ele shaman haste using elemental mastery

[shamenza 0]

Everywhere I look says our stats are pretty evenly balanced. My gut tells me this is wrong. I am a numbers driven person, but I just can't convince myself to believe the sim results on this one.

If I take the echoes of the elements talent, then yes, I suppose haste becomes more valuable.

If I take the Elemental Mastery talent, I feel like Mastery is way better than haste. Let me look at both scenarios:

1) Echoes of the elements. It's a passive talent, so assendence is the only dps cooldown we have (outside of lust). To get more benefit from it, we need to cast as many spells as possible. So... more haste. How the decrease in mastery compares to the increase in echoes procs.... im not sure. Regardless, this would cause an increase in the number of lightning bolt and fulmination casts.

2) Elemental mastery talent. With a 2 minute cooldown, plus lust, we get 1 min 40 sec (on any fight over 6 minutes) with a huge haste buff. I only have 10% haste and am able to hit 1 sec cast time on my lava burst. Assendence can be cast with a haste buff twice per fight if over 6 minutes. This is a rediculous number of lava surge casts. With our mastery, each cast has a chance to duplicate at 75% damage. This increases the number of lava surge hits and decreases the number of lightning bolt casts. Add in any on-use trinket buffs or potions, and you can stack tons of stats into these high damage phases, making our strongest spell hit even harder.

Considering Lava burst is almost 50% of our damage (single target), elemental blast (talent) with as much mastery as possible seems like the way to go. It makes sense to me to limit the number of lightning bolt casts and increase (or buff) as many Lava surge as possible.

Care to comment? I would love to hear some opinions to either support or reject this line of thinking.

[Stoove 347]

I think that your logic is OK, but there could potentially be any number of reasons that you're wrong. My experience with theorycraft is that you can't just consider one mechanic when assessing stats (unfortunately!). I think it needs, as you say, "numbers".

Have you considered speccing one way and reforging into what you think is the "wrong" way, then comparing to the "right" way?

I'd be interested by the results.

[thakk 2]

I use Echos with Elemental Blast. I prefer passive talents, rather than on use stuff, because it keeps my rotation a little simpler. So with elemenatal blast I get 8 seconds every 12 of +3500 haste, crit, or mastery. I want to get power auras working so that I can see when hast procs, as opposed to crit, because I'm critting with lava burst anyways due to flameshock being on the target.

I would guess that you are speced into Elemental Blast as well, because who cares about a boosted fire elemental on a boss, and unleashed fury only increases LB damage by 30% which we are trying to minimize using with more procs from echos and the ability to keep casting lava burst. So with that spec, if you happen to get some good haste procs from elemental blast, as opposed to another test with some crit procs, your tests will not be accurate.

[Stoove 347]

who cares about a boosted fire elemental on a boss

Well since it does more damage than Searing Totem by a very significant margin, it's definitely an upgrade.

Also, you can make it channel a buff on you for 10% increased damage for its entire duration.

That's a nontrivial DPS increase considering that you can get your Earth Elemental to do it **as well**. Works out as a significant boost, especially if timed right.

[thakk 2]

Well since it does more damage than Searing Totem by a very significant margin, it's definitely an upgrade.

Also, you can make it channel a buff on you for 10% increased damage for its entire duration.

That's a nontrivial DPS increase considering that you can get your Earth Elemental to do it **as well**. Works out as a significant boost, especially if timed right.

Oh my, I guess I better read those tooltips better then. I do drop the fire elemental on a boss tho. I just didn't know if I took that talent, it would be significantly better. I haven't tried it.

Thanks Stoove.

Edited October 25, 2012 by thakk

[Stoove 347]

Oh my, I guess I better read those tooltips better then. I do drop the fire elemental on a boss tho. I just didn't know if I took that talent, it would be significantly better. I haven't tried it.

Well I use it both for Enhancement and Restoration (which is my main spec), for both of which it's a major boost. If you use both Earth and Fire on CD, that's a 10% healing buff on ~40% uptime so a total of 4% damage gain which is a fair bit considering it applies to **everything**.

However I have to correct myself: It's only Fire elemental which channels the damage buff, and it's only 5%. That rather changes things! The increased damage is still a lot, though, and it would be worth trying out.

[thakk 2]

Well I use it both for Enhancement and Restoration (which is my main spec), for both of which it's a major boost. If you use both Earth and Fire on CD, that's a 10% healing buff on ~40% uptime so a total of 4% damage gain which is a fair bit considering it applies to **everything**.

However I have to correct myself: It's only Fire elemental which channels the damage buff, and it's only 5%. That rather changes things! The increased damage is still a lot, though, and it would be worth trying out.

That would be great to use while you're rocking ascendance, hero and storm lash totem.

[Stoove 347]

That would be great to use while you're rocking ascendance, hero and storm lash totem.

It would, but be aware that while the Fire Elemental is channelling, she can't stack Searing Flames. I believe there's a tradeoff you can make, but I'd assume it takes quite some skill to do.