• Khlysti

Since this seems to be a general enhance and whats wrong thread, first some quotes of what I said in durnitol's thread.

As it stands my damage is stupid, I played a priest in our naxx raiding days, but I know well enough where threat caps, and I don't know any TBC encounter where I can't pull aggro late on if I choose to go all out.

If we get a dps that fits with current WF 5/5 thats fine with me, if blizzard actually itemise enhancement gear sensibly. Shamanistic rage basically says we do not need mp5 on gear, at all, ever. With my current gear my raid buffed mana pool is ~8k and I fill it from 0->full with 1 shamanistic rage, clearly its less than this if I spam abilities as SR is up (but since I struggle to use 8k in 1 min 30 anyway...) the point stands that in the vast majority of raid fights I need 0 MP5 on gear.

Lets just keep it simple, remove the stupid burst I have quoted above and give simple sensible sustainable damage. Thats what we need, if we want silly burst we cant throw on a 2 hander and hope for a double crit WF, not just dual wield and fluke a 4 crit that gives us an aggro death sentance on most things.

 

panny

How can you say that you have no aggro issues and mention that you can get aggro and die in the same post?

 

• Khlysti

Erm, unless I missed something quite horribly I haven't claimed I have no aggro issues, I know what will and will not give me aggro, but I have no control over what I do with WF procs as a shaman, hence I have issues even where I should not.

 

panny

Right, I see what you meant now. Sorry, I misunderstood.

But given that you ARE threat capped... doesn't that mean a Shaman place in group PvE dps is okay? Even further since you can choose faster weapons to reduce your burst?

 

mek

Well yes, I'm just anticipating where our current threat issues will lead, given increasing gear power. I don't pull aggro or die often, no more than an irresponsible rogue, but of course once I pull aggro I have less options available to me to survive. Like fury warriors, our dps will (would..) quickly outpace tank threat generation, and aggro will become more and more of a problem in the future.

This DPS nerf hurts but I think it could end up being a good thing, IF the devs improve us in other departments, creating a more dynamic play experience, rather than SPAM COOLDOWNS RARRRRRR. That's a big if, though. And those improvements should be patched in alongside the nerf, or the angst will be extreme.

 

Miaxi

To be fair, your current huge bursts come from windfury multi-procs. With only one hand proccing at a time you won't burst that high and with the fix on unleashed rage your threat generation will become a lot more stable and predictable.

 

• Relwin

With any good tank (warrior or bear) you will not be threat capped unless the fight has a deaggro component. Threat is no more a limiter to enhancement shaman than it is to rogues, fury warriors, or mages. Hell, I see destruction locks out threating me more often than not.

 

mek

Rogues and mages both have a variety of deaggro tools, and mages have the added benefit of the ranged modifier.

Fury warriors resemble our situation the closest, but can only attain similar dps to us nowadays with us buffing them with windfury, UR, SoE, etc.

You mentioned bears though, and I'll have to say that it's much harder to pull aggro off a bear, their aggro potential is just nuts atm, can't say the nerfs are unexpected.

 

• Sebudai

If they feel enhancement shaman are doing too much damage, that's fine, and I'm okay with them nerfing us. I didn't spec enhancement to top our damage meters, I spec'd it so that our rogues and warriors could. What I'm not fine with is them nerfing us in such a way that it forces me to obsess over weapon speed and take a math class just to figure out if a haste effect is actually increasing my dps.

If this nerf goes through and they don't make the 3 second cooldown period scale with weapon speed I will be pretty annoyed.

Also, maybe they could put like 10 seconds of thought into the fucking mechanic and make our other weapon buffs scale in some remotely meaningful way? I'm pretty sure I could come up with something reasonable in about half that amount of time myself.

 

Thegreatcow

Aye this definitely nails it on the head for me at least. I've always been fascinated by the "melee-caster" hybrid style of enhancement style play, a guess a token to my DND days when I always played some form of a half-dragon battle priest or something of the like (Ker-topic de-rail). But suffice to say I've always wanted enhancement to be viable both for myself and for my group mates. This was part of the reason why i made the gear guide in the first place was to help people see what they could do.

