panny

Pretty hard to work out what he's actually saying.

Is he saying that
A) both the WF rank 5/4 bug will be fixed along with the 3 second cooldown bug; or
B) only the WF rank 5/4 bug will be fixed?

 

vorda

He's saying that the 3 second cooldown was intentional and every way to remove it will be fixed.

 

panny

Well, that's just horrid. Basically, he's saying that Shaman cannot use weapons that are faster than 3.0 (not including Flurry), otherwise Windfury's proc is no longer 20%... how incredibly stupid.

 

vorda

Its abit late/early here and I'm not that sober, but I think that 3.0sp comment isnt including offhands, as (and I quote from tseric):

I suppose noone is double buffing WF ever again when this 'fix' goes in?

 

Igniter

http://ctprofiles.net/5084917 my viable wishlist. I won't bother listing stats, as XI stated, ctprofiles is quite buggy atm. My choices are pretty easily obtainable by running kara + a few heroics, although I'm sure theres a few sidegrades in rings/neck/cloak to be had.

Also, don't discount gems and how powerful they can be. I find from the gear I've picked, it's a decent mix of stamina, int, and mana regen, while keeping enough hit/crit for the WF/hourglass procs. (also still trying to decide if I should take t4 shoulder or gloves, for the 2pc)

Oh, and, drakefist/dragonmaw are quite imba so far. Add in heroism and a few WF crits and whatever boss will gnaw on you for a few seconds.

Doubtful, especially for those who favored fast offhands. Of course, I look at this in a hopeful view, that they'll change the workings of rockbiter a bit

 

Thegreatcow

Aye to confirm what Tseric Clarifed in later in that post after responding to a post.


The windfury 5/4 trick we've been using will no longer be possible.

IE If you proc WF on either your main hand or your off hand, it will physically preclude you from procc'ing WF on either hand for another 3 seconds.

This was apparently after digging around on that thread before it exploded inserted way back in the day when they "fixed" chain proccing of windfuries of each other. We just didn't notice until now because back then all we could use were slow as sin 2 handers.

However as it has now been pointed out, the faster and faster your weapons are, the more painful this now apparent fix becomes. Dual windfury will only work decently with ultra slow weapons 2.9+ which severely hurts our choices for weapons if we want to stick with dual windfury.

I'm not confident of the math that was posted but with this fix some people were tossing numbers around as reducing the effective proc rate to 16% with slow weapons. And supposedly even less with faster. Again, like I said I have not done the math on the effective numbers, but these were the numbers tossed about. All in all it doesn't look too good for enhancement shamans on paper so far, we'll have to see what what becomes of it.

 

Pane

I suppose it's hard to parse, but I'd love to know by what % this will impact our dps, assuming either sticking stubbornly with WF, or using FT or whatnot.

sadly I lack the skill to calculate this

Weapon choices are so limited already, if you use weapon speed as an important factor. 2.9s; is that even out there anymore?

I use drakefist in mainhand, and was just about to spend hard cash on runic hammer for offhand. I'd hate to find out that haste proc actually hampers dps in the new set up, or that runic is simply too fast.

 

Thegreatcow

Aye to be honest I have not seen a single 2.9 speed weapon since TBC came out. I'm still using twin HWL cleavers enchanted with Crusader as I'm still too addicted to the massive stormstrike and quad windfury procs these things could generate. And boy oh boy could they make some sick procs. However the highest I've seen is 2.6-2.7 nothing higher so I suppose they're trying to indirectly nerf the fact that our windfury, never being normalized will not react so crazily with slow as sin weapons.

 

Avair

So any windfury proc from either weapon will put windfury on 'cooldown' for 3 seconds. Even just running in on your main hand will never give you 20% damage, since no 1H are slower than 3 seconds, not even counting flurry.

This means running windfury on your offhand is probably going to be wrong, especially with a fast weapon. You are going to proc a 50% damage windfury hit off your OH and waste any chance to get a good WF proc off your main hand now.

So what do we use on our OH's now? Rockbiter or Flametongue?

 

berg

If I understand things correctly you do not need someone to calculate what the impact will be. Just put wf5 on both weapons and go see for yourself.

 

panny

Counting Flurry, not even a two-hander is slow enough. :/

 

Sebudai

So, I think this is a pretty horrible change. If they want to reduce enhancement shaman damage potential I can think of much better ways to do it. This is about the most backwards, retarded 'solution' I can imagine.

It's quite the challenge to figure out just what this will all mean exactly, but here's what I think I know:

Windfury is still the best enchant for the mainhand. Windfury is going to be the worst enchant for the offhand. Flametongue will most likely be the best offhand enchant, and Rockbiter/Frostbrand will remain useless just like they have always been.

As before, enhancement shaman will want the slowest weapons they can possibly find.

Enhancement shaman dps will drop atleast 10% and possibly quite a bit more.

