Elemental mastery changed on PTR

[Fuzzyboy]

... from crit to haste. To be honest I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. 15% would be 492ish haste rating, correct? And EM + Heroism would put us near the 1 sec GCD, assuming they will stack.

What impact will the change have if it goes live?

[yaki]

Should be more useful at higher gear levels, a little less at "I haven't run a heroic or crafted a purple, ever" gear levels.

[HPAVC]

Seems like an odd and needless choice of things to mess with on their part. A nature swiftness + proto icy veins isn't really something i would think they could account well for on a three minute cool down.

[TheFallenOne]

They decided they liked the T10 2 piece bonus, and instead of changing it, figured they'd change Elemental Mastery to make it a worthwhile DPS increase.

Overall, it's definitely a buff, so no complaining from me!

[yaki]

Well I wouldn't mind if the cooldown was shortened...although I'd take a de-nerf to Heroism limited to party scope over it, and I'm hesitant to ask for changes to anything given that more often than not you don't really want to get dev attention if something isn't outright bugged.

[Fuzzyboy]

was it done to make shamans less bursty in pvp? I'm having a hard time seeing the reason behind this change.

[Altsoba]

was it done to make shamans less bursty in pvp? I'm having a hard time seeing the reason behind this change.

I'm not a maths guy but our harderst hit spell is an auto crit in the initial burst, so maybe and only maybe, it's better to have haste instead of those extra % crit.
Hope the math guys step forward so we know if haste is more dps than crit.

From Elitistjerks:

"In ZAP, assuming EM and BL stack, using them together is roughly equal to using them apart until about 900 haste rating (+ buffs, ~38%). At that point using them separately is better and it's still a DPS increase over the old EM. By 1100 haste without 2t10, if you use new EM+BL together it's less DPS than using old EM, but new EM decoupled from BL is still very slightly higher DPS overall (~10). With 2t10 new EM is clearly better than old EM whether it's used with BL or not.

This is assuming a 6.7% uptime on BL (that is, 40 seconds every 10 minutes) and an 8.3% uptime on EM (that is, 15 seconds every 3 minutes) without 2t10 (which increases EM's uptime to between 15 and 19% depending on haste).

So:
Haste < 900 = no significant difference between using EM with or without BL
Haste > 900 = better to use without BL
That means it'd be better to use the new 3.3 PTR incarnation of EM on cooldown every cooldown than to wait and synch it with BL.

If most of us save EM for use with other cooldowns at present, this change would increase our EM usage and uptime as well as increasing the DPS of the effect, which adds up to more of a DPS boost than the spreadsheet will claim (as it assumes EM usage on cooldown every cooldown anyway)."

[Whowantstoknow]

Yeah its a dps boost haste is better than crit for Eles up until you run into problems with 1s cast times which is what the EJ post is getting at. Its going to make the ToEW less desirable in 3.3 as anyone with BiS non raid gear will be getting close to 900 haste without it and our BL uptime on bosses is much higher than for raiders

[Fursphere]

was it done to make shamans less bursty in pvp? I'm having a hard time seeing the reason behind this change.

LESS? THey didn't say they are removing the nature's swiftness effect. That's still there from what I understand.

THey are just changing crit to haste. Haste = moar bursty.

[Multibocks]

I would like them to change it to +15% spell power, but we know that ain't gonna happen.