What this change effectively does is already pigeonhole us more in what our gear choices are. The fact that none of our weapon buffs scale adequately besides windfury past about level 40 or so is a major flaw in our combat system. Now I definitely agree double quad-procc'ing windfury crits from this wf 5/4 method definitely was not intended. But, now having to 2nd guess whether haste rating is going to nerf my dps and what gear can I look forward to as enhancement has me quite concerned what they're going to do with us.

Specifically as it was mentioned, this is going to be extremely annoying for weapon choices. I'm still using 2.9 weapons even at 70 just because of the fact that WF never really got normalized and thus WF plays on that. But shamanistic rage wants faster weapons, but now the WF cooldown screws with that, but what about SS.....

It just goes on and on and doesn't do anything but anger and confuse chaps like me who want to be worthy of being a solid contribution to my party and see that I am genuinely improving my character.

 

Vernichter

My biggest frustration with this change is that the execution is arbitrary. By its definition as a percentage proc rate that applies weapon-based damage, windfury is speed independent. Using an arbitrary CD time of 3 seconds completely removes that independence. While dual-wielding already suffers from miss rate and offhand damage penalties so that is is equivalent to using a 2-hander, this speed dependence affects the two quite differently. A slow two-hander could retain a proc chance on every attack (unless bloodlust is active), while a one-hander could miss out on proc-rates on two attacks in a row. That makes no sense, particularly when the upper enchancement tree revolves around dual-wielding. Furthermore, it flies in the face of Flurry and Bloodlust, which, previously had been defining attributes of the shaman attack make-up. Most important of all, though, is that this change has a huge impact on their itemization techniques, similar to the problems that hunters used to have.

It makes a hell of a lot more sense for windfury to have a CD of the next weapon swing and for offhand procs and main-hand procs to be independent. That would 1) reduce problems with stormstrike and auto-attack interaction, 2) cause consistent scaling for dual-wielding and two-handers regardless of weapon speed, and 3) allow for much easier long term tweaking of shaman damage. If our damage were getting out of hand using windfury, they could decrease the attack power modifier and know exactly how much it would affect every weapon arrangement.

The last thing I want to say about this change is that it makes me want to pull my hair out with regard to weaponsmithing. I have been a weaponsmith for ages and was really looking forward to the next personal weapons. Previously, I was a master axesmith, but I paid the 100g to switch to hammersmithing, because the proc on Drakefist Hammer was more enticing, even though the damage seemed relatively equivalent between it and the Planar Edge. I am fortunate not to have crafted the weapon yet, as I have been using an elemental/resto hybrid for more healing support in 5-mans, but I do not look forward to the prospect of dropping another hundred gold to go back. For those of you in Karazhan and beyond who are using the Drakefist Hammer or Dragonmaw, I feel terrible.

 

Thegreatcow

Hopefully this post I made on the shaman forums will generate some discussion. I aimed it mainly at Tseric to take the developers as he seemed interested in how this all plays out. It's a bit long winded but I figured I needed it to make my point:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...80399234&sid=1

Greetings folks, I know many of us are really uptight and angry right now with what's going to happen to our windfury proc so I figure given that we've given ourselves some time to cooldown, I think it's high time we sat down and had a discussion about where we go from here.

Tseric I do appreciate you taking the time to understand why we're so up in arms and I do hope this post helps clarify things a bit more as to why we're so upset.

I, along with many shamans think this 3 second forced windfury cooldown is horribly counter-intuitive how dual wielding has been set-up. From all the math that has been posted so far this cooldown basically says that fast weapons, haste effects and flurry are all now working against us as we now have to deal with the fact this will preclude windfury from procc'ing more often which is a staple of enhancement shaman dps, if not the backbone.


