5x Ele Shaman and Mastery

[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.