The difference is that ToW does not stack with Flametongue the Totem, while Flametongue the Weapon Imbue does (ie: it's just a substitute for oils)

Some thoughts on our talents i've had:

For Raiding I'm thinking of something like:http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000
There's a stray point left over and really nothing really deserving of it. I mean nothing that really jumps out at you. It could go into any number of talents but it's pretty meaningless. That doesn't sit well with me. Almost as if we need a little more 'bloat' in the Elemental tree. (Idea below)

Everyone seems to be putting points in Improved Shields but that seems to be a PvP talent to me. My job in a Raid is to Not get hit. While stray dmg is thrown around is it enough to warrant taking IS?

Same goes for the Eye of the Storm. If I'm getting beat on in BT pushback is the last thing on my mind. Again a solid PvP talent but it would be nice to not have to take PvP talents if I'm a raiding shaman.

I'd probably put it in Improved reincarnation.


It's nice to have Thundering strikes where it's at now but I'm wondering if it's not still a good idea to go Elem/Restro. From what i've been reading our role as an off healer could Possibly become much more Important. Having points in Restro still would facilitate that. Who knows at this point though but just a thought.

Idea for one point talent:

Move Thunderstorm to LvL 10. Strip out the mana regen and much of the damage thus making it a PvP 'Escape' talent.
In it's place as our 51 point talent give us what many have wanted. A strong targetable AoE. 'Earthquake' for example :-) (why are Shamans so interested in making the ground shake?)

I've never liked Thunderstorm. Imop It's wrong to have our 51 point talent be so tilted to one play style(PvP) over another(PvE). I can't imagine throwing mobs back 20 yards in an instance. It does have some mana regen possibilities but to me it just seems to be a straight up leveling and PvP talent.. Not something I want to see as our 51 point talent.


Edit: had saved the post from the other day when i was embargoed as new member.. hadn't seen the change to Lava flows concerning range of FS

Surprised no one has mentioned this yet... Completely undocumented buff. It is not even in the tooltips, but... SE&F now reduces the cooldown of chain lightning by 0.5 seconds per talent point.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000 would be more practical.

ToW stacks with Flametongue Weapon for healing though. ToW still last for only 2 min.

When i use flametongue weapon on the current PTR (8970) i gain more FIRE spell damage, not all round spell damage
The tooltip clearly states "increasing total spell damage by 96".
Is it giving only +fire damage intentional or just a bug ? (visual or otherwise)

Draenei Hit Racial has been merged to 1% to both melee and spell casting. (Relevant to the discussion? No. Interesting? Yes.)

To the above poster: Lava Burst is 30 yards range only.

I can also confirm that Flametongue grants 96 fire damage only (level 70 rank, not talented).

Interesting, now i wonder if its actually bug or they are taking just another step to ensure shaman will use FlS LvB rotation but since its not inthe patch notes... well, my guess is bug

This would make spell useless becouse there is weapon oils.

Even if it were reduced to 0 cooldown, the spell would fall far behind any serious AoE. Chain Lightning needs a complete rework if it's supposed to be our spammable AoE spell. If Blizzard wants to introduce AoE to our class, there are tons of good solutions, from Magma totem boosted, to giving us a good channeled AoE such as Earthquake.

When i use flametongue weapon on the current PTR (8970) i gain more FIRE spell damage, not all round spell damage
The tooltip clearly states "increasing total spell damage by 96".
Is it giving only +fire damage intentional or just a bug ? (visual or otherwise)

I'm voting bug, a change like this would be introduced through a blue or at least a patch note.

(why are Shamans so interested in making the ground shake?)

