Stats

Its been a while, I have been feeling a bit iffy about blogging my knowledge. Haven’t been getting many hits.

But like I said in my first post. If I can help one person, It is worth it.

Tell yours Shaman buddies!

Time for a stat discussion.

When to Use Chain Lightning

Chain Lightning in Action

Recently one of my best friends, Hunchy, decided to start a blog. Not only does he have the expertise to talk about his class, the Hunter Class, but he puts his words to the test and owns charts day in and day out.

http://huntardsareus.blogspot.com/ is this new blog, Please check it out and show him some blogsphere loving.

Now lets talk Ele.

Recently we got Shamanism buffed (again) which taked on another 5% spell gain for LB and LvB. A good buff. It will not be enough. Shamans in general still suffer the most from the Hybrid Tax. However this does help and I cannot complain. This buff does not change our mechanics because it buffed both LB and LvB. We still use CL.

Now that leads me into another topic.

When to use Chain Lightning.

• Always use it when there are 2+ mobs. It is undoubtedly worth it then.
• Never use it when you have a haste cool down going.
  • If you have 600-700 haste unbuffed, your CL cast will be below the GCD.
• Use it to correct your rotation
  • If you accidentally throw one too many Lightning Bolts, throw a chain lightning after the LvB to get back in sync
• Use it when it flows
  • It is important to feel your rotation going through you. When you get in the zone and everything just feels smooth, use your best judgment.
• If you have mana issues when you use Chain Lightning, use it after the LvB -> LB part of your rotation
  • Why? Because if you have mana issue, you want to use it when Elemental Focus is up. By casting a LB after the LvB you ensure that the CL does not hit before the LvB crit registers and you gain the buff.

Elemental Addons Pt 2

Did I say I would have this by tomorrow? I meant by the next Wednesday!

So you’re an Elemental Shaman and your having trouble keeping track of your CD’s. Rest Assured! I have your solution.

Event Horizon is an insanely good CD and DoT tracker. It was originally designed for S-priest but the author expanded it to cover almost every (if not every) class in WoW.

At its current version, it Displays

• Flame Shock DoT time
• Lava Burst CD Time
• LB Cast (not very useful)
• Elemental Focus Charges left (nice for Casting CL when it’s up
• And the CD on Elemental Mastery

Event Horizon in Action

You can also add trinket CD’s and other abilities  to it as well if your interested in doing that, it just takes a little editing of the code which I can guide you through if you are wanting to do that.

Totems! SOooooOoOOoo many fricken Totems. Blizzard has done a great job w/ their new totem UI, however it simply is not enough. And that’s OK!

I use Yata (Yet Another Totem Addon) simply because it is what I am use to. I may switch to Totem Timers because I am running into some issues w/ Yata. Both are great Addons that do pretty much the same things. No need for a screen shot. There are some on both of those sites.

Both of these addons organize your totems in 4 classes, like the Standard Blizz one now does ( it copied these). When you scroll over them, you see all the totems of that class. Once you drop it, it will save it. You can move these totems anywhere on your screen.

Also, they come w/ better timers. The standard Blizzard one is nice, however these are much more obvious. In addition they show the CD on totems that trigger one such as Fire Ele or Stoneclaw. Stoneclaw is an awesome name don’t you think? Yeah me too.

Anyway those are really the only essential types of addons an Ele shaman needs. I will be posting my Crappy UI soon and show you what I am using.

Quick Question : Did anyone else run into Saurfang being bugged and on Semi-HM last night?

His blood power gains were ridiculous.

Elemental/Raider Addons pt. 1

Finally! A Post about addons! Yay.

First off, if you are the type of person who says you do not need addons… please reconsider. I understand some systems cannot handle addons and if you are using one of those; I salute you!

Addons are software that is separate from the standard WoW Ui ( Ui = User Interface i.e your buttons, bars they rest on e.t.c) These addons are meant to do a number of things. Some are created to do cool things like the Gear Score addon (which I hate) addons that play sounds when you use various abilities like Death Grip.

After the jump we will discuss addons that are for a different purpose.

Fun w/ Ele

Click for My DPS on Festergut

The Above logs are of our Festergut down on Tuesday of last week.

8.6k Effective dps.

8.9k including fire Ele and searing totem.

