5x Ele Shaman and Mastery

[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
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.