I decided to make a new thread about this change so we don't Hijack Durnitols Thread he made on enhancement itemization at 70. (Sorry Durn!)

I realize this may be dooming and glooming a wee bit too early, but this change significantly affects our ability to dps efficiently and will require a significant "2nd Glance" as it were to our weapon choices. Considering I'm trying to update my enhancement gear guide to a 2.0 version, I'm particularly concerned as well.

But yes, I'd definitely like to start a conversation on the implications of this. For those of us just joining in on this, this is basically what is set to happen in either 2.1.0 or some later patch:

Windfury has now been officially confirmed by Tseric as having a "hidden" 3 second proc cooldown. This cooldown apparently has been in the game since they re-did weapon procs and windfury from chain procc'ing off each other, but we haven't noticed it until now since we just got dual windfury abilities.

So essentially what this means as I detailed in Durn's thread. If you proc windfury on either your mainhand or off-hand, the cooldown will physically preclude you from procc'ing windfury on either hand for 3 seconds, significantly reducing our dps.

To add the concern, another thread in the shaman forums was started pointing out how faster and faster weapons and the effects of "haste" supposedly nerf our dps even more, causing us to miss more chances to proc windfury. The math in that thread seems pretty solid so I'm not sure where this is all going to end up as Tseric seemed genuinely interested at figuring out what was going on.

Anyhow, your thoughts and maths would be greatly appreciated regarding this topic, hopefully we can figure this out and where it's going.

Would you mind linking that post, if possible?

http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/79216389.htm

I've been leveling a shaman (48 so far) so I don't know too much other then what I have read. I do a lot of reading and found out a few things but that doesn't mean I know anything definitive. What you 'read' vs what you have 'tested yourself' are two completely different things often times.

So... two thoughts.

I've heard people talking about downranking their Windfury on their off-hand in order to handle this. However, that wasn't addressed in the OP. Does this actually work or was that proven to be bogus?

Second, if you are limited on Windfury, why not just use something other then Windfury on another weapon like Rockbiter?

This is the other thread that shows how haste effects can push weapons into the cooldown. This has the potential to make small haste gains net DPS losses (if they're at the edge of the 3-second delay breakpoint). Tseric seems to be making an effort to understand it and to bring the point to the developers. http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/79821827.htm



The other forum threads I've read are saying that WF5/WF5 does 7%-12% less overall damage (SS+autoattack) than WF5/WF4.


My own take on the theorycraft is that the shared cooldown hurts fast offhanders more than slow offhanders: if your offhand is fast, it will proc more than your MH (doing less damage than your MH) and suppress more MH procs. OTOH, a slow offhand will suppress fewer MH procs.

It seems that poorly-geared shaman will probably go with WF5/FT. Above some level of AP, WF5/WF5 will be the best despite the shared cooldown.



To the poster above me: RB is the worst OH chant possible. It is subject to the 50% offhand damage penalty, and is mitigated by armor.

People currently avoid the 3 second rule by using different ranks of Windfury. Tseric has explicitly said that this work-around is a bug and will be fixed.

The question that will probably be soon answered is where the breaking point is for using another offhand buff. You can use rockbiter, but what amount of AP and what dps weapon would make windfury better since it scales with weapon damage?

I can understand them not wanting insane burst dps, and to lower enhancement dps overall a bit, but I'd really like to see them implement a cooldown that's proportional to the speed of the weapon you procced with. Something like a 1.5x weapon speed cooldown (3 second cooldown for a 2.0 speed weapon, 2.25 cooldown for a 1.5 speed weapon)

Shamans used to be the only physical damage class (well besides feral druids) that had the same overall dps regardless of weapon speed. You could choose if you wanted steadier or burstier damage based on your weapon choice.

Now like everyone else, you want slow weapons or you hurt your dps woot.

Were DW shamans dealing so much damage (and not managing to pull aggro) that this was necessary? I'm curious.

Well the thing is the downranking trick we've been using in the upper levels was the way to get around this forced 3 second cooldown. This has now been confirmed by Tseric as being no longer possible. Thusly all ranks of windfury share a 3 second cooldown now.

As for using other enchants, well here's the thing, windfury just hands and away scales better with attack power and weapon quality than any other enchant right now. Flametongue doesn't scale and Rockbiter just don't improve our ability to proc unleashed rage or shamanistic rage. Thusly that's why windfury is overall the best, particularly at high levels.

Now of course with this change if it goes live this might change all that for the offhand specifically. This change basically will make OF windfury not a suitable choice for weapon enchantments. The problem now lies there's not much better for enhancement shamans as a result of this. Rockbiter and flametongue overall just don't scale well enough in higher levels.

In many cases bringing a shaman over a class like a rogue resulted in higher raid dps yes.

That was the whole point though was it not?

The shaman I've been running Karazhan with can equal and sometimes exceed the threat I can generate on the heavier hitting trash. His sustained TPS is up to 1k sometimes according to KTM, which means he's either doing about 1150+ dps for sustained periods of time or KTM is broken for him. Since he can pull aggro even in the later stages of a fight, I tend to think it's the former. If he gives me a headstart we're fine; if he doesn't, it's nap time.

