Well it was news to me . The fact that a slow offhand is better was known to me, but the extent of that difference is mindboggling. Stupifying.

But my own mystification (Slowly running out of synonyms here) aside; I doubt the developers will be content to letting this stand. Previous situations where attack speed would play a too-large roll in deciding about weapons (shanker, hunter's aimed shot) have been 'rectified'. And there the discrepancy was no where near as large.

Since double WF seems to be deemed too powerful without the cooldown feature, I wouldn't be surprised if we go into situation like "rockbiter now does 72 dps plus an additional 50% of your attack power" and a "WF can only be applied on MH".

Blizzard Needs to introduce another scaling weapon imbue, so they can stop fidling about with WF -tuning. Just lock WF to MH and give it up.

There's a difference of 50 dps between the weapons and there's a difference of 5-25 dps between his tests. I think that's clear enough to show that a fast offhand really will gimp your DPS, but like mek said that's not really a surprise to anybody who's been reading this board for a while, especially given that the damage variance of any given parse is as large as 25%. The main hand speed of 2.5 isn't particularly good for abusing WF either.

by the main hand being 2.5 speed, you're not actually losing that much overall dps compared to a 2.8 speed. while it's true that the 2.8 weapon will hit harder on windfuries, it won't proc WF as often as the 2.5 speed (because the offhand will eat a higher % of possible windfury attacks as the MH gets slower).

My sim (probably very similar to yours, nite) is predicting wf4/wf4 results within 3% of my test data sets with a variety of weapons, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that when I simulate 10 hours of combat varying only the weapon speed (not the dps) of:

Mainhand: 2.2 speed to 2.8 speed
with Offhand: 2.4 speed

the overall damage is pretty consistent. Now, the thing is, as you've already indicated above, if you drop that OH weapon speed down to 1.3, but keep its dps the same, your overall damage output drops by about 15%

What I concluded from reading this thread is that I'll want to aim for a 2.0 weapon speed after haste, so that a flurry would take me to the sweet spot of 1.5 speed. This would only be to maximize the windfury dps, I imagine that the white damage increase of certain weapons outweighs the loss of a suboptimal weapon speed.

I also found the Sunstrider Axe quite funny, a 1-handed axe with a speed of 3.5, which recently received a comment on Wowhead.

Just so I'm perfectly clear on how badly this is messed up: if I grab a slow, level 10 white weapon from a vendor and stick it in my offhand I should see my dps go up post patch? Well, down from the 5/4 bug but that's seriously what raiding enhancement shamans should do?

Unfortunately only Blood elves can take that quest, thus making the weapon unobtainable by a shaman...

This seems completely absurd. Has anyone done testing on the PTR to confirm this? Also, has anyone tested WF totem MH and WF5 offhand to see if they remembered to fix the cooldown for that?

edit: Thanks moogle, now what about the WF totem?

Yes, thank you. Obviously this is still extremely messed up but at least I won't find myself slumming for slow grey weapons. I hope they look at this on the PTR as I consider it one of the top five most blatantly busted mechanics in the game right now.

From yesterday's "it's fine, l2p" eloquence: http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/us/102731970.htm
I just want to go on the record as saying that allowing blatantly ineffective and unbalanced abilities like this to be swept under the rug gives me a headache. I'll let a lot of things go, but to hear that they don't even really care that Windfury is better in every situation pretty clearly shows me that there's no deep interest in the class. I have a tough time imagining that someone can't find an hour somewhere to revamp these mechanics to at least allow something else to be competitive.

Is Flametongue the buff of choice for Elemental / Restoration, due to high spell damage on gear?

The spell damage interaction would lead to Flametongue being the obvious choice due to its interaction with your spec.

Windfury is obviously the choice for Enhancement, because Enhancement (and enhancment alone) benefits from multiple hits in several ways: flurry, UR, SR.

However, I would agree that from all perspectives Rockbiter and Frostbrand aren't niche enchants, they're completely pointless.


What if the devs want Flametongue to be the choice for spell oriented shaman, and Windfury for enhance? That restriction makes sense enough. Then give Rockbiter and Frostbrand a home.

Passive AP / crit bonus for Rockbiter again? With the right balancing it would make it worth it for your offhand, as a passive bonus cares not for OH penalties.

Mana restored on hit for frost brand? Reduced threat? Increased healing / MP5? Stronger CC?

Flametongue is better if you're elemental, but only in the sense that a sharp stick is better than a dull stick in a gunfight. The 'best' weapon for it is a Nathrezeim Mindblade which will clock around 72 damage per hit plus 10% of your +dmg. With 1000 +dmg it works out to be around 95 DPS from FT versus about 40 DPS with Windfury. Of course, if you stick a Decaptiator in the hands of that same shaman (reducing them to 800 damage) or force them to use a 2.7 speed weapon and WF will clean FT's clock. That is not right.

