[Elemental] Patch 3.2
 

Important!

Read this and this before asking any questions in this thread.

From the PTR the set bonuses from Elemental are:

Shaman T9 Elemental 2P Bonus (Flame Shock) (Class: Shaman) -- Increases the duration of your Flame Shock spell by 6 sec.
Shaman T9 Elemental 4P Bonus (Lava Burst) (Class: Shaman) -- Increases the damage done by your Lava Burst spell by 20%

What exactly is this trying to say? I would have thought they were already affecting non-periodic spell critical strikes, or is this a bug fix?

Clarification. Some people might assume that since Flame Shock crits with T8, that it would have procced Oath / Focus, so Blizzard changed the tooltip to clarify that this isn't the case.

Also: 20% damage increase on LvB? As in, 20% damage done increase, not critical damage? That's decent bonus... 150... 160 dps increase at 2800 spellpower (calculated in my head, I'm afraid, but I'm sure Bink will have reliable numbers asap). A bit over 3%, seems in line with previous bonuses.

I sincerely don't like the relic, though, hope it's a placeholder.

There are no actual figures for the set bonuses yet, just place-holder values (You can't increase the damage of a spell by 0.021 seconds, and increasing FS duration by 61 seconds is OP), unless you can prove otherwise.

Posted thoughts here: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/binken...l_changes.html

I'm a bit disappointed that they keep going back to the proc haste totem. It should be a bit more reliable with our haste levels than it was in BC, which means we can probably keep a pretty damn high uptime on it if they don't throw some hidden cooldown onto it.

I still have some of the old formulas I was kicking around for the BC badge totem I can plug it into.

20% damage on Lava Burst seems like they are trying to keep the spell relevant for us, which I suppose is nice, wouldn't shock me if you saw people trying to weave the 4pc bonus into PVP with the burst potential for it though.

However, the biggest thing I'm noticing is that we have 3 pieces of t9 with hit on it. The 258 level gear has 272 hit rating between the three pieces, meaning that they are over the hit cap on them alone for a draenei. It seems like wishful thinking that all the other top iLvl gear will have no hit on it, so we are going to have to be making some interesting choices on pieces of gear to take to minimize waste. One of those three pieces is likely going to be getting cut from our BiS to compensate for the massive hit overage we are likely to get.

2 piece bonus with 6 more seconds will roughly speaking save you a quarter of GCD on single target nuking (18+6 sec gives that instead of 4 casts to reach 72 sec, it takes 3 casts). The 4 piece bonus with 20%(confirmed?) boost to Lava Burst sounds nice, but worth to note here is that if you look on other class-sets, then you see a lot of "<insert ability> gets 5% crit chance". I.e. you get the impression that there are a lot of placeholders here.

Addendum:
Did some additional rough calculations on the DPS increase you get from the 2p T9 bonus, and we were then talking about 50-60 DPS. This should answer the question if you should break 4p T8 or not.

Update:
The 2p bonus is currently 9 more seconds on Flame Shock. This will allow you to save one GCD every 54th second, which in extension means that this bonus is roughly worth 55 DPS.


When it comes to the relic, then I would wager it is not set in stone either. Just some very rough calculations, with the assumption it has 10% proc chance and 45 sec internal cooldown, gives that it would in the long run offer about 40 Haste Rating.

For fun I asked myself how long duration the new relic should have, instead of 12 sec, in order to give it 65% uptime. My rough answer was that it should last for 40 sec in that case. One alternative to make it competitive to Totem of Hex, is if this new relic offers a lot more haste. Heck, 200 haste rating sounds a bit too even to be a final number, so it is quite possible that the haste rating is just a placeholder. A nice figure here would probably be something like 650 haste rating.

Later in the thread it is mentioned that it has no internal cooldown, and a high proc-chance, making the two paragraphs above meaningless.

Relic

The relic seems basically the same as the current 15 badges of heroism.

