a decent rule of thumb for old world for rogues was instead of 14AP = 1 DPS, 14AP = 3DPS.

This took into consideration misses, yellow dmg, etc. It also, however, assumed no glancing penalty, since that was at the time mitigatable through +skill items. Now maybe it'd be more like 14AP = 2.75 dps for rogues.

As much as I do agree that for my Shaman, I would have liked to see less hybrid more Enhancement stats on, well, Enhancement sets, I have to imagine Blizzard's logic is this; generally on a scale of 1-5 where 1 means something's never done and 5 is always done (in given raid fights):

Elemental Shaman: Caster DPS 4-5, healing 1-3, physical dps 1
Restoration Shaman: Caster DPS 1, healing 5, physical dps 1
Enhancement Shaman: Caster DPS 2, healing 2, physical dps 5

An Elemental or Resto receive zero benefit from any physical DPS stats. They don't use them at all. An Enhancement Shaman, however, will throw shocks sometimes, will heal sometimes, and thus makes SOME use out of that stat allocation towards +dmg.

Now again, I don't entirely like it as I'd prefer greater allocation of hit/crit, but it does make some sense.

One can counter-argue that Druids don't have +heal or +dmg on our feral set, but then again we're in the same camp where we never do caster dps and don't heal often (and have to spend up to 1k mana shifting to do so).

OK, one more time; perhaps some math will dispel this kind of wrongheadedness. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that we get NO USE AT ALL out of +damage as an enhancement shaman. I will demonstrate.

First, note that ES, being an instant spell, scales with 43% of +damage. Cyclone Harness has 121 +damage; this means that it will increase the damage of your earth shock by 52. At this point, let's stop and compare that benefit with the bonus from Totem of Impact, and marvel at the waste of item budget. But I digress.

Now, let's say you're in an 8 minute fight against a raid boss; assuming for now spell crit chance ~ 5% and the 17% spell resist rate of bosses, then if you assume you get your stormstrike boost about half the time, the best possible benefit from the +damage on the cyclone set would be to provide you with about 4k extra damage over the duration of the whole fight (10 shocks/minute * 8 minutes * 52 extra damage/shock * 10% bonus from SS * 88% adjusted resist penalty).

For comparison, let's assume that on the same fight you are merrily swinging away and doing X dps with your leet autoattacks, WFs, and stormstrikes. How big a number does X need to be before 2% extra melee crit exceeds the entire benefit of ALL the +damage on cyclone? Well, given that your physical damage is typically 90% of your total, we need 0.9 * 0.02 * 480 sec * X damage/sec = 4000. So when your purely physical dps ~ 460 (a trivially easy number to reach even without raid buffs), 2% melee crit (50 agility, or 44 crit rating) exceeds the benefit that all the tasty item budget spent on +damage on all 5 pieces of the enhancement T4 set gives you.

For healing, the situation is even worse; equipping a Totem of Healing Rains gives you +79 to LHW, which is just flat out better than the +52 you get to LHW from Cyclone.

So, in summary, no, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that "enhancement shamans get NO APPRECIABLE BENEFIT WHATEVER from +damage on their gear."

Question on professions here. I didn't really want to make a new thread for it. But the gist is I'm getting into the Outlands stuff now as a Draenei shaman. I've been enhancement for the longest time while levelling (wife is a shadow priest) and I've always been planning to get axesmith or hammersmith because of the sweet bop weapons. I don't plan to do any raiding past Karazhan (and who knows if I'll even be doing that) so I want to maximize my gear choices.

Now the thing is I don't know if I'm going to be enhancement all the time at 70 when we start doing heroics. Right now me as enhancement and her doing more of the healing works because I'm sturdier. But my thought has been for lvl 70 stuff that it might be better if I'm resto and she is shadow rather than me enhancement and her holy. So what profession is going to be the most well rounded for a 70 shaman?

Choices:

Axesmith (shying away from hammersmith on count of the haste thing)
- Gives me access to all smith stuff, plus the nice planar edge and the 2h axe.

Armorsmith
- All smith stuff again, and access to the upgradable enhancement chestpiece.

I do have a friend here who can make the fel edged battleaxe, and I'm sure I could find someone to make the runic hammer at some point. Hand of Eternity is nice, but there is the exalted healing mace which is about the same thing.

