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Stats
The most important things to note here concern our new reliance upon Intellect and Spirit.
Intellect (Spellpower)
Spellpower is gone (mostly) and Intellect is what we have instead. 1 intellect = 1 spellpower, however, astute observers may notice that intellect costs more on the itembudget than spellpower does. What this means is that all our 23 spellpower Runed Cardinal Ruby will turn into a 20 intellect Brilliant Cardinal Ruby, costing us a smidgen of delicious and succulent spellpower, and ditto for Reckless Ametrines. So if you compare any item between Live and PTR, you’ll see that it has slightly more intellect than it used to have but also slightly less total spellpower.
The main exception is weapons, which have spellpower instead of intellect and actually have quite a lot more spellpower now to make up for the losses from our other items.
So Intellect is now the go-to elemental stat, and spellpower is still great where we can get it. Plus Intellect still gives us mana, mana return and a smidgen of crit chance too. More on this later.
Spirit (Hit)
Spirit is replacing MP5 and becoming a staple requirement for elemental shamans. We’ll be sharing a fair bit of off-piece gear with restoration shamans and other healers, and the spirit we get as a result will be turned into Spell Hit Rating through the revamped Elemental Precision talent:
Only spirit from gear is affected – base spirit remains (relatively) useless.
The talent’s innate hit bonus is gone and replaced with an equivalent damage bonus.
Shadowpriests and Moonkins no longer grant other raiders increased chance to hit with spells.
Draenei no longer grant their party members increased chance to hit will spells, but still have extra hit chance themselves.
All this together means that the average elemental shaman will go from needing only 10 or 11% hit to needing 16 or 17% spell hit chance. But given that we can now get this from spirit suddenly makes all that MP5 mail – now spirit mail – rather useful. As does mail specialism, which we’ll touch on shortly. Remember that any MP5 on gear will be changed to spirit at a 1 MP5: 2 Spirit conversion.
Hit requirements
So, the numbers to aim for in 4.0.1:
Draenei: 420 hit rating (hit rating + spirit from gear)
Everyone else: 446 hit rating (hit rating + spirit from gear)
To make up this new requirement we can gem for spirit (= hit) through Purified Dreadstones or even Sparkling Majestic Zircons with the bonus of gaining an extra useful “blue” stat which can replace our old Glowing Dreadstones. We can also swap from Sapphire Spellthread to the spiritlicious Brilliant Spellthread if we need to, as well as changing our helm and shoulder enchants (56 spirit in total).
Reforging and Mastery
Further flexibility is offered through the reforging mechanic, whereby we can visit friendly NPCs in major cities and swap 40% of any non-primary stat on a piece of armor for any other non-primary stat. Spirit is the exception to the primary stat thing which means that if we somehow have too much hit we can reforge some of it off.
The options for reforging are thus Hit, Haste, Crit and the new Mastery stat. At this point we lack firm stat priorities, but Hit will remain the most important raiding stat to be capped in, and Crit will remain our least beneficial stat. That means gemming and reforging really comes down to Haste or Mastery. At the moment it’s Mastery which seems to have the slight edge simply because none of our items actually have any yet whereas we’re pretty swamped in haste – and Mastery has the added bonus of being quite fun because, for elemental, it increases our chance to proc Overloads from our Lightning and Lava spells.
To get the most benefit from reforging, we’ll want to reforge all our least valuable stats on any given item to our most valuable stat – in this case, Mastery. If we’re over the hit cap, this means we can reforge hit or spirit. Otherwise, we’d target crit first, then haste if the item has no crit.
Edit from Binks: The Haste/Mastery Reforge Conundrum
Ideally you want an roughly even mix of Haste and Mastery as they’re valued fairly similarly. Since you will have no Mastery, and lots of Haste, reforging haste to mastery is a good thing for 4.0.1. It may not be once we get to actual Cataclysm gear, but for the moment it is.
Mail specialisation
Another reason to swap out your cloth and leather off-bits for mail is the existence of Mail Specialisation, which grants any shaman 5% more intellect if they wear only their “primary” armor type – in our case, mail. That’s right – wearing mail now makes us smarter. This bonus to our intellect, combined with reforging and our higher hit needs, make swapping out old cloth or leather items for mail alternatives very lucrative indeed.
Glyphs
Prime Glyphs are pretty simple, except you’ll note that the old Glyph of Totem of Wrath has been removed from the game:
1.Lightning Bolt
2.Lava Burst
3.Flametongue Weapon (if you have 4-piece tier 10)
4.Flame Shock (if you don’t have 4-piece tier 10)
Major glyphs, as billed, give us more freedom to choose, but it’s likely that Glyph of Hex will be all but required for any serious Cataclysm dungeoneering. For minor glyphs, Thunderstorm may be a serious consideration for mana purposes despite its lamentable removable of the spell’s knockback.
