Thunderstruck: Here comes the Spiderman

Tristan “Trustyn” Johnson is a blogger and podcaster for The Elitists. There he writes and podcasts about all things Blizzard and it is home to the only Pan-Blizzard podcast besides Blizzcast to date. In World of Warcraft however, he raids as an Elemental Shaman in a top-100 World guild and writes about the wonderful lightning hurlers in this weekly post of Healing Way affectionately called Thunderstruck.

Hello once again ladies and gentlemen of the totemic persuasion. I must apologize for last week as the start of Nanowrimo and a couple days of having gasp a life screwed over my time in the later week and I hope that does not happen again. As long as my Shaman is my main you should expect me around here.

So In this latest tier the fights that are really holding any real difficulty for raids are the last two fights in the heroic hardmodes. Faction Champions is sometimes considered a real issue, but once it is a lot simpler than it first seems. The Twin Valkyrs are a pretty good challenge and I don’t mean to plug my blog again, but I did make a blog post for turning the Twin Valkyrs into a laughably easy encounter. What I’m going to talk about however is the heroic Anub’Arak fight as I’ve now done it about six times and I can tell you it is a fight that really lets the Elemental Shaman shine.

So first and foremost, this is a great fight for elemental. The two main phases require AoE DpS that is melee range safe and burst. Both of these are ample opportunities to strut your stuff.

• Magma Totem: If you can you have to keep magma totem down when Anub’Arak isn’t submerged. It is a giant amount of damage and most guilds are beginning to run with Demonology Warlocks for demonic pact, so this might not be too bad for you.
• Fire Elemental: In phase three you are in all out mad dps mode. It is a good time to use the 20 minute cooldown (10 in 3.3) we never seem to have a good time to use. The fire elemental does a ton of AoE damage and has a low chance of getting killed here. It is the perfect situation for this dude to go wild.
• Elemental Warding: Remember that Spec I told you about a few weeks ago? Well I revised it into a new spec you can find here. In phase three you take aoe damage, and a percentage is given to anub. Your 6% not only helps you survive some of the nasty things like Penetrating Cold and possibly take an extra tick from his submerge phase if something goes wrong.
• Thunderstorm: 5 Mobs you need to AoE all together… No brainer. Make sure it’s glyphed in the name of all that is holy.

In the submerge phases you also need to burst down these little scarab adds. A lava burst is fast and strong so you will end up doing very wll here too. Be sure to utilize chain lightning in this phase when you can.

All in all if you focus and get the feel of the fight down right you can clock yourself at well over 8000 dps. My record was 9150 and I dare you to beat it.

To finish you off I leave you with a youtube boss kill I put together of this boss:

Happenings around the web

Shatner. Um, it’s related. He claimed to be a Shaman once. In an ad…

A quiet Sunday morning begs to be followed by a yawning, lazy afternoon. Hence, a cheapie links post. Enjoy.

First, I’d like to point your attention to Tristan’s renewed series of hard mode boss strategies, annotated with kill videos. Posts are up about Freya with all 3 elders and Mimiron’s Firefighter. And if you aren’t already, you should be listening to his podcast. Nowhere else on iTunes will you find Matticus’ mom freaking out.

Friend of the blog and frequent commenter Windsoar has opened up a blog and really hit the ground running. Jaded Alt, as you might infer from the name, covers a lot of ground. Favorite post: A personal view of what it’s like to go from Horde to Alliance. Some unexpected wrinkles in there, particularly for a former Blood Elf Paladin tank.

Another commenter, Charles, makes good with Planet of the Hats, featuring some surprisingly strong Elemental Shaman coverage. My favorite post talks about his Power Auras setup because it’s entirely different from my own, and therefore rich with ideas to steal.

While I was attempting (and failing) to get my fellow healbloggers to post about why they heal, the sphere instead picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Don’t be that Shaman. Followups include a Matticus-penned post on WoW.com titled Don’t be that Priest. Shortly thereafter, not 1 but 2 Holy Paladin variants went up; HolyPaladin.net beat Horde Review by 2 days. If there are others out there I’ve missed, fill them in the comments.

