(edit-supertldr: this is what draxar said about windfury, but a bit more indepth and with some numbers and more words)

(EDIT 2: GUESS WHAT THIS IS ALL WRONG AND SPACEDRAKE IS DUMB AS HELL AND FORGOT TO COUNT BUFFS HURRRRR. I'm going to leave the original text intact as a signpost for how not to fly to conclusions on this website.)


I've also got a bit of a "report from the field", as it were, having tried out 0/17/54 in VoA25 and 10 against Toravon and Koralon. The results were very encouraging (and interesting) and revealed something pertinent to the thread re: strategy and raid buffs, particularly for the many readers this forum gets who may do only 10-man content most of the time.

My performance in 25-man was... impressive. I'm using normal Bryntroll and a DPS armor set comprised of gear ranging from 219s to 245s, and I managed to match damage with quite a few people who outgeared me. This was even with a couple of rotation fuckups; the spec seems fairly forgiving of minor flubs, misjudgments or interruptions due to boss actions (such as moving out of the effing fire on Koralon) so long as you can keep all of your self-buffs going.

VoA10 revealed something interesting and pertinent to the thread, however. In going from 25 to 10, we managed to keep just about all of the buffs (and relevant damage-enhancing debuffs) for my spec, but I lost one thing in particular: Windfury. I no longer had raid melee haste on top of my personal haste.

The difference was incredible; I lost two thousand DPS on both Toravon and Koralon. The other melee who were in the 10-man did not suffer such high drop-offs (several only lost a few hundred DPS, in fact). And my rotation wasn't an issue - if anything my rotations were tighter and better executed, particularly on Koralon. I was simply doing straight-up less damage to both bosses - I could even tell this during the attempts. My ghoul wasn't swinging nearly as fast (due to not inheriting the haste from my raid haste buff + his own raid haste buff), I wasn't getting as many swings (and thus procs, both of FC and lifedrain), I was simply far less impressive all around. All due to missing a single buff.

The point is this: if, for whatever reason, you do not have a raid melee haste buff as 0/17/54, your DPS will plummet. With this build, raid melee haste from Windfury or Improved Icy Talons becomes the most important buff you can have after percentage stat scalers and if you lose it for whatever reason, your DPS will suffer. Greatly.

There are two big pertinent facts for the thread, then:

1) If you outrange your source of raid melee haste, your DPS is going drop like a stone off the side of a boat. That can seem like "hurr raid 101" advice, but really, even losing your raid haste for less than a minute could absolutely kill your DPS, and there's a couple of fights in Icecrown (Deathwhisper, Rotface, Putricide and in some cases Valithria spring to mind) where this could really be an issue. If you need to talk to your Enhancement Shaman (or token Frost DK) about positioning totems or whatever, now is the time to get those issues sorted out for maximum damage. (Of course, if your Enhancement or Frost buddy goes down, you either a) need to call for another shaman to place windfury immediately or b) are fucked.)

2) This is more for the 10-man crowd: if you don't have regular access to a source of raid melee haste, either Windfury or Improved Talons, 0/17/54 may not be the best build for you. Quite simply, if you just can't get that buff for whatever reason, sub-frost might not be the best thing for you and your raid group. 0/17/54 is very reliant on stacking as many haste buffs as possible to up personal and ghoul swingtime for proc action while still getting full benefit for gemming and gearing for strength/crit/arpen; if you can't get the raid haste on top of your personal icy talons, your DPS is going to suffer tremendously. So, you should either spec sub-blood if you can't get raid haste for whatever reason, or you should find an Enhancement Shaman or Frost DK and make them your new best friend. (It helps that we synergize really damn well with both classes.)


So the TLDR is, when you don't have raid melee haste (for any reason), 0/17/54 seems to get hurt quite a bit. I'm eager to test it some more, but I'm pretty confident in my assertion here. Of course, if you do have nice, constant raid haste (and for post of the regular posters at EJ I doubt this is an issue)... mother of God. There really is no comparison, especially if you have Bryntroll (or Shadowmourne). If a terrible scrub like me can consistently pull 7.5k in a mix of dumb Ulduar and ToC-level items, anyone with great gear will pretty much blow the tops off of the charts with 0/17/54. It's a hell of a spec, and I'm looking forward to getting some more miles on it.

Well, I'm probably cruising for an infraction here but I do stand by the assertion I made. If it was just one boss on which I did crappier DPS, then I'd chalk it up to my being a scrub, but the thing is, I did a certain amount of DPS on two very similar bosses who are essentially perfect tank-and-spank DPS parse bosses, and then minus a certain buff I consistently did that DPS less two thousand almost exactly. I'm confident I didn't mess up my rotation (and if I did, why would it be consistent between the two bosses?) and the only other real relevant damage modifier I was missing between the two pulls was +crit%, which I doubt would make up a thousand DPS by itself. The only thing I'm left with is raid melee haste.

I would argue that frost subspec benefits "overproportionally" from raid haste, for the record. With my ghoul alone, Windfury is the difference between over half a second of attack time (from ~1.65 with just IT to just a hair over 1 second with IT and raid haste), so that alone is a fairly substantial DPS gain. Factor in the higher uptime on Fallen Crusader, the additional number of Byrntroll procs/faster procs on Shadowmourne... maybe it isn't all of the 2000 difference and I'm just a scrub (read: this is likely ) but sub-Frost sure as hell benefits a lot more from raid haste than sub-Blood does, and takes a much larger proportional hit to damage output when it is missing.

So the final point of my earlier post stands, I think: if you go sub-Frost, do everything you can to avoid losing raid haste, and if you can't get raid haste for whatever reason, sub-Frost may not be the best choice for you.

Well, it's all rather a moot point anyway because I'M DUMBER THAN A BAG OF FUCKING ROCKS. When my raid lost the enhancement shaman and had no hunters or blood DKs, guess what else we lost? 10% attack power scaling.

GEE, I WONDER IF THAT MIGHT COVER THE REST OF THE DAMN DAMAGE GAP SPACEDRAKE YOU DUMB BITCH.



Leaving my original post intact as a good example of what not to do around here.

If nothing else, take from this debacle the fact that this somewhat undergeared Bryntroll user switched to 0/17/54 and noticed an appreciable increase in DPS when fully raid-buffed in a 25 man setting. The spec definitely survives real-world conditions and scrutiny and should be very effective going forward - even in the hands of scrubs like yours truly.

Bug fixes in patch 3.3.3:
Source: WoW -> Patch Notes -> Current Patch Notes

Finally Demonic Pact is fixed.

What does the Everlasting Affliction fix mean? AFAIK Everlasting Affliction already did account for your current haste when it refreshed Corruption through Shadow Bolt, Haunt or Drain Soul. So what exactly did Blizzard fix?