Maybe it was because of the Gruul hurtful strike bug, but my DPS was horrible. I went from around 540dps on Gruul to 480. This might not seem like a big jump, but it knocked me from 5-6 on the DPS meters to the very bottom. I had fury warriors w/o totems doing more damage than me. On the plus side, the rogues and warriors in my group (that were able to stay alive) were at the top of the meters, so I guess enhancement buffs are making a bigger difference now.
There were no changes made to threat generation in this patch. You didn't take aggro because you did less damage than before.
I believe you answered your own question. And I may be doing slightly (very slightly) less damage then before, but I am now not worrying about pulling aggro. There is no 4 quad proc on a boss opener to be wiped out quick and I had a large increase in my white damage from the glancing blows change. I really feel the changes will be better on the whole.
I do worry about my pvp viability with dual wield, but its no longer the "omg, /pray that i quad proc this caster". It's just nice to feel a little more in "control" of my dps, as I used to be with my rogue.
We didn't get to raid because Kul Tiras was (and still is) borked but in the time I've played the damage is far less spiky which is a really good thing in my book. While I was absolutely a whore for those big four quad crits opening with one was consistently an awful thing. I'm cautiously optimistic about how this will play out. Less dps overall but steadier may turn out to be a blessing in disguise on alot of fights.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
Maybe it was because of the Gruul hurtful strike bug, but my DPS was horrible. I went from around 540dps on Gruul to 480. This might not seem like a big jump, but it knocked me from 5-6 on the DPS meters to the very bottom. I had fury warriors w/o totems doing more damage than me. On the plus side, the rogues and warriors in my group (that were able to stay alive) were at the top of the meters, so I guess enhancement buffs are making a bigger difference now.
Your rogues beat everyone because of the inherent power of WF and the glancing change, not primarily because of enh-specific buffs. Our rogues+fury war demolished the rest of our DPS on gruul last night with me (resto shaman) in their party for WF (and I really mean demolished, only our best lock got close (lock with 1K+ spelldamage) and he got a shaman in his party too). UR is icing on the cake that is WF- and resto gets WF too. If you're doing half their DPS UR isn't going to make that up.
I was hoping the glancing change would somewhat negate the WF nerf but apparently it hasn't... kind of as expected I guess since so much of our damage (WF) is unaffected by glancing.
We just picked up an enh shaman and I hope this isn't how it really is or he's going to be respeccing soon. Maybe if he wears full leather and crafts a runic hammer he'll be OK.
How you guys can say this is a good thing boggles my mind. Maybe it's because of our attitude towards tanks especially on trash (i.e. we all try to pull aggro all the time) but I can't say anyone truly has aggro issues with salv before patch either, including me when I was enh - our tanks' aggro is always good. This is a nerf plain and simple. Throwing in the PVP worthlessness as well it is quite undeserved.
Fixing an obviously broken mechanic isn't a nerf, but there is no question that the DPS reduction from 2.0 to 2.1 hurts a lot. Part of the problem is poor armor itemization as you alluded to (Kings scales like crap on non-T4/5/Gladiator slots since everything else is Huntard Agi/+AP) and part of it is the idiocy of the WF cooldown being independent of weapon speed. The fact that there are damn few slow weapons makes it really hard to try to choose your weapons around the WF cooldown.
Sorry to switch gears, but was looking for some feedback on a suggestion.
Give us a charge after every 5 swings, per hand, that we can use to proc windfury on that hand. Graphically put a little number in the upper right hand corner, in the buff box, to indicate how many charges we have built up. Then create a button for each hand that we can put on our toolbar so we can use these charges. (Sure with faster weapons there will be more button mashing, but at least we'd be able to use higher dps weapons that are faster than the slower lower dps weapons.) To make it balanced, stored charges are lost when we leave combat.
This solves all dps, pvp (except CC), pve and aggro problems. This also shouldn't be that hard to code.
Or just remove the cooldown on WF in the first place and nerf the damage (i.e. WF hits do 80% damage or whatever) to compensate if neccesary. Much simpler and easier - and hey the tooltip would now be accurate, imagine that. If too spiky, then increase proc chance to 30% and decrease actual proc damage accordingly (this is starting to sound like a cookbook ). There are so many simple ways to fix this that solve the issue of having extremely limited weapon choices or spiky damage, which is damn annoying (especially for offhand, most offhands are fast for other classes who wouldn't dream of using a 2.8 speed offhand).
