With the reduction to 2point cost of Unleashed Rage in 3.1 many of us Enhance who still pick up the 10% AP buff for the raid will have some extra points to spend.

I find myself looking at 3x 3 point talents as the DPS options to spend them.

Call of flame (many will spend 2/3 here regardless due to the pre-req)
Improved Shields (like CoF, many will have 1/3 by default for pre-req)
Reverberation

My simulated damage with 3 points remaining unspent:
4511

Then when I add one to each of the three talents:
CoF: +13dps
Imp Shields: +9dps
Reverb: +11dps

Those numbers are all going to vary a little from setup to setup, so I haven't worried about posting in the complete log details of each change. My main point is that they all seem close enough to each other to each be worth deeper consideration. They also each have their own utility and conditions that could greatly affect their value in each situation.

Call of fire obviously gains in value when a little AE is added, but loses value if there is a need for Flametongue totem.
Imp Shields is going to gain in value any fight with a boss based AE that proc's extra triggers.
Reverb will have some utility value in anything that makes use of our interrupts as well as having more value in any fight where we cannot always melee (and thus Shocks are a greater portion of our damage)

Anyway, the main reason for my post was to gauge other peoples opinions on the relative value of each of the three options and how much those slightly less quantifiable benefits are worth.

Some lucky Shaman who can rely on 10% AP from others in raid will have a couple more to spend as well.

Well i think all enhas are pickin UR because 2% melee crit.

5/5 Ancestral Knowledge is another candidate. It's about 10dps per point and give bigger manapool.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Looking at that spec at the moment. We have frost specced death knights able to provide the 20% haste, and I can probably convince a resto shaman into speccing improved strength of earth totem.

That's five talent points freed up, plus three from the new Unleashed Rage. All to spend on damage dealing talents!

I am thinking most shamans will be pickin up UR for 2% crit, then going 1 more in CoF and last 2 in AK. Atleast that's what I have been planning but will sim my choices before making them.

I don't see extra points in shock being somewhere to go because I won't be able to get 2 shocks in before having to SS. Before I would go to imp shields I would fill AK for more attack power, crit, mana pool. The point in CoF is because 5% more fire damage which should scale pretty nice because I have ele or resto to drop ft totem.

I'd be leery of spending points in reverb unless you've got 3 or 5 to put there so the CD coincides better with GCDs unless you've got a lot of haste. I'm thinking 3 is about ideal in real world with moderate haste.

Also I'd be interested to know what your sim times were, and if you did something like, put 5 points in reverb then at the end divided the DPS increase by 5, because I'm betting not every point in that ability is equal.

Is that using Searing or Magma totem? Magma's single target DPS beats Searing by a decent amount now and I don't recall it being simulated yet.

Where is that at? Enh Sim thread?

You can specify Magma Totem in the simulator by selecting 'MT' in the list of actions on the Rotation tab. I sim a good 130 DPS higher with Magma Totem running with 2/3 in Call of Flame. Adding in that last point, my magma totem damage increases the roughly expected amount, going from 526.45 to 550.01. Searing goes from 374.29 to 391.19.

Note that I don't include mana currently, however, it remains to be seen how this is adjusted by the time we get into Ulduar.

Edit: As for the points, it all depends on your group and what you do outside of raiding. The 1 point to finish Call of Flame is a given in my opinion. After that its all preference and dependant on if you can expect Horn of Winter and the Haste buff to be provided without your talents.

The mana cost of Magma totem is negligible. I don't even let my magma totems run full duration. As soon as I'm cooldown locked on my 3 attacks and don't have a MW 5 stack I refresh magma. JoW and Replenishment made UR somewhat unnecessary.

HoW does not equal Improved SoE. ISoE is always the better buff.

Those 3 values I came up with were from adding just 1 to each talent point. I didn't consider at what value the synergy between Faster shocks and fitting 1 or 2 in between each Storm Strike would occur, but if someone has a good understanding of what levels are going to give little gain due to bad overlap vs what values might give big gains due to avoiding overlap, then I'd love their wisdom on it. Getting information like that from those who understand that dynamic well is the specific reason I started the thread.

On a similar note, does the Shock and Awe mod adjust the cool down bars to take the Shock cool down talent into account?

The Sim was done with Searing Totem. Until recently I have come from raiding 10's without much raid based mana regen, so I haven't really had the chance to safely use the extra mana.
I am still coming to terms with refreshing my Searing Totem efficiently in fight. I'm a bit wary of using a global cool down to refresh the totem if one of my higher damage abilities (SS, Shock) is less than a second off of its own cool down.
I find myself ignoring pure FCFS casting rules with regards to the refreshing the totem and instead I'm looking for a 1.5 second opening to redeploy the totem in the last 15 odd seconds of its life. Having to find that 1.5 second window much more regularly (within a 5 second window every 10 seconds) to keep magma up is something that I think I would struggle to do well right now.
If you have any tricks or rules of thumb you use to pull it off efficiently, I'd love to hear.

PS: Thanks for adding in AN to the candidates, I managed to glaze over the value of Int when looking at talents. Still too much of a Leather/BC mindset I guess :-)

This is exactly what I do. If for whatever reason my Magma totem is about to drop off somehow and lava lash is ready to go, dropping magma totem then using lava lash seems to have higher returns. Plus, the totem GCD is 1 sec.

You should still prefer to use LL before refreshing Magma - magma doesn't proc MW stacks like LL can. While LL in most cases won't directly equal/exceed the DPS contribution of magma totem it definitely pulls it's weight by contributing to MW-LB damage.

I'm not sure if this is true in every situation. I think it depends on wether you can drop the totem directly after Lavalash or if you have then your other spells ready which are even more important. If this results in a longer time without the totem I'm quite sure there is a greater Damageloss as if you take lavalash at the end of the queue.

Simming shows you're correct. Prioritizing lava lash before magma totem in the sim results in a 20 dps loss.

Thank you for the test, but you are missing what I try to emphasize: In this special case it is possible that sticking to a stiff priority is wrong, because sometimes it could be better to use lavalash and drop the totem afterwards. But here we are at the point where the actual sim can't help out or is there the possibility to tell the sim only to use lavalash prior the totem if there aren't any other spells ready after the gcd? Sounds a little bit complicated to me.
Anyway you should refresh the totem early when you have a free gcd so you don't run into this problem.

If Ulduar contains some outdoor encounters Improved Ghost Wolf might be another strong place for 2 points. Depending on ecounter design the better mobility can make a huge difference...but it might also be completely useless

I probably should have clarified that I do indeed mean in an on the fly in a situation where if I LL before refreshing magma I will also have to either ES or SS next. Also if I have 4 stacks on MW I know I'll be adding even more time without magma down if I LL first.

However if I have time between LL and the next thing in my rotation I will LL and then redrop magma. The 1 sec GCD really helps make the situation an easier choice as well.

But great point bringing up LL having a chance to procc MW stacks Malan I just should have clarified heh.

If you're pretty proactive about refreshing magma you wont' run into the conflict often anyways. Just requires you to have one or more replenishment in the raid with JoW to be set for the mana cost.