Are there any EJs looking into PVP specs for Elemental? I'm new to PVP elemental for wrath so I'm speculating talents in terms of their value. I'm goofing around with specs but here is what I am coming up with:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Shaman -> Talent Calculator

This is the non 3.0.8 but some things wont change much.

Is totem of wrath very useful in PVP? I am thinking about dropping Imp Fire nova more due to the blast wave stun similarity.

I'm leaning more to putting points in Thundering Strikes (+5% crit) vs. Reverberation (-1s cooldown for shocks). I think the burst value outweighs the tactical value of reduced shocks.

Is lightning the default shield? I can see using water shield if you are hurting for mana, but lightning seems to hurt more with Improved Shields.

Any feedback would be great!

Beesknee
Crushridge

Improved Shields and guardian totems are nice, but if you don't take lightning overload, you are gimping your burst damage, which is the elemental shaman's role in arena. An extra proc can be the difference between life and death.

As far as reverb goes, I personally would drop convection for it, being a high priority target, who works best with burst teams, the chances of you or them living to see the end of your mana bar are pretty slim, and even if the fight does drag out, you can usually maintain it with water shield procs.

For ToW, I've found that searing and fire nova totem are your best bets for arena, as they continue to do damage even when you can't, just don't drop them near the CC target.

Id say something around this would be good for post 3.0.8.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...h=000000000000

Unless a pvp veteran can say different, id say 3% crit would be better than 24% duration off snares.

How much of your time are you casting LBs and CLs though? It would seem all your burst damage would come from LvB combos, which cant proc Lightning Overload.

Even at lvl 70 with massive pushback, we were able to hard cast quite a bit in 5s and 3s. In fact, successful teams with an Ele Shaman were largely focused on giving him space and allowing him to hard cast. With pushback the way it is in WOTLK I expect we'll be hard-casting quite a bit, and Lightning casts of various kinds will remain our main source of damage. You'll use LvB to deliver on-demand burst damage, but if it's the main component of your damage you won't be doing much.

Let's get a discussion on some hybrid specs going, ele~resto builds look good for 3 dps groups.

Absolutely. I can't say much for 3s, but in 5s the team (2345/6) the team would often lay down a foundation of damage on one target and then shift to another. The elemental shaman had to take part in both of these efforts. If the decoy target didn't take enough damage for the team to take the threat seriously, the switch and gib wouldn't have been successful. So you'll spend plenty of time casting lightning bolts in arena, using your LvB as part of a burst effort.

Unfortunately, I don't think elemental shaman will get any better in arenas at 80 than they were at 70. They'll still be terrible in 2s and very weak in 3s. They'll be effective in the right 5s teams, with about the same burst potential they enjoyed at 70. The new elemental mastery makes an interesting change, giving the shaman 20 seconds (presumably during bloodlust and trinkets) where they turn out a shitload of damage. Great on paper, but in competitive arenas, it means elemental shaman have to be shut down. Just like at 70 they'll have a couple people standing on them to stop their output. They have greater survivability with the 30% damage reduction while CCed, so that will help the rest of the team keep them standing.

In the 2345 at 70, the opposing team had to shut down the elemental shaman. Doing so meant the inbound damage could be managed, aside from the NS+EM+CL burst with a shock. At lvl 80, that tactic doesn't really change, except that now the opposing team doesn't have to worry about an instant cast burst from the shaman. The shaman has to use part of his old burst (earth shock) to set up a flame shock, fire timers, and then hard cast their burst (including LvB). This makes the shaman's burst more susceptable to mitigation via interrupts, pushback, curse of tongues, nature tree lockout, etc. I think what I'm saying is that, at lvl 70, a rogue on the elemental shaman would wreck their damage output, except for their 2 GCD burst potential. At lvl 80, the shaman will still have their shock, but the rest of their damage will be from hard casting only. So the tactic to beat a 2345 (stop the shaman from producing damage) will even be more effective than it previously was.

Sure, elemental got a tool to help (Thunderstorm), but I think it will be largely ineffective in taking the shaman from a lockdown to free casting. It will be better used to interrupt healers or to push healers out of position with respect to their team mates rather than be used as a defensive tool (in 5s).

A Thunderstorm could give you time to get off a hex on someone trying to counter the Shaman, although I don't know who would be a better target for the hex whether it be the burstee or the elemental counter. I have come to love hex, as you can unload on the little frog a ton before the actual CC breaks.

I'm going to try doing 2s with a rogue baiting the healer with a stunlock burst attack from the shaman and rogue, and hex it when they trinket.

I am just starting to pvp on my shaman after being pve resto for BC, so any tips would be cool.