Matthew Rossi on WoW.com summarizes the (dubious) current state of Enhancement tanking. I was hugely excited when I saw the headline. The article disenchanted me, however. The key tools that were once available no longer are. Those attempting Enhancement tank builds now are fighting an uphill struggle. I’d love to try my hand at tanking, but I am not willing to subvert the designers’ intentions to do it. They have shown a long history of striking out at such unintentional consequences.

I updated GridStatusChainWho to fix the Debugging and Enabled switches. While I was at it, I added experimental support detecting Holy Nova and Circle of Healing, but am unable to test this out myself. If any Priests can try it out, I’d love to hear back. After several false starts, the addon is now available on Curse as well as WoWInterface.

Thunderstruck: Lightning hurlers in 3.3

Trustyn is the brains, brawn, and occasional abusive partner of the blog and podcast called the Elitists. He raids on an elemental shaman in a top-100 raiding guild and apparently writes for this here Healing Way Blog about Elementaly stuff.

So coming down the pike we have a new patch coming to save us from not one, but TWO Jormungar worms and that is 3.3 with the new toy of Icecrown breathing its big ugly undead head down our necks. On top of this new wacky encounter we have some new toys to play with for Shamans in general and what some of these mean for elemental.

First of all, a lot of mana regeneration and mana cost of low end elemental spells and such is being changed. This means that we could possibly see a viable elemental leveling in 3.3 even before thunderstorm. This will obviously need a bit of testing, but I think a elemental leveling build could be in the future if it checks out. There is a number of low level changes to daze and such too that will make the very awkward low levels much easier for shamans in general.

An incredibly confusing AoE change is coming. Instead of trying to describe it, I’ll quote it directly:

Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.

This yields overall no increase in damage, but it means our AoE’s like Magma Totem and Thunderstorm will do more even damage in large groups.

For you Orcs and Trolls, you will have some new looking totems. Draenei and Tauren however, well it sucks to be you. [Llyra sez: My totems already don’t look like anyone else’s. Doesn’t bother me none.]

Fire Nova has also made a mode from being a simple totem to a spell that will shoot a fire wave out of whatever fire totem you have on the ground. It’s another melee-range AoE, but it is more elemental AoE altogether and definitely worth getting excited about as we will be doing even more damage on fights like Anub’arak or whatever fun AoE fight Blizz throws at us. My testing on the PTR has shown a decent amount of damage from this little totem bomb so I’m sure you’ll find a million and one uses for this little plaything.

Reincarnation is also having its cooldown halved. Even without resto talents it will make it a lot more functional and you will be able to ankh much more often.

So those are the new features of 3.3 that mean anything to the elemental shamans. Now go forth my friends and lets make that Lich King squeal like a piggy.

Thunderstruck: Major and Minor Intervals

Tristan “Trustyn” Johnson is actually a prototype for the first wave of sentient machines, using their knowledge of science and mathematics to undermine the entire foundations of mankind. Since he is a prototype they needed to test him out in a simpler environment. After the decision to make him into a master at computer chess, he was accidentally left to go wild on a computer with world of warcraft and a blogger account. What follows is the words of such a creature; more can be found at his own blog and podcast, The Elitists. He is here to give you powerful information from his android brain about the mighty elemental shaman.

So about a year ago now Blizzard decided that we really weren’t spending enough time theorycrafting pointless things, so a new form of character customization had to be added. For those who do not play wow (I am curious as to why you read this in that case), glyphs are a sort of enhancement for customizing or amplifying certain abilities and spells. This is going to be a shorter article taking on the glyphs, show the good ones and which situations they are used in. And also just to make this an article worth commenting on, I’ll respond to comments at the end of my posts.

Major:

Flame Shock: This was a staple of the 3 major elemental glyphs and as of 3.2.2 its old use of being extra seconds on flame shock and not being consumed by lava burst was baked in and the Flame Shock Glyph has been replaced with the bonus of the capability of Flame Shock to crit. This, however is also shared with the piece Tier-8 bonus, which many of you have. If you do, then this glyph does nothing and should be skipped. Don’t worry, there is an alternative.

