Season 11 - Elemental Shaman: Gear Stats Gems and Reforging

by Hevan // March 1, 2012

Introduction

Hello everyone!

In this article I will be showing you everything about Elemental Shaman Stats, Gear, Gems and Reforging for the new PvP Season 11.

First lets go over the changes for Elemental Shamans of the new patch with season 11, patch 4.3:

  • [Flametongue Weapon] no longer increases spell damage. It now increases all non-physical damage done by the wielder by 5%.

It seems that this is a small nerf for now (around 3% according to the people on our forums) but over time, it will get better and better, since it scales better with gear, so possibly at the Pandarian expansion this will be a small buff.

Awesome!

  • [Wind Shear] base cooldown has been adjusted to 15 seconds, up from 6 seconds.

This isn’t partically affecting elementals, since they’ve also adjusted the talents in the elemental tree, this just means now that you’re forced to take the Reverberation talents rather than any other talents you might’ve wanted.

The compensation for the [Wind Shear] nerf, since blizzard only intended to make it affect Resto Shamans they compensated this talent so that we can still have our beloved 5-second cooldown on this ability.

Small nerf, but not very impactful ([Fire Nova] doesn’t do a lot of damage anyway, and is mostly used to try to get people in combat/out of stealth or to prevent people from drinking).

  • Earthquake damage has been increased by roughly 75%.

Even with the damage increase [Earthquake] is a very bad ability in PvP, so this doesn’t change anything for us.

A very nice change for us, we’re now able to spam [Chain Lightning]whenever we want and are no longer limited by a small cooldown.
This is especially good once multiple people are together next to each other, since [Rolling Thunder]‘s [Lightning Shield] stacking and mana returning effects benefit 3x from [Chain Lightning] if it hits 3 targets, so this causes you to gain a lot of extra Lightning Shield stacks which will give you much more often full Fulminations.

  • [Shamanism] now increases the spell power benefit to Lightning Bolt, Lava Burst, and Chain Lightning by 36%, up from 32%.

A nice change, increases our [Lightning Bolt], [Lava Burst] and [Chain Lightning] damage by a bit.

Stats

It’s very important to know what kind of stats you should be aiming for, since this determines how much damage you can output and how fast you can output the damage, this also helps you choose different gear pieces based on your stat-priority.

Casters including Elemental Shamans have the following two caps which are crucial for us to have:

  • 4% (410) Hit Rating
  • 240 Spell Penetration

You want to obtain the Hit Rating cap by reforging certain items from their secondary stat into Hit Rating.
You will want to try and get as close to 410 Hit Rating as you can while reforging.
The best way to do this is to use a reforge calculator from a website like www.wowreforge.com.
You can achieve the Spell Penetration cap by getting the Cloak that gives Spell Penetration.
After you’ve achieved these two caps the stat priority is as following:

Intellect>Haste>Resilience>Mastery>Crit

Intellect is simply the best stat for Elemental Shamans, it increases your damage by the most and it also increases your off-healing.
After intellect comes haste, haste makes your casts and your global cooldown faster, so faster damaging abilities, faster CC and faster heals.
A lot of people are wondering whats better haste or mastery, imo haste is quite a lot better, since mastery gives “random” burst, its not guaranteed to be there, and I prefer to have solid reliable burst then unreliable burst.
Also there isn’t really a DPS difference, if you’d be spam hitting a dummy and exchanging haste for mastery you will hardly see a DPS increase, and since mastery only affects [Lightning Bolt], [Chain Lightning] and [Lava Burst]haste is the better choice.
Crit is the worst secondary stat for us, this is because one of our main damaging abilities, which is [Lava Burst], has a 100% crit chance when you have [Flame Shock]up, so adding more crit doesn’t do anything for the [Lava Burst], so you’re far better off with any other secondary stat.
Resilience is also a very important stat, just because Intellect and Haste is more important doesn’t mean you want to be running around in PvE gear maximizing these, you definitely need a large chunk of resilience and I recommend using close to full PvP gear (with the exception of one good PvE trinket maybe for example).

Gear

Now that we know our stat priority lets have a look how this affects our gear choice.

Main-set

As an elemental shaman it’s absolutely crucial to have the 4-set bonus from elemental PvP gear, which is the following:

  • When your Lightning Shield is triggered by receiving damage, a charge will be generated rather than consumed, up to a maximum of 3.

What this mean is, that normally, without the set bonus, you would be losing [Lightning Shield] stacks when you are hit by damage, but with this set bonus you will gain a charge rather than losing one, so this is absolutely crucial to us.
Since if we were to be trained and wouldn’t have this set-bonus our damage would be almost nothing because [Fulmination] from our [Lightning Shield] is a ton of damage.