Thus far I've found it very powerful for previously mentioned situations, in Blade's Edge and Dalaran Sewers, both of which can force a healer to have to walk all the way around to heal their team mate/mates. Especially in Blade's Edge, for making a switch it highly useful to knock their Paladin off the edge.

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I saw something above about mix specs, didn't know for surely if it was for Pvp/Pve mix or like Ele/Resto but for the Pve
I would go for something like: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
And for the Ele/Resto Pvp spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
I don't know to much about the Pvp spec, maybe wanting a little more into resto for the cleanse, but that's pretty much how it went for my mix spec. (Accounting less things because of level 70)

You want 6% hit to cap against taurens, night elves, and blood elves. Up until this previous patch any hit over 4% was worthless because talents and racials were unaffected. Blizzard fixed the racials, said nothing about talents. With 3 pieces of deadly hit you have 4.35% hit, draenei has 1 more, and 1 point in the ele talent will cap you.

I think ele is still pretty borked as far as 2s goes, however, I have not tried it this season personally (resto for 2s). I play ele for 3s and 5s and use this spec Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (should also be in armory).

I think reverb is a pretty useful talent especially on teams where you may switch targets very rapidly and any lower cooldown on your shock can be helpful. However, with the comps that I play I prefer the fire nova stun. If you can catch a healer in the nova stun you can almost solo them with a decent rotation (drop totem, CL, FShock, LvB hit on stun, CL should be up again, shock or ts, etc). Also depends on your dps partners in 5s. I wouldn't take imp fire nova if say I were playing with a 2 or 3 caster team (rogue/spriest/mage/ele/paladin as an example) because taking the 280 sp and 3% crit away from the other dps during a burn may be less beneficial overall.

Leaving out elemental oath is silly with the new changes to how it affects clearcasting.

Another option for a spec is to go ele/resto, something like this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I don't think I'd do this for 3s, even though the dispel resist on flameshock would be very useful. This build is something I've considered for 5s (specifically 4 dps) because getting a few big tidal waves heals off after your first target dies can usually be more effective in ensuring a win, especially if your paladin is already out of bubble and probably being harassed/zerged by now. I don't currently do 4 dps 5s though, so I've stuck with the ele/enh spec.

[e] Thunderstorm is definitely more useful for throwing off positioning. Another point I left out is that I feel if you're playing ele you really cannot play without a holy paladin. Conc aura allowing you cap any pushback is too important without NS as part of your burst. In my 3s, we will often even use Hand of Protection for the sole purpose of allowing me to burn something that got stuck in a trap, rather than use it to save someone.

So while you can be successful, elemental shamans are far from favorable to play currently.

I've played an Elemental Shaman as my main pretty much forever and have always been a PvP guy as opposed to PvE. That said I'm pretty sure that this is the darkest time for Elemental Shaman in the history of WoW.

Here's the spec I've been working with lately for arenas.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...h=000000000000

I'm going to try to address some of the question that might come up.

5/5 Reverberation. I find this talent essential because shocks are the biggest form of Shaman utility and you want to have the option to use one as often as possible whether to interrupt a caster, kite a melee, or set up your Lava Burst burst. I also think that if you are going to get it has to be a 5/5 as opposed to a 3/5 because .6 seconds reduction is just going to throw off the timing of your GCDs.

No Totem of Wrath. I opted to not spend a point here because in past experience ToW would be down for about 5-6 seconds if I had setup time before I would be dropping Fire Nova for the stun. Once you get that far into a fight you really don't have time to waste a GCD redropping ToW (provided you live that long). Also, if you get jumped without prep time you definitely will not have a GCD to spend dropping ToW.

I noticed that some people didn't go in for Lightning Overload or Elemental Oath. Oath's 10% damage is really too good to pass up especially since we now have a guaranteed crit in LvB not to mention a really high crit rate from gear and talents. Oath definitely should be in every Elemental spec. LO is slightly more questionable. In 5v5 it is a must have as you are guaranteed to get in some Lightning casts. In 3v3 and 2v2 when an Elemental Shaman is almost guaranteed to be the focus target, and thus probably locked down, I could see how people might want to pass this up.

No Improved Ghost Wolf. Again, my spec is mainly built for 5v5 and I find that I really do not benefit from having instant GW. Even in 3v3 and 2v2 it really doesn't get me away from any melee (who WILL be on me) so I find I'm just wasting my GCD's casting it.

Guardian Totems. I see a lot of you going into Guardian Totems. I'm not really sure why. Stoneskin I find is not worth a GCD even with the extra 20% and 2 seconds off Grounding Totem is nice but not essential since mainly I find that melee is my problem, not casters.