For further clarification I should explain what is the main reason that raids bring enhancement shamans along. For many guilds that decide an enhancement shaman is worthwhile to bring along, yes our dps certainly is a factor in our consideration. However the main thing we bring to the raid is Unleashed Rage by critting and keeping up what I like to refer to as the "Flurry Train" so that my longevity in a fight is assured by maximizing my mana return on Shamanistic Rage.

That's the real reason shamans are brought to raids, we turn a slice of apple pie into pie a la mode. We make the melee dps group shine in ways it could never do before, however with this 3 second cooldown this makes it much more difficult to do so.

I won't bore you with the math as it has already been covered but essentially this cooldown forces us to acquire slow as sin 1h weapons in order to circumvent this. I'm still using for reference two High warlord Cleavers at 2.9 speed because I prefer maximizing my stormstrikes. Now however, I'm pretty much pigeonholed into these two weapons if I want to avoid getting bitten by this windfury cooldown as much as possible.

However, I now run into the problem with that ultra-slow weapons are much burstier leading to aggro spikes, and less efficient work with Shamanistic Rage. Faster, higher dps weapons fill in this role much better as it allows me to still hit hard, but still keep the crit and flurry train going as much as possible for my group and regen my mana more effectively.

So now we come full circle then, the developers have a problem with windfury and it doing too much damage they feel is appropriate. The problem lies however that windfury, more or less past level 40 or so, is still our best scaling buff as our attack power and weapon and gear quality increases. It is heavily used both for the dps it provides and for the fact it gives us extra opportunities to proc flurry and unleashed rage both very important to our and and our group's dps.

So! I would recommend one of two things at this juncture. In the essence of avoiding that 3 second cooldown and all the mess it would cause for itemization (that topic holds dear to my heart in case you haven't noticed) I propose two following ideas.


1. Make windfury a "Double-Edged Sword" if you will. Make it so that if you proc a windfury within 3 seconds a previous one, don't simply block it from happening, but rather the windfury proc do less damage, say something like 10-20%. This would alleviate the developers concerns about doing too much damage and this would not ruin the effects that fast weapons and haste effects would present us with this cooldown. This would also allow us to keep proccing unleashed rage and flurry and still maxmize Shamanistic Rage as well. I realize this may be a coding headache so here's what I recommend for option 2.

2. Make our other weapon buffs more desirable to fit the vacuum left by windfury's supremacy. Lets face it, we used Windfury because, at least for me anyway, I never really felt that any of the other buffs really did anything for me, now granted, 2 extra supercharged attacks is a heck of a buff to live up to, so I can understand it would be tough to buff our buffs to be something in line with what windfury is capable of but here goes.

Flametongue - A bit tough to buff given that it is a proc every hit type of buff but how about make it sort of like hemorrhage? If you proc it enough times on a target, say some arbitrary 20-30 times, it becomes afflicted with a debuff called "Seared Flesh" and damage taken is increased by 1-2% (Something small so it's not completely unbalancing) This would work well with making a shaman DPS and still improve the damage to his group.

Frostbrand - Sweet monkies I can't even recall the last time I used this buff. I think instead of the snare this weapon provides it could go in one of two directions. It could go the path of giving us a CC of some kind a la frost nova's effect. That would work pretty well on controlling trash in instances and help us in PVP. Obviously given that we have to hit people with it, it would have to have a higher tolerance against breaking than frost nova would but that could be figured out I suppose.

If CC is not a supported idea than frostbrand could have it's proc-rate slightly tweaked and have it proc an effect called "Frozen Flesh" (Don't know why I'm on a flesh tangent today, but you get the idea) which would reduce the enemies' attack speed by 5% or reduce it's damage dealt by 5% something along those lines.

Rockbiter - This one's a toughie to deal with as it's already been changed quite a bit, but what about having it proc a threatless, stacking "sunder armor" type spell? Obviously significantly less than a warrior's sunder armor and capable of being overwritten by warrior's sunder armor, but for all practical purposes, rockbiter does not do anything for us in later levels because it does not help us proc unleashed rage or make shamanistic rage any more effective, it's just straight, armor-mitigated dps. This spell could definitely use some loving if we are to use it past level 30 or so when we get windfury.

