5x Ele Shaman and Mastery

[cmeche]

I have done a few BGs in the last week and one thing I love is the lowered cd on chain lightning. I am guessing that CL might be hitting for less, but now being able to always cast LB-CL combo is amazing.

But anyway, I was wondering if anyone running 4 or 5 Shaman went for full mastery? I would say running solo, mastery would help out a bunch. But I cant really figure out if mastery would help out my team. I would guess it would, but to the loss of a little crit worth it?

[Zappy]

I reforged all my gear (pvp) and got up to something like 15.63 mastery or the likes. On the test dummies, I didn't see any increase in DPS - seeing a solid 8500 DPS for both configurations. I think in the end, I lost something around 8% crit. For BGs, I can't say I really notice a difference, except on the pillar humping LOSers. If you manage to get one spell off on them, there's a very good chance, they'll get hit again from overload.

[Colakongen]

hey, im quad-shammyboxer :D
I run full mastery atm, full wrathgear.
and I can tell u that mastery is WIN! especially when firing into huge groups(targeting warritanks etc).
and do u really need crit? ur LvB is 100% crit, so are the proccs.

and tbh, check out ur ES instead :D 20k crits x4=lovely! :D

-Tèr!

[Kicksome]

I tried to reforge all my pvp gear to mastery and I lost DPS.

Zappy, are you using a castsequence for your shamans?

[zenga]

@kicksome, how do you test your dps in pvp? Recount ain't a good option, neither is the dummy, nor does the total damage done at the end of a BG (if you kill quicker, that means you'll have less total damage done). Mastery = makes your spells go off twice for free. I don't see how that can be < than waiting for the cooldown for the next spell.

[heyaz]

I've only done one shaman so far, reforged all to mastery and I love it in PVP. Fire off stuff like a machine gun... the overloads do 75% damage and can crit (unlike the old version of overload). I'm getting multiple lava bursts... going to try it on all 4 shaman this week, I think it could be some insane burst. I can instagib people in pve gear with 1 shaman right now.

When I reforged I took it all out of crit. Somehow I was sitting at over 40% crit (they must have changed something) and I now I have about 34-35% which seems like plenty - I crit a ton and resilience doesn't reduce chance to crit anymore... but as for having all your shaman reforged mastery.. i can't really see how a few % more crit (when you're aleady over 35%) is better than >30% chance to launch free spells up to 75% dmg

[Zappy]

I tried to reforge all my pvp gear to mastery and I lost DPS.

Zappy, are you using a castsequence for your shamans?

yah, pretty much the same macro as posted everywhere else. :)

[Noids]

Purely on numbers mastery is better than crit every time and the effects are almost identical unlike trying to compare crit to haste.

As we know 1 crit = 1 mastery and as you pointed out you can swap 8% crit for 8% mastery.

1% crit will double the damage of any spell or dot tick 1% of the time EXCEPT for Lava Burst which should be a guaranteed crit if you can play. Now my LvB does 25-30% of my damage and being our biggest nuke, is probably your best kill shot. This means 1% crit adds maybe 0.7-0.75% dps. Sure you get clearcasting also but I already have a reasonable uptime on that from my LvB crits.

1% mastery will add a 75% damage increase to all of your nukes (except shocks and fulmination) 2% of the tim. dps increase here is 1.5% x percentage of damage your nukes do of your total dps which is probably approx 90% in PvP. (ie. 1.35% theoretical dps increase)

So mastery is approximately 80-90% better overall than crit. Hard to prove in practice obviously, but thats a big enough theoretical number for me to give it the benefit of the doubt at this stage.

[BrothelMeister]

The overload only works on your nukes, and since our number one killer now will be a fully charged earth shock, since its a 10k instant cast that crits for 20k, I think that 8% crit [8% chance for double damage] in exchange for an extra 16% for an extra 0.75 damage nuke (not including the earth shock release) is fairly equal.

All in all, at this stage, it seems like preference. Increasing the crit chance will make your earth shock crit more when chasing down flag carriers, and point for point, the mastery will just make your hard cast nukes hit harder.

For me, I think I'm gonna stick with crit, but thats just because I like a 45% crit chance with my hardest hitting ability.

[zenga]

The overload only works on your nukes, and since our number one killer now will be a fully charged earth shock, since its a 10k instant cast that crits for 20k, I think that 8% crit [8% chance for double damage] in exchange for an extra 16% for an extra 0.75 damage nuke (not including the earth shock release) is fairly equal.

All in all, at this stage, it seems like preference. Increasing the crit chance will make your earth shock crit more when chasing down flag carriers, and point for point, the mastery will just make your hard cast nukes hit harder.

