Totem Talk: Cataclysm spell DPS trinket gear guide for elemental shaman
by Sarah Nichol 
Jan 27th 2011 at 3:00PM
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Get some Fulmination with your Lightning Bolts! Sort the shocks from the flames with Totem Talk: Elemental, brought to you by Sarah Nichol, otherwise known as Pewter from The 'mental Shaman and the Obscurecast podcast and founding member of TotemSpot.
A couple of weeks ago, I covered pre-raid gearing for elemental shaman. After a brief sojourn to look at what to look out for on the patch 4.0.6 PTR, I think think it is time we delved a little deeper into the ins and outs of selecting trinkets. This time, I'm going to cover both entry-level and raid trinkets, as well as covering the basic principles by which I personally make my trinket selection.
However, there have been a few patch 4.0.6 developments, and I'd like to take a quick look at them now. One undocumented change, in which Earthquake now consumes a charge of Clearcasting, results in the spell now benefiting both from the mana reduction of Elemental Focus and the increased damage from Elemental Oath. Benefiting from this change will require us to pay more attention to detail when using Earthquake, but I'm very happy with it alongside the 10% increase in base damage previously noted in past patch notes. We also get to look forward to an increase in the value of mastery, as Rolling Thunder can now proc from an Elemental Overload of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning. Our final cause for rejoicing is an increase in the spell coefficients of Lava Burst, on top of the 10% increase to base damage reported previously.
A couple of weeks ago, I covered pre-raid gearing for elemental shaman. After a brief sojourn to look at what to look out for on the patch 4.0.6 PTR, I think think it is time we delved a little deeper into the ins and outs of selecting trinkets. This time, I'm going to cover both entry-level and raid trinkets, as well as covering the basic principles by which I personally make my trinket selection.
However, there have been a few patch 4.0.6 developments, and I'd like to take a quick look at them now. One undocumented change, in which Earthquake now consumes a charge of Clearcasting, results in the spell now benefiting both from the mana reduction of Elemental Focus and the increased damage from Elemental Oath. Benefiting from this change will require us to pay more attention to detail when using Earthquake, but I'm very happy with it alongside the 10% increase in base damage previously noted in past patch notes. We also get to look forward to an increase in the value of mastery, as Rolling Thunder can now proc from an Elemental Overload of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning. Our final cause for rejoicing is an increase in the spell coefficients of Lava Burst, on top of the 10% increase to base damage reported previously.
What to consider
Passive bonus A passive intellect bonus is strongest. Depending on your current gear, a passive haste or mastery bonus is also very strong and can be further refined as needed. On the other hand, a passive crit bonus will be much weaker.
Reforging If the trinket is reforgable, that lends you some extra flexibility when attempting to reach hit caps or adapting your gear to different types of content. If I know I'm going to run a lot of heroics, I reforge my hit trinket to haste to make the heroics run more smoothly.
Proc stats Intellect and spellpower procs (or on-use abilities) are the most powerful procs and are most often partnered with haste or mastery passive bonuses. Haste and mastery procs are correspondingly weaker but are paired with a passive intellect bonus and, as such, make for great trinkets. Just please avoid spirit procs, even if you're below hit cap, and crit procs.
On-use vs. on-equip On-use trinket buffs will tend to last for 5 seconds longer than an on-equip trinket but generally have a 2-minute cooldown. On-use is great if you know a fight like the back of your hand and you've picked perfect moments for unleashing all your cooldowns at once to get the maximum benefit possible. However, what will equate to a great boost to burst DPS will not average out as higher DPS over the length of a whole fight. Your choice is between higher average DPS and control. On-equip procs tend to have shorter internal cooldowns and are once less thing to remember in the grand scheme of button pushing. Personally, I prefer on-equip procs.
Ramp-up time Some trinkets have a buff that stacks up over time. Buff stacks may build at a lower rate than expected, and any time spent not casting risks dropping the full stacks off and starting the ramp-up time all over again; however, these trinkets overall often have a very high uptime.
Internal cooldowns and proc chance Unfortunately, neither of these things is obvious in game, so it's worth researching these things from Wowhead before you go looking for a particular drop. If there is no data available from third parties, you can also use an addon like Proculas to help determine uptime, proc chance and internal cooldown.
