Elemental Shaman and MoP

[ayla]

MoP â€" Elemental Shaman and Talent build

Tier 1 - Personal Survival - choice between a threat reduction and increased health if you get below 30%, or and earth totem that grants an absorption shield for seconds.  The final choice an ability that reduces damage taken by 40% for 6 seconds.

I will be probably taking Astral Shift â€" which is the final choice, but this choice does depend on how often you will need damage reduction.

Tier 2 â€" crowd control â€" choice between ‘frozen power’ that roots the target if you use frost shock.  Earthgrab totem that roots enemies in place within 10 yards for 5 seconds, after which the movement speed of the enemy, is then reduced.  Windwalk totem, this grants immunity to movement-impairing effects to all party and raid members within 40 yards.

Personal choice for me is the earthgrab totem.

Tier 3 â€" totem cooldowns and mobility â€" first option is call of the elements which does not trigger the global cooldown, resets the cooldown of your totems that have a base cooldown shorter than 3 minutes:

Grounding Totem: 25-second cooldown;
Earthbind Totem: 30-second cooldown;
Earthgrab Totem: Tier 2 talent with a 30-second cooldown;
Healing Stream Totem: 30-second cooldown;
Capacitor Totem: 45-second cooldown;
Stone Bulwark Totem: Tier 1 talent with a 1-minute cooldown;
Tremor Totem: 1-minute cooldown;
Windwalk Totem: Tier 2 talent with a 1-minute cooldown.

Totemic restoration reduces the cooldown of the totem proportionally to the duration that remained on them before they were destroyed or replaced.  The final choice is totemic projection this enables you to relocate the totems to a new location.

Personal choice here for me is between totemic restoration as this will mean I can use my fire elemental roughly every 2mins for 24 seconds, or totemic projection as I can then move my searing totem without using a gcd.

Tier 4 â€" performance enhancing â€" elemental mastery increases haste by 30% for 20seconds.  Ancestral swiftness gives the next nature spell and instant cast, this also passively increases spell and melee haste by 5%.  Lastly, echo of the elements this gives you the chance to duplicate your spells that do direct damage or healing.

Personal choice is again torn here between echo of the elements or elemental mastery.  More than likely I shall opt for elemental mastery.

Tier 5 - Healing â€" healing tide totem heals the 5 most injured players, ancestral guidance causes you to heal up to 3 nearby injured party or raid members for 40% of the direct damage or healing that is done.  Final choice here is conductivity this is a passive ability that causes you to both increase the healing done with direct spells.

I have opted to take ancestral guidance.

Tier 6 â€" performance enhancing abilities â€" Unleashed fury is the first choice this upgrades the unleash elements by making it also increase the damage done by lightning bolt by 30% for 10 seconds.  Primal elementalist cases the earth and fire elementals to deal 50% more damage, also grants abilities that you can control.  Finally, elemental blast is a 12 second cd that enables you to maintain 66% uptime on a buff that changes randomly each time it is refreshed i.e. +3500 crit strike rating, +3500 haste or +3500 mastery.

Personal choice for me will be elemental blast as at the moment it appears to be ahead of the other choices, albeit slightly, but time will tell.

Glyph choices â€"

Glyph of Flame shock â€" mandatory â€" increases the duration of flame shock by 25% bringing this up to 30 seconds, however, it does reduce the initial damage by 25%.  The reason stated for this being a mandatory glyph is that it simplifies the rotation somewhat and that provides a slight dps increase.

Glyph of Thunder reduces the cooldown of Thunderstorm by 10 seconds, which will be very beneficial in AoE situations.

Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem reduces the cooldown and duration of your Fire Elemental Totem by 40%. This means that your Fire Elemental Totem will have a duration of 36 seconds (down from 1 minute) and a cooldown of 3 minutes (down from 5 minutes). This can be useful for lining up your Fire Elemental with periods of increased damage that come every 3 minutes.
Or,
Glyph of Capacitor Totem reduces the charging time of your Capacitor Totem by 2 seconds. This means that it will stun all enemies within 8 yards after 3 seconds (instead of 5 seconds, without the glyph). This can be useful if a pack of enemies needs to be controlled rapidly.

Rotation â€"

This appears to not have dramatic changes until level 90 and then dependent upon which tier 6 ability you choose to take.
The rotation basics are:
Searing totem and kept up for duration of fight > Flame shock, keep this up on the target and refresh at 3 seconds duration > lava burst, watching out for cooldowns being reset by procs of lava surge > earth shock when there are 7 charges of lightning shield > lightning bolt as the filer spell.

*most of my information has been gleaned from Icy Veins and various other elemental sites that I have happened to stumble across*

[Slush]

If you want a nice clean view of your most important timers, based on Weakauras:
  http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1087110-Endus-Elemental-Auras-v2-0

I've tried it, and i highly recommend it to any elemental shaman (its ele only). Have all timers and important stuff in one place.

[TommyGuner]

Agree with mandatory flame shock glyph, the inital damage you deal with it isn't huge anyway, doesn't really make a difference if its less.
More time to play around with fire nova.

[Vargen]

Really been enjoying the elemental spec in MoP. Good to see I'm not completely outdated on the class even though I've been away for quite some time. Keeping track of cooldowns is really the biggest issue atm. Still don't like that the totem bar is gone, though I do like the changes they made to totems in general making them more situational.