damage from TLC. I mean haste doesn't separate it from static +stat trinkets, but +spell crit does.

It will be interesting what we can get our +damage and critical strike to in 2.4... I've just been focusing on the haste.



Correct me if any of this is wrong, I'm just doing off the top of my head/what I can recall.

I don't follow your logic at all. Sure you crit more in a given time but you also cast more LB in general which your plus dmg would apply to. If you are trying to prove that TLC scales at a better rate then plus dmg I'd be curious to see why you think so but with the cooldown I would imagine it would scale slightly slower.


In the patch notes they mention they changed how TLC works a little but no one is sure yet about hit / crit rates with it until we get more data from the ptr.