Because Thrall destroyed a whole fortress with it and because Farseers had it in Warcraft 3:

Warcraft III - Orcs -> Units -> Far Seer
(scroll down)

In warcraft 3, that spell was similar to antistructure Blizzard. It should be noted that back then, it only slowed units, not dealt any damage to it. That's problem no. 1. Additionally, Earthquake lasted 25 seconds and had a cooldown of 60 seconds, with a mana cost of 150 (twice the Blizzard). This may not seem important, but Blizzard tends to stick close to War3 spell effects when designing wow stuff (compare for instance mollyporph with hex) - well, for everyone but shamans, that is, or our Sentry totem would detect rogues

However, playing through a certain questline (those in Beta playing horde will know what I mean), I'm pretty sure there's a few kickass spells Blizzard could take from Thrall and apply them to shamans as our AoE. I'd still prefer to see my original "Thunderstorm" idea, i.e. a "channeled" chainlightning effect originating at shaman's position, attacking random X targets with bolts of lightning for a certain duration.

I have to confess to being rather confused by Blizzard's continued attempts to give us improvements to Flame Shock. It seems rather counterintuitive when the very nature of Lava Burst encourages both enhancement and elemental shaman to use it as often as the cooldown comes up, meaning we'll never get more than 3 ticks of Flame Shock anyway (unless we happen to be on the move or something of that sort). This glyph and the extra 50% damage on FS dot from SE&F just don't make much sense to me. The glyph I can ignore, of course, but I still tend to think SE&F is just kind of lacking in elegance and effectiveness in its current form. The fact that it still retains the increased range on ES (which is pretty much purely a PvP benefit, I would think?) only adds to the overall unfocused, kludgy feel.

Anyway, I don't want to whine too much here. Overall the changes seem to be shaping up nicely. It would be interesting to see some sort of real AoE, though. As mentioned, Earthquake would fit right in, though it would need some tweaking from its original form. Some other sort of lightning AoE would also be good. Perhaps a Ball Lightning spell (I'm thinking of something that behaves rather like a Flare from Curator)?

A critical thing that people are not talking about, is the lack of scaling for Elemental damage spells.

The scaling talents we've had have been nerfed or removed, and the compensations we've been given were more powerful base spells.

That works only at the gearing point Blizzard is testing us at. Which will take what, 4-6 months after the game hits retail for the top raiders to have farmed out.

And after that, what about elemental shaman in gear that comes out down the road? Powerful Base spell + poor scaling = will be left behind by other classes.

It seems to me that this topic is not being discussed much at all.

Storm, Earth and Fire nerfed from 25% to 10%, but hey they increased the base damage of Lava Burst to compensate ... that's a terrible, horrible, aweful tradeoff for Shaman players.

As gear progresses, Shaman will fall behind in PvE and PvP due to the current lack of scaling. Blizzard certainly won't be releasing a new rank of damage spells every new content patch.

That's not exactly true. First, SEF was given a +10% LB empowerment in the talent changes, but you need to realize that LO basically works like an empowered talent in that it's a chance to one-and-a-half up on scaling talents, and it even scales with haste.

The other thing you need to realize is that the changes to mage Imp scorch (and WC), balance druid Earth and Moon, and warlock Curse of Elements are FAR better for eshams than buffs to selfish talents- talents that only benefit yourself. What ele shamans lacked the most was raid synergy, and that's been heftily addressed. Plus, as a severely crit-happy spec design, elemental shamans are most likely to be the target of the newest design of a mage's Focus Magic.

All-in-all, I'm really happy with the changes that have been made... I'm just somewhat confused by the changes that have been made in the last build.

You need to stop conflating raid buffs that the entire raid benefits from, and personal buffs that only particular classes benefit from. Everything you listed as a personal scaling buff, is in reality a raid scaling buff, with the exception of Lightning Overload. That is a serious lapse in judgment on your part.

Several classes (Paladins, Death Knights, Rogues, Warlocks, Druids) bring the same raid buffs that Elemental Shaman do, and the raid buffs do not stack (for the most part). And all of the classes gain the same benefits from raid buffs as do Shaman.

That means that, when all is said and done, if you are not in a casual raid that doesn't care about things like DPS, and just brings you because you are friends with the GM, Shaman will have to have equal damage output as every other class.

