Josh Myers
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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: Choosing an elemental shaman weapon in Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) One of my favorite things about Dragon Soul are the weapons off Deathwing, as proc weapons have a long but tenuous history with WoW players. Some fondly remember the Fireball proc from Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, while enhancement shaman look back on Onyxia's Empowered Deathbringer and wonder what Blizzard was thinking. Seriously, the lower-ilevel Calamity's Grasp off the end boss from two patches prior was a better choice. Losing stats in favor of a weapon's proc effect is always a gamble, especially given how incredibly loaded weapons are with stats. Going from a Lightning Rod to a Ti'tahk, the Steps of Time involves giving up a tremendous 300 hit rating and even more haste rating with the hope of the haste proc's paying off in times of great need. Because of this, I was curious about how the weapons in Dragon Soul would stand up when compared to one another, especially since there are multiple non-proc weapons in the instance to compete with the proc ones. So, I took to every elemental shaman's best friend -- Simulation Craft -- and did some simulations with a variety of weapon combinations. The shocking results: Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest is still the best weapon in the game. Surprise?
About the Bloggers: Josh Myers
About the Bloggers introduces you to the people behind WoW Insider. You can find articles on more of our staffers in earlier About the Bloggers profiles. What do you do for WoW Insider? I am a writer. I write! My general responsibility is to cover DPS shaman, once referred to as the Defense Against the Dark Arts position of class columns. I'm also one of the Choose My Adventure crew, currently leveling a goblin priest named Clergelam. Finally, I occasionally write news or the rare Occu'thar raid guide. What's your main? My main is the awfully named Elamqt, of Proudmoore. He's a man-cow shaman, generally of the enhancement variety. When I started playing WoW, I went through a large variety of alts that I got to around level 20 and stopped playing. I fell in love with Elam when I discovered that he got Ghost Wolf at 20 and wouldn't have to wait until 40 to get a mount. He became my main then and has largely been my main ever since. I took a short break in Wrath of The Lich King to play a hunter -- and am currently focusing a little more on my mage -- but Elam is always first in my heart. Horde or Alliance? I'm a Tauren, but I don't think much of the Horde's politics. In particular, I hate Garrosh Hellscream. I hate him hard. But even without Hellscream, I don't care for the Horde. I play Horde because I love Tauren, but if they were an Alliance race, I'd be there. I don't really like the Alliance that much either, though. Pretty much, I'm just for the Herd.
Choose My Adventure: Shiny new adventurers
Choose the adventures of the WoW Insider staff or join in with It came from the Blog on Zangarmarsh (US-PVE-H). A priest, a druid and a paladin walk into a bar ... and announce that the votes have been tallied: Josh Myers will be playing Clergelam, the female Goblin priest, and will play on Thursday at 12 p.m. EDT (9 a.m. PDT, 10 a.m. server time). Joe Perez will be a male Troll druid and will play on Sunday at 4 p.m. EDT (1 p.m. PDT, 2 p.m. server time). Fox Van Allen will be playing Foxlight the Shirtless Pally by questing, dungeoning and/or PVPing on Friday at 7 p.m. EDT (4 p.m. PDT, 5 p.m. server time). Roblinator the Goblin shaman will continue to play on Wednesday at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT, 11 a.m. server time). More polls and a story are after the break.
Choose My Adventure: Welcome our new adventurers!
Choose the adventures of the WoW Insider staff or join in with It came from the Blog on Zangarmarsh (US-PVE-H). Joining Roblinator for future adventures in these pages will be Josh Myers, Joe Perez and Fox Van Allen. Yes, it's the return of Foxlight, the shirtless pally. Please keep the swooning to a minimum. Josh and Joe will be having you choose everything about their characters, but Foxlight just needs to know how and where to adventure. Roblinator will continue her shamanating ways, with your help and direction. We'll be discontinuing the stream, but not the fun! We will be posting the schedules for each adventurer so that you can join them on their travels, and of course we will have polls and stories. Join us after the break to vote on what you'd like for our new adventurers.
