Over the past few weeks there have been numerous posts asking about specs, rotations, gearing and glyphs for Elemental Shaman. I thought it would be an idea to get all the facts together in one place for easy reference. So here I go. If you notice any errors, please point them out and I will update the post. As best I can, the post reflects the situation once 3.08 hits live. I don't take any credit for the work done coming to these conclusions - that has been the work of many but I would especially like to thank those over at the EJ forums.

The post will be split into four sections:

1. Talent Specs
2. Gearing
3. Glyphs
4. Spell Rotations


Talent Specs

Currently, there are 2 main elemental specs Deep Elemental and the 33/38 hybrid build. Since it is likely that the 33/38 spec will become redundant once 3.08 hits due to the buffs in deep elemental and the dropping of Mental Quickness down the talent tree, I will only deal with the Deep Elemental spec.

There are numerous minor variations on the theme but all the talents in the following spec should be considered essential other than Convection, Elemental Warding and Unrelenting Storm which are matters of preference or simply fillers. None of these 3 talents add directly to DPS though at lower gear levels the mana reduction/regen talents will probably be required.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?shaman=253300150321335132501351000000000000000000000000000050500310000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000

Of the mana regen/efficiency talents (Convection, Unrelenting Storm and Shamanism), Convection provides the smallest gain per talent point and should be the first one to drop.

3.1 Changes : The talent tree undergoes a few alterations in 3.1 and the following is likely to be the best DPS Spec

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?shaman=25330015032133513223013510050500310000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9722


Gearing

Even with the changes coming in 3.08, Elemental DPS is all about Spell Power. Whilst Haste is a reasonable stat it does not significantly increase the damage from your Lava Burst, Flameshock or Chain Lightning as these are governed by fixed CDs more than cast time. Crit is a poor DPS stat as it does not effect your Lava Burst damage or the DoT component of your Flameshock which will account for about 30% of your damage. It is only really useful due to it proccing Elemental Focus, however, enough crit should be gained from gear without having to focus on it at all and will still provide roughly 80% uptime of the damage buff from Elemental Oath.

Hit is of course important and top priority should be given to capping this. The cap is 17%. Talents will reduce this by 3% and raid buffs should reduce it my another 3%. Drenai racial will reduce this by a further 1% if available. So the hit caps are:

Horde : 11% = 289 Hit Rating
Alliance : 10% = 263 Hit Rating

Put simply, the priority of stats is : Hit (to cap) > Spell Power > Haste > Crit


Glyphs

By far the most important glyph for Elemental Shaman is the Flame Shock Glyph which prevents your Lava Burst from consuming the DoT and increases the DoT duration by 50%.

In 3.08, the LB Glyph will be changed to increase Lightning Bolt damage by 4% and this will become the second best glyph.

The difference between the Lava Burst and Flametongue Glyphs is not as large but still significant with Lava Burst being better for DPS but Flametongue helping in situations where you might need to heal or are hitting multiple targets.

For Max single target DPS, go Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt & Lava Burst

3.1 Changes : In 3.1, the ToW glyph will grant a personal SP boost of 84 for 5 mins after it is placed. This will make it our number 3 Glyph, pushing LvB out of the reckoning.


Spell Rotations

The number of different CDs on Elemental spells combined with the variance of haste from one shaman to the next (or even during one fight) make it impossible to create a single best rotation. Rather, a priority casting system is used to ensure that our highest DPS spells are cast as frequently as possible.

In its simplest terms, this means that we should always keep Flameshock up, Use Lava Burst whenever it is off CD, use Chain Lightning whenever it is of CD and then fill in the gaps with Lightning Bolts.

Haste does complicate issues a bit, however, because it is possible that by using the above priorities you will delay the cast of your Lava Burst which will reduce your DPS. This only becomes a significant problem once you exceed about 600 haste rating [edit: experience has revealed it to be closer to 500 haste rating at which you should start dropping CLs from the rotation] , however, and by the time you get there you should have an idea about what you need to do to fix it.

The rotation usually ends up being something like:

FS-LvB-CL-2LB-CL-LB-LvB-LB-CL-2LB

3.1 Changes : As haste increases with Ulduar gear, the FS-LvB-5LB-LvB-4LB rotation will become become the norm (from about 550 haste). If gear permits us to get to around 630 haste, we might need to start looking at a FS-LvB-CL-4LB-CL-LB-LvB-2LB-CL-2LB rotation (once again back to the priority casting system). If the announced changes to CL go ahead though, this might change and it might be preferable to leave CL out still.


