Quest for s3 Shoulders. New patch tactics? [Quad shaman]

Ok, so I've spent most of my time on a horrible battlegroup, I finally migrated two weeks ago to another battlegroup.

In two weeks I'm sitting at 1792 now, and so far I've only been climbing. If I had two more weeks, I'm sure I'd be able to get s3 shoulders. I finally got the feel and tactic to beat most teams. But now there's a new patch!

And so far I've noticed a few things. Quite some classes got a boost in dps. Elemental shaman dps however has gone down. I'm sitting at around 150-200 dps less then before the patch per character, and without having nature's swiftness at the ready for that insta blow. Thunderstorm is nice. For melee teams. But in all honesty, I'm wacking all melee teams pretty easily. It's the 4 caster teams that worry me.

So far, I've been able to beat four caster teams by continuesly pushing them in defense. Sometimes for 15 minutes on end, waiting for that one oppertunity to blow one up with the nuke at the right time. It works. I won't have that in the new patch.

The whole resto tree isn't nice anymore. Previously we also got 5 spellcrit for speccing ns, now the spellcrit moved to enhance tree. So speccing for ns in the new patch doesn't seem much good. Thunderstorm does shit damage, has bad spellpower scaling, so is unreliable to use as a nuke as well. And obviously, it only works on melee, ranged wouldn't get close enough to you if they're smart. This leaves me to wonder, will I still be able to get them shoulders? If I look at other classes improvs, and ele shaman improvs. I dunno. I'm skeptical.

So, has anyone tried arena yet with the new patch? Any major changes in tactic vs ranged teams?

I've been pondering this aswell. However, it's a complex situation really.

* If ranged dps is afraid of getting close, just remove meelee dps with thunderstorm, and kill the casters with a steady dps.
* If ranged dps circles you and does aoe dmg, just remove them with thunderstorm, or go for kills with Novas+Shock+EM+4xThunder.
* We are much more mobile and dynamic with Thunderstorm.. and we have tons of control. For example, consider LOS humping queers at a pillar. Frost shock one, run up close, and Thunderstorm him away from the pillar.. shock again, kill.

Btw.. has anyone confirmed that EM+TS generates crits on everyone hit?

Actually, yes it does seem to get affected by EM:
http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=59159#comments


Now... I can't see anyone surviving 4x Shock + 4x Fire nova + 4x Crit TS. Looks like roughly 20-25k damage to me.. and good news is that the TS is an aoe spell so it won't be grounded or spell reflected.


Basically as far as I can tell, we have a guaranteed kill on anyone that comes close.

I haven't tried arena sense the patch, but I would guess that it's 99% ret pallys in pve gear atm

I did some BGs yesterday and basically everyone was just getting insta gibbed left and right

I did two arena matches, ended up with the same team twice. Ret pally Ret pally Ret pally hunter priest. I got lucky and won the first time by nova totem then crit thunderstorm. I guess they hadn't bubbled because no one was taking damage. The second time they killed my priest all bubbled and ate me alive.