Trinket league table
These lists were worked out using my own crude spreadsheet and DEP ratings that approximate pre-raid ilevel 346/359 gear, calculated using tools like Binkenstein's ERC spreadsheet, SimulationCraft, and Stelmaria's Elemental Rotation Simulator. If you want to be sure that you're making the right trinket choices, then use those tools with your own gear. Re-sim or re-run the spreadsheets every time you upgrade a piece of gear.
These lists are general comparative rankings, and each successive group is relatively more powerful than the group above. I've made some edits to reflect issues with usage in a practical situation. It is important to think about how the various factors I've described above are combined in each trinket. Also keep in mind what items are accessible for your style of play; just because something is lower on the list doesn't mean it is no good at all. A high-end raider will dismiss Stump of Time, but if you're a very casual raider, it may be perfect for you. Jewelcrafters and alchemists have fantastic profession trinkets for this tier.
Just got to level 85
- Gale of Shadows
- Talisman of Sinister Order
- Sea Star (heroic)
- Sorrowsong (heroic)
Doing heroics and preparing for raids
- Gale of Shadows (heroic)
-
Tendrils of Burrowing Dark (heroic)
- Soul Casket
- Anhuur's Hymnal (heroic)
Entry-level raiding
- Stump of Time
- Vibrant Alchemist's Stone
- Heart of Ignacious
- Bell of Enraging Resonance
- Witching Hourglass (heroic)
Best in Show
- Darkmoon Card: Volcano
- Theralion's Mirror (heroic)
- Heart of Ignacious (heroic)
- Theralion's Mirror
- Figurine - Jeweled Serpent
- Bell of Enraging Resonance (heroic)
A few notes
At the moment, the top combo is likely to be Darkmoon Card: Volcano, paired with the heroic version of Theralion's Mirror. DMC:V is likely to be extremely expensive, but it is getting fairly common for guilds to set up card exchanges to help members assemble their trinkets. I prefer trinkets with an on-equip bonus, because I feel it is all too easy to end up "saving" an on-use trinket for the right moment. Very easy to save it too much and hurt your overall DPS as a consequence. However, there is a lot to be said when learning a fight for saving cooldowns for that special burn phase.
Patch 4.0.6 is only likely to increase the value of mastery for elemental shaman, so personally I do not think Theralion's Mirror is going to drop in value when compared to Heart of Ignacious. As with the pre-raid gear, you can see that it is possible to get very strong trinkets from a variety of sources, with 5-mans, Darkmoon Faire, valor points, professions and Tol Barad giving us many possibilities if we're unlucky with a particular drop.
Show your totemic mastery by reading Totem Talk. Ready to take your elemental shaman up to the new level cap? We'll help you get to level 85 with our guide to leveling an elemental shaman.
Filed under: Shaman, (Shaman) Totem Talk
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
DapperDave Jan 27th 2011 3:08PM
"Vibrant Alchemists Stone is not unique"
Not true. You can only have 1 type of Alchemists Stone equipped.
Royal Jan 27th 2011 3:27PM
"due to be introduced in patch 4.0.6"
vanye111 Jan 27th 2011 3:54PM
@Royal
I'm pretty sure I saw it said on MMO-Champion Blue tracker that they ALCHY stones were going to be Unique equipped after all...
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 4:02AM
As of writing, it was still saying no longer unique-equipped, but I'll add a note in, cheers!
Drez Jan 27th 2011 3:29PM
I highly, highly, highly recommend binding "on use" trinkets to a primary spell like Lightning Bolt. These trinkets are most valuable when they are up as much as possible. As you state, "saving" trinkets more than just a few seconds per cooldown is often times a horrible mistake for maximizing DPS.
Sterb Jan 27th 2011 3:45PM
Unless you're talking about the Heart of Ignacious in which case you're likely activating it too early, wasting an entire proc when you don't have a full stack.
TxAg Jan 27th 2011 5:24PM
Engineers can avoid proc'ing the heart too early by macroing it in just after synapse springs. Since they share a cooldown, your heart won't proc until at least 20 seconds into the fight. This will also work with other on-use abilities that share a cooldown with the heart.