I agree that this wierd quad-proccing thing had to be removed but clearly the damage needed to be compenstated in some way.
Oh and actual enh shaman itemization instead of hunter gear with str instead of AP would be nice (although of course there are almost no items apart from tier sets that are str instead of AP, and not blatantly hunter). Stuff with actual str, some hit/crit, and none (or barely any) int/mp5 that isn't leather would be great. For now though our enh shaman will have the same priority on leather with rogues.
I've noticed a dps drop also, from about 750 to upper 600s on Gruul fight. We tried Gruul 3 or 4 times and the best I could get was about the 700 mark before he killed me with bugged hurtful strike, but the rogues I was buffing with totems were literally a hundred dps higher than yesterday before patch. The main rogues went from 750 prepatch flasked + pots + food to 800+ with only one battle elixir and a random food.
With the item buffs + glancing blow change our dps nerf wasn't that big. What is depressing is seeing me spinning my wheels while everyone else around me got significantly higher dps and try as I might I cannot make up the gap.
Asked my officer team if I should spec back to resto, received a big fat NO from the rogue/warrior officers. Guess I'll be gimpy for the time being. (I prefer resto spec for most things, it's inherent survivability and in turn the lesser repair costs is quite addicting.)
Fixing an obviously broken mechanic isn't a nerf, but there is no question that the DPS reduction from 2.0 to 2.1 hurts a lot. Part of the problem is poor armor itemization as you alluded to (Kings scales like crap on non-T4/5/Gladiator slots since everything else is Huntard Agi/+AP) and part of it is the idiocy of the WF cooldown being independent of weapon speed. The fact that there are damn few slow weapons makes it really hard to try to choose your weapons around the WF cooldown.
Yes, this is why I'd like to be able to wear plate, even if the talent point for "Plate Armor" reads "Allows the Shaman to equip Plate armor, but the armor value of each equipped piece is 25% of the listed tooltip".
If we could break into dps warrior itemization, the devs wouldn't have to go on a massive mail item creation bender to make us happy, and we wouldn't have tanking ability due to the plate armor reduction penalty that the talent would impose..
Don't get me wrong here. I'd rather get a dps boost AND managable aggro. Given the choice between having my dps drop some while still being pretty damned useful and being a stain I'll take the former every time. But I'm also wielding a 2.5/2.6 with an eye toward that damned axe off the Prince; shamans who are less aware of their weird class mechanics are pretty much screwed.
I'm at least reasonably confident that they're aware of the WF problems. How could they not be? I'm hoping they're just having an internal debate on how to shift it since there's several different ways they could go as far as a fix.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
One thing to keep in mind is that we're seeing a reduction in damage from the WF quad proc fix (a flat reduction in and of itself) at the same time we're seeing a significant improvement on Warrior and Rogue DPS thanks to the glancing blows changes. This change affects Shamans a great deal less than their other melee counterparts. Add to this consumables changes that further alter the pecking order by making flasks and/or elixirs more accessible to everyone, but prevents some stacking that was quite beneficial to a shaman (190 AP from 2 potions vs 155 for a rogue using the same). If each of these changes had been applied in a vacuum none of them adds up to much, but taking them all at once hurts. It's a chilling effect on DPS in relation to other melee DPS classes.
Most casters didn't see a big jump in damage this patch, but the melees are finally catching/caught up with the outrageous damage that casters have been putting up since release. We're just now seeing things "they way they should have been" so it'll take a little bit of time for things to settle in again after the multitude of changes. I think the Enhancement changes were much more popular than they ever believed they would be and with the multitude of changes this patch they were a little hesitant to tweak anything for fear of pushing us too far in the powerful direction, similar to the situation Ret paladins are in. I believe that things are really pretty close to where they ought to be and it won't take any sweeping changes in order to get the class where it ought to be. It might be something so simple as improving Weapon Mastery to 15%, even though I'd rather just see them fix the weapon buffs once and for all.
Yes, this is why I'd like to be able to wear plate, even if the talent point for "Plate Armor" reads "Allows the Shaman to equip Plate armor, but the armor value of each equipped piece is 25% of the listed tooltip".
