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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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).

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.

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