Improved Shields. Again, don't really find this essential. I'm always dead before I get close to oom and the Lightning Shield damage is mediocre at best.

I think that's everything people might question, but if there are any other questions on my spec please post away with them and I will answer as best I can.

One last thing. With the sort of announced nerf to Chain Lightning's single target damage it may be possible to pass on Storm, Earth, and Fire since with that change we probably won't be casting Chain Lightning anymore, or at least not often.

Thanks for reading.

I saw some discussion about the possibility of a resto Elemental spec.

Here's what I come up with. http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...h=000000000000

Basically this is the spec for those people who believe that Nature's Swiftness is still better than Thunderstorm. Personally I agree with this idea. Nature's Swiftness IS better than Thunderstorm for several reasons.

1. A Nature's Swiftness Lightning Bolt will do about as much single target damage as a Thunderstorm.
2. Thunderstorm can not be used when attacking a ranged target. In this instance it is basically a wasted talent.
3. The knockback on Thunderstorm buys an Elemental Shaman less time than the Fire Nova stun does. It really isn't useful for getting melee off you provided you're on level ground (which all arenas are) and not on a bridge or ledge.
4. The knockback on Thunderstorm bugs out for me about 30% of the time. I'm not really sure why, my targets are not stunned or rooted, but I Tstorm and they just stand there.
5. Nature's Swiftness can be used to heal yourself or another friendly target.

From this it is pretty easy to see that Nature's Swiftness is superior to Thunderstorm as a talent. Given a straight choice between Nature's Swiftness and Thunderstorm I would always take Nature's Swiftness for PvP. (If you have different opinions please post away. I'd like to get some discussion going on this topic)

That said, the problem is that you are not just trading Thunderstorm for Nature's Swiftness. You are trading Thunderstorm + 20 other points in the Elemental and Enhancement trees for Nature's Swiftness + 20 other resto talents.

It is these other 20 talents that makes a Nature's Swiftness spec inferior to a Thunderstorm spec.

Specifically it is tier's 1 and 2 of the Resto tree that are the primary cause of this. Compare the Nature's Swiftness build I just posted with the Thunderstorm build I posted in my last post and compare the talents I lost with the talents I gained.

No matter how you slice it I do not think that Nature's Swiftness's benefits outweigh Thunderstorm + the other lost talents in the Elemental and Enhancement tree.

Thanks for reading.

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Kegsta, on your spec I really think that you should find a way to get Improved Fire Nova. The AoE stun is just ridiculously good and the damage isn't half bad either. I'd say -2 Elemental Precision or -2 Unrelenting Storm. I understand that you're trying to PvE and PvP with this spec but in my experience that only leads to gimping yourself in both areas. In my opinion when you want to PvP, pay the 50 gold, drop 3 out of Elemental Precision (since you do not need the +hit if you have the Deadly hit cloak, the Deadly ring, and the Mark of the War Prisoner out of heroic Violet Hold) and put 2 into Imp Fire Nova and 1 into Shamanistic Focus. You won't regret it.

I'm really liking the power word: stoneclaw too I do have to re-wire my brain though to think about dropping it in situations since I NEVER used it PvP before. The chance for it to be useful though will present itself many many times.

Here is my pvp spec with the new talents: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...0&version=9614


Is haste still a preferred stat over crit for us in pvp? I would still think so since we are already guaranteed to crit with FS + LvB, and resilience trivializes crit as we all know, so getting spells off faster would be a better option I would imagine. I'm asking because I want to figure out what would be the best enchant for our cloak: resist, penetration, or haste?

With the new talents, I was actually thinking a Frost Shock kite spec would be interesting.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...0&version=9614

Depending on your role in arena's one could possibly kite melee whilst bursting them down. 5 second icetrap with a 4 second cooldown Frost Shock? You would still have FireNova for aoe-stuns if multiple mobs get close, but you do lose out on Thunderstorm and some extra dps talents. Sounds like an interesting setup imo, but I have to admit I have never really played Arena's very seriously, so it's a mere layman's opinion.

Call it FrozenPower/Booming Echos


NOTE: I am not that good @ arenas. I know it I admit it, but I am pretty good at theory. I kow how I SHOULD do arenas, Im just not that good at twitch


Im not a fan of hybrid specs, but a post in another thread on 3 seconds shocks made me wonder if a spec like this would be useful.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...0&version=9626



Gear: Elemental Gear, PVP oriented, a good player might be able to get by with PVE gear for max dmg, but Im not that good. However, this build is about control. Making sure you have some hit would be helpful. Maybe a trinket?

