Tig3ress wrote:
:O You got geared fast!
Any tips for a freshish 80 shaman?
For restoration? NO! Im terrible at it. I do okay in some conditions but I can't heal heroic blacknight phase 3 to save my soul so you don't want advice on that from me!
For elemental, certainly!
First as an 80 you need to think about hit caps if your raiding.
17% base miss rate for casters in raids
3% free talented for being a shaman
1% free for being a dreanie
-------------------------------------------------
13% For dreanei needed
14% For horde shaman
-3% if boomkin or shadow priest in your raids
So most of the gear you'll be choosing initially will be +hit gear. I chose jewel crafting (again) as a profession for the 39 spell power gems and the hit rating trinket with two sockets. My other profession is mining; I originally thought titanium would make me some money but finding titatium blows and I guess now I just have the 500HP maxed mining offers. Saving the matts and uncommon gems I mined while leveling, made JC a lot easier because I didnt have to buy as much. It cost about 1200g to level JC on this toon, opposed to the 3000 it took Ryoko
Theres a lot of +hit and other gear in ToC 5 man, and ToC 5 man heroic. I ran these daily, sometimes several times a day for the normal mode instance. The normal instance also has the Abyssal rune and thats a very good trinket. Some of my items were cloth, leather until I had enough mail gear with hit to reach hit cap.
I also did the heroic daily every day for the badges, and other misc heroic farming to buy my teir 8 items.
After hit capping, gear in this priority order when choosing items:
Spell power, which is greater than
Haste, which is greater than
Crit, which does very little because you have so many crit talents and an auto-crit spell anyway
Dont worry about MP5 as elemental. Once you has enough +int, your natural regen talents, totem and raid regeneration classes will cover it. Sometimes with the help of a mana pot. On 8-10 minute fights it starts to hurt but you can usually scrape by.
As you replace +hit items, save them for a while. That next upgrade or teir peice might screw your hit over, and its nice to have some options sitting in your bank.
I tend to use maxdps.com to compare items for my character, and it can armory import as well. You'll notice some of our healing gear is more DPS than our DPS gear... thats because it has hast and spellpower, opposed to crit or hit. Also, you sometimes have to 'lie' about your hit rating, if your a shaman or have +hit buffs in raids. You'll notice my PVP neck and ring, see its placement?
Theres also a few different ele shaman spreadsheets here on elitist jerks. However, like anything on EJ you have to dig vigorously for it throughout the thread, and if you 'ask' where its at you get banned.
Glyphs im using, for raidingGlyph of lightning bolt (bread and butter!)
Glyph of totem of wrath (big spell power gain here)
Glyph of lava burst
DPSing in raidsThere is much debate over whether or not lightning bolt spam is better, or an actual rotation with lava burst, chain lightning and lightning bolt. I chose the latter for now. Using 1 spell for hours isnt very fun at all.
I downloaded quartz casting bar and customized it a little. You can queue spells up naturally before the blizzard cast bar is finished. Doing so on every cast is a huge DPS gain. This happens because of latency between you, and the server. Quartz can show you the actual latency delay and how soon you can spam the next button.
Rotation logicFlame shock, only if your going to lava burst and its not up. Don't refresh it if lava burst isnt ready. Your only using it for the auto-crit on lava burst. If you get enough badges for 2p T9 like I did pugging toc10, daily heroic and toc25 it adds 9 more seconds to flame shock which means you can lava burst about three times before refresh.
Lava burst first and foremost. Refresh flame shock as required for lava burst.
Chain lightning, over lightning bolt.
Lightning bolt, while waiting on the other two.
Dont wait on cooldowns. Waiting 1-3 seconds for lava burst to come off cooldown is bad. Throw a lightning bolt instead. That castbar should be busy every second of the encounter.
I found that doing this, while moving out of fire and or shadow crashes etc was rather cumbersome, its very tough to stare down those casting bars watching cooldowns and timing bolts while trying to watch the actual encounter. Anything that requires me to pay attention cuts into my DPS. As well as having to heal myself in bad pugs, or heal targets like incinerate flesh because its not getting done -.- lol.
Castsequence macro DPSInitially I tried a castsequence macro. The benefit of this, is a perfect rotation thats always correct, and much less button watching. After rolling with it for a week I dropped it, because of the negatives.
