Well I did it lol.  I went elemental to help fill a gap we had in the guild for ranged casters.  I have been running heroics like a mad man over the last week to try and get ready for 25’s this week.  I really thought I was ready.  Man was I ever wrong or was I?

Let me start of with my stats so we are on a even footing for all this.    With self buffs no totems I am currently at 1855 bonus damage, 19.99% to crit, 338 haste rating,  226 casting mp5.  Let me say up front I had ZERO mana problems.  In fact the only time i drank was if I died.    So having lasting sustainable dps is not a problem.

The trinkets i am using are both proc based.  In this WWS shows both proc often enough to warrant keeping them.  I am looking to replace the haste one with another proc’ing spell power trinket.  WWS LINK

Patchwerk is a DPS race there is no way to pull agro it is all about how fast and how hard you can dps.    With the amount of lag experienced in the current 25 mans I tend to go for the wait for the CD rotation as opposed to putting in a lightning bolt every rotation.  It is normaly only about a half second wait for a CD if any.  I on the longer CD waits i do put in lighning bolts as to not be doing nothing.    I put out 2285 dps for the fight.

Having just recently changed to elemental spec I don’t feel like that is too bad.  However compared to my guildmates I am VERY low.  I don’t want to be a hinderance to the guild progression but I personally just feel very behind the 8 ball on this one.  I know elemental shaman are getting some nice buffs in the next patch but that does not change the fact we have some seriouse short comings in the raid environment we are in currently.

To start with my rant going to start with trash.  The trash dies SO fast i barely have time to drop totems then cast one rotation before the mob is dead.  As a elemental shaman my only AOE is a totem that i have to RUN up to mobs and drop a totem near them to do AOE damage.  Lucky for me I missed all the cleaves and whirlwinds the trash do so i didn’t get one shoted any.  Every other ranged dps class has the ability to AOE from range.  Hunters have volly(i know it is getting nerfed but they still have it) Mages have blizzard or flamestrike, Warlocks have sead of corruption, Druids have hurricane,  Shadow priest have mind sear.

I miss so much DPS time having to run up and drop a totem.  With the speed the trash dies by the time I get back into position to DPS the skull or first target is pretty much dead.  I feel completely gimp on trash.  My biggest loss of DPS comes on the 2,3,4th targets were there health is so low I don’t have time to do a proper rotation.  Should i just be spamming lightning bolt and ignoring my other spells on trash.  Going to have to mess around with it over the next few weeks to see how I do.  I also feel i am wasting GCDS using flame shock to much I need to find a reliable mod to track the dot so i can cast more Lightning bolts in its place.

So what would be a cool shaman AOE spell.  Druids already have the one that i would say best fits a shamans abilities in there hurricane.   In wrath of the lich king we are very fire based with lava lash, lava burst,  etc.  What about a Volcanoe type ability.  You could target were you want the volcanoe to apear it would burst up out of the ground and spew lava on surrounding targets for X amount of damage per tick.  I am just pulling stuff out of my but trying to comprehend why we don’t have a  ranged AOE.  All the AOE spells we have are either on a long CD or are a totem.

I need to do some more testing and also finish off my 4 piece tier 7 bonus to really get a complete fell for how I am doing compared to my guild mates.  Pretty much everyone in the raid last night had 2 pieces or more of tier 7 and are in full purples.  Were I am in Half purples half blues and only 1 piece tier 7.

So wish me luck and better dps in the future.  I did get 2 upgrades last night so we will see what kind of improvement they are.  Too bad they were purple to purple upgrades and not blue to purple upgrades.