Silkroad Online Forums

May I introduce....

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-shee ... Vodkaparty


This is the most fun I've had in a long time. This was the most fun character to level up. She can shell out numbers. She can heal herself. Kite mobs and melees, solo group quests, tank 4-5 quest mobs at a time, walk on water, tun flags, and wtfown people with lava burst, throw people off bridges and lumber mills XD

Theres just something about DPSing and watching MiC's spaz out with giant crit numbers allover the screen that sets your heart on fire.

Shes been 80 for about 12 days, and I love every minute of it. Took 55 days to get there, not too bad but could only play on weekends and for about an hour after raid nights, and some weekends I was gone but we got there.

<3 shamsham

:O You got geared fast!

Any tips for a freshish 80 shaman?

Damn, you did get geared fast. Grats.

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 raiding

Glyph of lightning bolt (bread and butter!)
Glyph of totem of wrath (big spell power gain here)
Glyph of lava burst

DPSing in raids
There 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 logic

Flame 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 DPS

Initially 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



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 DPS
Then 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.






My bar setup looks like this:

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.

Wow thanks, i've added the rotations.

I'm really starting to like ele more than resto, even though I've got alot of healing mail.

Also, I'm a complete noob, so thanks for explaining the hti raiting thing to me

Always wanted to make a shaman.

/bookmark

Aren't you supposed to put the level of the spell in the macro? I thought I saw something before about how if you just put the spell in a macro, it'll cast the first level of it, and not your highest level of it.

It casts the max level for me.

It always casts the highest level of a spell if the level isn't mentioned in the macro.

I can't stand Elemental pve. Even an arcane mage is more rng oriented opposed to a class that can macro its rotation into a single button that needs to be mashed.

Mine shall be resto main spec and I'm planning to gather an enh offspec set.

Ryoko.

On my shammy, i'm absolutely addicted to re-casting water shield..

Can't stop doing it.

in Dala. In dungeons. Walking around. Even press the button while flying. It's hell.

Horn of winter here :<

Ryoko, glyph of Flame Shock is better than Lavaburst unless you have two pieces of Teir 8 elemental (which i see you do). its a GCD for pretty decent damage and the ability for it to crit is much more valuable than 10% extra spell power on LvB.

also, i disagree on the only casting FlS when LvB is ready. you should be rolling it as best you can at all times. its a global cooldown for pretty decent damage, you just have to keep it up.

the rotation i always used was
Flameshock --> Lavaburst --> Lightning Bolt x4 --> Chain Light --> LvB -->LBx3 --> FlS --> CL --> LvB --> etc etc..

or once you get enough haste, you can fit 5 lightning bolts in instead of worrying about working chain lightning in.

I didnt list GOFS because I have the 2p but for new shamans it could apply yes

Flame shock, currently with the /click sequence I have it adjusted so it usually refreshes right before drop off anyhow; its almost exactly three LvB's worth of its duration

I has that on mouse thumb-button

I do it as well, its such an annoying habbit :S

Also Ryoko, gearing is much easier as elemental, thanks for suggesting it :D

Yar you gots lot restoration gear to swap still. If you save badges or run VOA most all the T9 peices have like 60 hit or so on it, that will help you out. Some items out of TOC 5 man heroic also have hit. The boots, the cape, bracers and so forth.

Once you get hit capped, it almost gets annoying. I got either more hit than I know what to do with, or I swap 1 peice and im under cap.

Of course, as you get hit/haste/crit gear to replace the MP5 bank that for your resto set

And run the life out of heroics. Conquest+daily 2 badges.

Kayy

Ok i have a new love affair. I have had a shaman for months, stuck around 50 and never liked it much when i was leveling elemental... So i switched specs and within a week, she is 66. I love it. Enhancement is so fun... Though im addicted to casting lightning shield. Even when im semi-afk or watching TV i make sure its up.

Bought 2 of the ilvl 226 maces from the Brewfest boss. Found them on AH for 700g each which isnt at all bad. Put Berserking on one and Mongoose on the other. Now the race to 80 begins!

Cant wait for 80 so i can raid with her, especially knowing we need more melee in guild, as we are over-run with casters, i should be able to get into uld25 and toc25 within a week of hitting 80

/thread hijack.

Sloowly getting ele gear.

I need Tier armour so bad :S

I see I see, some new additions.

Still a long way on that hit cap for raiding =S takin some time.

If the armory is accurate, get that meta gem and the head enchant from the kirin tor. The meta gem is a huge dps gain

You workin on maxing tht JC profession? Not only will you get 39 spell power dragon eyes (limit 3) but also that 42 hit / 2 socket / spellpower use trinket might serve you just right, instead of the heal trinket

gogo

atm, I'm broke(ish) so money is quite tight.

Got into a raiding guild, we do ToC 10/25 etc.

Wish me luck lol?

Nice. I recently got myself into a raiding guild that does ToC10/25 after my few months break.
Gl on your ToCs!