I apologize if this comes off as a "noob" thread, I hope it can provoke some discussion. I'm in the process of leveling a draenei shaman as an alt, which I plan to quickly get to 70. I’ve been curious about shaman for some time, as my first char was a troll shaman before I deleted him at level 6 to play with a friend who had rolled alliance side. I have a 38 troll shaman on another server but now I can finally level one up with full support from my guild, friends, and main.

Anyway, I can’t seem to find concise information on weapon buffs. I’ve heard the suggestion “Flametongue for leveling” pretty often, but I can’t find the math to support this. How much dps does flametongue add at each rank, pre spell damage? Is rockbiter > flametongue on sundered targets? Currently, I’ve been using whichever weapon buff I’ve trained a new rank of most recently. The only solid bit of info I have is that flametongue has a spell damage coefficient of 10%. Finally, is there a “quick n’ dirty” formula for estimating dps for a given rank of windfury? At the moment I’m mostly interested in gathering base dps for all ranks of weapon buffs.

I’d like to offer this thread as a source for consolidated info on shaman base damage, spell coefficients, and “break-even” points, in particular for newly leveling shaman.

I would also find such discussion useful as I have been having similar problems. What I have been doing so far is just trying both Rockbiter and Flametongue out and seeing which come out with the best average DPS ;)

My advice? Get Swstats, reset it, grind for 5 minutes with one buff, then reset and 5 minutes with the next. Pick the highest DPS.

Experimenting seem likely to produce better results than theory crafting, especially since you end up with new weapon buffs every few levels.

When a weapon buff says "From XX damage to XX damage", the lowest number is at 1.0 speed. The actual damage scales exactly with your weapon speed, it's very easy to calculate. Windfury damage is your tooltip damage times 1.5 or so (eventually scaling downward closer to 1.4 or lower) before mitigation. If you're leveling up with any sort of AP gear at all (bear/soldier/beast suffixes) then Windfury will almost assuredly be superior since it's the only one that scales with AP.

I'm leveling a shaman as well and it seemed that windfury is far superior to rockbiter or flametounge. I'm using giants/mageblood at all times when grinding and the combination of stormstrike and windfury simply owns mobs while you take little damage. I also dual-wield firey weapons so all the the damage is fairly low I'm hitting very fast and consistently.

Really, though the fastest way to level seems to be to use a 60 character to power level. I got to 31 under a day played and was averaging 1 hour -2 hours levels from 29-40 in SM. Hoping to try the same thing in ZF because 3 hours levels questing and grinding are no fun at all. (If anyone has any suggestion on certains mobs to grind that could speed this up that would be helpful).

SM was good up until about 43. At 43 the xp started dropping off pretty badly. Until then it was 60-70+k an hour.

After that ZF seemed too slow to me, Maradon seems like a better bet. Elementals are kinda low hp and ac for the level.

While I can't offer fact's, merely experience of levelling my shaman, I would say choosing the most recently ranked spell is generally idea till you get windfury. Though on the note of windfury I picked up a pacifer for the 32-35 ranges and basically a 4.0 speed weapon was awful itself. I'm not sure how good any alternative enchant would be on a such a slow weapon though perhaps they would be better. I do know Windfury rank 2/1 on a pair of Crusader'd flurry axe's is quite frankly in terms of attack output and consequentially DPS output.

Yeah. I did a run of ZF today just for the quests but unlike Sm where I am able to aoe 8-10 elites at once I have to kill most of the mobs with single target spells and only do 1 pull at a time. The experience might be slightly better than grinding solo but not much. Maradon sounds like a better bet since I remember farming NR there and mobs being pretty low HP wise. I really am just going to grind it out until level 50 when I can tap grind and shoot to 60.

Normally, I also don't like to use totems when I solo. Sometimes a searing totem on higher level mobs but recently as I've picked up grace of earth/air it seems that if I throw those two down and mana spring and then pull 5-6 mobs to that area it works fast. Its also kind of fun to start to learn about the shaman class since right now its been all pve grinding and healing 60 mage.

