Elemental Shaman & Catacysm - quick summary

[TeaLeaf]

Been levelling as elemental on Beta and thought a quick summary might help seeing as most of this stuff is now on Live with the 4.xx patch.

Primary Stats:
Intellect
Spell power on weapons

For the most part spell power is now gone and apart from on weapons is now replaced by intellect (1 int provides 1 spell power).  Intellect is now the primary stat to get although you'll still find that weapons retain a base spell power number (and a little more than was on them in 3.xx WOW) to make up for the crappy conversion of a for example a 23 spell power old-style gem into an 'only 20 intellect' 4.xx gem.  

Mana Regen:
Intellect will increase our mana pool, regen and crit, so all is good.  MP5 has been replaced with Spirit (1 MP5 = 2 Spirit).

Learn to Thunderstrike at every opportunity to keep mana up.  Thunderstrike returns is based on mana pool, so max that Intellect.

Hit Rating:
Shaman used to only need 10-11%, but that's all changed.  Hit targets for elemental shaman now are:

420 hit rating (for Draenei).  Everyone else will be going for 446 as draenei no longer provide a 1% hit buff to party members.

Shaman have lost the 'free' 3% from Elemental Precision as this talent now converts otherwise relatively useless spirit into hit rating.  So you need more spirit for more hit and elemental precision will give you 1:1 conversion of spirit into hit rating plus a nice 3% damage buff as an apology for losing 3% hit.

Remember, you can also boost your hit rating by swapping some existing gems for for ones that have spirit (remember spell power has now been replaced with intellect on the gems, so a previously useless SP + spirit gem is now a useful Intellect + Spirit gem and might help socket bonuses.  In addition, your leg and head enchants can be reviewed to see if the spirit from alternate enchants are now worth using rather than the non-spirit versions shaman have preferred until 4.xx).

Reforging:
Reforging allows us to convert a low value stat into a highly valued stat.  At the moment Mastery is a highly valued stat, so make use of reforging to stack Mastery once you are sufficiently hit capped.  During levelling it is probably not worth worrying about hit cap too much as you'll see greater returns from Mastery when questing on similar level mobs.  As an example, even with quite low levels of Mastery from a couple of Cata items I was seeing 25% overload proc chance which is a massive benefit - scrolling combat text has trouble keeping up when chain lighting hits multiple mobs and it procs!

Get Rid of Cloth
We get a bonus of 5% intellect if we wear mail, so get rid of cloth and stick to our mail stuff.  Clothies rejoice, we're not fighting for your loot any more!

Lightning Shield v Water Shield
Read the tooltip folks.  Elemental shaman should not be running around with water shield any more.

Lightning Shield
Instant
The caster is surrounded by 3 balls of lightning.  When a spell, melee or ranged attack hits the caster, the attacker will be struck for 390 Nature damage.  This expends one lightning ball.  Only one ball will fire every few seconds.  Lasts 10 min.  Only one Elemental Shield can be active on the Shaman at any one time.

Rotation:
Remains pretty simple and a priority-based rotation.  The mostly complete summary of it is:

FS - keep it up
LvB - if off CD then use it (watch for Lava Burst procs to re-use it!)
Earth Shock - (assuming FS is still up with at least 6 seconds remaining - 6 seconds as that's your shock CD)
Lightning Bolt filler spam

You can weave CL in there too, but theorycrafting shows as per WotLK that it is more mana and situational only.  Overload procs on a single target from LB are higher than those from a CL so best saved for mob situations not single target.

Talents:
Not a lot to say here as there's close to bugger all choice.  Talk about one-size fits all, it's ridiculous.  Yes you'll need to blow some relatively unexciting  points along the way, but seriously folks, it's an idiot's tree and pretty obvious what to take.  Remember to unglyph thunderstrike while levelling too as it's a nice knock-back.