T10 Elemental Set bonuses

I almost want to apologize for making another thread, but most of the others have been derailed into oblivion. In short, pretty much every theorycrafter has come to the conclusion that the Elemental shaman T10 set bonuses will not be sufficient to make T10 an upgrade over T9 until we skip 2 tiers of gear higher. This means, if you have the 258 ilevel T10, you'd need skip 251 (obviously) and 264 because both would be dps downgrades. So until you get the heroic set (ilevel 277), you'd actually be downgrading your gear.

This is of course speculation since we don't have precise numbers of Spellpower, Haste, and Crit but the approximate values were extrapolated from the Boomkin and Mage gear.

There are four main reasons the set bonuses are ineffective.

1. Crit is our worst scaling stat. Elemental Mastery is already a fairly bad cooldown for elemental shaman because an instant cast spell isn't much faster than a 1.4-1.6 s Lightning Bolt AND 15% crit over 15 s when only 70% of our spells scale at all with crit is not good. There's also no guarantee we'll get an extra use out of Elemental Mastery over the course of a fight meaning a lower cooldown could result in 0 dps gain (instead of a very tiny dps gain).

2. The reduction in the cooldown on Elemental Mastery is only from Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. However, our 4 piece lowers the cooldown on Lava Burst. This means we'll cast Lightning Bolt and Chain lightning less. So our 4 piece means we'll actually decrease the effectiveness of our 2 piece by ~19%.

3. A lower cooldown on Lava Burst of roughly 19% isn't a 20% increase in dps of Lava Burst (T9 bonus). The reason being that increased frequency of Lava Burst means we have a decreased frequency of other spells. Though it IS a dps increase to cast more Lava Burst, the T9 4 piece is more effective because it increases the Lava Burst damage but not at the expense of casting other spells like is the cast with 4 piece T10.

4. More Lava Burst also means we devalue crit even further since Lava Burst is 100% crit. We already scale very very badly with crit. Do you guys really want to devalue this stat even more?


In short, I just wanted to express that these bonuses in comparison to T9 bonuses are so underwhelming that T9 is actually better dps gear than T10 until we go two ilevel tiers higher than our current gear (245 has to go to 264, 258 has to go to 277) and even then it is possible they'll be roughly the same dps output.

PS: Do you guys think they are fine the way they are? Or that we're perhaps "doom and glooming" a bit early? I honestly don't think our dps is so horrible, but I do feel that the theorycrafting on this set is going to pan out accurately and then we're going to lag behind. Just think being proactive is better in this case.