Mostly elemental shaman bring totem of wrath. That is our primary utility (vs a resto shaman) and do ok as ele dps. However as utility goes vs other dps casters we have lust, wrath of air, totem of wrath, and mana spring which make it very obvious we ARE a utility class. Implying we should be on par with locks because we are bad at melee and healing is just silly.

I don't think support specifically means heal, support to me means having spells that support your group. I drop totems/heroism/drums for my group not to be #1 in dps, but to increase there dps makes my spot more worth while. If we could dps like mages/warlocks we would just stack elemental shammys till the cows come home for rotating heroism/bloodlust/totems. I am currently around 200ish dps below the mages/locks in my group and would be concerned if it was any other way.

An Elemental Shaman is never a worthless healer. Keeping the other members of our group alive should absolutely be viewed as a priority. What use are all of our buffs if they lose 20% of their effectiveness every time a guy dies?

Sure, one could say it's the healers job to keep them healed, it is. But it's still your priority to keep them alive. By this point we should all be aware that almost every fight has some phase that's difficult on healers. If you can keep your own group alive by throwing half a dozen heals over the course of an encounter, you have no choice but to do so.

Your group is your damage. Letting any of them die when you could have stopped it is at least equivalent to not throwing damage spells at every opportunity.

Every Archimonde raid I end up healing myself and my warlock comrades from the party if we are unlucky enough to get seperated from the raid by a Doomfire/air burst and the healers love the call on vent that I am "handling it" so they don't have to stress and run all over.

Gurtogg is nice to spam heal yourself.

On Brutallus I que up a healing wave to land right as that final tick of burn goes off if our healers are stressed on the tanks.

Just a few instances where being a "hybrid" is great -I am sure we all have them.

If you want to throw urself or someone in group a LHW or something thats fine, but as elemental you are there to dps. If you want to heal ur group to keep everyone up, spec resto.

As far as us having lower dps then mages... It should be a given that we are below Rogues/Mages/Locks. If you are above any of those classes on a fight in t6 content, they are doing something wrong (unless they are on kick/sheep/banish duty). We are a support calls, even as a healer we are. We arent there to top the dps charts, we are there to give 3 crit, 3 crit, 101 spell damage, drums and bloodlust/heroism to our group. We are in the raid for the same reason a MS warrior is in the raid. His damage isn't going to top the charts, but the dps boots from Blood Frenzy and shout makes it worth while for him to be there.

Felmyst, thats a fight you could heal the raid, felmyst in there air.. chainlighting, then chainheal

Brutalus, NOT A FIGHT TO HEAL. You are there to dps, you have 7+ healers in the raid to heal you, no reason for you to be healing urself on that fight, if you die its their fault.

With good mana pools ok regen kinda low amounts of plus healing but high crit rates ele sham are ok stop gap healers. I don't think ele sham should be relied on to spot heal as part of the raids strat however a good player should be able to evaluate the situation and figure out if healing for a few s might be better than continued dps. Enh shaman can do the same. This is more of last resort when things have gone wrong though. I've certainly witnessed good players eeking out a kill from a wipe by doing this type of thing but I also think that if you are finding yourself healing every fight something else is wrong.

I have a hard time telling if I am ready to start stacking haste yet. I have an SP in my group so mana isn't an issue really. But right now I have no haste. Well ih ave 5 actually in my Gloves b/c i didnt want to regem lol. My guild is on Archimonde and ROS in BT. We have not done SP.

I was under the impression that I shouldn't really focus on Haste until I get a bit further along in progression and loot available.

If you always have a shadow priest, give haste a go, there are a lot of amazing badge items that will be far better than your tier 5 (offhand, chest, legs) the PvP haste neck is nice (even nicer when s4 comes along) and there's apparantly a cloak from ZA which i can't seem to get my hands on.

I wouldn't go all out gemming +10 haste into every slot, but once the gem vendor comes out, pyrestones fit nicely in those yellow sockets. and remember a lionseye and a spinnel is the same as 2x pyrestone.