The only reason that FT is viable now is that the DPS of caster weapons hasn't gone up a lick since Stratholme. If caster weapons scaled up in actual DPS at all Windfury would still be better. With the pre-BC rank of FTW it was still better to use WFW unless you were at the very apex of +dmg gear. The only thing they would have to do in order to cause it to be more viable would be to allow the +dmg to scale with weapon speed just like Seal of Righteousness, which is why it completely blows my mind that they are content to leave it alone.

Nite, that's an astute observation, well said.

As for the "l2p eloquence"... infuriating of course, but hey, that's what MMOs are all about. That and guild drama.

It's stuff like that that really makes me want to cancel my account.
Oh yah we know they're worthless but ehh whatever you've got at least 1 that works so screw the others.
God how I wish a new MMO comes out and steals a significant number of WoW's subs. Maybe that'll light a fire under there asses. /sigh

We don't care if you want to cancel, we aren't Blizzard. Go tell them.

I posted my opinion of the comment. Screw you.

Before I dig through the spreadsheet and test this for myself, have any of you contrasted the offhand use of a lvl 60 PVP weapon (2.9 speed, 59.x dps) with a Kara drop one-hand dagger (1.8 speed, 87 dps in 2.1)? Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if, given the 2.1 WF changes, if the 2.9 speed offhand offered a superior bottom line DPS performance.

Has anyone look at this, or did everyone delete their honor lvl 60 rewards long ago (I've got mine)?

The thing I believe is going to be crucial is getting the most windfurys possible with the right weapons. I would like to see what the best dps for wf/wf combination would be. As far as I can see right now from my own thought if you could use a two slow weapon combination and not go 5/5 flurry more like 3 or 4. Is the best combination (1.6ish main/2.9 offhand) with 0 flurry and 0 haste rating? You could also consider switching out a slow main hand before stormstrikes and then re-equip your fast weapon again. This would cause more main hand procs than offhand. Worth it?

One of the times I ran the sim I did so exactly to answer the question you're asking, Juice. The level 70 weapon won out slightly. Given that I recently found out that my sim is not "correctly" counting the 4th attack that gets flurried, white damage is even more important than my sim shows it. This makes it an even larger edge for the lvl 70 weapons. I did this with a 2.7 speed main hand, if interested.

I've been testing this recently on the PTR i found that while using Black Planar Edge with the HWL lvl 60 epic i out performed Runic Hammer and my Guile of the Korzanni(w/ potency).

This numbers are without Stormstrike, just auto attack w/ wf5 on both weapons on the Servants in the blasted lands, sorry no screenshots.

BPE/HWL: 630 dps

BPE/RH: 620 dps

BPE/GK: 580 dps

I tested multiple times and i think that the Runic Hammer could be better than the HWL offhand because a minor difference like that over the 10 minute period i was using is well within the margin of error. That said, i had tests where the Guile was even lower than this basically pointing to HWL>Guile. The worst part about this is that if i add in Stormstrike the slower weapons will pull further ahead of the fasters ones.

Since the blacksmithing weapons are 2.7 i think they put you in a bad spot now because of the cooldown making it so your offhand will strike before your main after it ends. This makes it so even a slightly slower mainhand is going to be punished by the offhand even if it is rather slow. I did a few runs DWing Runic hammers and they were much worse than the BPE/RH or BPE/HWL runs but did have a much better mainhand Wf rate compared to Slow/Faster combos which makes me think getting 2 2.6 speed 1 handers is really the optimal set up.

It's not surprising Guile is hurting your dps in 2.1, that is a very fast offhand, and therefore very bad. Speed is extremely important, in another thread Disquette summarized it as:

10% slower MH = 5% more dps
10% slower OH = 3% more dps

So even though Guile is 25 dps better than your HWL axe, the HWL axe is 80% slower and will be significantly better. The fact that a lvl 60 epic is competitive with a level 70 epic shows how stupid the current mechanic is, but what is one to do? Runic Hammer is pretty much as good as it gets apart from Gladiator weapons, until the axe off of Al'ar. I crafted one ahead of time since I don't anticipate killing Al'ar in 2.0. :P

edit: this all begs me to ask if a HWL offhand will surpass Runic Hammer in a raid buffed situation... is it actually optimal level 70 gear next patch?

I'd be horrified if the level 60 HWL weapons really are the best offhand. I currently have a Gladiator's Cleaver, which is the slowest offhand possble (aside from Netherbane). I don't mind our DPS dropping, but limiting us to a weapon 10 levels ago at the endgame would be very frustrating.

Thanks for the replies on my question. I'll have to do some self tests using my old HW Axe (lvl 60) with my available weapons (I don't have an epic 70 offhand yet). If I find anything surprising, I'll report back.