Because our stat priority for our Secondary Stats is Haste > Mastery > Crit the best items to choose from the main set are the following:

Helm: Elemental

Shoulder: Elemental

Chest: Elemental

Gloves: Restoration

Legs: Elemental

Basically we pick the Elemental gear Helm, Shoulders, Armor and Leggings.
Since the normal Elemental Gloves have Crit rating, and we already have our 4-set bonus, I recommend to use the Restoration gloves since these give Haste as off-stat which is a lot better than the Crit rating from the Elemental gloves.

Off-set

Our off-set has no set bonus whatsoever, so we can simply pick out items based on our stat priority, which would have the following result:

Necklace:

Cloak:

Bracer:

Belt:

Boots:

Ring1:

Ring2:

or

Since the only other PvP-spell ring we can get is a ring with Crit rating, this PvE ring which can be easily obtained through Valor Points is a very good choice, it gives Hit rating and Haste rating, which basically means double haste, as you’ll be able to reforge other items which you’d normally have to use for hit-rating into haste rating.

Relic:

Trinket 1:

Trinket 2:
Here are quite a few options, which are the following:

[Cunning of the Cruel] and [Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor] are insanely good trinkets for PvP, the damage increase is very big so if you have the opportunity to get one of these PvE items I certainly recommend you to use them.
Even the Looking For Raid version of [Cunning of the Cruel] is very good already, so give it a shot every week and maybe you’ll be lucky!

Gems

In patch 4.3 Blizzard have added Epic gems to the arsenal.
These gems can be gained from doing the new Dragon Soul raid, but seem to be quite a lot drop chance and are very expensive in the Auction House currently.
Of course if you can afford it extra stats are always welcome, but be sure to only use them on Best in Slot gear for this season as you wouldn’t want to be replacing items having Epic Gems inside them as this would be very costly!
I recommend you to use the following gems in each socket:

Red socket: +40 or +50 Intellect

Yellow Socket: +20 or +25 Intellect and Haste

Blue Socket: +20 or 25 Intellect and Hit rating

Meta Socket: +54 Intellect and 3% increased critical damage

Prismatic Socket: +40 or +50 Intellect

Enchants

No new enchants have been added with patch 4.3, so the enchants we had from last-season should simply be re-applied which are the following:

Helm: +60 Intellect and +35 Resilience

Shoulder: +50 Intellect and +25 Resilience or +50 Intellect and +25 Haste

Cloak: +50 Intellect

Chest: +40 Resilience

Bracer: +50 Intellect

Gloves: +50 Haste or +65 Mastery

Legs: +95 Intellect and +80 Stamina

Boots: +50 Haste

Weapon: Power Torrent

Off-hand: +40 Intellect


Last Words


This was my article regarding the 4.3 patch, stat priority and gearing.
If you want to get exactly 4% Hit-Rating with reforging I recommend you to use a reforge calculating addon or a website for this, like for example www.wowreforge.com, it’s really easy to reforge exactly into the right amount using one of these tools as they’ve the ability to load your character from the armory and do all the calculation for you!
If you have any questions or comments just post it in the area below here or send me a PM.
Thanks for reading and take care!

  • -2
    mosembleker
    10 months ago
    Why would an EleSham need hit? Doesn't our spirit convert to hit?
  • -1
    Blacktooth
    11 months ago
    Haste better than Mastery. Is this taking into account the fact you will not just be sitting still and beating on a target dummy? I've played both and Mastery has taken down opponents where Haste hasn't due to constant maneuvering.
  • 0
    Shoe
    12 months ago
    I believe the stats are the same, but what is the difference between using the T1 Cataclysmic Mace (Something Gavel I think it's called) and the T1 Cataclysmic caster Dagger? Or is it simply because the weapon speed is faster so you can get the Sprit Link Totem, etc. faster. I personally prefer the look of the mace, so do you think it is really that much of a difference? Since you're usually not in range of those totems and stuff at first anyway.
  • 0
    hairyotter
    14 months ago
    what about the LFR version of the poison dagger from Deathwing? i have that at the moment and just seems like the stats outweight the ruthless dagger?
     
    • 1
      Hevan
      14 months ago
      It is better than the ruthless s10 dagger indeed, but the tier 1 Cataclysmic dagger is better than the LFR one :)
  • 0
    hairyotter
    14 months ago
    this guide doesnt mention weapons, is there any PvE weapons that would out weight the PvP ones?
     
    • 0
      Hevan
      14 months ago
      Only the heroic Deathwing poison dagger is better than the Tier 2 PvP Dagger.
      The normal Deathwing poison dagger is better than the Tier 1 PvP Dagger.
  • 0
    Thuben
    14 months ago
    Hey, just started playing Elemental in PvP and I wonder if "unleash elements" is useful (I know in PvE its not)
    Greetings
    Thuben
     
    • 1
      Hevan
      14 months ago
      It's especially usefull while you're sitting in a silence (it's physical) or when you want to set up a lot of burst (Unleash -> Lava Burst -> Chain Lightning -> Fulmination).