You can just calculate rockbiter and compare to FT. FT damage is consistent so you can see how much damage it does with your current weapon. The damage rockbiter adds should be the dps listed*weapon speed, before armor. You can get a rough idea of the amount of armor mobs you're fighting have by looking at the average damage listed on your char sheet vs. how much you actually do (It's something like 15-40% armor it seems to me depending on mage vs. warrior mobs). And then compare them.

In practice I found that when I first got FT it was significantly better, then as I got closer to 30 rockbiter became somewhat better especially vs. low armor mobs. Then at 30 I got WF and never looked back ;). If you have elemental weapons talent, WF actually does more like 60% of your listed weapon damage, since it now scales the entire damage not just the AP. It also makes keeping flurry up alot easier as WF hits can crit and proc flurry but don't use up flurry charges. The only problem is that it makes your damage very bursty which isn't what you want for grinding -> so 30-40 levels I think a good argument can be made for RB/FT although I'd rather just take WF's higher damage and live with the burstiness. Once you get DW, that makes your damage far less bursty and WF very good :). Right now at 42 fighting those whelps in badlands with 2 wirts legs I kill them on average in about 10-12 secs and my exp/hour is about 35-40K unrested with no quests, even with the fact that I'm mining and travelling across the elite dragon place since they don't respawn fast enough. It goes down to about 30K if there is someone else there competing with me though.

Thoughts on weapon speed choices. Basically, we have 4 choices: slow/slow, slow/fast, fast/fast, and fast, slow.

Slow/Slow: Biggest Stormstrikes.

Slow/Fast: Big Stormstrikes, but the faster offhand means you start the flurry/UR train faster. Fast OH will eat a few of your flurries. Good for when you're constantly starting and stopping (like in a five man) and more consistant.

Fast/Fast: Smallest Stormstrikes, but very consistant damage that gets its maximum dps very quickly. Less chances of threat spikes, OH will eat less of your flurries. Highest amount of Shamanistic Rage procs.

Fast/Slow: This is one I've been using in instances due to having no good OH. When Wastewalker Shiv dropped, I decided to OH my HWL's cleaver instead. Your Stormstrikes are small (but better than fast/fast), you have the advantage of starting flurry/UR quickly and your MH will use more off your flurries because it's faster than the OH. Threat spiking is not that big a problem because your big slow WF procs have the 1/2 damage penalty applied to it.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I haven't done exhaustive testing, but mild glances at my Damage Meters in instances tells me that Stormstrikes are a fairly small part of my damage compared to white damage/Windfury. Fast/Slow at seems to be at least superior to Fast/Fast in every way.

Note: Having weapons of the same speed means you get flurry for four swings instead of three. Having weapons with attack speeds that are multples of each other will also have this effect if you get a crit on the faster weapon when it strikes by itself.

Another thing to consider is that flametongue does full damage on the off-hand, while rockbiter and windfury get the 50% damage penalty. I've been leveling with WF mainhand and FT offhand, and while it might not quite have the same DPS as differing ranks of windfury it is much more consistent.

I am also building a shaman, and was wondering which is best for raid situations, wielding a 2h weapon or running duel wield?

Dual wield will thump using a two hander in terms of DPS given comparable weapons, but it's possible to cook up a hybrid enhancement-resto build that can still push decent damage to irritate Oggie ;p

Using Windfury 3/2 (at 51) I see silliness like this with enough frequency to make me smile everytime I see my combat log fill with all yellow.

Your Stormstrike hits for 84.
Your Stormstrike hits for 56.
Your Windfury hits for 95.
Your Windfury crits for 145.
Your Fiery Weapon hits for 40.
Your Fiery Weapon hits for 40.
Your Windfury hits for 87.
Your Windfury hits for 92.
Your Fiery Weapon hits for 40.

One thing damage wise that annoys me is that I think if my main hand stormstrike gets parried my OH doesnt attack, I will test it out some more (and granted this doesnt really occur on a raid dps level) but it is a bit annoying. I am now wondering how it reacts to dodges so for I am hounding my combat log >_> .

That is indeed what's happening, and I believe the same mechanic applies to Mutilate for Rogues. The tooltip's description that it attacks with both hands is a bit misleading since the first attack must land for the second to occur, but thanks to the high amount of +hit in from talents you'll really only see it on dodges and parries.