alright so i’ve been watching a bunch of “get ready for TBC guides” regarding enhancement shamans.
i’m pretty sure i got most of it memorized and on-point, but all the video guides have one thing in common: their suggestions for best talent setups.
basically, most of them are promoting talent setups like this:
https ://legacy-wow.com/tbc-talents/shaman-talents/?tal=0200000000000000000050052021050213353115150005301000000000000
or this:
https ://legacy-wow.com/tbc-talents/shaman-talents/?tal=0503305000000000000050052021050213353115100000000000000000000
instead of this:
https ://legacy-wow.com/tbc-talents/shaman-talents/?tal=0502315000300000000005052021050213323115100000000000000000000
or this (assuming hit cap from gear):
https ://legacy-wow.com/tbc-talents/shaman-talents/?tal=0502315000300000000005052021050213350115100000000000000000000
can someone explain to me how NOT taking elemental focus and elemental devastation is somehow a net benefit for enhancement shaman in those two first specs i posted? because it seems like it would be a net benefit to just drop 4-6% weapon damage (weapon mastery) in favor of 9% crit for 10 sec on spell crit which syncs super well with all other enhancement shaman talents + 2x 40% mana cost reduction on spells, which goes to 100% combined with shamanistic focus.
because i can’t figure it out, unless i’m missing something crucial here.
hell, if you’re really selfish you could easily go with something like this: https ://legacy-wow.com/tbc-talents/shaman-talents/?tal=0502314000300000000005052021050113343115100000000000000000000
and only lose out on 2% weapon damage, 15% wf totem bonus and 0.2 sec shock cooldown, and still retain all of the good stuff for the most part.
I would assume it’s because of the uptime of elemental devastation. The talent becomes incredible in WoTLK when it starts getting a huge uptime, but in TBC, the only spell you have that can proc it is your shock spells. Your shock spells have a 6 second cooldown and lets assume a nice generous 35% crit chance.
That means you’d get 1 proc of it every 18 seconds, on average.
right but talented shock CD is only 5 seconds, and you’re gonna use shocks on every cooldown nonetheless, so you might as well get some benefits when they crit, right?
i used this spec on the beta and shocks crit surprisingly often despite having no spell crit% and due to shamanistic/elemental focus reducing spell cost by 100% i was able to totem twist as well without any issues.
EDIT: and this is in gear that provides absolutely no mp5, very little intellect and no spell stats, its all (mostly) pure melee stats. i was even able to do this without water shield on, and actually resorted to using lightning shield since shamanistic rage was ready every time i ran out of mana, and i’d just put on water shield after using shamanistic rage until its off cooldown.
I think those two talents are wasted as your shocks don’t crit much as enhancement since you don’t stack spell crit and it’s very rng mana usually isn’t an issue with shamanistic rage if your going oom totem twisting you drop shocks or go resto subspec if oom often
you’ll get better gear in TBC though (more melee/caster hybrid-ey) and this works just fine even in pure physical dps gear.
like i said above, i basically don’t go oom at all. flurry and shamanistic focus currently have a 100% uptime for me on the beta, and elemental focus on top of that removes the mana cost of shocks completely, thus over the span of a fight i’ll continue to be able to pump out shocks and totemtwist. you’re right in that spell crits are more rng than melee crits, but once you do get a spell crit you constantly get melee crits for 10 seconds afterwards.
It might be becasue of the free hit for more AA hits. Using 2.6/2.8 speed weapnos if those white hits miss it will take a while for them to do something again. It might even impact your flurry uptime. The other thing is spell hit. You need 17% to land the shocks guarantee and those need to crit for you to see any benefits from E. Devestation.
It’s possible that it was simmed to do the most damage that way on avarage. I haven’t done any math behind it because I’m staying resto but that’s my guess.
My memory is vague on Shamans from the old days but Enh/Resto and Enh/Ele were very close on dps in my memory, the resto tree offers very little but 30y range on totems is a big convenience on some fights for raid dps
And at least in T4 gear levels mana is a problem if you totem twist, you won’t have enough of it to make it to shamanistic rage while continuing a full dps rotation and resto reducing totem mana cost by 25% adds up pretty quickly. Elemental devastation looks great but it’s your spell crit chance per 6 seconds to increase by 10 seconds and your spell crit is gonna be like 5%.
So over a 5min fight you’d get maybe 2-4 procs, but lets say 4 procs for good measure so 40 seconds total or about 13% uptime on 3% crit, or 66.24 crit rating with 13% uptime averages 8.6… In reality 1 point of Elemental Devastation is worth less than 1 gem.