They just need to have their itemization guys not have such a hard-on for Hunter loot and put something with some damn strength on it now and then. Every single 'best' Shaman non-tiered/pvp drop is a leather item because our needs are the closest to Rogues.
Anyway, I actually feel good about the changes. My overall dps stayed the same, while becoming more consistent and less spikey. My relative dps (to the rest of my raid) dropped, but so did my realitive threat - which is fine with me. Previously, I'd been so threat limited that I'd literally wait for about 60 seconds before joining a fight, and I wouldn't use shocks till we hit execute range.
As we left the raid yesterday, I got spammed by the melee in my party complimenting me for my massive buffs. Sure, I dropped a few slots on the dps meters, but the buffs I bring are more potent than ever. The AP I deliver with Unleashed Rage is greater than what you get from a flask.
I do more DPS than the feral druid, I do less dps than the Mages and Rogues. I'm okay with where I'm at. It's still true that my personal DPS + my buffs are the single largest contribution to DPS in the entire raid.
Edit: Posting this on the wow forums got me flamed. God, what a worthless group.
Any "fix" to weapon mechanics which makes a lower DPS weapon in an off hand deliver more bottom line damage than a higher DPS weapon is a poorly implemented fix. Some players may think this helps them avoid pulling aggro, but there are lots of easier ways to do that without monkeying with the underlying fundamentals of the mechanics such that a 2.6 weapon of lower dps will out perform a 1.8 weapon of higher dps. It's kinda silly.
Edit: Posting this on the wow forums got me flamed. God, what a worthless group.
Posting a statement like that is likely to get you flamed anywhere. If your dps has indeed stayed the same you were likely doing something wrong before. One thing I know I hate more than being nerfed, is listening to others try and downplay the severity. I've personally observed the White:WF ratio change from roughly 50:50 pre-patch to 60:40 post-patch as have many others, and the change to glancing doesn't come anywhere close to making up the difference.
Any "fix" to weapon mechanics which makes a lower DPS weapon in an off hand deliver more bottom line damage than a higher DPS weapon is a poorly implemented fix. Some players may think this helps them avoid pulling aggro, but there are lots of easier ways to do that without monkeying with the underlying fundamentals of the mechanics such that a 2.6 weapon of lower dps will out perform a 1.8 weapon of higher dps. It's kinda silly.
Windfury's underlying issues (which I agree are blatantly stupid) are pretty irrelevant to the fact that quad procs were broken as all hell and the offhand WF cooldown was never intended to be untied from the MH cooldown. The entire Windfury cooldown system throws such a wrench in weapon selection that we're arguably worse than pre-2.0 Hunters in terms of being tied to a weapon. Until somebody prioritizes fixing the weapon buffs in some fashion we're stuck with what we have, and judging by their attitude in the dev chat last week it'll be half past never when they rework those mechanics.
I wouldn't be too surprised by heavy raiding enhancement shaman DPS remaining roughly the same. Epic gear was substantially buffed and glancing blows minimized in 2.1. Like the man said his DPS relative to the rest of the raid dropped, so he's fully aware of the situation. He just doesn't mind.
Posting a statement like that is likely to get you flamed anywhere. If your dps has indeed stayed the same you were likely doing something wrong before. One thing I know I hate more than being nerfed, is listening to others try and downplay the severity. I've personally observed the White:WF ratio change from roughly 50:50 pre-patch to 60:40 post-patch as have many others, and the change to glancing doesn't come anywhere close to making up the difference.
I gained almost 200 attack power, 2% crit and 3% hit from item buffs, and my mainhand increased by 5 dps.
I've personally observed the White:WF ratio change from roughly 50:50 pre-patch to 60:40 post-patch as have many others, and the change to glancing doesn't come anywhere close to making up the difference.
Your numbers indicate a good bit more windfury damage than average. Under exactly what test conditions did you "personally observe" these values?
I gained almost 200 attack power, 2% crit and 3% hit from item buffs, and my mainhand increased by 5 dps.
Everyone wearing epic gear saw buffs, I gained about 100ap 3% crit and hit stayed about the same, after swapping in some drops I'd banked. That your increases were so much larger suggests you might not have have been making very good gear choices pre-patch and were using items players focusing on their performance would have passed on. Your personal gians don't mean the actual raid contribution of the class stayed the same, it didn't. Our group buffs have stayed exactly the same while our personal DPS has gone down substantially, meanwhile the classes we compete against for raid spots all received a modest boost.
