Elemental, My Dear Watson

We’ve been looking for an Elemental Shaman in the guild for a long time now, we’ve recruited several and have without fail been underwhelmed. Excuses abound, and I’ve been left wondering do Shamans really suck this bad? Is it a problem with the class, or the itemization? Why are these guys under performing? It was with that in mind that I decided to try my hand at the class I’ve largely avoided since I started playing World of Warcraft.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
I have a long history with Shamans, but not in WoW. I played a Shaman in EverQuest for six years, it is no doubt the time I’d spent playing one already coupled with the fact that the Shamans of WoW are such different animals when compared to their EQ equivalents that I’ve largely avoided the class thus far. A bit over a year ago however, I decided to start five boxing my own group. It began with a Protection Paladin and four Shamans.

I had a lot of reasons for deciding on this group composition, and for even doing it in the first place (for more info read my interview with The Escapist Magazine located here the finished article can be found here). It was fun, but we started raiding. Face on Fire began to have enough members that I didn’t have to box to get things done, so I began to focus on Khaas and all was right with the world.

Until…

When we started working on a raiding roster we realized we were quite caster heavy, much of this was born of necessity. Kel’thuzad for example is much easier with minimal melee DPS, and in general many ranged DPS tends to eat less cleaves and incidental damage, which therefore relieves stress from healers. With our raid force we wanted to promote diversity which would ideally decrease direct competition on many items, the idea to get one of each of the specs (where possible) to fill our roster. So, we wanted to get a Resto, Enhance, and Elemental Shaman. It’s taken a while to settle on an Enhancement Shaman, and our guild leader (Exvanlane) fills the Resto slot. So, Elemental?

Well, we’ve had several Ele Shamans, unfortunately as gear has gotten better the disparity between the top DPS and the Eles has gotten more and more pronounced. Personally, I would expect the Ele Shaman to be right around our Boomkin and fellow officer Someshta DPS wise. But no, we’ve been running into Ele Shamans pulling 4-5K even on low movement fights. That may sound good, but that’s in 25 man with all possible buffs, infact with buffs stacked in FAVOR of casters. And where similarly geared players are doing double this number. Something really doesn’t add up.

I’ve spoken to several about it, and a lot of it has been “Gear isn’t itemized properly for Eles” or “This is a really difficult class to DPS with” etc, etc. Now, to the first I can’t lie… the lion’s share of mail gear with spell power is not itemized for DPS, it’s itemized instead for heals with haste and MP5 and maybe some crit. While not optimal, an upgrade is an upgrade. And let’s face it, sometimes there’s a case to be made for lesser armor class. Cloth tends to have the stats an Elemental Shaman or Balance Druid craves, the pervading notion however, is that using lower armor types is somehow wrong. Again, an upgrade is an upgrade.

But even forgetting all of that, it seems that an Ele Shaman as geared as my guildmates tend to be should be putting out significantly more than 4K damage doesn’t it? It was with all of this in mind that I decided to take a page from my buddy Cozmo D who had similar concerns when he ran into a fail DK. So, much like his DK Kaustic, I decided to wipe the dust off of one of my old multi box Shamans, Tuesday I logged on Ghroth for the first time in nearly a year and got to work running heroics…

Enter the Shaman
So far I haven’t dual specced for heals or anything, I’m going strictly with Elemental for the time-being. I wanted to see how hard the rotation was, and just how much damage I could put out. After raids Tuesday night, I logged Ghroth on and spent my talent points, got Glyphs from my Scribe. Then I headed to the target dummy in Org, I found that with my crappy gear (I had some iLevel 200 crafted epics, blues, and greens from quests) I was doing 3.5K on the boss dummy. It should be noted, this is also without Flame Tongue on my weapon, because I forgot to configure it in my SmartBuff Addon.

So, it was time for some randoms, I got lucky that first night and qued quickly. But I really didn’t do much till Weds, I ran some heroics with guildies apparently I’m not the only one with the itch to play alts lately. My buddy Sharp’s been playing a DK tank, I’ve been trying to help him out with as much advice as he needs but generally he’s doing fine without me. He’s gone DW Frost however, which seems to work beautifully in 5 mans. Similarly, one of our rogues has been playing a Resto druid. And the a fore mentioned Someshta’s been playing an Enhancement Shaman. So, we’ve nearly got a full regular group of alts. Even so, I’ve had my run ins with random pugs during these little excursions. And though I’ve been proud overall of my success at playing this new class, and have been having nothing but fun hurling lightning at my foes, some of these randoms have been … well, again Cozmo will appreciate this I think.

