Thursday 8 October 2009

Tier 10 Announced

It is that time again! With a new major patch comes new tier and subsequently new tier bonuses. I don't need to explain to most of you how dramatic these announcements are; they tend to unleash a sea of complaining and arguing over which are good and which are bad, which need nerfing and which need buffs.

As I write this these are now offical.

Elemental Shaman Tier 10 Set Bonuses:

2-Set: Your Lightning Bolt spell reduces the remaining cooldown on your Elemental Mastery talent by 1 sec.
4-Set: The cooldown on your Lava Burst ability is reduced by 1.5 sec.

There was announced ones earlier that were seemingly incorrect and most people assumed they were 'placeholders' until Blizz finalized the changes. These has the 4-set bonus listed as a 15 second reduction, which was illogical considering it only has a 8 second CD initially.

I will leave the floor open for discussion at the moment, and will post my thoughts later. This announcement made me realized how behind I am on talking about tier 9, so expect to see a Trial of the Crusader gear guide and tier 9 analysis to be posted soon.

-Puut

13 comments:

  1. The two piece bonus sounds really interesting and is quite innovative. Seeing as LB makes up a huge part of the rotation, this is going to pull the Cooldown of Elemental Mastery right down.

    It makes me realise that I probably don't use Elemental Mastery as often as I should.

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  2. I do like the ideas of the Tier 10 bonuses, but as the numbers are now, they seem weak.

    The two-piece bonus will probably end up making Elemental Mastery cooldown around 2 minutes, which is an extra Elemental Mastery every 6 minutes. 15 seconds of added +15% crit every 6 minutes (plus the minor effect of a lightning bolt cast time reduced to a GCD) is 689 crit rating 1/24th of the time... about 29 crit rating. Hm.

    There's also the Elemental Mastery glyph, which reduces its cooldown by 30 seconds, that no one ever uses now. Will doubling that reduction be worthwhile? If we use both, allowing an Elemental Mastery every 90 seconds, doubling the frequency we can use it... is even that worth a glyph slot? I don't think it is.

    I also don't see how the Tier 10 four piece can hope to be even as good as as the Tier 9 four piece. The maximal benefit is casting a Lava Burst every 6.5 sec cooldown cycle + 1 sec cast time instead of every 8 sec + 1 sec cast time, which is a 20% greater rate. So we get to cast at most, 20% more Lava Bursts, spells that we actually have to spend time casting, reducing the time we have to spend casting our other rotation spells. This is strictly worse than adding 20% to our Lava Burst damage.

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  3. Looks like you need to upgrade your gear before you start looking into tier 10

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  4. @ Dithyrambos: You need to slow down, you are doing my work for me! You are correct though, the tier 10 bonuses seem a little weak compared to the last two. The Elemental Mastery one came from way out of left field and I don't really understand the point of it.

    @ Darkgreen: I am still sporting the full t8.5. I don't want to break the 4-set because it is rather nice, so I am holding off until I can do a big jump from all 8.5 to all 9. The guild's demand for trophies is still pretty high though, but I am happy enough with what I've got for the mean time. I would hope I am decked out a little more before t10 is released; if not I will be pretty annoyed, haha.

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  5. Heh, sorry for stealing your thunder there, Puut. So what do you think the numbers should be to get the bonuses to where they should?

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  6. Not at all, it makes my life easier, haha. I haven't grilled over the numbers yet but yours seems to be pretty logical. The fact that Elemental Mastery is only boosing our already plentiful crit makes the 2 set a letdown. As for the 4 set, it isn't terrible but not on par with t8 or 9's.

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  7. @Darkgreen: Breaking 4 pc t8.5 for anything less than 4 pc t9 is a dps downgrade, just fyi.

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  8. New set bonus is no way near as neat as the ones on tier 9... i mean longer duration on flame shock and 20% more dmg on lava burst, it rocks!

    when loosing the extra duration on flame shock, you have to put in on more often, thus "wasting" a global cooldown, so the 1.5 second lower cooldown on lava burst isnt that good then is it? Almost evens out, since we loose the extra duration.

    Elemental mastery? what? I rather want 20% bigger hits, kick ass in pve and pvp. elemental mastery is usaually saved till im using blood lust/heroism anyway or in boss fights where i know i can use i more than once.

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  9. I agree extra crit from the 2 set is not going to do much of anything for our dps and the 1.5 sec cooldown is not nearly as good as the 20% extra damage. I hope Blizz decides to change this.

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  10. Maybe it would be cool if Blizz did a combo from T8 and T9, the two set from T8 is nice and the four set from T9 is amazing.

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  11. elemental mastery is no use for me
    i think you should come up with something more usefull to shamans like less casting time of lightning bolt by .5 sec or like 5%more crit stike chance of all your spells

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  12. well, now from the new patch notes EM becomes more usefull to us... 15% haste instead of crit is a very nice change...

    and about the t10 4piece bonus... i really wish Binkenstein would still work out at EJs Board... i dont know, 20% more LvBs dosnt sound so bad to me but i'm no math freak, but might be better in the end since the t9/4p will get a nerf (yeah nurf the last set cuz the new bonus is crap oO)

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