Lightning Bolt: This is a pretty no-brainer. I mean it isn’t very interesting per se, but a 4% flat damage increase on lightning bolt is pretty damn good. If we only had a 4% increase in performance in other areas of the world…

Totem of Wrath: This is a good glyph, and again is a little big of a humdrum, an 84 Spell power buff whenever you cast Totem of Wrath. It’s a good little toy and does a lot of very nice damage, but again, not much to write home about.

Glyph of Lava: About the same effectiveness as Totem of Wrath all things being equal, but if you have your Tier 9 4-piece is a better choice than Totem of Wrath. Also, if you have 2-piece Tier-8, this is the best glyph to make up for the loss of your need for glyph of Flame Shock.

Let’s Conclude here with the bare basics of what you need for major glyphs:

• Starting out: Flame Shock, Totem of Wrath, Lightning Bolt
• With 2-Piece Tier 8: Totem of Wrath, Lightning Bolt, Glyph of Lava
• With 4-Piece Tier 9: Flame Shock, Lightning Bolt, Glyph of Lava

Minor:

Not a lot of great choices sitting in the minor slots, but there are a few good choices I like to pick up.

Water Shield: An extra charge on water shield is a stable choice for refreshing mana. Since there are so few good minor glyphs this is worth one.

Renewed Life: You will save a lot of money by no longer needing an ankh to… ankh.

Thunderstorm: Not just more mana back, you really need the take back of the knockback effect of this in PvE so you at least have a safe mana return and a functional AoE (you’ll be surprised how many times you can use it for mobile damage.)

Responding to Comments:

I thought since for some people I might be a single elemental resource and I would like that resource to talk back. So if there’s anything you want to know, I am reading the comments and by the way, I am very appreciative of the ones I’ve gotten so far. So let’s take a look at what people have been asking.

I’m surprised you went with convection — it’s hard for me to get through more than half my mana (granted I’m still in heroics/low level raid tiers) but that’s generally when mana problems occur as well.

Granted there’s not much better to take — I personally picked up Elemental Warding and Imp. Ghost Wolf — but they definitely provide more utility. -Windsoar

A good point that comes up in a couple other comments. I may have come off as a little too confident over that choice, but this also traces back to a fundamental disagreement I have with Binkenstein’s statement on 3.2.2 that I will explain in a moment. But right now I am testing the new heavier mana load of 3.2.2, but I would still be hesitant of taking all points out of Convection. It might be feasible to take 3/3 Elemental Warding and 2/5 Convection, but I would need to test it.

I use CL after LvB. I haven’t had to drop CL from my rotation due to mana issues or change my talents so far to account for greater mana cast (again, anecdotal, and in low ranking content, i.e. my haste is not high enough for 4 LB’s in new rotation yet).

Perhaps due to content (length of fights) or less than ideal gear setup — mine still has a lot of mp5 — I am not feeling the pain of the new rotation yet, and will need to make a talent change in the future. -Windsoar

The MP5 gear can be a large factor, but you did point out my issue with Binkenstein’s new statement on 3.2.2. Now I have nothing but respect for the guy. I think he is more or less the word when it comes to elemental, but this Chain Lightning statement seems a little too conservative. I present you some of my numbers from a Northrend beasts kill (the only ToC fight that doesn’t have a large Chain Lightning factor). Warning, the next section contains math.

Chain Lightning: Avg Hit: 4045.5 Avg Crit: 9466.3 Cast Time: 1.13 4045.5/1.13=3579.9 damage per casting second 9466.3/1.13=8377.3 damage per casting second 47.7% crit

8377.30.477=3996 3579.90.523=1872.3 3996+1872.3=5868.3 damage per average casting second

Lightning Bolt: Avg Hit: 5460.2 Avg Crit: 12003.3 Cast Time: 1.5 5460.2/1.5=3640.1 damage per casting second 12003.3/1.5=8002.2 47.7% crit

8002.20.477=3817 3640.10.523=1904 3817+1904=5721 damage per average casting second

So, even if it’s small Chain Lightning does more damage per casting second than Lightning Bolt and that means that if you can afford the mana for it, use CL as much as you possibly can rather than every lava burst. This might be the reason for my talents in convection and I got a lot of sexy parses to back it up if push comes to shove. I should mention that your mileage may vary due to haste and spell power, but run those numbers yourself.

