Edit: redundant post removed

I was actually talking about the Lava Burst vs. Lighting Bolt scaling, which IS fine. Blues already said our dps is too low and should be a lot higher. This means only general scaling talents and/or base damage need to be improved, but not the relative value of LvB vs. LB.

I think that "too low" comment was specifically aimed at Enhancement-only in the context of that conversation, but I might be wrong. Certainly all of the comments coming from beta seem to be that Elemental DPS was competitive before this latest nerf, but Enhancement DPS was prot-warrior bad.

That may have been due to the WF bug in the previous build, as indications are that elemental is the lower of the two.
Anyway, I'm updating my spreadsheet for wotlk (and no you can't have a copy), adding more items in, so once I've got it set up with the proper gear/enchants/gems/glyphs I'll take a look at how specs and dps is going (that may be another couple of weeks down the track though, starting a new job thursday).

It was aimed at enhancement dps as it was singled out the post after that as well,the current consensus was all was fine elemental wise and enhancement needed fixing, it's been the point of my last 3 posts, but he has missed it sofar
With the current swapping of the lower end side of the talent trees to fix cross speccing difficulties between enhancement and elemental, I doubt we will actually be seeing any significant changes to elemental.
They're balancing enhancement at this point in time and it is really looking like enhancement will have elemental as sub spec, so massive changes to the first 20 odd points are hard to do while keeping it balanced both ways.
Oh well we can hope they do something fancy with lightning mastery.


As a side note:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...aman_spell.jpg

The new nuker pvp set, without changed 4/4 bonus, I really wonder what we will be getting as a new bonus. Heh , wind shock now also knocks back the target it hits for 4 yards , would be my suggestion

Yes, confirmed (posted it in a few posts up). SS now only for the the shaman that cast it. The change to affect more schools is a direct result of that if you watch the next blue post in the thread
WoW Forums -> Stormstrike not working

Daring to make a huge asumption I even dare say that this is how they orginally intended to implement it. But back then they found the unexpected synergy interesting instead of annoying as they do these days. (annoying to the raid designers, not the players).
I just see it as another casualty to the "less synergy, more focus on personal dps and epeening" that lichKing brings. And as a support caster myself it will be fun to see better personal dps output IF it happens.
But someone will get the short end of the stick and be undertuned and totally uninvited despite being "friend". Let's just hope it's not shamans shall we.

Unless you can provide a reference for this 'blue quote', then the hit rating currently stands at 17% - not counting any drenai aura bonus, you need 176.4 rating to reach 17% (assuming 3% from talents)

I thought it was established that the 9% rumor was just due to hit rating being consolidated, so an Enhancement Shaman would find that they only needed 9% more due to talents and other things that provided hit. It is still 17%, however, the last percent can now be negated as well. So the hit cap is complete.

I finally got a chance to see the beta this weekend. My character sheet seems to be giving me an extra 10% chance to crit. On live, with your standard 41/20 build, I run with ~23.5% unbuffed crit chance, but in beta, with a 54/7/0 build, my character sheet says I have ~43% unbuffed crit chance. I realize that live doesn't include the 10% from talents. I would assume beta does, but where does this 9%(14% really since I didn't pick up the 5% from resto talents) come from? I'm not using any addons in beta, and I was completely unbuffed, unless there was some zone wide buff in borean tundra that I didn't notice.

It was firmly established that, for BC spells at least, the 17% hit cap remains. There was a second rumor that LK spell ranks were the only ones with the new hit mechanic, but I haven't seen any testing to confirm/deny that one.

Either way it will be 17% at 70, so you'll need the number Papaduval cited.

Actually, I can deny it. I've been testing various things (don't worry, you'll get full report in time ) on boss dummies and the miss numbers were consistent with 17% miss rating on a level 80 shaman.

Well, I don't think we will all die and lie as corpses all around outlands when the patch arrives. We are talking about a couple of weeks at the most, where we will be on the short end when it comes to spell hit. We lost 9% to spell hit and then add 1% to that due to we can finally reach the hit-cap. If you raid with a Boomkin or Shadow Priest, then we are talking about that you need to get 7% more spell hit, or 89 hit rating.

A quick check at your gear, and I noticed that you could socket 8 gems and reach 80 spell hit. Of course you lose some spell crit, spell damage and spell haste, but that is how it goes. Outside of the obvious gem-change, there is spell hit items from badge vendor like [Fused Nethergon Band] and so on.

Edit:
WotLK-wiki state that Elemental Precision once again give 2/4/6%, which means that you only need 7% without Moonkin or Shadow Priest, and 4% with. (source: Shaman - WotlkWiki - Wrath of the Lich King Information)

Edit 2:
Which has now been debunked below. Well, in either case, the numbers are there.

I can confirm that this is not the case. EP is still [only] 3% +hit.

If you look at all of the BC gear, and how we maintain our spell hit. Its going to crush some of shamans on the higher end with this patch. I will be swapping sunwell gear for T6 gear, and regemming. The spell hit nerf, and our new talents just don't really add up. Give us a new DPS spell that makes us keep a Shock on a target, take Stormstrike away, give us CoE. Force us to be closer to the boss because of the shock. Not exactly jumping up and down for joy. Granted we only need to live with it raiding wise for a little bit before we are back to grinding. But it seems that they shouldn't break our current raiding ability.

