Elemental Shaman Midnight Gearing Guide

Midnight Season 2 Elemental Shaman Tier Set Bonuses:

• (2) Set Bonus: Earth Shock, Earthquake, and Elemental Blast damage increased by 25%.
• (4) Set Bonus: When Stormkeeper or Ascendance fade, your next 2 Lightning Bolts, Chain Lightnings, or Lava Bursts deal 25% increased damage and cause your next Earthquake, Earth Shock, or Elemental Blast to cost 100% less Maelstrom.

Tier Set Discussion:

Elemental’s tier bonuses in 12.1 are fairly impactful, both providing a passive damage increase and a rewarding-feeling chain of spenders at the end of your cooldown windows. In order to capitalise on our 4-set bonus we need to alternate up to 4 sets of builders with spenders after cooldowns, meaning a lot of hard casting is required when playing Elemental Blast.

It’s good to have Spiritwalker's Grace up for this moment if possible, especially when Stormkeeper and Ascendance fading overlap, provided you don’t have to sacrifice your uptime inside Ascendance for it.

You should still prioritise the gear you use by running a sim for your character, but the lists below will give you a good idea of what items are considered good for Elemental Shaman, and help you target the right content for each piece of loot.

• Overall
• Raiding
• Mythic+

Elemental ideally wants to have one trinket with an active effect that is paired with Ascendance and then another one that provides a passive effect. Strong trinkets this season include:

Vile Vial Of Volatile Venom - A powerful trinket with flat intellect, and a 2 minute on-use effect that gives a large amount of a random secondary for 15 seconds, followed by a small reduction of a random secondary for 15 seconds.

This synergises well with us this tier as Mastery, Crit, and Haste are all powerful stats, meaning there is a 3/4 chance the gained stat will be very strong, and a 1/4 chance the reduced stat will be Versatility, and thus meaningless to us.

Of course it is possible to get incredibly unlucky and only gain Versatility every time, but on average this trinket will perform best this season. The 2 minute cooldown also synchronises incredibly with Ascendance.

Gebbo's Bottomless Bag - A passive trinket that provides random buffs (or debuffs!) to your secondary stats when casting spells.

While this increases variance, on average the DPS from this trinket is pretty insane for us due to lots of Mastery, Crit, and Haste buffs, and should be taken whenever possible.

Freightrunner's Flask - A strong trinket that also provides flat intellect with a good amount of crit on-use every 1m30s.

It is worth running even if you play 2 minute Ascendance, simply hold it for 30 seconds to send with the start of each Ascendance window.

Wavecaller's Seastone - Another passive trinket that causes your spells to have a high chance to grant an Intellect buff up to 6 stacks, then reduce the buff back down to 0 before restarting.

Strong and with less variance than you might expect due to how fast you cycle through the buff basically guaranteeing one full cycle per Ascendance window.

In the long run, we want 2 pieces in low stat assignment slots with Arcanoweave Lining on them, ideally Bracers and Belt due to the 344 Cloak from Mythic raid. If you don’t plan on clearing Mythic, it would be better to craft in the Back slot than the Waist slot as you lose more stats by crafting a belt.

1. Provided you plan on bonus rolling the last boss on Heroic, your best first craft should be Farstrider's Trophy Belt with Arcanoweave Lining.
2. Following this, you should look to craft Farstrider's Plated Bracers with Arcanoweave Lining.

If your priority is immediate power, and you aren’t planning to bonus roll the last boss Heroic, you should look to craft an Aln'hara Cane with Hunter's Ritual Stone as a first craft. This will eventually be replaced with the cantrip dagger from the last boss along with a strong offhand, but until you get these a crafted staff is very powerful.

If you get a Jan'thrazet, The Soul Fang early, you can get a similar early power spike by crafting an Aln'hara Lantern offhand with Hunter's Ritual Stone instead. This isn’t BiS in the long run, but is INCREDIBLY close and should never be discounted as an option if you have a strong mainhand.

Bonus Rolls (Nebulous Voidcores)

The Midnight Season 2 Bonus Rolls (Nebulous Voidcore) will be available from the start of the season as an alternative reward from your Great Vault. More sources for the bonus rolls will become available later into the Season.

Nebulous Voidcore Bonus Rolls let you target specific loot from a Raid Boss or Mythic+ Dungeon; once an item is received via Bonus Loot, that item is removed from the Bonus Loot Pool.

You should only take a bonus roll from your vault if the expected value of the loot you will receive from it is greater than that of the items in your vault or a socket. Bonus rolling the last boss on Heroic is INCREDIBLY valuable this tier due to the fact she would drop her loot at Mythic 1/6 with a cantrip, but in order for this to be worth it over a Mythic+ roll or an early boss roll on Mythic, the cantrip effect has to be either worth more than 80 crests in another slot or you have to be so flooded with crests you simply don’t care about “wasting” 80. The cantrips are incredibly strong for Elemental, and I would always advise rolling on Heroic Ula’tek early. If you do, you should roll in Restoration loot spec so you guarantee you get a powerful cantrip item by removing the trinket from the loot pool. It’s not weak, but it’s not as good as any of the other 3 pieces.

The same logic about loot-specs should be applied any time you’re bonus rolling. It’s always worth checking the Adventure Guide to see which specs can drop which pieces, I can’t directly advise for anything but Ula’tek as it’s so situational based on what you already have. Also, you should always sim your gear and rolls if possible.

A good early bonus roll target could be Nymrissa Wavecaller in The Tidebound Grotto. While none of the items she drops are BiS, she is a lot easier to kill on Mythic than a lot of her alternatives that drop the same slots, and drops an incredibly good trinket that is a close 2nd for passive trinket behind Gebbo's Bottomless Bag. Even if you don’t get the trinket, your other options would be a Mythic shield with good stats (also a very good outcome), or wrists/hands/ring all with decent stats. I wouldn’t recommend doing this on Heroic, but on Mythic it could absolutely be a good decision.

Below are the High Priority bonus roll target items and where they drop from:

If you are not a player who will clear the raid on Mythic, it is absolutely worth rolling on Ula’tek on Heroic, as the cantrip items are better than any other item you could possibly receive in those slots.

Remaining bonus rolls can be used to fill up your weaker slots, especially a Mythic Offhand/Shield or Mythic Helmet.

Omnium Folio

The Omnium Folio is a new player power system, released in Midnight Patch 12.0.7 and active for the duration of the Midnight WoW Expansion. By completing a weekly quest, you will unlock more of the Omnium Folio upgrade Tree and can choose from a number of player power enhancements.

Recommended Omnium Folio Powers for Elemental Shaman:

• Rune Of Unleashed Fire
• Rune Of Void-Tainted Shell
• Rune Of Lingering
• Rune Of Critical Power
• Rune Of Overload

For more information on this system, check out Method’s Omnium Folio Overview Guide.