Hopefully this will answer questions for some and prevent repetitive posts asking ‘How To…Elemental Shaman’.

Well, two things I'd like to comment:

a) You are saying crit does not benefit Lava Burst. That is not entirely correct in 3.0.8: The more crit you have, the more chance of Lava Burst benefiting from the Elemental Focus bonus damage. And considering Lava Burst is the most damaging spell, you do want that to happen.

Although crit still won't be the priority stat, it shouldn't be totally ignored. True you most likely get it from gear, but at lower gear levels crit may be a good idea to invest in (after hit ofc), though I have not calculated anything to confirm this.

b) I'm really thinking of using the Glyph of Elemental Mastery, now that it will give us 20% crit for 30 seconds. It seems most sexy.

Nice idea, I was thinking of doing similar, after seeing the 15 hit cap and stat priority threads a day.

I think the FT glyph is a fair bit worse than Lava - its not that marginal at all. I corrected some misconceptions over how the Lava glyph works on EJ which were making people devalue it.

Oh and I can't see crit ever, ever, being worth stacking. We have so much from raid buffs/talents anyway, that clearcasting uptime will never be bad (and crit is our worst stat). It might in fact be worth explaining how we will get a good uptime of clearcasting, and diminishing returms on additional crit, due to the way clearcasting works with 2 charges.

---

Q u o t e:
Well, two things I'd like to comment:

a) You are saying crit does not benefit Lava Burst. That is not entirely correct in 3.0.8: The more crit you have, the more chance of Lava Burst benefiting from the Elemental Focus bonus damage. And considering Lava Burst is the most damaging spell, you do want that to happen.

Although crit still won't be the priority stat, it shouldn't be totally ignored. True you most likely get it from gear, but at lower gear levels crit may be a good idea to invest in (after hit ofc), though I have not calculated anything to confirm this.

b) I'm really thinking of using the Glyph of Elemental Mastery, now that it will give us 20% crit for 30 seconds. It seems most sexy.

---

I have deliberately kept the OP clear of calcs to make it very easy to read but will try to answer you questions here instead :)

a) Raid Buffed, an elemental Shaman will be running at about 45% crit which will lead to an 80% Clearcasting uptime and about 70% CC uptime on LvB. So any additional benefit of crit to LvB will only be evident 30% of the time. To gain an extra 5% CC uptime on LvB it would require about 8% more crit which gains a 10% damage bonus 5% of the time - ie a damage increase of around 0.5% on your average LvB.

Instead, for the same item budget you can gain about 440 spell power which will gain you ~8% damage increase on all LvBs. So you can see it really is not worth stacking crit for the sake of the CC buff.

Non-raiding shaman will see a slightly better improvement in groups where they have less crit buffs (ie. no mage) but it will still pale into insignificance compared to the lost SP.

b) The EM Glyph will certainly better in 3.08 than it is currently but is still not worth a Glyph slot. An unglyphed EM will provide 20% crit for 30 secs every 3 mins or an average of +3.3% crit through a fight. The Glyph increases this to 30 secs every 2.5 mins or an average of 4% crit. So the benefit of the glyph is to increase your crit by 0.7% average throughout the fight - about 1/3 as good as the FT Glyph which is our 4th best DPS glyph.

So I'm afraid the EM Glyph is one that whilst it might sound sexy turns out to be a little less desirable once the beer goggles wear off :)


Mmootimus - I have reread the EJ post and will adjust my OP here to reflect a larger difference. Thanks for the reminder.

---

Q u o t e:
I think the FT glyph is a fair bit worse than Lava - its not that marginal at all. I corrected some misconceptions over how the Lava glyph works on EJ which were making people devalue it.

---

Tbh, there are a couple of occasions where extra glyph may come handy (in particular AoE), however, I don't think anyone would be swapping glyphs between fights (especially, as it requires walking straight back to the city to get the book :p)

Added in a reference to FT Glyph use for multi target DPS - thanks :)

---

Q u o t e:
Hit is of course important and top priority should be given to capping this. The cap is 17%. Talents will reduce this by 3% and raid buffs should reduce it my another 3%. Drenai racial will reduce this by a further 1% if available. So the hit caps are:

Horde : 11% = 289 Hit Rating
Alliance : 10% = 263 Hit Rating

Put simply, the priority of stats is : Hit (to cap) > Spell Power > Haste > Crit

---

Im currently running with 377 Hit (14.37% a bit over cap) in raids and 339 Hit (12.92%) in heroics where I rather put on a shield instead of the offhand from emblems.