-It doesnt much accommodate changing haste, in raids or on trinket procs, or heroism. You need a different /castsequence for multiple conditions, such as other peoples raid buffs, heroism, trinket proc etc. Its a locked in sequence, the order does not change regardless of haste / trinket / heroism changes. Very bad.
-It actually waits for blizzards castbar to fully finish and disappear. Remembering that because of latency you can queue spells up before the last is actually done casting, this is a huge DPS loss.
I designed mine with the same logic "Lava burst over chain over lightning bolt, refreshing flame shock only as needed." With my 500ish spell haste and totems down, my cast times are
1.23 Flame shock (Thats my GCD time with my avg haste)
1.27 Lava Burst (with 8s cooldown)
1.27 Chain Lightning (with 3.5s cooldown)
1.69 Lightning Bolt (no cooldown)
And so, my sequence looks like this
Flame Shock
Chain Lightning
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning
Lava Burst
Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt
Lava Burst
Chain Lightning
Lightning bolt
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt
Code:
/castsequence reset=target Flame Shock,Lava Burst,Chain Lightning,Lightning Bolt,Lightning Bolt,Chain Lightning,Lava Burst,Lightning Bolt,Chain Lightning,Lightning Bolt,Lightning Bolt,Lava Burst,Chain Lightning,Lightning Bolt,Lightning Bolt,Lightning Bolt
It needed to be long enough to get 3 lava bursts out of a flame shock. So some tweaking to fit the macro limit and space removal was required >.<
However (big however)
I ditched castsequence in raids, because of the DPS loss waiting for blizzards castbar, problems with chaning haste/trink/heroism and its "locked in" rotation. However, you can weigh it against a manual rotation, by asking "Could I do better than the /castsequence while moving out of fire and paying attention to the encounter?"
Note: I do use a different castsequence for PVP. Flame shock gets dispelled a lot, it sometimes gets eaten by grounding totems, and targets change frequently, and the below macro isnt great at PVP/5 mans
/Click macro DPSThen after a little digging, I found this. It looks a little awkward and takes more macros to work.
The benefit of using the /click macro, is that it does -not- wait for blizzards castbars to finish, thus a big DPS gain. Also, because of its nature, its not a "locked" in sequence so it automatically accommodates haste changes / trinket / heroism by itself. It automatically prioritizes lava burst, over chain lightning, over lightning bolt and it keeps that castbar cooking.
Some of the negatives are, its not very friendly outside of raid DPSing and thats why I set it up on a second bar. The way its designed to wait for spell cooldowns means you can't just 'press' that ability whenever you'd like and throw a lava burst or chain. Its also... somewhat of a hack trick.
It takes 5 macros.
Code:
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","0")
/click ActionButton3
/click ActionButton4
/click ActionButton5
/click ActionButton6
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","1")
Code:
#show Flame Shock
/castsequence reset=combat flame shock,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Code:
#show Lava Burst
/castsequence reset=combat lava burst,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Code:
#show Chain Lightning
/castsequence reset=combat chain lightning,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Code:
/cast lightning bolt
My bar setup looks like this:
Attachment:
barsetup.jpg [ 43.64 KiB | Viewed 8115 times ]
The commas in those macros is delay. Its "no spell" in the sequence. These need adjusted on a test dummy with your buffs up and totems down. It somewhat related to how fast you spam the button as well.
-I have 2P T9 so my flame shock is worth 3 lava bursts. I added a lot of delay time until it was correct.
-Chain lightning and lava burst were not firing as fast/often as they could, so I removed delay time.
Without the delay time, the whole macro breaks. Blizzards 'secure' macro functionality kicks in, and it jams. By design, macros are not supposed to allow you to queue multiple GCD spells in the same macro, so those "fake multiple squence spells" delays need to be there or nothing happens.
Downsides to this
You cant manually force a spell to go off, so its terrible in instances / questing. I put mine on a second castbar so I can flip back and forth between them.
Alternatively, you can put the macros to the left (multibarbutton1, 2, 3, 4, 5) etc to preserve your natural castbar and keep your original spells on it for these uses. Just be sure to change the click macro to point at the appropriate button bar.
Upside, this macro setup is Farking win machine in terms of raid DPS. Though it runs my mana dry in no time flat. If your undergeared and having serious mana problems, you can alter the macros and drop chain lightning for now since its very expensive, but that will (theoretically) cost you a lot of DPS. Chain lightning is ~.5 seconds faster than lightning bolt.