5x Ele Shaman and Mastery

[cmeche]

I have done a few BGs in the last week and one thing I love is the lowered cd on chain lightning. I am guessing that CL might be hitting for less, but now being able to always cast LB-CL combo is amazing.

But anyway, I was wondering if anyone running 4 or 5 Shaman went for full mastery? I would say running solo, mastery would help out a bunch. But I cant really figure out if mastery would help out my team. I would guess it would, but to the loss of a little crit worth it?

[Zappy]

I reforged all my gear (pvp) and got up to something like 15.63 mastery or the likes. On the test dummies, I didn't see any increase in DPS - seeing a solid 8500 DPS for both configurations. I think in the end, I lost something around 8% crit. For BGs, I can't say I really notice a difference, except on the pillar humping LOSers. If you manage to get one spell off on them, there's a very good chance, they'll get hit again from overload.

[Colakongen]

hey, im quad-shammyboxer
I run full mastery atm, full wrathgear.
and I can tell u that mastery is WIN! especially when firing into huge groups(targeting warritanks etc).
and do u really need crit? ur LvB is 100% crit, so are the proccs.

and tbh, check out ur ES instead 20k crits x4=lovely!

-Tèr!

[Kicksome]

I tried to reforge all my pvp gear to mastery and I lost DPS.

Zappy, are you using a castsequence for your shamans?

[zenga]

@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.

[heyaz]

I've only done one shaman so far, reforged all to mastery and I love it in PVP. Fire off stuff like a machine gun... the overloads do 75% damage and can crit (unlike the old version of overload). I'm getting multiple lava bursts... going to try it on all 4 shaman this week, I think it could be some insane burst. I can instagib people in pve gear with 1 shaman right now.

When I reforged I took it all out of crit. Somehow I was sitting at over 40% crit (they must have changed something) and I now I have about 34-35% which seems like plenty - I crit a ton and resilience doesn't reduce chance to crit anymore... but as for having all your shaman reforged mastery.. i can't really see how a few % more crit (when you're aleady over 35%) is better than >30% chance to launch free spells up to 75% dmg

[Zappy]

I tried to reforge all my pvp gear to mastery and I lost DPS.

Zappy, are you using a castsequence for your shamans?

yah, pretty much the same macro as posted everywhere else.

[Noids]

Purely on numbers mastery is better than crit every time and the effects are almost identical unlike trying to compare crit to haste.

As we know 1 crit = 1 mastery and as you pointed out you can swap 8% crit for 8% mastery.

1% crit will double the damage of any spell or dot tick 1% of the time EXCEPT for Lava Burst which should be a guaranteed crit if you can play. Now my LvB does 25-30% of my damage and being our biggest nuke, is probably your best kill shot. This means 1% crit adds maybe 0.7-0.75% dps. Sure you get clearcasting also but I already have a reasonable uptime on that from my LvB crits.

1% mastery will add a 75% damage increase to all of your nukes (except shocks and fulmination) 2% of the tim. dps increase here is 1.5% x percentage of damage your nukes do of your total dps which is probably approx 90% in PvP. (ie. 1.35% theoretical dps increase)

So mastery is approximately 80-90% better overall than crit. Hard to prove in practice obviously, but thats a big enough theoretical number for me to give it the benefit of the doubt at this stage.

[BrothelMeister]

The overload only works on your nukes, and since our number one killer now will be a fully charged earth shock, since its a 10k instant cast that crits for 20k, I think that 8% crit [8% chance for double damage] in exchange for an extra 16% for an extra 0.75 damage nuke (not including the earth shock release) is fairly equal.

All in all, at this stage, it seems like preference. Increasing the crit chance will make your earth shock crit more when chasing down flag carriers, and point for point, the mastery will just make your hard cast nukes hit harder.

For me, I think I'm gonna stick with crit, but thats just because I like a 45% crit chance with my hardest hitting ability.

[zenga]

The overload only works on your nukes, and since our number one killer now will be a fully charged earth shock, since its a 10k instant cast that crits for 20k, I think that 8% crit [8% chance for double damage] in exchange for an extra 16% for an extra 0.75 damage nuke (not including the earth shock release) is fairly equal.

All in all, at this stage, it seems like preference. Increasing the crit chance will make your earth shock crit more when chasing down flag carriers, and point for point, the mastery will just make your hard cast nukes hit harder.

For me, I think I'm gonna stick with crit, but thats just because I like a 45% crit chance with my hardest hitting ability.

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.