Ele Shaman Glyphs

We bailed out of work early on a promise of Ulduar hard modes raiding. But of course that did not materialize. So as I waited to see what happened, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to reexamine Kuanchichi's glyphs.

Now Kuan has been doing some relatively craptacular dps in the ICC raids Darkfall has been running. I had been running with Flametongue Weapon, Flame Shock (note the tooltip here doesn't match what it was, which is that Flame Shock ticks could crit) and Totem of Wrath ever since Kuan lost his Tier 8 2-piece bonus. After comparing some raid log analyses of Kuan's damage with Hellshot's, whose was much higher, I decided I would swap out the Flametongue Weapon for Lightning Bolt, which scaled better, and had a bigger effect as Kuan's haste goes up.

Then, this week, Patch 3.3.3 dropped. In the Patch Notes (note for later: this is not a permalink), it calls out:

Flame Shock: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes and is affected by spell haste.

Since there was nothing in the notes about Shaman glyphs, I figured: well gee, that sure renders the Flame Shock glyph useless; I'd better swap that out. I was thinking, Lava.

But look at that tooltip again! Imagine my surprise when I logged in to see: Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Flame Shock damage by 60%. Whoa! Lava Burst is stuck on that 8 second cooldown, and I am thinking that 10% of spell power once every 8 seconds probably wasn't a good trade for at least 6 ticks (depending on haste and whether I ever pick up piece #4 of the Tier 10 gear) that will crit 1-3 times. Well, gee. Maybe it is. I wasn't sure. But considering it, I am thinking both of these are better than the Totem of Wrath which is, basically, an extra 84 spell power.

I looked at the Spell Coefficients page on Wowwiki and decided whoever designed this at Blizzard oughta be fired. How can they possibly maintain that code, what good is spellpower...

I went to the Thunder Bluff target dummy to try it out. 5300 with Totem of Wrath Glyph. 5800 with Glyph of Lava. I think I'll stick with Glyph of Lava this week and see what a difference it makes with raid buffs.