Talents
Not much to say here, the new talent trees are pretty self-explanatory and obvious. It’s necessary to take one point in a talent which isn’t directly DPS-related to get to Earthquake (which is fun if not strictly necessary) and we sadly can’t reach Ancestral Swiftness until Cataclysm.
This then is how your talent pane may look:
Reverberation is one of those talents that probably isn’t going to be needed for maxx DPS builds, and so will be a case of personal preference.
Totemic Wrath replaces Totem of Wrath and is considerably more useful, turning all our fire totems into buff-sticks.
At present Searing Totem’s range is still only 20-26 yards, which makes our range talent rather less useful than it could be. For this reason, Convection is listed instead of 2/2 Elemental Reach – we’ll discuss mana management a little more below. Again, this is something where we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out.
Rotation
By “rotation” we still of course mean “dynamic priority system”, and in 4.0.1 our priorities are gaining more complexity through the addition of Fulmination and Lava Surge. To offset that, we have Flame Shocks of a guaranteed 18 seconds base (give or take a second or two) and 27 seconds with the Glyph – with 4t10 and enough Lava Surge procs, Flame Shock can roll on a target almost indefinitely. This, then, is what our casting priority looks like:
Flame Shock should always be up. The extra duration means we don’t have to cast it too often.
Lava Burst as soon as it’s available. Remember that Lava Surge can reset the cooldown, so using a Power Aura type warning is virtually mandatory.
Earth Shock as soon as you have 9 Lightning Shield charges, or when you are moving – but only if your Flame Shock has more than 6 seconds remaining (or, with the tier 10 4 piece set bonus, if you’ve got a Lava Burst coming up to extend the dot time). Extra notes from Bink: It is possible to use Earth Shock with fewer than 9 charges, but you need to have at least 6, preferably 7-8 charges before doing so.
Otherwise, Lightning Bolt!
As you’ll notice from the above, our in-combat shield choice is now Lightning Shield instead of Water Shield. The latter is still useful out of combat or if we have to swap to healing, but for normal DPS Lightning Shield is where it’s at for us.
Chain Lightning’s gone from our single-target priority list because the only thing it was really useful for was tightening up Lava Burst cooldowns – but with Fulmination and Lava Surge that’s not really going to be possible.
Flame Shock and Earth Shock still share a cooldown, but we do have some flexibility with when we cast both. It is slightly harder to anticipate when Flame Shock will need to be refreshed with 4t10, but if you’re used to that already then you won’t have any trouble in 4.0.1. Using addons to track cooldowns and DoT durations is strongly recommended.
Searing Totem or Fire Elemental Totem should also always always be active: not only do they contribute damage, but Totemic Wrath causes them to grant our raid 10% extra spellpower while they’re up.
Mana management
With the Replenishment reduction, the removal of Unrelenting Storm and our new preference for Lightning Shield instead of Water Shield, mana regen and conservation may actually be important again for Elemental in some circumstances – it’s unclear from the PTR whether mana is something we’re going to have too much or too little of. Rolling Thunder is certainly intended to be a major source of mana, but we should be open to the possibility of regular Thunderstorm use and a point or two in Convection. For this reason it may even be preferable to use the Thunderstorm glyph on a regular basis, even though it removes the awesome knockback effect – it’s something to keep an eye out for anyway.
Also remember that our Rolling Thunder mana return is entirely based upon how much maximum mana we have, which in turn is based on our new primary stat – Intellect.
New spells
We’ve gained a Concentration Aura equivalent through Totem of Tranquil Mind, which uses the water totem slot, as well as the ability to crowd-control elementals. Neither of these will likely play a big role in any pre-Cataclysm raids or instances, but they’re fun to have and we should get used to the expanded toolbox now. Tragically, we’ve lost Sentry Totem
Relics
Finally, our old “totems” – that’s the ranged slot/relic item – are changing to simple stat sticks, so if you have Bizuri’s you’ll lose 186 haste but gain some intellect, stamina and crit as well as a shiny new red socket – save a Cardinal Ruby for it!
And that wraps up our 4.0.1 Elemental prep guide! Questions or comments are welcome and we’ll do our best to answer them either in the comments or on the forums.
In Summary
1.Get 446 or 420 hit rating or spirit on gear.
2.Reforge excess hit/spirit, crit, haste in that order.
3.Use Lightning Shield, and use Earth Shock when you are at 9 charges or moving. Remember to allow for Flame Shock recasts.
4.Use this spec & glyph setup
5.Mana regen will be less, so start using Thunderstorm pro-actively if you don’t already.