Another scenario would be to re-equip the heart just before combat begins thus putting the trinket on a 30 second cooldown and preventing a premature proc.
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:58AM
I think Heart is going to need manual care - although I've heard there are some issues with seeing the stack of the buff - power auras and a separate button are probably the safest bet. Personally I'll probably not go for it, as I find having extra to manage doesn't really suit me as a player. Others won't have that problem, so Heart will be a great choice for them.
shade780 Jan 28th 2011 12:22PM
I've been hearing people talking about macroing trinkets into spells, but what is exactly the macro to do so?
I always thought it was somehting like
/cast Lightning Bolt
/use 14
Is it? Or is it more complicated than that?
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:23PM
That's pretty much it, you might add a #showtooltip Lightning Bolt line to the top, but a lot of the time time you'll put /use line before /cast line.
RunAmok Jan 27th 2011 3:43PM
This is a really good reference. I'm currently using Serpent and DMC:V for heroics, and replacing Serpent with Stump for raiding until I get more hit/spirit epics, after which I'm going back to Serpent.
Also, DMC can often be *much* cheaper by buying the cards and assembling the deck yourself. Doing so saved me 11-15k off AH prices for the actual trinket, and all you do differently is turn in the deck.
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:54AM
Yeah, I set up a card exchange with other scribes, so I swapped other cards to obtain most of mine. The rest were given to me by a guildie (and I'm now paying it foward by making cards and giving them to guildies so they can trade to collect the cards they want.) I was lucky enough to get Theralion's Mirror on our first Ther/Val kill, so I'm anxiously waiting for the Darkmoon faire so I can replace my Gale.
I also picked up Sorrowsong the other day, looking forward to testing it out ;)
Zalvi24 Jan 27th 2011 4:02PM
on use > on proc, because i dont need it to proc when im casting my shield on me before the pull
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:56AM
I think that's a decision everyone has to make for themselves, and the LS proc is something you can mitigate by not refreshing LS on the pull. Refresh it as soon as you enter the instance after a wipe, or immediately after battle (or not at all, if you have surplus stacks of LS ready to go!)
greg Jan 27th 2011 8:30PM
One trinket I do not see listed here is Tyrande's Favorite Doll, which is obtained through archaeology. Granted the on use proc isnt as powerful as some of the others, it still is a great starter trinket.
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 4:00AM
I didn't think to include it, actually, as it seems even more RNG that most other trinkets. The passive intellect is great, but it is very much a healer trinket. I might see if I can incorporate it into my ole spreadsheet at some point, but 'starter' is right.
Glaras Jan 28th 2011 12:14PM
"Just please avoid spirit procs, even if you're below hit cap, and crit procs."
Why? (And I'd like to suggest, at the risk of seeming too pointed, that making this statement in your article without providing even a word of justification for it weakened the statement tremendously.)
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:26PM
Would you take a trinket with a hit proc? The combat regen is negligible, and the closer to the hit cap for the instance you're in, the less value the proc will be - and being only temporarily at the hitcap for 20% of the fight is not desirable either. Hit is the one stat you want to get from spirit/hit completely passively from gear, buff foods or elixirs/flasks, not from a random proc.
Sally Bowls Jan 28th 2011 12:17PM
Where would you rank DMC:Tsunami? I.e., I already have it for my resto set; it's a pretty standard resto trinket. So I currently use it and jeweled serpent when ele, figuring the proc is wasted but 321int is 321 int.
Sarah Nichol Jan 28th 2011 3:30PM
It essentially amounts to a passive 321 intellect (which is pretty good compared to Talisman, for example) but a temporary, stacking spirit proc is little use for an elemental shaman (for reasons mentioned above.) And like the mandela, it only procs from healing spells. Also if I remember correctly, we don't get spell hit from temporary effects, such as kings/motw, so whether it procs or not, it's essentially a glorified stat stick, and Gale of Shadows will be more useful.
(so for general ranking, worse than gale of shadows. heroic version, but it certainly won't hurt for an elemental offset for heroics)