I know 368 Hit is needed for horde to get hit capped as this gives us 14% + 3% of talents.

I've gemmed quite a bit of hit, so is it safe to get rid of some of these 16 hit gems and the + hit glove enchant?

What if im running a Naxx 10 pug without a shadow priest or moonkin? Then I would still need 368 hit on my char sheet no?

I'd rather not depend on a class that may or not be there when it comes to pugs since I hate a spell missing, on 25 man guild runs we always run with a shadow priest though.

I don't think that is a choice anybody can necessarily make for you - all we can do is help you by pointing out what you are gaining/missing if you take hit that high.

As you point out you are gaining the facility to ensure no misses when you have no SP/Boomkin in your group. In very simple terms you are gaining 3% DPS when there is no SP/Boomkin present.

What you are missing out on is the increased damage you could be doing in raids where there is a SP/Boomkin present. Very roughly this means that if there is a SP/Boomkin present you are losing 2% DPS.

So ... +3% when SP/BK missing vs -2% when SP/BK present. The decision is yours :)

I always get confused with this hit rating business so a big thank you to the OP, I now realise how wrong I've been about hit rating for my Shaman - oh I'm so embarrassed at how low it is :( Still at level 78 I find I still do lots of dps but then heroics is gonna be a big fat NO until I boost my hit.

Still, I do find this levelling business alot more fun with my shaman after resting him for a couple of weeks to level a DK to 80 :) Now bring on the next patch so I can have more fun playing with my talent trees.

Hi great guide!

i really enjoy that someone put the time to make such a exellent guide and that ppl is filling in :)

i have a question, and i just want to tell you im not a calculator freak this is just what i have been thinking about and would like some pros to evaluate it:

in patch 3.0.8 when we get shamanism and the new LB glyph, and both of those boost regular LB damage

...and here is the question

wouldnt it be good to leave out CL from the rotation then? now with all the fluff coming to regular LB?

i had plans to try leave it out after 3.0.8 but now when i read this guide im not so sure anymore

anyone that can give me a awnser on this?

thx fellow shaman

Nice guide - bump

---

Q u o t e:
in patch 3.0.8 when we get shamanism and the new LB glyph, and both of those boost regular LB damage

...and here is the question

wouldnt it be good to leave out CL from the rotation then? now with all the fluff coming to regular LB?

---

Whilst it is certainly true that the DPS difference between CL and LB will be reduced, possibly even to the extent that CL won't really be worth the very high mana cost, increased damage is not the only reason to use CL. Probably the main reason to use CL, even before 3.08, is to ensure that you keep the time between LvB casts as close to 8 secs as possible. This is probably best explained by example:

If you had zero haste and no WoAT down, 4 LBs would fit perfectly between 2 LvB casts. However, as soon as you have any haste or haste buffs you need to either fit in a fifth spell or you need wait for a period doing nothing while you wait for LvB to come off CD. At low haste levels a fifth LB could take your time between LvBs up to (let's say) 9 secs. At this point, if you had instead added a CL, the time between LvB would only be 8.5 secs, increasing the frequency of your highest DPS spell. So even if LB did the same DPS as CL, your rotation would do more DPS due to the increased ratio of LvBs.

If you then squeezed a second CL in between the LvBs, the time between LvB cast would come down to 8 secs - perfect!

This is a very simple example and doesn't take into account latency which further complicates the issue. However, I think it is propably enough to demonstrate that even if CL does no more DPS than LB there is still room for it in your rotation not just for the sake of it's own damage (which will still be higher than LBs) but for the sake of increasing the number LvB casts during a fight.

Not to mention that CL hits 3 targets wich gives you 3 chances to crit --> Triggers clearcasting --> 10% more dmg :)

Against multiple targets, CL is a no brainer - I'm pretty sure the question was concerning single target DPS on bosses :)

On the subject of multi targets though I believe CL also has multiple chances to proc Lightning Overload which makes it pretty cool for throwing nice numbers up all over your screen :P

/bump

Nice thread TBH.

Regarding CL skipping. On boss i will probably omit CL out from my rotation, but on trash it is still worth spell.

In case of glyphs after 3.0.8 i will prolly choose LB, FS and FT glyphs cuz of more crit > more clearcasting state > more elemental oath > more dps.

Right now with 3995 spell dmg raid buffed (and trinket procced, 3590 wo/ trinket) im doing 4k dps on patchwerk, so hopefully this will be fixed in next patch, cuz everyone is asking me how the hell with so big spell dmg im doing only average DPS.