Hi there
I have a question about trinkets.
From a lot of sites, it appears that skull + crusade/hex are the best combo for us but I would like to have an opinion on a combo like sextant + shiffar/eye of mag. Those 2-3 trinkets should proc more than a trinket like icon/hex, you should have at least 1 proc per minute.
Eye of mag appears to have no internal cd as one of my teammates said to me and the others two have a 45 internal cd but if you have a proc on the first trinket, you have 10-15 sec of increased spelldmg while the internal cd is already started so when the buff finishes, you have to wait "only" 30-35 sec for the next proc. Let's say you will gain a buff once per minute but those trinkets will proc more if we have a 2sec or less casting time, so we got more crits per minute right?
Same thing for Eye, more spells casted per minutes means more spells resisted/partially resisted so this trinket should proc at least once per minute or more.

What do you think about those combos?

(Sorry for my bad english ^^)

Like I said in my post... a LHW to keep you alive or casting chainheals during down time on a fight like felmyst while hes doing deep breaths is fine, infact should be encouraged. But if you are taking the time to que up heals on yourself then you arent doing your job on a fight like Brut. It is a dps race. Either respec resto and top healing meters or stick to elemental and break 2k dps.

I'd like to QFT.

ps. Completely unrelated, but losing all of the spell hit on Skyshatter is starting to hurt without a skull :x

Elemental shamans have 0 issues being hit capped until possibly more and more sunwell gear gets accumulated. While Mags eye in theory would be a great trinket may in practice be pretty terribad -check your wws's and see how many resists you get. Ele shamans can get 12% hit though talents and our totem alone, it is something like 58hit (may not be exact number) rating that is needed through gear to be capped after that.

In all honesty Mags Eye should be a trinket of last resort, if you are getting enough resists to have it proc constantly you can probably gain more dps by picking up some of the gear that has hit on it and getting hit capped. It is similar to a hunter wearing the Shard of contempt for its "proc" to me.

I ran with shiffar's for a long time (3months) until I got my Hex Lord trinket, Alch stone, and Crusade deck all in the same week (boggle) and see an increase in my dps from just using the static alchemists trinket over shiffars. Procs are not that great by looking back at months of wws; what is cool is is seeing those monster LB crits when Hyjal ring, Nexus, and Dmg trinket are all up and 2 piece T6.

I don't think it's a matter of stacking haste or not. It's just that the new haste badge items or ZA items offer better stats altogether compared to what you might be wearing. You can describe this in various ways the easiest being, these items with haste have a higher EP or DP than the ones you see pre T6 gear that are crit alone.

The only suggestion would be that if you are having mana issues stay with crit items, but otherwise you will end up noticing a DPS upgrade with said Spell Haste gear. Now, it depends which pieces we are talking about but the easiest way to check is to use the SEIC spreadsheets Binkerstein has come up with.

As an example let's compare T5 [Cataclysm Leggings] versus the new badge leggings [Rushing Storm Kilt]. I'm looking at the spreadsheet for my current gearset, yours would differ slightly but for a general approximation we should be ok, the DP for the T5 leggings is 66 and for the kilt 82.

T5 has 54 dmg compared to the 61 damage of the kilt, 24 crit versus 38 haste, and 14 hit to nothing on the kilt (this can be considered a wasted stat if you're already at the 3% or 4% hit cap) and then 1 gem slot versus 2 on the kilt.

So, sure it has haste but it offers a lot more in terms of total damage stats than the t5 legs.

Anyhow, hope that makes sense. It's not a matter of haste or not, in my opinion, it's a matter of what item gives the most DPS gain while still accounting for mana considerations. For me, I've got so much haste gear that it's quite sickening how low my crit is. But, until more T6 drops or more crit items that offer a total DPS upgrade drop, there isn't much I can do.

Last thing to consider of course is breaking set bonuses. Even though the [Rushing Storm Kilt] is better than [Skyshatter Legguards] I would not break a 2pc or 4pc bonus to wear the kilt. Of course if you have 4pc from BT the leggings would be the item you would not wear as the Kilt is the biggest individual upgrade compared to other options around that gear level for the other T6 slots.

EDIT: In your case, I'd suggest not being afraid to use an offhand, [Fetish of the Primal Gods] vs [Mazthoril Honor Shield] for example. The Fetish comes in at 39 DP for me vs 30 for the shield. Now, I use this offhand for max DPS in a raid but in 5 mans I usually use a shield since I tend to pull aggro ^_^ Regardless, if Archimonde ever drops his shield I'll definitely be going back to shields, as that will net me a DPS upgrade over the Fetish

Speaking of the 4 piece bonus... which now shelves my badge kilt.

