elemental-shaman-gear-guide
Latest
Totem Talk: Loot to maximize your elemental shaman's mastery
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once just the expert on enhancement shaman, Josh Myers has spent most of Dragon Soul as elemental, and he's not quite sure how he got there. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Mastery is my favorite stat in World of Warcraft because it's the only stat that actually changes function from class to class. Haste might speed up rune regeneration for death knights, or fire mages might view a huge critical strike chance more happily than an affliction warlock, but those stats do largely the same thing across classes. On the other hand, the mastery of an elemental shaman is incredibly different than a holy paladin, which is a big change from a protection warrior. Lucky for me, this patch gave rise to mastery as elemental's key secondary stat after hitting the spell hit cap. It's been a good stat all expansion but sat solidly behind haste through all of Firelands and much of tier 11. With Dragon Soul out and most ele shaman who have been playing the past few months now wearing their tier 13 sets, it's mastery's turn to shine. The reason for mastery's newfound glory is the Spiritwalker's Regalia four-piece bonus, which gives you 250 haste rating every time your Elemental Overload procs, stacking up to three times and lasting four seconds. At a full stack, this is effectively 750 free haste rating that you get just for gearing for mastery. However, this stack falls off quickly, and chances are you'll only get one or two spellcasts off before it drops. As a result, you want a lot of mastery, to give the two casts you do get a fair chance at keeping the buff up.
Totem Talk: Trolling for elemental shaman gear in patch 4.1 and beyond
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Get some Fulmination with your Lightning Bolts! Sort the shocks from the flames with Totem Talk: Elemental, brought to you by Sarah Nichol, otherwise known as Pewter from The 'mental Shaman and the Obscurecast podcast and founding member of TotemSpot. The proliferation of troll-themed gear is giving me bear run flashbacks. Are they giving you flashbacks, too? I must admit that eying up the new Voodoo Hexblade is filling me with the ghosts of gear-longing pasts, for once upon a time I was obsessed with Wub's Cursed Hexblade. I never got the damn thing, but the memory of The Burning Crusade makes me smile. That can only be a good thing, when studying the next generation of epics for my totem-toting class. Thanks to crafting, rep gear, and the new troll dungeons, it is possible to get yourself fully kitted out in purples without setting foot in a raid. Of course, this gearing requires a little bit of luck, a lot of pugging, and a consistent time investment upon hitting level 85. However, we have covered getting an elemental shaman raid-ready a few months back, so while we look forward to patch 4.2, it is time to pick out some troll fashions and start saving for some new accessories.
