I'm wondering about two specific items, [Venture Co. Lightning Rod] and [Thunder Capacitor], and how good (or bad) they are for an Elemental Shaman. The former I'm obviously going to replace with a real totem eventually, but I'm not sure how big an upgrade it would be to figure out where I should prioritize that slot, and the latter I use because I remember the Lightning Capacitor being really good for Elemental Shaman at 70, although I have no idea how this compares to other trinkets.

Melee, it's a completely melee attack. It can be dodged and parried and uses all the melee tables. Just when it comes to figuring out the actual damage it becomes fire damage and is affected by any debuff that would increase fire damage.

But Malan had the courtesy not to phrase it like that.

I was around when people in the megathread started trying the /castrandom macros, as well as when we sim'd it and found the worst priority of SS/ES/LL was within 5% dps of the best. My contention was with the way you painted SS and LL as equivalents, when SS has been asserted as the better of those two all along. Perhaps the damage is roughly equivalent between the two as you outlined, but SS includes two attacks (and thus another chance to proc MW) as well as a chance to proc WF (which is in turn more MW potential).

And you forgot the OTHER other differences. Such as SS launching WF and offering 2 chances at MW procs, rather than just one. SS also has two chances to crit and thus two chances to refresh Flurry.

LL and SS both look the same in WWS, but Stormstrike is vastly superior. Try doing a sim where you remove SS completely -- the total loss in DPS is roughly equivalent to removing earth shock.

I'd also like to know this. I realize someone answered beforehand that pure INT gems are beneficial for regen. I would be putting [Luminous Monarch Topaz] in red slots and [Dazzling Forest Emerald] in blue slots.

It really depends what you need, based upon your normal raid (0/1/2 sources of replenishment, stacked mana totems, normal healing assignments) and your current gear. I've hit 25k mana fully buffed and to be honest I'm finding that in a normal 2-replenishment, 25-man raid that's too much (yet in 10man raids I can be gasping for every single point of mana I can find).

Look at your gear, look at your needs, and *then* make an educated decision to gem for throughput (spell power in red, haste in yellow, spell power + mp5 in blue), longevity (sp + int in red, pure int in yellow, int + mp5 in blue) or a combination (spell power in red, int or haste in yellow, int + mp5 in blue).

You'll also want to pay attention to socket bonuses and decide whether to follow the colours or just put the "best" gem in all slots.

Enhancement

I hit 70 right as LK dropped and thus had no time to farm any Badges of Justice. Do I need to go back and run Kara/70-heroics to get a decent totem? The Emblem-purchasable totems seem awfully lackluster to me, and my guild is sticking to 10-man raids (so no totem drop for me in Naxx). Thanks.

So you are saying that you weren't being a bit snarky with your response? I know what both attacks do and I'm pretty sure you know that I know what they do and there really wasn't any reason to phrase your reply like that unless you were trying to be snarky which is how I took it.


I never said to remove Stormstrike, priorities are very different then removal.

Since people don't like to use the sim to test this for themselves, I did the work for you.

DPS order for all possible priorities (using my current stats and all raid buffs - WF/FT both slow).

1. ES - LL - MW5 - SS -> 4366.32
2. ES - MW5 - SS - LL -> 4365.71
3. LL - ES - MW5 - SS -> 4364.33
4. SS - ES - LL - MW5 -> 4362.68
5. LL - SS - ES - MW5 -> 4361.29
6. ES - SS - LL - MW5 -> 4360.76
7. SS - LL - ES - MW5 -> 4360.48
8. ES - MW5 - LL - SS -> 4355.58
9. SS - ES - MW5 - LL -> 4355.31
10. MW5 - SS - ES - LL -> 4350.94
11. ES - LL - SS - MW5 -> 4350.49
12. MW5 - ES - SS - LL -> 4349.39
13. ES - SS - MW5 - LL -> 4349.07
14. LL - ES - SS - MW5 -> 4348.24
15. LL - MW5 - SS - ES -> 4343.25
16. LL - MW5 - ES - SS -> 4340.21
17. MW5 - SS - LL - ES -> 4336.48
18. MW5 - ES - LL - SS -> 4334.32
19. MW5 - LL - SS - ES -> 4334.18
20. SS - MW5 - ES - LL -> 4325.64
21. MW5 - LL - ES - SS -> 4325.15
22. SS - LL - MW5 - ES -> 4309.74
23. LL - SS - MW5 - ES -> 4308.24
24. SS - MW5 - LL - ES -> 4298.18


Doesn't really seem to matter very much what order you press the buttons does it (although pressing ES more often does seem to trend with more dps)? Personally I like having MW5 and ES on separate buttons (sometimes you need to interrupt and other times you need to save the MW5 to heal) and I like to hit SS first when I get into melee range, so for me using this macro + 2 bindings works very well.

/cast [mod:alt] Stormstrike
/castrandom Stormstrike, Lava Lash

But if you can pull some logic from the above that establishes that you should always hit SS before LL, I can't wait to hear about it.


Hate to say it but yah it would be worth it to go back and farm the badges to get yourself a Stonebreakers Totem. Either that or wait the few weeks till season 5 starts and then farm the honor/Arena points for one of the new Lava Lash totems.

Pretty sure there is a decent green quest reward totem that can hold you over till the next Arena season starts if you can't find groups to run the old heroics for badges.

[Totem of the Tundra]

As a jewel crafter I have access to Twilight Serpent and also have Thunder Capacitor. However, also have gotten Thorny Rose Brooch, and Rune of Infinite Power. So my question is, which ones to use and what combination.


Currently I'm running 152 hit and 250 (or so) haste.