Which gives me the option of dragonscale leatherworking.
- Looking through that there is a lot of good recipes there for a mail wearer. Including the 2 three piece sets, one being a pretty sweet elemental set which obviously would be much better for a resto/ele shaman than the enhancement stuff.

So which is easier to replace? The 1h weapons from the bop smithing or all the armor pieces from the bop dragonscale leatherworking? Any opinions would be appreciated and no I don't mind grinding. This is taking into account I won't be doing 25 man raiding and I might only get 1-2 pieces from Arena.

One question too: For the bop dragonscale leatherworking sets do you have to make a choice or can you make both sets if you so want?

If you can get on a decent arena team you can get 2 Arena weapons in a couple of months. The question is what do you want to do? Blacksmithing (tier 2 especially) weapons offer you an 80dps weapon the day you hit 70 and an 88dps one when you're about done with 5m dungeons, but this accumulation rate depends highly on the core you run heroics with. If you're pretty hardcore you can be looking at like 3 weeks. This helps you get (and be worth) the KZ spots earlier than you would otherwise. In 3 months when you're farming Nightbane and have enough Arena points to buy any 2 pieces you want then this choice will be mostly superficial in regards to your gear. It's the short term glory that's a selling point for BS.

"All the smith stuff" really is just the bop pieces at this point in time unless you're looking at the investment into epic patterns (or get lucky) and then it's a matter of your ability to farm lots of Primal Nethers and line up buyers. You're highly unlikely to make much use of anything more at 70.

As for the LW armor I can't testify for its awesomeness vs ilvl 115 blues but if you don't mind grinding (or esp. have alts to gather with) you can have both BS and LW.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30068 gives me hope that maybe Blizzard is realizing that previously itemized enhancement items (if any) were flawed. Beyond the m/5 on that item, I couldn't possibly make it more perfect.

Then again, maybe they were lucky. *prays*

Agreed. The dragonmaw mace is amazing, just amazing, The proc goes off a ton as well, meaning more hits! Should pair up nicely the pvp 2.6 speed offhand mace.

Thanks. I just wasn't sure of haste after reading the thread on WF mechanics and the 3 second cooldown and such.

After the WF changes, what would be better for pve, the 2.6 speed gladiator mace or the faster one? Heard that flametounge calculates off the mainhand speed, meaning a faster OH may be better.

I thought that even with both weapons having the same rank windfury that dual WF still beat any combination of WF in mainhand and flametongue/rockbiter/frostbrand in offhand? At least that is what I recall reading from the thread. While levelling here I've always put same level WF on because I don't want to have to deal with losing dps. The only thing I've ever known is dual same level WF, and I've been very happy with it levelling up.

If I recall this right, this thing was fixed fairly soon after 2.0. I remember having +90 from FT on a fast weapon at one point, and logging in to find it doing 40-ish instead.

Regardless, I posted a (reasonably extensive) test of the weapon imbues somewhere in these forums once, which showed that WF5/WF5 beats any other combination SUBSTANTIALLY, except of course WF5/WF4.

I'm still hoping that Blizz will shy away from fixing this, to be honest. I did 'scary dps' as it was called for a while, but now that all our slacker rogues* are gearing up and our clueless mages* are speccing fire, I'm no longer top of the bunch (still respectable but no longer way out in front). The fix is starting to feel unnecessary. Besides, quadprocs are fun!


(*just kidding guys; I love you all)

The simplest solution is to change the focus of your gear a bit. If you're finding you are threat limited, wear a few pieces with other stats like sta, +heal, or +dmg to improve your overall survivability or your healing capacity. As long as you're able to stay fairly close to your threat cap there's no harm in splitting your focus a bit.

In terms of ducking the threat cap, stop using WF 5/4 and you'll eliminate those 6k-8k quad crits that shoot your threat through the roof. Stick with WF 5/5 and you'll also be modeling your post-fix DPS.

Additionally, since ES has no threat modifier, consider holding back on shocking and letting the rogues use the SS debuff instead. It'll still be a nice overall raid DPS boost, and should help keep you below the threat cap.

But frankly, if you need to do both of the above after waiting for 5 sunders, I'd say tell your tanks to step it up a bit with the threat gen and leave the DPS to the rest of the raid.