Originally Posted by Azaranth
As we left the raid yesterday, I got spammed by the melee in my party complimenting me for my massive buffs.
I'm sorry but a statement like this one leads me to think Enhancement may not be your regular build, otherwise that gushing would have happened months ago. Maybe you're not a good person to be drawing conclusions about the state of this particular aspect of our class.
Parses from some of my guilds kills over the last couple months. I don't think my numbers are unusual at all compared to the parses I've seen from other Shaman. I haven't logged anything post-patch yet but I'll try to remember to, after looking at the in-game breakdown in SSC last night, there didn't really seem to be much point.
Everyone wearing epic gear saw buffs, I gained about 100ap 3% crit and hit stayed about the same, after swapping in some drops I'd banked. That your increases were so much larger suggests you might not have have been making very good gear choices pre-patch and were using items players focusing on their performance would have passed on. Your personal gians don't mean the actual raid contribution of the class stayed the same, it didn't. Our group buffs have stayed exactly the same while our personal DPS has gone down substantially, meanwhile the classes we compete against for raid spots all received a modest boost.
I think you're having some problems understanding what I wrote. I never claimed that the raid contribution of the class stayed the same, I claimed that my personal DPS stayed the same, even though my DPS relative to the rest of the raid has fallen. If you're having a hard time understanding these terms, send me a PM, and I'll explain it in a bit more detail.
I'm sorry but a statement like this one leads me to think Enhancement may not be your regular build, otherwise that gushing would have happened months ago. Maybe you're not a good person to be drawing conclusions about the state of this particular aspect of our class.
That's incorrect. I've been Enhancement since the burning crusade was released. Just judge my armory profile against your own. Your assumptions are both condescending, and inappropriate. Perhaps your guild members are not kind enough to send you a tell thanking you for some buffs, but mine are. The impact of our buffs has increased significantly.
Previously, a fury warrior would stack a Flask, Fel Strength Elixir, Agility Elixir, Elixir of Mastery, etc. When you get 500 ap from potions, a Strength of Earth totem seems insignificant. However, when the best you've got now is 120ap from a flask, getting 200 attack power from a Strength of Earth totem is proportionally a much bigger deal. With the change to glancing blows, windfury has a greater effect than ever,
You're welcome to cry all you'd like about Enhancement. Just don't flame me when I tell you my point of view, which is that the class is doing fine. Our buffing is still key to any melee dps group, and our individual dps is not insignificant.
Az
Edit: I did follow your WWS link. It looks like pre-2.1, you were doing 40% wf damage, and 60% other damage. I don't know where you came up with this 50-50 number.
Those were the most recent 3 fights listed. In fact, I looked through every report there, and the highest percentage I found was 44%. Are you just making up this 50-50 number?
I think you're having some problems understanding what I wrote. I never claimed that the raid contribution of the class stayed the same, I claimed that my personal DPS stayed the same, even though my DPS relative to the rest of the raid has fallen. If you're having a hard time understanding these terms, send me a PM, and I'll explain it in a bit more detail.
I'm saying that the bolded portion of your statement is incorrect, I just can't imagine how you're not seeing a DPS decrease with the change to WF mechanics, unless you just weren't paying attention before. I think you'll be hard pressed to find any other min/maxing Shaman who hasn't noticed a significant change for the worse.
That's incorrect. I've been Enhancement since the burning crusade was released. Just judge my armory profile against your own. Your assumptions are both condescending, and inappropriate. Perhaps your guild members are not kind enough to send you a tell thanking you for some buffs, but mine are. The impact of our buffs has increased significantly.
They did thank me when it was new and exciting... months ago. Maybe in your guild everyone thanks everyone else every time anyone provides a buff of any kind. If that's the case I apologize.
Previously, a fury warrior would stack a Flask, Fel Strength Elixir, Agility Elixir, Elixir of Mastery, etc. When you get 500 ap from potions, a Strength of Earth totem seems insignificant. However, when the best you've got now is 120ap from a flask, getting 200 attack power from a Strength of Earth totem is proportionally a much bigger deal. With the change to glancing blows, windfury has a greater effect than ever,
I would argue that the stat increases to gear and glancing reduction have gone a significant way to canceling out the changes in consumable buffs.