OK, cool, good to hear confirmation on that. My napkin calculations made the Thunder Capacitor look way better than a green trinket has any right to, so I'm glad I wasn't too out there in thinking it was really a pretty good trinket. I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing that it crits with your crit rate. I'll try to remember to install recount and figure that out.

What I'm trying to figure out it exactly how much better the Skycall Totem is than my current relic, and whether or not it's worth annoying some friends to help me farm a few old badges for it. I have the badges for the Totem of the Elemental Plane, but everything I've read is that it's a downgrade from the Skycall Totem so I'm not too keen on picking it up.

I forgot to update my profile here, it should have my Shaman now.

Don't know if you are a Draenei or not, but if you are, this is what you need hit-wise, assuming no Boomkin/SP:

1% racial
3% Elemental Precision
13% = 342 Hit Rating
= 17%

So you need 342 rating from gear to be capped. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, took this info from Spell Hit Discussion )

I would definitely drop some haste for hit, as it is REALLY annoying to miss while in a raid. This is assuming you are raiding, as bosses in heroics are only level 82 and don't take nearly as much +hit to be capped against. Twilight Serpent is good, but there are better trinkets out there, which are pretty easy to get.

There used to be quite a bit of theorycrafting on Skycall Totem in the old threads, but I can't find it anymore. I'm sure someone has some calculations somewhere.

Thanks though for posting about that LvB totem, didn't even know that existed!

My guess is that the 492 mana you are usually seeing is from Improved Water Shield procs as restoration spec, which do not get the benefit of Improved Shields (as I noted earlier in the thread), whereas the 549 is the proper amount of mana returned when water shield triggers from environmental triggers and taking damage. You can prove this by casting water shield and finding a mob to go beat on you -- you should get the expected 549 mana/orb returned when you take damage.

Interestingly enough, the resto 2T7 bonus affects improved water shield procs, but the improved shields talent does not. One of these two is almost definitely a bug (probably improved shields) but Blizzard has not posted anything confirming this issue.

You're correct, I do get 549 mana from mobs. The strange thing is that the spell is only supposed to return 400 mana. I had tested it without 3/3 imp. shields (via heal procs) to return 428 mana, which seemed reasonable as part of the normal spell-scaling-with-level from a level 76 spell and the amount as increasing appropriately with the talent (428*1.15 = 493). I didn't keep great notes on how I derived that, though, so it's possible I back calculated but even so the numbers are weird.

Taking 549/1.15 = 477.3. The only thing that makes sense to me is that 477 = 428 + 50 (basically), or in other words that orbs taken off via damage get a 50% of the mp5 bonus. I dimly recall hearing something about this when they added the mp5 aspect of water shield, but I wasn't actually playing a shaman at the time.

There is definitely something odd about Water Shield, and it's really unclear exactly why it is calculated the way it is, or even the exact formula used. Regardless, the way that the orbs are calculated leads me to believe that the differences are caused by something wonky with the way Improved Water Shield interacts with our other abilities and mechanics. The additional "50% of passive mp5 granted by water shield" you have noticed seems like a good starting point for further testing (and of course, we have to figure if that is affected by improved shields, 2T7, and glyph of water mastery).

I guess our mana regen is much more complicated than we first thought.

Is there a site that has the proposed updated elemental talent trees? I want to play with talent point possibilities, and would like to see what I can put together.

So alot of people seem to think that the [Thunder Capacitor] is a good trinket, what I wonder is, how good is it really?

For example is it worth switching it out for [Sundial of the Exiled] if we assume being hit capped?

http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t36782-s...p6/#post993309

12 Posts above you. It's pretty simple to work out with your chosen rotation and your current crit rating how many crits/second you'll be getting. It's then a case of working out how many times this will fire off during your rotation, multiply by damage stated in the tooltip and divide to find the additional DPS.

[Forge Ember] does not share a cooldown with the Sundial. I've had them both go off at the same time from the same spell cast. Just informational for those that like passive trinkets.

Enhancement

Which meta comes out on top, 21 Agi or 21 Crit? On the one hand you get some AP with your crit from Agi, but it's only melee crit. On the other, you get both melee and spell crit. Both seem to be pretty common as I search through the armories of various Shaman. Does it come down to running the sim to determine which is better or is one always going to trounce the other? Thanks.

More than likely the 21 Agi one will come out on top, not because 21 Agi is better than 21 Crit, but because it only takes 1 blue gem to activate. So unless you're a JC with those nifty all color gems, you'll take another hit stat-wise in gemming.

Agi also requires a yellow though so that can also be suboptimal once you can reach the hit cap without needing the gems.

Basically the 2 metas are equal so just use whichever one fits your current gemming scheme better.

I like socket bonuses (free stats!) so I went with the crit one because it fit better with my gemming.

Yes, an orange (AP & Crit) gem won't be as great as a pure AP gem, but the crit is going to be alot better for dps than the stam on a purple. But socket bonuses and being able to reach the hit cap from gear alone (and the feet enchant) will play a part in it too. I did a little write up in the TTT on the best way to get to the hit/expertise caps if gear doesn't get you there. Just going to copy the results over here so more people can see it. This is a priority list, so follow the changes in order until you hit the caps ie: Feet enchant first, then switch gems, then hit on gloves, etc.

Best gain of Exp/Hit

1. Feet enchant (12 Hit, 12 Crit)
2. Regemming
3. Gloves enchant (20 hit)
4. Changing buff food [Item not found!] or [Snapper Extreme]
5. Changing to Elixirs [Elixir of Expertise] or [Elixir of Accuracy] with [Elixir of Mighty Thoughts]
6. Gloves enchant (15 exp)
7. Bracers enchant (15 exp)