The (Elemental) Cataclysm and You! Part Two: Talent Builds

Expanding on my previous entry about talents, I’m now going to look at what we’ll do with them. I’ll look at a “standard” elemental build, a Dual Wield build, and a Searing Flames build.

Before I start I should point out that the Tier 2 Enhancement talents are due for a re-work. This has been confirmed by a few Blizzard poster comments about Enhancing Totems being turned into a self-buff when totems are out, and Ghost Wolf being usable indoors (whether this means it will be an instant cast by default or not remains to be seen).

The “Standard” Build, aka the current build plus 5 points.
59/17/0
This build is based around our current raiding build, and spending the extra points in what talents are available. The general approach was to get everything in the Elemental tree that would be useful for PvE, and then get sundry talents in Enhancement.

The end result is that we pick up Earthquake, Lava Surge, a single point in Toughness, and two points in Ancestral Swiftness. There’s a little flexibility around the Enhancement talents, especially if you go with a boot speed enchant (assuming such things exist at that point).

Dual Weild
54/21/0
The second build is the one everyone starts clamouring about. It cropped up mid TBC, and turns up on a semi-regular basis. The basis idea, for those that don’t know, is to equip a one handed weapon, ideally some sort of int or spellpower green, and then go dual Flametongue to get the additional spellpower. There’s a couple of sacrifices to be made, but Booming Echoes and Lava Surge could be worth it (this is all hypothetical at this stage).

However, to rain on the DW Elemental Parade, there are a few bliz quotes to look at. Incidentally, the second one was a point I was going to raise myself, as not being able to have two Flametongue enchants will pretty much kill off any possibility of the spec being viable.

“Elemental and Resto are going to be pretty unlikely to want to dual-wield in Cataclysm. For the most part we want them using a one-handed caster weapon and shield.” source

“We’re not quite ready to talk about it yet, but imagine that the DW talent is accesible to Enhance early enough to be useful but not to Elemental and Resto. We’re also looking at making enchants unique, which would let us drop the WF internal cooldown low enough that fast weapons might be more attractive.” source

The Searing Flame Build
53/23/0
This third build is the one I’m quite interested in. Searing Flame gives your Searing Totem a chance to apply a stacking DoT to your target, equal to 100% of the damage of the hit over 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times. Being mid way up the Enhancement tree, we’ll only be able to get 3 or 4 points in at most, but since we won’t be consuming the stack like our Enhancement brothers, and that the extra talent points only affect the chance that the dot will be applied, it means we won’t need to have more than 2 or 3 points in it anyway.

For more information on this, go read my earlier blog entry on Modelling Searing Flame

The cost to getting Searing Flames is that you can’t get all the talents from the Elemental tree, but this may not be such a great loss. Booming Echoes (which is only a minor dps gain with a slightly shorter Flameshock cooldown) and Lava Surge are the two I’ve dropped, although the latter is more because I think having a Lava Burst cooldown reset will make our rotation a bit more awkward.

Part 3 will be put together sometime this week, ending the run of pre-canned blog entries. I’ll look at the new spells/abilities, and then wrap up with a Part 4 after that, which will be another edition of Bink Writes Blizzard.

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