Badges of heroism item:
[Totem of the Elemental Plane] (196 haste, 10 secs)

New item:
Totem of Electrifying Wind - 200 haste, 12 secs

So, unless the uptime on this totem is close to 100%, which seems unlikely, this totem looks like it will sit around unused.

Set Bonuses

2 piece makes rotations longer, gives about 1500 extra damage per flame shock, and allows us to use less time refreshing it. Not terrible, but nothing special

4 piece bonus, a quick back of the envelope calculation:
Assuming lava burst averages of 12k (Probably reasonable for t9 gear, perhaps on the low side), the 4 piece bonus will push that average up to 14.4k, for an extra 2400 per lava burst. If we're casting lava burst every 10 secs (Again, not the tightest rotation, but not terrible), then it's 240 dps, and it will get better if my averages dmg and rotation times are conservative.

Overall, not bad, if a little dull.

Badge gear

Another worry I've got is that yet again, the first pass of badge loot doesn't have anything an elemental shaman would want.

Helms/shoulders, there's an mp5 and a physical dps item. Rings, there's either a spirit or mp5 option only

The +hit trinket isn't horrible, but doesn't exactly fill me with wonder.

This is exactly the same as happened with emblems of conquest. Both the badge items, and the runed orb recipes were of very little use to elem shammies, unless we were willing to drop down and use cloth/leather items, and they make 5 different necks, and none of them are much use to us, unless we have very bad gear already, as so much budget is wasted on useless stats.

I have the same concerns as you Kraken about the items available from badges and also LW which I didnt see anything for ( and yet another spirit dps ring :/ )

I kinda hoped they would make the 2pc bonus the same as the Glyph of Flameshock ( not consumed) so we could use the Glyph of of Lava again which could go well with the 4pc bonus.


Edit: Also does anyone else kinda dislike where they are going with relics? They are turning them into mini trinkets that only proc on a single ability, I think I prefered them as more static effect.

Did anyone test the 'badge'-changes? Emblems of Conquest will drop in Heroics? Meaning we can get Ulduar lvl gear from Heroics?

And they can be exchanged to Emblems of Heroism/Valor? Meaning I finally have a chance to aquire [Totem of Hex]?

Didn't yet had an occasion to try it but patch notes clearly state that we can get hero/valor badges for conquest ones.

I just calculated the total Hit rating given by the whole 258 set.

- 94 on chest
- 102 on legs
- 76 on gloves

Totals up to 272 hit rating which converts to 10.37 %

Assuming the spellhitcap is 17%
-1 % dreanei
-3% talents
- 3% Boomkin/Shadowpriest

Leaves us alliance shamans..... overcapped by just wearing the tier gear..

I had one question not about the tier gear, but about the new caster trinket that resembles The Lightning Capacitor from TBC, and later the Thunder Capacitor from leveling. Is this trinket proc effect better vs. straight spell power stacking for elemental? I can see the DPS calculations from the current trinkets that give static spell power, but there hasn't been a trinket like this that has been good enough to think twice about our current spell power trinkets.

Since the only ICD involved with this trinket is the 2.5 second delay on gaining another charge, would elemental's high amount of crits make this better for us than others?

There is more to that 2.5 second delay. If you have a LC or TC in your bank to test, you can see that the 2.5 second delay is on generating another charge after a discharge. If this functionality stays the same it keeps the value a bit higher, but with it being static damage, (doesn't scale with our spell damage) I can't see it being a long term trinket for us.

I guess the only solution to this problem would be to remove that stupid unbalanced racial.

Haha, I think all alliance dps count that buff as 'always there'.

Still means for horde shamans that with the set they shouldnt wear more then ~0.6 % hit which means that non spirit/mp5 non set pieces will be even harder to find.

As it is I'm wearing the T8.5 resto helm because I 'need' to dump hit ( and it has lovely stats in general ). With items where there is over 100 hit rating on it this will get worrse, making our itemization even harder.