How to gem your elemental shaman

v3.1

I notice a few people searching for stuff like, “Which gems for elemental shaman?” and the like and arriving at this blog.  So here it is.

First off when gemming your elemental shaman remember the hit cap.   If you are only planning on doing heroic instances then your hit cap is 79.  If you are planning on raiding you have two hit caps.  295 289 hit rating is your soft hit cap.  It assumes that you are raiding with a Shadow Priest debuffing the raid boss with Misery (Edit: Or balance druid with Improved Faerie Fire).  If you do not raid with a Shadow Priest your hard hit cap for raid bosses is 368.

Edit: Being a Horde I forgot about Dranei’s +1% hit aura.  If you have a Dranei with this in your group you can further reduce the hit rating needed by 26.  i.e. 263 and 342 hit caps.

Personally I feel must hit the soft cap and then have a piece of gear with lots of hit on it to swap in if there is no shadow priest in the raid.  Pieces like Ebonweave Gloves/Robe are good for this.

OK now the gems.

Meta gem

The 3% extra damage from this metagem makes it the stand out option for elementalists.  The big downside for this gem is the requirements for 2 blues gems to activate it.  Blue gem slots seem to be few and far between for the sort of gear we are looking for.

Yellow gems

Early on I put Rigid Autumn’s Glow in my yellow slots and swap in Veiled Monarch Topaz as I get more hit rating.

Red gems

The advantage of the Veiled Monarch Topaz are that they fit both your main slot colours and spread your hit rating around your gear.  They are also about one third the price of Runed Scarlet Rubies on my server.  I suggest starting with Veiled Monarch Topaz and replacing them with Runed Scarlet Rubies as the hit on your gear improves.

Blue gems

All you options for blues are pretty weak, but unfortunately you’ll need two for your metagem activation.  The two choices are pretty close depending on your need for hit rating.  I find my Eternal Belt Buckle a good place to put one of these.

Done.  Bookmark this or add it to your cheat sheet for you elemental shaman.

Gobble gobble.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to How to gem your elemental shaman

  1. cyathus says:
    19 May 2009 at 4:21 am

    Nice article! You might want to add that a Moonkin’s Imp Faerie Fire functions the same as Misery for a 3% to hit. Also, if you’re an alliance Shaman you get an extra 1% from the Draenai racial. You can also eat some hit food to get to the hit cap.

    From the EJ forums the hit cap for alliance are 342/263 (with and without the Misery/Imp Faerie Fire buff) and for horde are 368/289.

  2. BobTurkey says:
    20 May 2009 at 10:33 am

    Thanks. I’m not sure why I had it as 295 instead of 289.

    I’ve updated the post.

    Gobble gobble.

  3. eldsdragon says:
    23 July 2009 at 10:15 am

    For horde 295 hit is what you need if you have the heroic violet hold trinket on switch if you have a boomkin or a shadow priest.

    Spellhit is 26.23199272 = 1% chance to hit

    367~ hit (14%) without SP/Moonkin in raid
    289~ hit (11%) with SP/Moonkin.
    295~ hit (11%) with Violet Hold trinket on switch