You're welcome to cry all you'd like about Enhancement. Just don't flame me when I tell you my point of view, which is that the class is doing fine. Our buffing is still key to any melee dps group, and our individual dps is not insignificant.
I thought Shaman were mostly fine before the patch, if you look at those parses you'll notice I'm usually near the top, but also that our best rogue almost always beats me. Kalgan is on my side by the way, he thinks Enhancement still needs work, and he's right.
Edit: I did follow your WWS link. It looks like pre-2.1, you were doing 40% wf damage, and 60% other damage. I don't know where you came up with this 50-50 number.
Those were the most recent 3 fights listed. In fact, I looked through every report there, and the highest percentage I found was 44%. Are you just making up this 50-50 number?
As I stated clearly in my post, the ratio I was referring to was that of white damage to windfury damage which you'll find hovers around the 50:50 mark, or at least it use to.
Previously, I'd been so threat limited that I'd literally wait for about 60 seconds before joining a fight, and I wouldn't use shocks till we hit execute range.
I find this almost impossible to understand. 60 seconds of threat generation by a half-decent warrior should put him like 48k threat ahead of you. What on God's green earth could you do to grab threat after that short of knockback mechanics or Sudden Tank Death Syndrom? I think you put the safety threshold WAY too far.
If you were THAT threat limited, you should have switched to using WF5/WF5 a long time ago. A full minute of 0 dps; that's a self-nerf if I ever saw one.
All that aside, I don't find it so very difficult to believe that some people stay around the same dps, with the gear upgrades and glancing blow changes offsetting most of the fix impact. But seeing rogues and fury wars posting about 20% increased dps, that puts us pretty far back in relative value.
EDIT: I say AROUND the same dps, because shaman dps is fickle and weird. On the same fight, on the same night, and with the same buffs, I could show 900+ dps or 700+ dps (consequtive Aran wipes for instance) with no other explanation than 'a butterfly must have flapped its wings over the Atlantic'.
Last edited by Pane : 05/24/07 at 4:47 AM.
Reason: added some
There's an argument to be made that the removal of quad procs makes our damage much more consistent. I doubt that there were many people that were threat capped pre-patch that are now magically free of that restriction, so having more predictable DPS means that you're able to maintain the threat line closer without fear of spiking your threat from a main hand quad proc and going splat.
Shaman threat cap is fight dependant, Morogrim i could sometimes get close to ripping, so much so i would go help with the murlocs occasionally, last night we killed it and i had sustained dps of 952 over the 7 or 8 minutes (i think) of our kill and i could not get close to the tank, our best rogue came in at 1252 dps and a warlock abusing SoC had 1600~
Admittedly our MT is threat gen mad, his threat generation is insane.
Similarly on Gruul i got around 650 which for that fight is not much of a loss, perhaps 30-50 dps.
While the WF nerf(fix) is a significant loss the glancing change makes it alot less noticible.
I must admit im very happy with patch, because i gained 4% crit, 27 hit rating and 120 AP and 800HP, im at 8.6k unbuffed which is nothing to sniff at imo.
I would argue that the stat increases to gear and glancing reduction have gone a significant way to canceling out the changes in consumable buffs.
This in itself is true. However, based on this response I dont believe you fully understand Azaranth's view. As consumable buffs have been been nerfed, this has made class buffs even more significant than before. The (now) incredibly significant buff that our totems (and unleashed rage) provide has benefitted the Shaman class in a way that has pleased me greatly. I firmly believe that the increased proportion of a character's total buffs that we can now add* further increases the utility of our class and goes a long way to making up the impact on our raid spot due to 'potential' drop in our dps. After all, we are a hybrid class and utility is what I find (largely) makes up for our lack of raw dps in both the Elemental and Enhancement trees.
Overall I am very happy with this patch, even as an elemental shaman. (Finishing Gruul with well over 50% mana without using pots, is a bit of a joke. Although I have to thank our excellent Shadow priests for that.)
* I am sure everyone is aware of the different buffs our class provides and of the massive consumable nerf, also the fact that Azaranth has gone over this point before, therefore I feel no need to back this up with maths.
05/23/07, 12:02 PM
). There are so many simple ways to fix this that solve the issue of having extremely limited weapon choices or spiky damage, which is damn annoying (especially for offhand, most offhands are fast for other classes who wouldn't dream of using a 2.8 speed offhand). 
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