And right now, Shaman do not have personal scaling talents that match other classes.

Storm Earth and Fire benefits 40% of our DPS by 10% spell power scaling? Warlock Shadow and Flame gets 20% spell power scaling. Mage Empowered Fireball gives 15% spell power scaling.

That's the kind of scaling that I am talking about. Whenever the designers nerf our scaling talents (Like SE&F) and offset it with a buff to base spell damage, that is a long-term nerf. It's like giving out tax rebates in the middle of a war -- sounds great to ignorant people everywhere, and next thing you know your economy has collapsed and you are $10 Trillion in debt.

[e] From IRC
<Vontre1> 1 spd = 1.27 dps
<Vontre1> 1 crit rating = 1.1 dps
<Vontre1> 1 haste = 1.03 dps

While on my spreadsheet it's 0.832. 0.934, 2.374.

Scales differently, not better nor worse.

1. Who are you responding to.

2. Numbers with zero context are meaningless.

edit: thanks for clarifying, first set is Mage and 2nd set is Elemental. I think there is something broken with your spreadsheet;

1)With no gear contribution Elemental Shaman have a 20% crit rate, and with very basic gear that goes over 40%, with WotLK talents. So without even trying, Elemental Shaman are at a point where crit stats have diminishing returns.

2)FlS and Lava Burst, which make up 50% of the rotation, gain almost no benefit at all from crit stats (LvB gains absolutely nothing, and FlS only gains about 1/2 benefit.

3)Even if your spreadsheet isn't broken (and it is), and we use those theorycraft numbers, and you compare to a Mage with 2400 spell damage, it will take a Shaman 1,284 +haste to match the Mage. It is possible for the Mage to get those stats. It is impossible for the Shaman. Ergo, Shaman scale much worse, since the only way they can achieve scaling parity with a Mage is through gaining impossible stats.

And that's what I am talking about. People on the beta and PTR forums have completely over-looked this, and are just drinking the kool-aid with a smile and a thank you. Worse is not different, it is worse.

Holy moly, haste is *that* good?

How can critt possibly be better than spellpower when Lava Burst gains 0 of it and Flame Shock close to 0?
Haste is understandable because our base numbers are so high, but in our cooldown based rotation it seems a bit ouf of place.

I'd much rather scale well with spellpower (old storm earth and fire gave us the highest spelldamage gained / second in the game) than haste because of the horrible impact it has on our mana pool.

EDIT: And how does hit enter into this? I've heard that because hit is now so expensive, it doesn't become better than spellpower after a certain, rather high amount of the latter.

Scaling of haste can be that high only if you have rotation based on LB spam. If you try to fit it in any kind of cooldown based rotation you basicaly loose any dps gain from haste. And this is without th point Graze made about Lava burst and Flame shock.
If you want to see real impact of different stats you first need to find the best possible rotation and than to scale it according to haste because of the cooldowns of our spells (i am just too bad at math to do it myself ).

Not only is there the negative mana implications, but there is literally no possible way for +haste to keep up with +damage simply because you can not stack enough +haste even on a 1:2 basis (per my previous post, for instance, a Mage can get 2400 spell damage, shaman can not get 1284 spell haste because that amount of haste is not possible).

32.8 haste is 1% haste at 80 and increases your DPS by 75.4?
That would imply at least 7.5k DPS as ballpark estimate?
Seems like the haste coefficient wasn't converted to level 80 or something.


As for the hit rating question:
It depends on your base_dmg/scaling_coeffient of your spells.
A mage needs about 2.3k spell damage for hit gems to break even with spell damage gems.
From your Lightning Bolt stats, it looks like you'll need about 2.1k spell power.

So, with a fully gemmed, enchanted Naxx-10 kit and raid buffs, you should cap your spell hit.

Lightning Bolt coefficient was nerfed again? I've been hitting for a few hundred less per Lightning Bolt all day, very consistent loss of damage. <_<