I think the STA comment is good - I've been doing that already. I can't quite bring myself to add +dmg or +heal, though I do see INT and MP5 as important.

I hadn't thought about the WF 5/5. I may try that. When threat-limited, I'm definitely not ESing except ES1 to interrupt.

What TPS should a warrior MT be generating on a single target?

Enough that given a sufficient lead, I go around 6-7k threat via KTM, you will never catch them. Granted, this is assuming a properly gear tank(prot warrior or feral with bearfiance). if you are still having to hold back anything, WF ranks or full rank ES, then you should yell at your tank.

edit: this is for single target of course, multimob pulls are always dependent on coordination

I'm currently having trouble getting an accurate average TPS on our tanks with KLH. I generally don't bother having it displayed during a fight since it bounces all over the place, esp. with my own insane bursts. So I'd have to defer to some experienced tanks or perhaps any other raiders that have some decent numbers on TPS gen in raids.

My rule of thumb for engaging a mob as enhancement was to wait for 3-5 sunders or 2-3k threat from the tank and then unload (I was at ~1200 AP, 24% crit, 19% hit unbuffed. Adjust your wait time up or down depending on your personal stats). I ended up waiting longer than the rogues and hunters, but the mob usually died with me floating just a hair shy of the tank's total threat (or even just over, but never at 10% over). And at the end of the raid, I was still sitting at 2-4 on the overall damage meter (damn that overgeared rogue! ).

The best advice I can give is to keep an eye on KLH at all times. The WF 5/5 will definitely help in that regard. I became much less concerned with threat and even resumed tossing ES out once I stopped downranking. My DPS took a slight dip, and I usually resumed 5/4 for bosses or any pulls where one was just getting stunlocked and burned to the ground, but overall the raids went a whole lot smoother without my accidental aggro pulls from the tank.

I'd say about 600-700 TPS for a good tank in a raid situation (i.e. no rage issues). If you have BoS, give your tank a 5-6K threat lead and still have aggro issues, either teach your tank to hold aggro, or respec; you won't be able to play to your full potential with a bad tank and that at least to me is rather frustrating. If your tank is not prot/full feral you'll be in trouble too. In 5 mans you will likely have to hold back more (tanks needs to tank multiple targets more often and less chance of BoS), or go full out and burn a caster in the pull while holding aggro on it (this tends to be the better option if the mobs don't hit too hard). Another thing that helps alot is giving your tank WF for additional aggro.

Oh ok thanks. Still collecting my dps gear, but the guild days we already have too much melee as is. We have the 5 mag tanks consisting of 4 warriors + feral druid, and also have 4 active rogues. Hoping the next patch buffs melee dps to the point where they reconsider Sounds like I'll be getting the 2.6 Offhand then!

The solution is just to wait. Like Relwin I wait till the tank has about 6K threat, and then I let rip. Luckily our MT is getting better and better at generating TPS, so my wait gets shorter and shorter

And stacking stamina is a good idea. For a while I ran around kara with something like 6k hp unbuffed and was dying quite often, to a cleave or random charge. Now I sit *just* under 8K, and it makes a huge difference. If I ever manage to find a decent belt and pair of shoulders, I'll be at 8.5K hp.

That's buffed right? If not then you can definitely stand to trade some stam out for more damage pieces. Unless you're one of those jokers that wears leather. My stamina continually inches it's way down, currently at a tad over 6.7k unbuffed, but I'm almost at hit cap vs level 73 mobs. (unless wodin was lying to me to get my hopes on the value needed)

Nope that's unbuffed. The only leather piece I wear is my bracers; a truly neglected item slot by blizzard.

my current stats are in my sig image, I logged without buffs that day.

edit: since the sig generator seems to be down fairly often:
Attack Power: 1132
Hit Rating: 167 (19%+ incl talents)
Crit Chance: 24.84%

The mail bracers off attuneman & midnight (or whatever they're called) in Kara are pretty nice. I picked them up b/c no one else wanted them, and only later found out they're one of the best mail bracers in the game.

Daler, make sure everyone is using the most recent version of KTM, if one or more people are using out of date versions things tend to get out of whack.

I usually don't drop totems until the pull starts, which gives the tank about 5 seconds to build threat.