Great timing on the post, I just respecced from enhance to elemental for my day to day spec (main spec is resto for instances/raids) and pulled that build off of the web, at least now I have a better idea of what the talents are good for. I’ve been running around in my full raid healing set (with the exception of the naxx 25 ele totem and the caster DPS trinket from regular TOC 5) and I’ve noticed a few things. First off after changing into elemental glyphs I was doing around 2500 DPS with hardly any hit rating, secondly was that I could not run out of mana. I know that my resto set is pretty mana heavy due to the drops that I’ve gotten but this was too much. I was wailing away at the raid boss dummy, not dropping thunderstorm or anything and I never saw my mana bar loose more than a millimetre of blue and it came right back to 100%.

So far the spec itself has been fun, I’ve only been hanging out on netherwing ledge grinding that rep (never had the chance to do it on my first main) for the netherdrake, but things are going down faster and easier than when I was enhancement. The only thing that I miss is some of the oh crap abilities I had as ehnancement. I’ve been having some trouble dealing with the roving elites on the ledge and I sure wish I could pop ghost wolves to regen health faster and not have to deal with having to stop DPS just to heal back up. Guess I could go back to frost shock kiting, but there must be another way. -Abruk

Nah you are correct, for sheer soloing enhancement has elemental hands down. The only advantage I can give you is that you don’t need two sets of gear to do elemental in soloing situations.

I haven’t changed my build at all with 3.2.2 - still have 2/5 in convection and 3/3 warding. I’ve been following the advice Binkenstein put out a few weeks ago where LvB is followed by a single LB then CL.

This makes certain that LvB has completed its travel-time to target and procs clearcasting before you cast CL. With my haste where it is I don’t really seem to benefit from more than 1 CL in my cycle anyway.

I tend to think the people saying they never dip below a full mana bar are probably carrying Mp5 on their gear (which you should lose as you gear-up). But that said, even with 0 mp5, it’s not unusual for me to end a long boss fight at 5-15% mana. And left-over mana in a raid is wasted mana, imo.

The important part is that I almost never actually OOM. Faction Champions once or twice when the fight ran long and I wasn’t attentive to keeping WS up full-time. Now, the downside is that if you do OOM and TS isn’t up, you’re pretty much staying that way for a while. So there is a risk, for sure.

If I get to the point where I’m regularly trying to squeeze 2 CLs into every LvB cycle (where 1 cast might be outside of clearcasting), then I’ll probably make the switch to 5/5 convection. For now I suspect my healers appreciate the incoming damage reduction and I don’t think I’m losing any dps from that allocation. -Coral

Most of this has been answered already, but I wanted to point out on the clearcasting thing. For the most part, once you get raid buffs and over a certain crit threshold (33% or so) I find that you will pretty much have clearcasting up nearly all the time if not all the time.

Again I thank you all for your wonderful comments and I am really enjoying my time here on Healing Way. If you have an idea for an article you’d like me to cover simply leave a comment and I will get it. Next week I’m going to try and make heads or tails of what we know from the PTR and Patch 3.3. Should be very exciting. Best of luck and happy raiding!

Thunderstruck: How does I make talents?

Tristan “Trustyn” Johnson is a shaved 300 lb gorilla trained from an early age to press buttons based off the outcome of some charts. Miraculously this attempt to train a gorilla to play wow has created a type of sentience in the creature and since then he has picked up blogging and podcasting, and writing about the only thing he knows, elemental shamans here on Thunderstruck.

Talents… Talents talents talents. Yes they are special little points; so useful and jubilant, and just fun fun fun aren’t they? Now if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 months you might have missed that the expansion coming down the turnpike is actually doing a revamp of the talent system, but that’s not the focus of this day’s article.

