I may have gotten the WoW itch, tell me what's happened in the past 2 years.

[heyaz]

I haven't looked into enh so Krusch may be on to something, especially if they have a reliable insta kill shot - I didn't think anybody had that anymore at least not at range. Another grind to 90 followed by an honor grind I suppose.

The reliable insta kill shot is within a 3 minute window when you are in Ascendance and not CC'd. Stormblast (stormstrike under ascendance) hits for about quadruple and is all nature damage, bypassing armor. Correct me if I'm wrong but outside of that, enhance damage with stormstrike and lava lash is like auto-attacking compared to other melee. The kill shot with elemental back in BC was CL + ES. In wrath it was 4x lava burst + 4x FS/ES and or CL to connect at the same time - but this could be repeated every 10-15 seconds or so, you didn't need to wait for elemental mastery to come back up although it helped.

How do you kill anything quickly outside of ascendance every 3 minutes? You need a lot of uptime (not something you get often these days) to get kills after that is over. You need lucky windfury procs, stormlash, and some big stormstrike/lava lash hits to put out any real damage and it's not reliable. Correct me if I'm wrong but that was my limited experience with enhance, they've always been a CD, 2-3 minute cooldown class with mediocre damage in between.

As far as I can tell, elemental just doesn't have an insta-kill, period. With maxed pvp power and high spell power you may be able to get a good 200-250k hit with ele blast + earth shock but players have 350-400k and ele blast has to be hard casted unless you took Ancestral Swiftness. It's not a guaranteed crit and shaman have negligible crit with good gear (around 12%)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...s/Novoz/simple

Ascendance + lava burst in ele can score a kill but that's just because you can rapidly launch wet noodles for 15 seconds until something dies. But you get cc'd the second you pop it and need a good 5+ seconds (an eternity in arena) to get off that many lava bursts.