 

◊ Malan

http://www.wowhead.com/?items=2&filt...;crv=2.5#00ozc

That link there shows all blue and epic MH or OneHand wpns with speed greater than 2.5. The slowest one hand weapon is 2.9 speed. Most fall in the range of 2.6-2.8.

The windfury cooldown is seriously requiring a degree in mathematics to figure out how it interacts with Flurry and +Haste. (Does Flurry stack with other haste procs like the blackout truncheon?) I guess the real question is, how much haste rating do you need at each weapon speed in order to keep your attacks hitting as close to the windfury cooldown as possible?

 

Warstehgnome

I have been investigating this over the last few days using FT7 on my fast OH(Blackout Truncheon). I have noticed that with this I do about 3-5% less DPS than WF5/WF4 Combo. My MH is only 2.0 speed and this probably accounts for the low numbers and then the relatively same numbers now.


The nerf doesn't seem to destroy us. Using the stuff I am going to post nerf, I still outdps'd a rogue/warlock in an SP heroic run this morning. Also outdps'd a Mage/Mage combo last night in SH, along with warlock/hunter in BM this morning.

I also got outdps'd yesterday by a fury warrior, a combat rogue, a daggers rogue, two fire/arc mages.

You don't outdps everyone, but if sh t dies, life goes on. My guild doesn't care if I get nerfed, I'm still dps that can throw heals when I need to.

The doomsayers got it all wrong.

Tsarurukai, Main Tank of <OP> Blackrock
www.op-guild.org
Tankspot Member Wars.

 

GrizleyCQ

It results in higher raid dps because the enhancement shaman drops a windfury totem, heroism, strength of earth etc. Not because the enhancement shamans dps is in and of itself too high.

 

Pane

Some of my data, tested on the unkillable mobs in blasted lands, for 10 minute blocks of auto-attack only, no buffs, no totems.

wf5/wf4 mh/oh:
627.1 dps

no weapon imbue:
302.6 dps

just wf5 on mh:
406.2 dps

wf5/wf5 mh/oh:
571 dps

wf5/ft7 mh/oh:
466.5 dps

After the nerf wf5 mh/of will be the best choice, still. On my level of gear I take just under 10% dps hit from the nerf. I'll live, I guess.

my gear: http://armory.wow-europe.com/?#chara...unemaul&n=Pane

 

MeCh

Makeing flametongue scale with a portion of ap would be really nice.

Its not like magic damage scaleing with ap is unheard of (arcane shot).

 

◊ Malan

The question on everyone's mind is - How's that 4 sec reduced trap cooldown working out for you?

That depends on the shaman and how he gears himself. I'm pretty consistently in the top of the DPS charts depending on the characteristics of the fight, and Gurg/Relwin have said that all their enhance shaman are the same way.

 

Thebeat

They should do this for rockbiter as well. Would make it much more attractive to use. Frostbrand needs a total reworking though. Maybe lower the damage, make it hit each time like flametounge, and make the chance on hit a frost nova effect for a few seconds. Useful in pvp and 5 mans but not so useful in raids. Then we'd have some variety in the weapon buffs shaman use.

 

◊ Yes

Am I reading this right?

Autoattack, no sunder armor etc.

I am afraid to think what that will equal to when raidbuffed and using ss.

I suppose when minmaxing, putting a tranquil air totem in a shaman druid warrior hunter rogue group would beat windfury or grace of air.

I wonder how much shamans scale with say, hourglass of the unravaler, or proc weapons such as http://thottbot.com/?i=57479

 

Pane

Well those mobs are lvl 58, so you shouldn't be surprised to see high numbers. Also, 'auto-attack' (regular melee + windfury) is about 70%-80% of our damage even if we go nuts with shocks and stormstrike. We scale very differently than other classes.

Hourglass is real nice, but included in this setup anyway so nothing to gain. The dagger (imho) is utterly useless. Way too fast.