The article today is talents and which are good and which are bad. If you want to bypass the article and want a tl;dr version of the build without the explanation, go here and simply copy down. For the rest of you, let’s explain tier by tier.

Tier I

This is a pretty great tier with two 5-point talents and you basically want to get both right away. Convection, which is a flat out mana cost reduction to your elemental spells used to be kind of meh, and usually avoided, but since 3.2.2 and the buff to CL, you’ll want this to keep your blue bar going as long as possible. The second is this crazy talent called concussion that gives a 5% increase to all your elemental core spells. Highly essential, but highly yawn.

Tier II

There is only really one good talent this tier (RIP picking up Elemental Warding, that was so nice) and that’s the three point Call of Flame talent. It is a buff to lava burst and a huge buff to fire totems. Now that sounds pointless for those who have to drop totem of wrath, but the lava burst buff is worth it. And if you are not using a totem of wrath this means you can get a lot more out of your magma totem. This will be a little sexier with the 3.3 addition of Fire Nova.

Tier III

Two talents here, first of all we got Elemental Focus. Not only is this always up, great for your longevity, but it also buffs your dps further down the tree and unlocks several important talents. We also have Elemental Fury which will make crits go from 150% spell damage to 250%, for a class with a spell with 100% crit, this is very VERY nice.

Tier IV

Eye of the Storm is the only great talent here, but what a talent it is. Take notice in a raid situation how many times you are casting and doing damage and try to say that pushback resistance is not useful.

Tier V

Everything here is awesome, take it all. Elemental Reach so you can put some more distance from the things you damage. Call of Thunder because we all want a free 5% crit and it unlocks a good talent further down. Finally you have Unrelenting Storm, a scaling MP5 buff based on your intellect. I wish it was spellpower like resto shamans got but I’ll take what I can get.

Tier VI

Another TAKE IT ALL tier with Elemental Precision. Lightning Mastery is a pretty little talent that reduces the cast time on lightning bolt, chain lighting, and very curious to its name, lava burst.

Tier VII

Tired being told to take every talent in the tier yet? We got the big elemental cooldown Elemental Mastery, and instant cast spell and a 15% crit buff every 3 minutes (or sooner with the spiffy new 2-piece Tier 10 bonus). We also want Storm, Earth and Fire because more chain lightnings and more flame shock dot damage is our friend.

Tier VIII

Guess what? Take it all again here. We got Booming Echos giving us a reduced flame shock cooldown and increased initial damage on it. Plus for the occasional times you kite it buffs frost shock too. Elemental Oath, one of your raid buffs AND a 10% increase in spell damage if Elemental focus has procced. And we have Lightning Overload. Now what is better than casting a lightning bolt? Casting two lightning bolts at the same time. Get this talent.

Tier IX

You don’t need every talent point this time, but close. You want to pick up the legendary elemental spell Totem of Wrath if you like getting raid spots. Lava Flows gives a cool pvp buff and increases the critical strike bonus of Lava Burst by another 24%, taking us up to 274%..

Tier X

Shamanism! This talent is so awesome. It gives you a 15% increase in the amount of spellpower gained from bonus spellpower to chain lightning and lightning bolt. It does the same for lava burst for a whopping 20%. This is a huge damage buff.

Tier XI

Thunderstorm is a great move for regaining mana and is an awesome AoE, grab it grab it grab it!!!! SOME KIND OF SEXUAL REFERENCE!

Enhancement

Yes you should spend your remaining points in the Enhancement tree, trust me, some of this stuff is worth it.

Tier I

Ancestral Knowledge, 10% intellect buff… better than nothing.

Tier II

Thundering Strikes, a flat 5% crit buff, I’m not complaining.

Tier III

The final tier. These are the voyages of the… no we got two good talents here, one more so than the other. We have the sort of meh talent, but still really good Shamanistic Focus which cuts the mana cost of shocks in half. And last but not least we have Elemental Weapons; a talent that increases the spellpower you get from your flametongue imbue by 30%.

That’s all for talents, be sure to check in next week for a little bit of a shorter article where we will talk the oh so fun topic of glyphs.