The "sudden" loss of hit and the poor itemization we currently are sitting with (since we aren't very likely to have stacked hit before LK changes) would push Spicy Hot Talbuk up as our best food for 3.0 raiding I asume?

Meaning most of us would only need to reach 118,6(106 for Draenei) on character sheet with talbuk since we are more than likely to raid with shadowpriest. (they are our "friends" so we have to raid with them regardless of what happens to the mechanics.. so say Blizzard )
If the gems we are removing and replacing with hit gems to get hit cap without talbuk food are +12 spelldamage ones we will actually gain from keeping them and using talbuk food (since regular spell damage food is only 23 while two gems are 24).

Asuming current supply of food and t6/SWP itemization. (who knows what might sneak in with 3.0...)


On a nother note: I saw some interesting posts in the enhancement thread regarding item priorities for 3.0 and the enhancement list had quite a few caster items high on the list (due to the merging of melee/caster stats and the talented AP from INT)
I have yet to see any thoughts regarding this in this thread.. are there simply no melee items we would consider or have we yet to ponder about such? I can't seem to find any that would fit in the slot anyone done more extensive thinking regarding this?

You don't *have* to be closer as the Flame Shock Glyph increases its range by 10 yards. It's your decision to be closer if you want the Lightning Bolt, Flametongue and Totem of Wrath Glyphs. That's assuming Glyphs are have a paradigm like enchants, they could be most like potions.

I did the math and if I replaced all of my current yellow sockets with +8 hit gems and picked up a Scryer's Bloodgem my T4 Shaman would be set for hit (assuming Misery), but would lose 40 spell damage and 32 crit rating. The latter is offset somewhat by the skinning perk.

To state the obvious for those that visit other forums, then we have a new patch, namely #8962. Biggest change for Elemental Shamans would be that the Thundering Strikes talent (Enhancement tier 2) will boost both spell and melee crit with 5%. This will make Thundering Strikes to have a superior effect to Tidal Mastery, and like that the restoration sub-spec is gone. The 5X/11/0X-build should probably see its light for a brief period of time, until next patch arrives.

Oki, there's been a new talent build today. Sadly, I can't login to Beta for the next two weeks, but reading a few things on MMO and official beta forums yields this:

1. Thundering Strikes (enhancement tier 2) now also affect spell crits. This effectively kills any need to go into restoration, as this talent boosts shocks as well.

2. Shamanistic Focus is flat 45% shock mana cost reduction as opposed to previous 60% after melee crit. Better for elementals.

3. Elemental Fury and Call of Thunder swapped places and point costs. No change for elemental, but we'll see more resto and enh. shamans going deeper into elemental tree for extra spell crit damage

4. Thunderstorm is back to 20 yards (will need confirmation on this one, please)

5. Lava Flows talent still claims that it increases Lava Burst crit damage by 24%. Can someone test this for real?

6. Lava Burst's base damage went from 1010 average to 1230 average (220 base damage increase)

EDIT:

7. Lava Burst mana cost also dropped from 22% to 10%

8. Ghost Wolf seems to have the mana cost of 3% (same as Hex), down from 13% (probably the result of removing snare breaking)

In total, I'm thinking this right now:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000

Tufy summed that up quite nicely. Finally, some positive changes for Elemental Shaman, in that the Thundering Strikes change make it viable for Elemental Shaman to actually talent into the Elemental tree with more flexibility (eg. instead of a 100% required build for raiding, I can see the current version of the talent tree leaving a half dozen talent points that can be spent at the players discretion without impacting damage results).

An example -- similar to Tufy's thoughts, but slightly different raid build (not saying mine is any better, just showing that there are several talent points that can be used flexibly in this build without compromising the core DPS value of the spec):
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000

Another benefit for Thundering Strikes is that is actually supports the new Fire rotation, and not just Nature spells. If it stays in, it will have been a very slick change by Blizzard to increase the viability of a Fire rotation without further nerfing Lightning spells (which should be strong, as they are the iconic spells of Shaman).

This is where I'm at currently for what should be considered "must get"

http://talent.mmo-champion.com?shama...00000000000000

I love this change for elemental's benefit simply because it opens up Shammy Focus creating an affordable Flame Shock. The new Lava Burst rank on Wowhead has the same mana cost as Lightning Bolt, further increasing the efficiency.

Right now, I'm leaning towards Elemental Shields, Ghost Wolf, and 2/3 Elemental Warding for the final 7 talent points.

Furthermore, this change is beneficial to resto, as it provides an additional 5% crit that previously wasn't available.

This is indeed a great change and makes sense, as it allows both elemental and resto Shamans, who have both gotten even more crit-dependant with the new talents, to pick up another 5% crit. Personally, I'm psyched about it simply because it allows much more flexibility when choosing a raiding spec.

On the contrary I see it as such that everyone must spend points in Enhancement as there's nothing to rival it that's within a reasonable range. Tidal Mastery and Unrelenting Storm is out of reach for any Elem/Resto synergy, and the talents in between doesn't do much to help the "main" specc.