Keep in mind I have maybe 1 25 ToGC lvl piece of gear. The rest is 10 man ToGC, Uld and ICC gear.

What I did to achieve this:

I did not move. Since You only need 8 ranged, I stayed in melee range of Fester. This helps tremendously.

Moving for an Ele shaman is just horrible. (Too horrible) Hopefully this gets fixed some how.

If you look over other fights, you see I still was in the 7-9k range. EXCEPT for Marrowgar. Suprise! A high movement fight.

Ele can still shine bright. The only fix we REALLY need is something that doesn’t impact our dps as significantly when we move a lot.

Positioning Pre-Fight is Extremely Important

So please, Before you pull… Know exactly how your raid will move the boss and stand somewhere where movement is minimal.

Make sure you are using Potions of Wild Magic during Bloodlust/Heroism. We already have TONS of haste. My shaman sits at 1040 Unbuffed (I got dislodged foreign object Tuesday and it is fooking aweshome)  1040 is 31% haste. Put the totem on top of that and my goodness.

I still have not picked up a worthwhile cape. I plan on getting the one out of 25 Ony as a filler. I have failed in not keeping relevant w/ that.

My 10 man group's down of Lana'thel

I was hoping to get some questions when my blog got a bit more popular. So far not much. But that is ok. If one person sees this and gets help… I am very happy. Thanks Ophe for getting me off my ass!

Just an add-in. The Below post was Sarcastic. Some of my guildies informed me it comes off as if it is some great change. Point Blankly : it sucks.Not only would it screw up PvP via masking intentions w/o FS  but the dps increase from the bonus is worse than T9 4pc! A little over 1/2 as good. I’m hoping tomorrow’s patch brings something wonderful.

Fix inc

Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Bonus
In the next minor content patch we’re making a change to the tier-10 elemental shaman 4-piece set bonus. In addition to lowering Lava Burst’s cooldown, this bonus also no longer requires Flame Shock to be present in order for Lava Burst to be a guaranteed critical strike. (Source)

Amazing

Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your DPS As an Ele Shaman

Hey. Sorry for the extreme delay. Been a crazy busy 2 weeks for me.

I wanted to give a quick post on how to improve your dps/dmg.

First, In my opinion Damage done is much more important than dps. And though these two things should correlate with one another, they don’t always do so.

Never Stop Casting. EVER!

During a boss encounter you should always be casting something. Fit your spells in as tightly as possible. If you have to move, cast Flame Shock, if your close to the boss while moving, cast Thunderstorm.

Use Chain Lightning When Ever it is Off Cooldown

This is key. Currently My CL’s can hit HARDER than my Lightning Bolts single target. Shocking stuff. I will have an add-on Post coming up soon but just remember THEY DO HELP. In a huge way. If you deny that fact, you are behind in the times.

Event Horizon is a great add-on that monitors your Flame shock, Chain Lightning and Lava Burst cool downs. It is essential to have a Cool down timer type mod to manage your rotation most efficiently.

Don’t Clip your Flame Shock

It is both mana inefficient and a dps loss. You probably wont be clipping it at the same time every rotation so you will be spending more time casting FS and less time on LB.

Do not use Elemental Mastery with Bloodlust/Heroism

A longer time spent with hastened casting is insanely good. you are squeezing in more spells in the allotted time. Not to mention, you will have 55 seconds OR 65 seconds if you’re a troll with hastened spell casts. Think of how much better than is than 40? Amazing on fights like anub, twins, dps races and what not.

And that is it for now. These are just quick tips on how to improve  your dps w/o relying on gear. Enjoy!

Busy Busy Busy

Hey

Super Busy these few weeks between work and relations just haven’t had the time to post anything. Super sorry! Will get back in the swing of things this coming week.

Icecrown Citadel Impression pt.2

Ello Ello!

Lady Deathwhisper

The fight starts out as dps needing to burn down her mana shield down. It cant take a few minutes.

At the same time… Waves of adds will be spawning from 2 sides of the room. 1 tank on each side will pick em up. Shield of the Occult prevents ranged from dps’ing the Cult Adherents due to making them nearly immune to magic effects.