I really looked searched and googled this is as much as I could (I feel that having to post this is a failure in my ability to search)... even tried to find the formulas in some of the dps spreadsheets found in this and other threads.

My question:
How is the 4 piece tier6 damage bonus calculated?

is it akin to (((base LB damage)*1.05)*1.05) for concussion and the set bonus?

or is it (base*talents*spell damage etc.)*1.05 for the set bonus?

I only had an hour to raid with the new set bonus last night, but I was getting some nice numbers, I am just looking for confirmation on how it exactly works.

I'm almost positive that spell damage benefits are calculated before talents/modifiers.

So it'd be (avg base + damage*coefficient)*concussion*spellhit*spellcrit*setbonus...you get the idea.

OK so I found this

([dmg] x [Lightning Bolt coefficient] + [Lightning Bolt Base damage] + [Teron totem additional bonus]) x [Concussion] x [Lightning Overload] x [crit rate bonus] x [tier 6 4p ]


Is that correct?

Teron's relic isnt added to spell damage then multiplied by the co-efficient? Instead it is added to the the base LB damage and then added to spell damage*coffecient number?

Hmm... learn something new every day.

OK, that makes more sense because the numbers I was generating on my spreadsheet vs. game play were quite a bit off.

Also I noticed that the tier6 4pc bonus on the LB tooltip increases the base damage by 5%... not post spell damage, but that might just be the tooltip being incorrect.

I'll create a couple different scenarios and run some numbers to see what most closely modles my damage output.

I don't see where it says base anywhere? "Increases the damage dealt by your Lightning Bolt ability by 5%."

mhm guys what you say it's true, an elemental shaman should be always hit capped BUT you didn't consider 1 easy thing:
Eye of mag can proc on full resist AND on partially resist.SO this trinket for us is amazing
why?
because we have no spell penetration enchant on our back and because we cannot have a spell resistance reduction from lock's curses.
That's why I proposed eye of mag as one of the best trinket we should use, at the end of the combat we should have 1% full resisted spell (and only 1% full resisted spell is not enough to wear the eye) but eye becomes a great trinket if we consider all the partially resists.

EDIT:

In addition Eye of mag has NO INTERNAL CD so you can have a refresh of its buff also if the trinket has just procced, all the others trinkets have instead a 45 sec of internal cd (my second choise is sextant) so basically with a sextant I could have 1 proc per minute instead of 1 controlled every 2 minutes like hex, skull etc.

With eye + sextant we should get an enormous dps increase just because we can cast more spell per minute = we can have more trinket's proccs.

What do you think about that?

* It cannot.
* Curses/spell penetration have no impact on level based partial resists. Which is moot due to the first point anyway.

Please adjust your post or mark it so readers aren't tempted to follow it.

I've been thinking about this issue, too, not that I am faced with it yet. I had taken engineering a while back for the goggles pre-t6. I haven't used engineering since and was considering dropping it for LWing for the drums, but the [Lightning Etched Specs] schematic dropped recently. While I cannot use them now without losing my t6 set bonus at this point and would use the haste badge legs before this head, I wonder if they have their use prior to getting the final boss drops with the new head armour? With this one item, a space goat would be hitcapped (including the glyph). Anyway, I've been thinking of them as a potential hit cap stop-gap solution in case I never got the skull.

Also, I follow the discussion here most days and have seen a lot of projections regarding stat weighting (haste, crit to damage, etc.) and trinket dps calculations. If any of these numbers are considered 'hard' at this point, can they not be added to the Think Tank informational post?

The end result of that conversation was something like this: There are ways of screwing up a 4:1 rotation such that you lose most if not all DPS benefits while still incurring the increased mana cost. On the other hand, it is possible to achieve near-perfect results: http://elitistjerks.com/717090-post1654.html

I don't know how many ways there are of screwing it up or of doing it correctly. However, I would suggest that everyone grab LagInfo to see their performance. It will show you your interval as well as that of everyone in your party/raid. I was surprised to find that almost ALL of our casters had intervals of 140-180ms. They are now all using AutoHotkey and running 10-40ms. So that's equivalent to a permanent buff of ~80 haste rating per caster. If I spam LB I'll see 0-10ms. A 4:1 rotation puts me at about 36ms. Hunters may get depressed if they are using a castsequence macro, as ours clock in at 350-450ms depending on spec.


Fixed.