For me, I think I'm gonna stick with crit, but thats just because I like a 45% crit chance with my hardest hitting ability.

I have played quite some bg's since the patch (solo) and I have maybe cast 10 earth shocks in total. I usually ended up having a 6+ stack by accident. Any decent priest will dispel you and you lose your stacks. Not to mention those resto shamans who cast earth shield on you by accident. On top of that you want fs to go off before you cast LvB, casting an ES will only delay your LvB.
One could build up 9 stacks vs a dummy and then cast an ES upon joining a BG, but thats a pita as well to do.

I'm considering to just drop my talent point in fumination for my pvp spec as I consider it utterly useless in pvp. Lava burst with every single point of mastery you can get is for me the only way to go.

[cmeche]

I have played quite some bg's since the patch (solo) and I have maybe cast 10 earth shocks in total. I usually ended up having a 6+ stack by accident. Any decent priest will dispel you and you lose your stacks. Not to mention those resto shamans who cast earth shield on you by accident. On top of that you want fs to go off before you cast LvB, casting an ES will only delay your LvB.
One could build up 9 stacks vs a dummy and then cast an ES upon joining a BG, but thats a pita as well to do.

I'm considering to just drop my talent point in fumination for my pvp spec as I consider it utterly useless in pvp. Lava burst with every single point of mastery you can get is for me the only way to go.

Same here.....I either find myself with maybe 6 stacks(waiting for higher stack) before a melee jumps in and removes a few or I refresh lightning shield back down to 3 by habbit. I do like the chance of 2% of mana on spellcast though....makes those long turtle AVs very fun.

[Multibocks]

Does the glyph of lightning shield make sure that you never have to refresh shield again?

[zenga]

Does the glyph of lightning shield make sure that you never have to refresh shield again?

Glyph of Lightning Shield (http://www.dual-boxing.com/Glyph%20of%20Lightning%20Shield%20Major%20Glyph%20 Classes:%20Shaman%20Requires%20Level%2025%20Item%2 0Level%2025%20Use:%20Permanently%20teaches%20you%2 0this%20glyph.%20%20Your%20Lightning%20Shield%20ca n%20no%20longer%20drop%20below%203%20charges%20fro m%20dealing%20damage%20to%20attackers.)
It can still be dispelled though. Using that glyph seems to make little difference. It might be good though to deal a finishing blow on your target while running away over frost shock. I don't see the use of it in PvP, unless maybe for those AV turtles where you keep casting at range and use lightning bolt enough to build up stacks.

[Kicksome]

@kicksome, how do you test your dps in pvp? Recount ain't a good option, neither is the dummy, nor does the total damage done at the end of a BG (if you kill quicker, that means you'll have less total damage done). Mastery = makes your spells go off twice for free. I don't see how that can be < than waiting for the cooldown for the next spell.

Basically, you're saying (at least this is how I read it) it's impossible to tell your DPS, if that's the case, how is everyone saying they do so much more dps.

I sat at the training dummies in SW on 5 shaman for probably an hour DPSing the level 80 target dummies. Using the same macro, I got a very consistent DPS with and without mastery, on all 5 of my shaman.

I tried it all with mastery, and all with crit, and the mastery lost DPS with my PVP gear - which is all the top PVP gear you can get besides shoulders.

I guess I'll try it again tonight on one of my guys, and see if there's any difference.

[Boylston]

What I don't care for is that you can over-write a 9-stack of Lightning Shield yourself by casting the buff again.

If someone dispells a shammy, if I use my "Everyone cast LS" button, then the whole team gets reset down to 3 stacks... What a pain.

I've used Fulmination a fair amount in BGs, although I will say that it's not being used as much as I thought it might. I still think it's worth having, though.

[BrothelMeister]

I have played quite some bg's since the patch (solo) and I have maybe cast 10 earth shocks in total. I usually ended up having a 6+ stack by accident. Any decent priest will dispel you and you lose your stacks. Not to mention those resto shamans who cast earth shield on you by accident. On top of that you want fs to go off before you cast LvB, casting an ES will only delay your LvB.
One could build up 9 stacks vs a dummy and then cast an ES upon joining a BG, but thats a pita as well to do.

I'm considering to just drop my talent point in fumination for my pvp spec as I consider it utterly useless in pvp. Lava burst with every single point of mastery you can get is for me the only way to go.

Who says you need flameshock before lava burst?

Lava ->Chain Lightning -> (Any shock) Is quite often enough to kill a single target anyway.

You can try to think outside the box, if you always pre-cast flameshock, your opponents always know that they are about to get hit hard, and are either going to notify their healer, or LoS you. The most successful way I've found to catch hard targets is to not pre-cast 4 stacks of flameshock on them, but instead to just start the attack with a nuke.

