Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

The Shaman Tier 10 bonus has been redesigned and will no longer reduce the cooldown of Lava Burst or enable Lava Burst to be guaranteed to critical strike without Flame Shock present. Instead successful Lava Burst casts now increase the duration of Flame Shock on the target by 6 seconds.

Please note this is still a work in progress and we may end up with a different or modified bonus before the patch goes live.

Source

If this goes live, it opens up the ability for Elemental Shamans to roll Flame Shock. If you’re not familiar with the practice of rolling DoTs, it’s not a new concept to the game.

What is DoT rolling?

When a DoT is cast, the properties are set and persist throughout the duration of the DoT. These include things like Spell Power and Crit. Cast time is the only time these properties are looked at. The idea of rolling a DoT is to front load the Spell Power and Crit (through Potions and Trinkets), which will then persist when the DoT is refreshed. Shadow Priests have been doing this for awhile now, and our 4P T10 will give us the ability to do this to.

How does this help?

With the help of Nevermelting Ice Crystal you can add 20% crit to the DoT. But you’re not going to want to actually wear the Nevermelting Ice Crystal. What you can do instead is activate the buff slightly before a pull and switch out to a different trinket before entering combat. You should be able to make a macro for the trinket and equipping a new one. Similarly, you can pop a Potion of Wild Magic for another 200 crit rating / 200 Spell Power and still have access to a Health or Mana potion (in 1 minute).

One more note. The resident Shadow Priest in our guild also has a deal with one of the Rogues to cast the first Tricks of the Trade on him. I’m not sure that this can actually be rolled, but it’s still not a bad idea if you can get a cooperative rogue.