Maybe anasthetic poison should have been a shaman weapon enchant instead of a rogue poison

The only way they can justify that is if they give warriors tranq shot to deal with enraged bearform druids.

The trick is that enhancement shaman are not fighting for raid spots with rogues/warriors like everyone always assumes.

They are fighting for raid spots with resto shaman who can buff a melee group almost as well as an enhancement shaman can.

Enhancement worked because the Unleashed Rage added enough dps group wise that the UR dps+ the shaman dps yielded a net gain compared to a 5th dps class.

It was the perfect game mechanic because you would never want to stack enhancement shaman as there are completley diminished returns after the 1st one.

Now the gap between enhancement and rogues/fury will be significantly higher and both classes will continue to scale better than enhancement does.

Saddened by this change, the rough 15% dps drop. The change will also impact guilds thinking about taking an enh shaman for lager raids.

It's not just that having different ranks on weapons circumvents the 3 second rule, it also causes strange four hit streaks from either main hand or off hand. Also it seems that sometimes the offhand windfury hits do not get the -50% penalty for melee attacks from offhand. It needs to be fixed somehow, but I don't think the 3 second cd is the right way. Or if Blizzard doesn't want us to have dual windfury, they should just make it impossible to have windfury enchanted weapon in offhand.

But I think most of the cries from rogues come from rogues who don't bother to perfect their combat skill cycles. For an enhancement shaman the optimal cycle is to press stormstrike every 10 seconds and then a shock button every 6 seconds. And that is something even a handless donkey can do.

My wish simply is that Blizzard would state if pve enhancement shaman is supposed to be raid viable even when not buffing 4 warriors in the group or at least to see the changes in ptr or specified somewhere else. That way I could decide if I use the t4 tokens on healing or elemental or enhancement gear.

I assume yes but ill ask anyways, has their been confirmation that the totem is affected also? I assume its windfury effect but a rogue in my guild is skeptical.

DW is extremely bursty, unreliable, and usually just plain bad in PvP, and completely threat-capped in PvE. They're absolutely comparable to old fury warriors. Without BoSalv, raid dps is simply out of the question, even with it caution is required (not sure to what degree the Unleashed Rage bug is affecting our threat, though). I carry invuln pots at all times because I can still occasionally pull aggro at the very end of a fight, or at the very beginning if somebody mis-blessed me.

I could never consistently beat rogues, or fury warriors with the benefit of my totems and UR, but I could beat everyone else in a single-target dps situation reliably.

That said, I'm fine with the nerf so long as we are buffed in other ways to improve our hybrid-ness. Right now the best idea I have is to replace Mental Quickness in deep Enhance with a talent that adds 10/20/30% of your ap to spell damage and healing, this would bring us up to 800 or so damage/healing in a raid situation and make our totems/shocks/heals a more significant part of our dps. Right now as an enhance shaman gears for dps it becomes less and less time-efficient to heal, eventually when we're in tier 6 or 7, our heals will be hitting for 1k on targets with 15k hp and we'll just remove them from our bars (if we haven't already, lolz). I also think the tier 5 2pc bonus is an awesome idea and probably should be a talented ability (2% on hit of proccing a buff that makes your next LHW cast instantly, therefore not breaking your autoattack). But again, those 1k LHWs are kind of pointless, hence why we need the benefit of an AP->spellpower conversion.

And Spirit Weapons needs to affect all of our damage done, not just melee damage.

This cooldown has been in game since they changed windfury to not proc off itself. Nothing will change for the totem.

While a global 3 second cooldown might seem excessive, something needs to be done to fix windfury proccing off itself. The DPS of a well-geared enhancement shaman is just too high and a 10% reduction might well be in order. Currently DW shamans are well capable of pulling far ahead of all dedicated DPS classes with only stormstrike and autoattack-windfury, no shocks, no fire totems and minimal mana investment. Combat rogues need to keep up a strict skill rotation in order to maximize their output, that shamans can easily be on par with just using stormstrike on every cooldown sounds pretty wrong in my ears.

I am positive, that once our DPS output is brought in line, the devs will look at lacking aspects of the class, as well. Currently, however, high DPS is our own hurdle just like paladins' bubble.

Ok that explains a lot, I never read too much into the enhancement cross ranking side the fact that it would proc itself, i wasn't aware that it was forcing it to ignore the 3 second rule though thats sort of common sense. : /

I agree with Spirit Weapons. It's far too restrictive. Make it all threat while in melee range. I'd love it to be 20% instead of 15% too, but I understand if Blizzard wants Shaman to be threat restricted in PvE. I do think you're exaggerating slightly with Shaman's threat issues, however.

+30% spellpower would be excessive though. Make it 30% +heal and maybe 10% +spellpower. Something that makes +heal and +dmg still cheaper on gear.

I'd love for them to give our Enhancement Tree some more choices and make it a bit more PvP friendly. Make it so you have to spec deeper into PvP, missing out on some of the nice PvE talents in Resto/Elemental. A +crit talent on WF and/or SS. A snare/stun resist. A chance for Lightning Shield to stun? A talent like Blinding Speed? At the moment, Enhancement specs are pretty clear cut.