Raiding is Hard (Apparently)
Thursday I ran heroic COS with one of our guild tanks Threedrakez, 3d is a troll and he comes to us from the alliance, but don’t let his racial short comings or previous choice of faction mislead you, 3d is a great tank. Somewhere along the way 3d asked me a couple of questions about Khaas and raiding, at which point we were greeted with a great deluge of QQ from Ticc of Boulderfist. This turned out to be one of two huntards I would encounter in the random que this week. But I divert from the point…

Ticc apparently has a beef with raiding, and without preamble began to regale us with his reasons. And in a holier than thou attitude began to basically present a case for I have a life, you don’t because you raid. He said he didn’t have 18 hours per week to dedicate to raiding (after we’d told him we raid 8 hours per week, 2 nights at 4 hours per stretch). When this was repeated, he repeated that he didn’t have 18 hours per week to raid. He also doesn’t like the randomness of loot drops in raids. And apparently raiding is hard, especially if you’re in a sub optimal time zone.

Now, I’ll admit. If you’re living in Korea and playing on a US server. It might very well be difficult to find raiders in your time zone. Worse, finding a competent/successful guild will be similarly difficult by virtue of the limited options. However, it has been done. The number 2 guild on Bloodscalp for example is a predominantly Chinese guild named Gansita joining the guild is not horribly difficult, and they run multiple raids to accomodate the large number of people in their guild.

To be fair, Ticc probably isn’t Chinese. I do recall him saying something about moving from the West Coast to East Coast or something like that… And how that makes finding a raiding guild hard. In other words, it’s easier to cry about it than to look on tankspot for guilds recruiting that raid in his available time. What I gathered from the limited time I was around this person (and let me tell you, I couldn’t get away from him fast enough) is that, he simply likes to complain, about everything (I assume this is to distract people from looking at his numbers on recount). I can only imagine why no one wants to raid with him…

+ Fail Hunter #2 – Basals of Stonemaul
This failure was so epic, it was a screenshot or it didn’t happen kind of situation. Saturday after work, I hooked up with Sharp and Wow on their alts to run some randoms, our first was TOC which went fairly quickly (The last fight is honestly a lot easier with a DK tank that knows what they’re doing). This was when we met Basals, he stayed in the group when Sharp qued us again and we landed in Halls of Lightning.

I really didn’t notice the fail damage, I was honestly watching my own DPS and seeing how the new upgrades from running TOC 10 and 25 were doing. It wasn’t until someone (I think it was Wowiown) said something in Vent about the fail hunter. I looked at my Recount after killing Ionar the Lightning Elemental boss that I noticed the following:

DPS was low for everyone on this fight, because of the phase changing. But 562 DPS? Are you kidding me? Worse, when my wife got back home with an arm load of groceries I excused myself for a sec to get the door and help her get in. I came back to find they still hadn’t killed the trash mob they were on when I left…

The rogue in all honesty was kinda fail too, but he was atleast doing something… This hunter… /facepalm.

So when I said I was back, I got a “thank god” in Vent and we pushed on to the last boss Loken. Suddenly, Sharp says in Vent, “Where’s that hunter, he’s getting hit by something” a quick look at Grid confirmed the Hunter was about to be dead. So, we went looking for him. We didn’t find the guy, and he didn’t respond when we told him we were at the last boss… So we pushed on without him.

The numbers from Loken:

I’m not going to play a Hunter to prove it can be done better than these failures, because I know it can. We have several top notch hunters in our guild, but sometimes I’m just amazed. More so when I checked out the second failure on armory and looked at his talents…

In Conclusion
A lot of people blame their gear, or their class, or maybe it’s that Ghostcrawler owes them a pony. But in the end, there are good players and there are bad players. Sadly, some classes have less good players (to the outside observer) than others, but if you’re not performing well it’s ultimately up to you. Obviously, performance is a subjective thing, this is why Gear Score and similar rating methods are so controversial, it’s impossible to quantify skill in an accessible and meaningful way that we can all agree upon. If you feel you’re under performing, do some research. Ask around, “Hey do you know any of class X? Who’s the best?” Then talk to them, don’t be a sycophant, but try to form some kind of relationship with them. Learn from them. Or even if you just know a good player and they aren’t the right class, talk to them.

What I’m saying is, ultimately if you’re failing it’s your responsibility to get better. Myself, I use a combination of Recount and Gear Score to tell me how I’m doing. There’s an option if you have both that shows you what your DPS/Damage is in relation to your GS for everyone in the group/raid. It then ranks people based on their performance relative to their gear. It’s a very interesting feature, and probably the closest of seen to truly quantifying player performance in a meaningful way. It’s definitely helping me to push harder at being a DPS. So, for now I leave you. Expect more from the Shaman in the weeks to come, and I may just pick up dual-boxing again, though admittedly on a much smaller scale than I did previously.

P.S. If you’re reading this and you ARE an Elemental Shaman looking for a good raiding guild, check us out. But be warned, if you can’t out DPS my alt don’t bother to apply!