 

Coriolis

While I'm quite pissed off about this change (why in god's name does it need a cooldown? We can't have even one class in this game favor fast>slow weapons?), we may be a bit too doom and gloom. After all since we've never had any +offhand damage talents our offhand is about 1/3 of our dps, and maybe using FT or rockbiter, whichever works out better (I'm guessing FT but I'll need to check) will not be such a huge pain. It does suck for proccing flurry though, and it will be less damage, but I don't think more then a 10% decrease (not like that's small...). And at least now you won't need a slow offhand if you're not using WF and will get the full benefit from SF/JoW.

Why have such a stupid mechanic in the first place though is beyond me. If they wanted us to do less damage there could be better ways other then enforcing a secret stupid cooldown that limits your weapon choices.

This and the feral druid changes... why give people a bone and then take it away? Especially when apparently they are going to leave what is possible the single strongest and most overpowered offspec class (shadow priests) alone? If I didn't enjoy shaman so much I'd switch back to my priest in a heartbeat.

 

Sebudai

Flametongue doesn't proc Flurry, Shamanistic Rage, Unleashed Rage or Judgements. Unlike Windfury, it doesn't really scale with gear in any meaningful way.

Those offhand Windfuries gain the benefit from all of those gear upgrades and raid buffs. Flametongue really just doesn't. Outside of the minor boost Flametongue will recieve from the minor amount of spell damage we will have on our gear, it's not getting better until we're leveling to 80 in the next expansion. It's a very significant loss in damage, and I'm willing to bet it's well over 10%.

And yeah, if they want to nerf shaman dps, fine, whatever. But don't nerf it in such a ridiculously annoying way.

 

Malan

Big thread here with lots of Tseric replies trying to figure out how the windfury cooldown is going to truly impact shaman DPS because of Flurry and other Haste effects.
http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/79821827.htm

 

stinkfot

my dps has dropped by about 200 dps from some not to good tests it seems.. i used to be between 550-700 dps.. now i hower around 290-500 mostly between 450-500 approx.. that is using the first of the crafted maces and another blue ~71dps weapon.

 

Skiace

well that was an interesting read, at least tseric is trying to understand the issue. i don't understand why he's hessitant about this point though:

and he doesn't come out later on and say "oh yes, i see now why that is would be the case." i don't get what's intuitively difficult about seeing that WF without any cooldown would be a dps increase independant of weapon speed.

 

berg

My initial results are pretty disturbing. Previously it seems like windfury would increase my main and offhand weapon damage by 33-35% (It should be 40% but whatever).

Afterwards with 2.6 main hand and 1.8 offhand windfury increases my main hand around 25% and my offhand around 23%. Replacing my offhand with a 2.8 offhand with 10 less dps netted almost no damage change (what the hell.)

With a 1.3 offhand my proc rates were even lower.

Overall dps was lower in the neighborhood of 15%.

I try not to get too emotional about this stuff but this is probably the largest nerf that any class will ever receive in this game. Considering the complete lack of PVP viability and the near sacrifice of hybrid status I am not convinced that enhancement has any place in a raid.

I do not understand how they could implement a game mechanic that flies in the face of all the existing synergies of the class. Unleashed rage and JoW both want fast weapons and here we have a class specific mechanic that ruthlessly punishes you for using fast weapons.

 

Durnitol

OP updated. For now I am ingoring the upcoming WF nerf, as that is not what I wanted this thread to be about.

 

Malan

Threads have a mind of their own on this forum.

 

berg

The wf change gas more impact on your itemization than anything else does. It is foolish to dismiss it. Fast weapons are now completley toxic to your dps which is gross as they synergize so well with Unleashed rage and JoW.

 

Durnitol

I am ignoring it because the drop in our DPS is so significant, that I wonder if I'd just respec. I'd rather talk about what I know then speculate about what might happen in the next patch.

 

Khlysti

So, was slightly bored and went for a dps test, gear is as shown in my link on the left (expect with gems in it). Each test is 1000 seconds of auto attack only.

For windfury 5/4 - 628.4 dps
For Windfury 5/5 - 557.3 dps (equivalent to what an enforced cooldown will give us)
For Windfury 5/flametongue - 517.8 dps
For Windfury 5/rockbiter - 550.8 dps
For no weapon enchants at all - 326.5 dps

However since shaman dps is currently insane, and plain broken with enough buffs
e.g. You crit Shade of Aran 2100
You windfury crit Shade of Aran 3179
You windfury crit Shade of Aran 3211
You windfury crit Shade of Aran 3219
You windfury crit Shade of Aran 3154

Windfury 5/4 in its current mode is broken badly, yes this change sucks hard as it makes slow offhand a requirement, but something does need doing. 4 main hand procs in one is funny for dps epeening but wrecks my dps in heroics as I have to do nothing so for so long to avoid mad procs giving me aggro.

As far as gear goes, I'm fairly happy with what I have in my profile, still need desolation shoulders and legs to drop though.

 

Gatzu

Auto attack only doesn't show the full extent of the wf nerf. You should test with ss too.

 

Igniter

I'm sorry, but just making up numbers to prove a point just doesn't cut it.