[zenga]

Who says you need flameshock before lava burst?

Lava ->Chain Lightning -> (Any shock) Is quite often enough to kill a single target anyway.

You can try to think outside the box, if you always pre-cast flameshock, your opponents always know that they are about to get hit hard, and are either going to notify their healer, or LoS you. The most successful way I've found to catch hard targets is to not pre-cast 4 stacks of flameshock on them, but instead to just start the attack with a nuke.

I assume you are more talking about arena's and me about BG's. LoS in a BG ain't that evident. As I haven't played arena past the patch (no skirmishes for me) i'm sticking to bg's for now. Basically now there are certain classes that I want dead as soon as I attack them, wasting my lvb vs pally healer or resto druid is something I don't fancy. That being said I almost never open with FS/LvB, but rather cast a lb or cl after the first fs to make em waste cooldowns / spellreflect / etc (ie. fs, lb, - windshear- fs, lvb for example).

Obviously each will have his own playstyle. Though with the healthpools going to increase as we gear & level up (and spell damage not to scale as much afaik), the importance of guaranteed crits for our main damaging spell + the fact they can go off multiple times (mastery) is going to increase. Not to mention that our crit levels are going to decrease as we level up.

[BrothelMeister]

With reforging and re-gemming, I can drop 560 resil (to land at about 900) in order to get 560 mastery.

By my math, that should take my %chance of overload from the 16% up to 40%

That with the 45% crit, and 4k Spell power I've got will definitely make my shamans OP as hell.

Even still though, not sure that more damage is worthwhile in exchange for more defense

[BrothelMeister]

Well, cant-reforge Resil into other stats, which is probably good, otherwise you would see Icecrown PvE gear re-forged into resil for Better PvP gear.

Since its still true that fulmination is a bitch to stack to full, then nukes really are still the majority of the damage involved in a kill, a balance of % chance for Overload, and % chance for crit is probably best, which Is what I did.

[Eloxy]

word, fulmination is in my eyes nothing you use to drop a target from 100%-0%. But more of a "kill shot" (wich usualy does its job all the time these days xD)
And yeah we do loads of damage as it is now pre 81+ so ill be having the set amount of resi to def me. And rather have a prio of: mastery-int-crit. dont gonna worry with hit atm as as arena isnt a issue.

[Noids]

As nice as an ES and fulmination crit is, the cool thing about mastery is that LvB with an overload proc can be just as likely, easier to get off more frequently and only do slightly less damage all said.

At this stage if 5 of my guys get a 6 stack fulmination and ES off thats 75k damage non-crit anyway, minus resil, add the 35 crit I still have, that person is going to die regardless of the extra mastery I have managed to pick up.

[BrothelMeister]

As nice as an ES and fulmination crit is, the cool thing about mastery is that LvB with an overload proc can be just as likely, easier to get off more frequently and only do slightly less damage all said.

At this stage if 5 of my guys get a 6 stack fulmination and ES off thats 75k damage non-crit anyway, minus resil, add the 35 crit I still have, that person is going to die regardless of the extra mastery I have managed to pick up.

This is the exact point that drives home what I say about playstyle. Anythign executed correctly will be enough overkill to finish someone regardless, so just go with whatever spec/ stats you prefer.

[zenga]

Something I've noticed: In AB/WsG/EotS/SoTA my stacks are getting dispelled all the time. Whereas in Wintergrasp, IoC & AV it seems to be less the case, and fulmination comes in handy. Can only assume that it has to do with the nature of the BG/map: in the first ones enemy players are all over the place, whereas in the latter ones it's often more here vs there.

[Greythan]

Makes sense Z. The three larger BG's you mentioned give you much more opportunity to set up in a quasi-sniper position, start dishing out damage, and not be receiving any defensive response. The smaller BG's make it much more likely you'll be targeted and subsequently dispelled.

While I'm still purely in the theoretical stage (still getting set-up and haven't played post patch), I have really mixed feelings on the Fulmination mechanic and usage.

[BrothelMeister]

I really dont know what this dispell is that you speak of. In all honesty, if youre putting pressure on the enemy target with 4 shaman, theyre going to be struggling to stay alive, and not very capable of dispelling the shield. Do you have the glyph of lightning shield? If not my guess is that its not being dispelled, its simply being used up.

[Kruschpakx4]

just reforged crit to haste, now I have 35% crit and 16% haste, 4,30 hit and 8% mastery, as long as mastery does not effect healing spells I prefer haste because at the moment I can outheal ~5 dps with healing surge spam