Weapons: Catser weapon with FT in the MH, Fast high DPS dagger with FT in the OH. The KT mace and any 1.4 speed dagger would be optimal.

Gems: Its PVP, you go for sta/resil so yeah whatever.

Enchants: See gems

Glyphs: FS, shocking (for reduced GCD) and Lava

Keep up lightning shield especially if you are not using ES

The key to the build is a melee/shock combo. The spec is all about control rather than burst and would be mainly for BG's and 5's. Maybe 3's too.The prefrerred method for this is to FS from range and LvB if possible. Then close and SS/ES. Then you FS and SS until you have to LvB again. This gives you time to drop totems, etc. You have very good dmg from LvB (missing lava flows but all the rest of the talents). Plus you have the DoT from FS which will continue to tick even if you Frostshock or ES.



Against casters you have the ability to stay in melee range using frost shock as needed and you have ES for interupts. You might also switch your MH weapon to frostbrand against casters to help keep them close. This can be done ealry in any fight.

Against melee you can do the normal rotation, or if possible, get to range and use frozen power to kite them. Even with DR, a FS every 3 seconds will cripple a melee. Obviously most melee has the abiility to close on you, but if your partners can peel them off you can get away again. Or you can just turn on them and maximize dps.

One note, this build would be GREAT at peeling melee off of casters. Especially in 5's where you can peel 1 melee every 3 sec alternating to reduce the DR effects


Pros- Very mobile, dual weilding for more FT bonus dmg, very good at control (frozen power+booming echos). Decent burst...lvB/SS/ES combo for max burst. Pop Elemental Mastery for a good crit rate during burst attempts.

Cons- Missing some of the good PVP defensive talents (Astral shift, Earthen power), missing some of synergy (MQ, Lava Flows, TStorm). Burst is not as good as a pure Elemental and relies on being in melee for max effect. Relatively low AP (although white dmg is not the point). Higher miss % due to DW.

Took ur idea and worked a little on ur spec Sprout.

I would definately go for
mmo-champion - talents <-- that spec instead..

Seems much better imo, with more survivability... Dun think its as good as deep specs in arena, cuz of less burst. But im pretty sure it could be fun in battlegrounds, maybe some arenas too .

Simply there would be 2 different tactics.

If ur target is on some1, who is attacking some1 else:

0.0s Flame Shock
1.5s Lava Burst
3.4s Frost Shock (snaring) - Assuming lag, delay and such im sure that ur FS + LvB is rdy at around 3.2s (and cooldown on shocks with these talents are 3.4s)
5.0s Lightning Bolt
7.0s Lightning Bolt
(8.4s Snare breaks)
9.0s Fire Nova Totem
now just spam something till he reaches u, around that time ur fire nova totem stuns him, and then Stormstrike + Earth Shock and now everything should be pretty obvious if u know how to PvP.


If the target is comming towards u:

0.0s Frost Shock
1.5s Lightning Bolt
3.5s Flame Shock
5.0s Lava Burst
(5.0s Snare breaks)
6.5 Fire Nova Totem
Again, now he comes close and gets stunned. Stormstrike + Earth Shock and do ur thing

Ofcourse all this is situational, and will properly not happen very often.. But im sure that this tactic could be fun , Earthbind/Frost Shock and instant Ghost Wolf gives nice options to kite :p.


By the way this spec will obviously require pretty decent gear.

Got a question, what is the caster hit cap in pvp? It used to be 3%, and now I'm guessing it's 4% since that 1% of guaranteed resist was done away with? Or did that only apply to boss mobs and not players?

If you are going to be playing elemental in arena's you will be doing 5's and as such , you will be the one that needs the peeling not other people. You are the person that is tanking the damage, because you will otherwise demolish the other team, you will need the maximum available survivability.
The lowered cool-down on frost/flame shock may seem nice, but is completely irrelevant, you will not be the person snaring people and on swaps you will be saving your shock for a heal interrupt.
If you apply a new snare to a target it will reset the old one, if you are playing with a hunter, you really do not want to reset his trap snare, if you are playing with a warrior same deal as the snare is now dispel-able leaving the warrior to spend more rage on his target.
Your best case scenario on shocks is 4.5 crits on frost shocks, this is not going to do you any good with 20k health pools and healers.
What you want to do is chain interrupting enemy casters/healers, while fully assisting dmg doing fast swaps when playing a 2 healer set-up, in a 1 healer set-up you interrupt and disrupt the enemy's formation while adding some burst.
At this point there is nothing I would be willing to drop for booming echoes, even the situational use of TOW would be the preferred option in my opinion. It's a horrible talent for pvp and pve , I have no idea what they thought when they made it.