Elemental Shamans and Hit Rating

Post by Jaspah

Hey guys, I've been playing elemental since TBC and I've stayed elemental as I leveled to 80. I found myself doing well in raids and instances during TBC. However, recently I've been doing tons of heroics and some raids. Now, in heroics my DPS has been relatively good... I'm usually the best or second best DPS in my party. However, when it comes down to raids my DPS is significantly worse than others. In a 25-man raid I'm terrible... I've never been in the top 10 DPS.

I've taken the time to read several articles on elemental shamans and I've heard that hit rating is the most important stat for an elemental shaman that will raise DPS significantly. So, here I am with 380 hit rating (capped) and still getting the same DPS. Elemental shamans with little to no hit rating do more DPS than me. If hit is so important why is it not on our Tier 7 set pieces either...?

So, here I am with several questions for all you elemental shamans out there.

First of all, is hit rating REALLY all that it is cracked up to be? I don't understand how it caused such a signifigant loss of DPS in the first place. It seems like a waste passing up better items for something with +hit instead.

Second, what kind of DPS are you getting in raids and if you're doing better than I am, could you link your armory page so I could check out your items?

Third, what is the optimum rotation for us? I've heard many different things and I'd like to get some straight answers.

Fourth and final, are you also finding yourselves using cloth and leather armor? In order to acquire all this hit rating I've been forced to use several cloth and leather equipment over the course of time. Are you doing the same?

Also, here is my WoW Armory page for you guys to check out.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadowmoon&n=Jaspah

Thanks again for all your help. It's much appreciated. =)

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Post by Jaspah

I'm clocking at about 2k DPS most of the time. As for my glyphs, I'm using Lava, Flametongue, and Lightning Bolt at the moment. I'm having a guildie make me the Flameshock glyph as soon as she logs in (for some reason it's not on the auction house...). But thank you for your reply, it was the kind of thing I was looking for.

I knew hit rating couldn't be that important and that I should not be sacrificing spellpower in place of it. Thanks for your reply!

Post by windcrusher

I'm severely disappointed in Blizzards itemization, or lack thereof, for WotLK. Sure, the caster mail gear is good... if you're resto. Resto doesn't need +hit, however I'm supposing they forgot about the other caster in mail gear, us Elementals. Hit is a fairly important stat, one that should be capped out before stacking SP/crit. What good is all the SP in the world going to do if you miss? What you should look at is WWS and/or your logs to see how many partial resists, full resists, and misses your spells did during the course of a standing fight, i.e; patchwerk. That would be the best graph to go off of in terms of what you should be stacking at that point to increase your DPS. As for rotations are concerned I usually do:

FS>LvB>LB>LB then either LB or LvB depending on lag then refresh FS and repeat. On AoE pulls, wait for threat and add CL, maybe a MagTot if you want to get that close. Now that MagTot isn't going to cause threat, that may pad your AoE DPS numbers some.

So the choice is whether or not you want to hit more often for less dmg or hit less often for more dmg. IMO I think we should hitcap first, then beef up SP/Haste/Crit as we can untill Blizz gets its head out of its you-know-what and give us elementals some gear, lord knows they've taken enough from us as it is.

On Glyphs: Lava will actually get you more DPS than the Flameshock will. Having a certified crit every 8-9 seconds to keep your self-buffs without having to refresh flameshock is a no-brainer. Theyre changing the LB glyph to +#% dmg. I cant recall the specific number, but being that it buffs our primary attacks dmg, AND buffs overload shots... I think that earns a spot in my Spellbook. The third glyph would have to be flametounge, the bonus is just too much contribution to your DPS to let go of. But this is all just IMO.

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Post by windcrusher

Hence why I harp on +hit so much. Can you link your armory so I can see what you're working with? There's several trinkets, rings, amulets that have some nice entry level +hit... I did some research and found you can get close to 240-260 hit before stepping into raid, and thats not downgrading to take cloth/leather armor all that much. If downgrading a little of your straight SP/crit/haste to add a little more hit, you should see an average increase in your DPS, a missed/resisted spell adds 0 DPS.

Post by Gnub

After about 150 casts, I found I was missing a little over 16% of the time.
Making a percentage-based statistic with that little amount is bound to be off. It's way too few to base anything on, other than sheer bad luck. Try casting for a period of a few minutes or something.

Post by windcrusher

Good idea Gnubigena, I should have mentioned that. Take a 4-5 minute record against the same type of target to get a more accurate assessment of your hit/miss ratio.

Elemental Shamans and Hit Rating

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