My experience with shaman on the PTR.

[Shodokan]

I know this is more of a PvP thread, but I'd rather not start a new one.

Copied a shaman to the PTR today, put in new talents, trained, etc. Made a simple macro:

/cast elemental mastery
/castsequence reset=combat/target flame shock, lava burst, lightning bolt, lightning bolt, lightning bolt, lightning bolt

I originally tried with 3 LB, but it would get hung up on the Lava Burst. Pulled around 3700 DPS on a Heroic dummy, about the same throughout a Heroic instance just using my macro. Then I tried doing my spells manually and pulled around 4500 DPS. So I'm looking at a considerable loss of DPS so far, but i'll start getting a bit more complex soon. Also need to find a way to work in Earth Shock.

Earthshock as a secondary button is fine.

[Boylston]

I think playing with some of the PTR stuff has me convinced that I'll need to stick with Shamans. I have 4 of them, from the Healer+Quad Shammy arena domination days, so I will likely drag along a druid on my level-up quest to 80. (Or a DK, or Pally, or Warlock... they're all on the fifth account!)

I think I may be done with multiboxing instances all by myself. There doesn't seem to be any major gear reason to do so anymore, and I can always pick up a tank with my 4xShaman pack and run stuff. (I have several great friends who are tanks and always liked doing instances with someone else tanking.)

mosg2-- You've nailed it for me with the druids. I think I will get them to 85 eventually, but I think I'm going to focus on the shaman first. Doesn't hurt that my guild is pretty overloaded with druids-- I'm less likely to cause raid-night problems by being a shaman main...

I'm sure this will all change in 24-48 hours. =P

[Toned]

Duel a Boonkin as an Ele shaman on PTR or Cata Beta... IMO that will solve most of your questions lol. Unless boonkins are horribly horribly under balanced with coefficents and numbers they are really squishy atm and seem to do mediocre dmg.

[Boylston]

Duel a Boonkin as an Ele shaman on PTR or Cata Beta... IMO that will solve most of your questions lol. Unless boonkins are horribly horribly under balanced with coefficents and numbers they are really squishy atm and seem to do mediocre dmg.

Yeah, I've played both as a pre-made 80... Even with some Elemental tuning downward, it's a big difference.

Fulmination will stay in as a concept, I think. Even with some damage tuning, it's likely to stay reasonably potent, given that there are counters to it in PvP and the devs have somewhat said "If you let a caster build up a big attack, you deserve to get hit really hard."

Last expansion, I stubbornly made the mistake of leveling my multi-hunter team first-- I knew that it didn't seem like it was going to be as good as the shammies, but didn't listen to my gut and leveled them to 80. They were almost never played after hitting 80 and reality set in hard.

This go-around, I'm going to go with what appears to be the better team. If people playing multi-druids are dominating later on, I can always make them my second team and finish the 80-85 journey a few months after release.

[Kruschpakx4]

faced a 85 boomkin today in tol barad

insect swarn 3k ticks 6k crits, starfal 3k ticks

flame shock- EM = 22k lava burst with full green gear + 11,8k lava burst overload (!), followed by goblin rocket chainlight 2xlightning blot earth shock druid dead

I had about 40% life when he died, he used starfall, treants and all that shit


misstimed unleash elements because I've binded lava burst with em (very bad idead btw:P), so lava burst does about 27-28k damage with em, green trinket +900 spellpower and unleash elements (with 2/2 elemental weapons)

[Shodokan]

faced a 85 boomkin today in tol barad

insect swarn 3k ticks 6k crits, starfal 3k ticks

flame shock- EM = 22k lava burst with full green gear + 11,8k lava burst overload (!), followed by goblin rocket chainlight 2xlightning blot earth shock druid dead

I had about 40% life when he died, he used starfall, treants and all that shit


misstimed unleash elements because I've binded lava burst with em (very bad idead btw:P), so lava burst does about 27-28k damage with em, green trinket +900 spellpower and unleash elements (with 2/2 elemental weapons)

Are you going to re-forge for mastery? The extra damage from overload seems like A LOT to pass up.

[Boylston]

Fresh 85s have about 85-100k hit points? Is that about right?

[Shodokan]

Fresh 85s have about 85-100k hit points? Is that about right?

85k in greens, 100k in blues

[Kruschpakx4]

my full green shaman has 67k hp, the druid had about 62k

with blues you'll have about 85-100k hp and may with epics 110k+

[outdrsyguy1]

I'm definitely liking the shaman for cata. The spiritwalkers grace (move while casting for 10 sec) is great and the burst is pretty awesome right now, i've definitely done 24k crits followed by 11k overloads. The overloads really seem to happen a lot and that unleash elements making your next fire spell 20% bigger, that and EM are downright nasty. I'm totally going to use the fire elemental with glyph. Having 5 fire elementals out in virtually every fight is going to be crazy.

Warlocks Burning Embers talent is stupid. Locks do pretty good dps (destro) but after I played with a target dummy and 48% of my damage was burning embers (i had 10k dps) which is an ability you have no control over, it's just a proc off your imp that does like 5k dps all on it's own. You could totally run 4 locks and have a 4 man hit squad of imps chasing people down while the locks do virtually nothing. ***apparently i just learned the spell is bugged op***

BM hunter pets are still pretty nasty too, even after the nerf. I was getting 11 to 12k dps on target dummy (all this is unenchanted, ungemmed, un professioned)

ret pallies are a total letdown. The holy power system sucks. It's terrible dps, very little burst but maybe once every 2 mins after some rampup. And it's very reactionary, i'm a sad panda because i really loved dk/pally team. If dk's could heal each other even a little i'd totally go to a 5 dk melee team and annhialate people.

lol, i just tested locks by sending my imp on a target dummy and leaving the lock afk. Imp does 1500 dps, burning embers dot from the imp does 5k dps, that's 6500 dps for doing nothing but hit attack on the pet. I can BARELY break 5k dps activly mashing keys like mad on the ret pally. let alone the 10k+ the lock can do.