Posts with tag ElementalCombat

So, what's the score with Elemental as a spec? Why, Mister Rossi, have you been so assiduously avoiding any discussion of it?

Well, in part it's because I don't really like playing as an elemental shaman. It's a personal preference issue: when I'm DPS, I like to be up in mob faces, not standing back casting spells. My default spec for when I'm not enhancement is restoration, if only because I seem to be able to keep people alive fairly well with that spec and usually healing is at a premium. But I would have no difficulty in admitting that not only am I not particularly enthused with elemental (unlike Mike Schramm, one of our big elemental boosters) I'm also not very good at playing one. So speccing elemental this week and testing out the spec was to some degree like asking Wayne Gretsky to go figure skating: sure, the guy can skate, and skate well, but he's really not known for that particular kind of skating. Still, I did it, and I have to say that as is always the case when I do it I found the spec much less agonizing to play than I expected. It's actually pretty fun. (Yes, I use basically the same gear as I do when I go resto now, which means my crit sucks, but I'm not going to blow all my badges on elemental gear just to test the spec.)

As I promised you, our look at Wrath talents and skills for Shamans (started here and continued here) concludes with a roundup of restoration talents and skills and then a discussion of what all these new abilities mean for shamans in the expansion. I know how much you guys love discussion. For instance, the picture accompanying today's post is most likely of a resto shaman who is, for whatever reason, attacking a shovel tusk. Now, with the changes to spell power that are coming, that resto gear probably packs a good deal more punch than it currently does with the healing/damage rates it has now. Nevertheless, resto shaman, attacking defenseless wildlife, I have no idea why. He looks cool doing it, though.

First off, of course, I will talk about Earthliving Weapon. Now, we all know I love this (despite a lot of naysayers who look at it as similar to the Fel Reaver's Piston and call it undesirable) but let's be fair: we have no idea how good it will be at 80. All of the current ranks are the same as rank one. The reason I linked to the comments was to show user defektunge's estimate for how it will look at rank 6. Assuming he's in the ballpark, at rank 6 it will be an extra 102 healing plus a chance to proc roughly 1400 healing over 12 seconds. Depending on how high stamina values are on gear by then, and how often the proc really contributes to healing, the HoT of Earthliving could be a gimmick or it could be pure awesome. It's definitely an attempt by Blizzard to address the shaman's lack of any kind of heal over time while remaining true to the Windfury 'random proc' mechanic.

I personally hope that this estimate is low. By level 80 I expect stamina values to be significantly higher (a well geared T5/T6 tank can have well over 22k health, as much as 26k on some right now, so I expect tanks in blues to be easily pushing 19k by the time we're all 80) so I'd hope for double both those numbers. But I'm still excited for Earthliving, especially for leveling shamans or shamans who need to heal in a pinch. Throw on your healing weapon and imbue it for extra oomph.

Continuing our series on Shaman talents in Wrath, we're going to talk today about Elemental Combat, and the new talents for it. One of the first things I notice comparing the current talent trees to the ones coming is the move of Elemental Devastation down to a 5 point talent, making it much friendlier for Enhancement Shamans to pick up (as was commented upon in our previous post on the subject) especially now that Nature's Guidance is gone from the Restoration tree. With the ability to guarantee a Lava Burst crit by using Flame Shock, you could theoretically keep your melee crit rate up for a very long time, and in so doing reduce the cost of your shocks significantly as well as keep Maelstrom Weapon stacked.

Which is very nice for enhancement shamans who want to spec into Elemental, yes, but what about for elemental shamans themselves? What talents will they be looking at?

Well, just for starters, let's talk about Paralysis.