So you will be getting on the Fanatics. Once they are down.. Back to the big boss you go! Rinse and repeat until her mana reaches ZERO from the mana shield being dps’d off. Once that happens… You’ve pretty much won. On our down of her, myself and a Shammy healer traded interrupts similar to Vezax. Fun stuff to be honest.

Just burn hard and loot your purples.

NOTE: There is an alternative strat in which the group stands behind the boss

While the tank LoS’s the adds. We tried this in the 10 man version w/ much success. It allows ALL the dps to get some hits on

the mana shield for a longer amount of time, making the fight much shorter.

After Deathwhisper, you will be on your way to the Gun Ship Battle. I will not say much on this besides it being INSANELY FUN. From jumping around w/ rocket packs

to destroying the enemys’ (The Alliance in my case) ship. It was just a great experience and I hope it gets recycled in Cata.

Death Bringer Saurfang. Now for those who love some pretty epic dialogue between npc’s and a little

lore, just pay attention. I won’t spoil it but it is pretty cool to watch the banter between the Saurfangs.

The fight itself is pretty fun. Fire Nova comes in handy as well as our Rooting effect on earthbind. Saurfang has an Energy, that when it gets full : (1) Puts a debuff on a random member call “Mark of the Fallen Champion” (2)Heals him for 5% of his health if they die  (3)Gives the fight an enrage timer.   It deals about 6-7k dmg to the person w/ the debuff every time he hits your tank. His Energy goes from 1-100 and gains pts every time someone takes dmg from one of the adds he spawns as well as from other abilities due to :

Blood Link — Saurfang gains Blood Power from damage he inflicts with abilities and summoned creatures. Also increases his Energy by 1 each time Blood Link triggers.

Spreading out is extremely important in this encoutner as well as being aware of whats coming at you and avoiding being hit from the beasts.

If your raid is well coordinated… This is not to much of a problem. But on first downs coordination tends to be lacking. We let the first 3 people die and healed the rest through it.  The deciding factor in this encounter is how well you do on the 5 adds he spawns every 40 seconds or so. Slowing/snare effects are great. It is possible to get just 1 -2 triggers of his Mark of the Fallen Champion  which will net you an awesome achievement.

This is from our 10 man down. I don’t have a 25 man SS =(. But this is good enough from my Uber shweet 10 man group. I know some people like to run armory on people just to see differences in spec/compare/curiosity;

So pictured from R to L in the front row for those who care are :

Phinio – Holy Priest

Sainted – Fury Warrior

Beredur – Resto Shammy

Myself – Elemental Shaman

Obsidius – Unholy Death Knight

In the back row are:

Pattontwo : Disc Priest(he’s barely visable)

Selctiverepo- Feral Druid

Blodyelfy – Prot/Holy  Paladin (Behind Selc)

Marcalo – Arcane Mage

Hunchy- Survival Hunter

Thanks for Reading. I’ll have some Raid Leading Advice coming up later in the week. My next post will probably be on Addons and You.

Icecrown Citadel Impressions

So I was lucky enough to clear the first wing in 25 man  ICC with my guild on Tuesday. We went an hour over raid time but of course, in the name of progression, it was an easy “sacrifice”.

My impressions : Fakin Coool.

About the same difficulty as Reg ToC 25, maybe a little harder. The trash was probably harder than than Marrogar who is the first boss.

Marrowgar Idleing

As an Ele shaman it’s a pretty straight forward fight. 3 Tanks stack on top of each other and turn him away from the raid. From there dps burns him until he casts an ability that impales 3(IIRC) raid members. Switch to spikes and back to boss.

He also casts an ability called Cold Flame. This ability targets a ranged raid memberand     goes in a straight line towards them. Very easy to see, and VERY easy to lose sight on do to Tunnel Vision. DBM will remind you if you fail of course and hopefully your raid leader will too.

The last thing to worry about with Marrowgar is his Bone Storm. You guessed it. Its like Bladestorm just bigger and more badass. He will target a random raid member and twirl his way on over..Stop… and then shoot out Cold Flame in 4 directions instead of one.  Very easy to avoid.

As an ele shaman all your really doing is staying put for the most part, kill impale, then right back on boss. I suggest taking a Single jump to dodge cold flames and keep on with the dps.

All in all.. Good fight. It takes very minor coordination and is definitely not dps intensive.

Lady Deathwhisper Impressions coming soon.