So lets pray this changes will make elemental shaman decent DPSer and funny class to play again!

---

Q u o t e:
/bump

Nice thread TBH.

Regarding CL skipping. On boss i will probably omit CL out from my rotation, but on trash it is still worth spell.

In case of glyphs after 3.0.8 i will prolly choose LB, FS and FT glyphs cuz of more crit > more clearcasting state > more elemental oath > more dps.

Right now with 3995 spell dmg raid buffed (and trinket procced, 3590 wo/ trinket) im doing 4k dps on patchwerk, so hopefully this will be fixed in next patch, cuz everyone is asking me how the hell with so big spell dmg im doing only average DPS.

So lets pray this changes will make elemental shaman decent DPSer and funny class to play again!

---

Numbers have been run for the Glyph choice between FT and Lava taking into account the Elemental Oath change and Lava still comes out on top. The problem is that the kind of level of crit we are talking about in raids, an extra 2% makes very little difference to CC up time.

That 2% crit will take your CC uptime from 80% to maybe 81.2% so you will get an extra 10% damage for 1.2% of the fight > 0.12% increase in damage due to CC so about 5 DPS to your cycle. The crit will also add about 45 DPS to the remainder of your spells so this will give a total of about 50 DPS increase.

An extra 350SP on LvB on the other hand will add about 7% damage to each LvB which account for about 25% of your damage > +1.8% = 73 DPS increase.

So even on a straight nuke (aka Patchwerk) fight the Lava Glyph will be superior. On a fight where you are required to move, the proportion of FSs & LvBs in your rotation will increase and the Lava Glyph will become even better compared to the FT.

---

Q u o t e:


Numbers have been run for the Glyph choice between FT and Lava taking into account the Elemental Oath change and Lava still comes out on top. The problem is that the kind of level of crit we are talking about in raids, an extra 2% makes very little difference to CC up time.

That 2% crit will take your CC uptime from 80% to maybe 81.2% so you will get an extra 10% damage for 1.2% of the fight > 0.12% increase in damage due to CC so about 5 DPS to your cycle. The crit will also add about 45 DPS to the remainder of your spells so this will give a total of about 50 DPS increase.

An extra 350SP on LvB on the other hand will add about 7% damage to each LvB which account for about 25% of your damage > +1.8% = 73 DPS increase.

So even on a straight nuke (aka Patchwerk) fight the Lava Glyph will be superior. On a fight where you are required to move, the proportion of FSs & LvBs in your rotation will increase and the Lava Glyph will become even better compared to the FT.

---

You cant count my 3500 spell power after 3.0.8 since 33/38 will not be able to play with anymore.

With t7 and kind of that gear you got prolly 2200-2300 spell dmg wih ToW up (at least i got something like this). So it means LvB will gain 220SP > 1.25% = 50.69 DPS increase.

---

Q u o t e:
With t7 and kind of that gear you got prolly 2200-2300 spell dmg wih ToW up (at least i got something like this). So it means LvB will gain 220SP > 1.25% = 50.69 DPS increase.

---

Actually, provided 220 spellpower, you'd gain approximately 65.68 DPS before new EO is taken into account

The trick is that meta gem scales 2.34 modifier, not 2.0 modifier, which results in crit value of 2.2753. This scales 220 spellpower over 1.11 modifier (talents) + 0.13 modifier (CoE) to 620.7, which divided by 9.45 (FS-2LvB-3CL-6LB rotation at 10% haste; you have 11% with WoAT, but I simplified it for the sake of this discussion) yields us 65.68 DPS.

(btw., given that my gear can get over 2500 already and some items I'm not exactly proud of (Gul'dan lol), 2200 should be the absolute minimum when considering T7 gear).

---

Q u o t e:


Actually, provided 220 spellpower, you'd gain approximately 65.68 DPS before new EO is taken into account

The trick is that meta gem scales 2.34 modifier, not 2.0 modifier, which results in crit value of 2.2753. This scales 220 spellpower over 1.11 modifier (talents) + 0.13 modifier (CoE) to 620.7, which divided by 9.45 (FS-2LvB-3CL-6LB rotation at 10% haste; you have 11% with WoAT, but I simplified it for the sake of this discussion) yields us 65.68 DPS.

(btw., given that my gear can get over 2500 already and some items I'm not exactly proud of (Gul'dan lol), 2200 should be the absolute minimum when considering T7 gear).

---

well with flask you can get over 2500 ofc.

And you are counting raid buffs like CoE to your equal?