The fact that there is no warrior and two cats makes it a bad group.

A group that's getting Battle Shout will strictly outperform the warriorless group. At best GoA+poisons for Mutilate slightly outperforms WF, depending on gear levels. But WF so clearly dominates GoA for a warrior that the net group DPS goes up by using WF and down by using GoA.

Obviously if your group is shaman/druid/hunter/rog/rog then you'd want GoA... but then you have a suboptimal group to begin with.

i was actually thinking more along the lines of the second group Sebudai mentioned, which you mentioned in your post (sham/war/druid/rog/rog) when i made the mutilate comments. i guess i don't really know where the breakpoint is between GoA+poisons and WF for a mutilate rogue, but if it's as low as you're implying, then WF of course makes sense in the context of a group.

We had an interesting setup for Kara Group 2 this weekend.

Tanks:
Prot warrior, feral druid

Healers:
Resto shaman, holy priest, holy paladin

DPS:
Combat Rogue, arcane/fire mage, warlock (I forget which spec), marks hunter, ele shaman (hi!).

It is a key point that this group is not as geared in the tanking/healing department as our other group, and needs to maximise healing/mitigation.

The groups were ultimately set as follows:

prot warrior, feral druid, rogue, warlock, ele shaman (SoE, totem of wrath, and either GoA or WF: I mostly went for WF on trash- as much to let the prot tank build more aggro faster as anything- but erred on the side of GoA for Moroes, Romulo and Maiden due to avoidance considerations. This group only goes as far as chess event thus far: this is only the 3rd week for group 2. Group 1 has Nightbane down, but IIRC only three of this week's group 2 people have run with group 1 including myself, and one of those uses his main for group 1 and his alt when he's with group 2).

paladin, priest, mage, hunter, resto shaman (wrath of air, mana tide)


Be interested to know if other people would have set the groups up in the same way. We didn't feel we could do without Blood Pact for the tank on boss fights and we wanted all the healers in a group with mana tide.

There was also a minor hidden disadvantage to that group setup: I'm a LW, and with a predominantly melee group my drum buffs were basically restricted to myself and the warlock in most situations.

For comparison, GoA is calculated to be 50 dps for a feral, windfury being 0.

That said, a druid critting is a druid ripping more often, so its probably worth a bit more.

In a group like this (where's your lock? :S) you should fit the totems to the MT. Which 9/10 times means windfury. The difference in threat generation by having WF up is massive.

The only reason to put up Agi is if your mt is being meleed for more than he can comfortably handle.

I would have gone with:
1) Warrior, Feral, Hunter, Rogue, Resto Shaman
2) Mage, Warlock, Elem Shaman, Priest, Paladin

Reasoning: Your shaman are your weak links when it comes to mana, do a mid combat swap of the paladin or warlock and the Resto shaman for Mana Tide when ready for it. The rest of the time the Hunter and the Resto both get Spring with WF for rogue and warrior.

Never underestimate the benefit of both Wrath totems for healers, 3% crit is rather useful for Paladins for Inspiration and Priests to keep Inspiration on the tanks, the 101 healing is an added bonus as is your mana spring and drums.

He's in the other group lapping up the Shadowpriest's VT with the healers. We haven't run into any fights in kara that "require" BP for the tank, so we just end up trying to maximize our mana regen.

Enough people are saying this for me to stick my nose into a melee thread - GoA is not just a flat AP increase for rogues (or anyone else) - it absolutely scales with your gear, since it provides crit (and a non-negligible amount of crit) to rogues, warriors, shamans, druids and hunters, in addition to the AP it provides many of them (and FWIW even if all it provided were static AP, it would still scale, since the higher your crit rate got from other sources, the more that static AP would buff your DPS).

He was.

alienangel > It's the same indirect scaling I think Mana Spring is providing with our gear (as a healer/nuker), but my theory does not convince many people here.

Well, laugh's on him. I probably would have done uniformly GOA otherwise. Thanks for letting me know.

I was just wondering if anyone had specific numbers on the effects each have on a group of the more ideal make-ups i.e. 3x rogue, warrior, shaman. 2x rogue or 2x rogue, warrior, hunter/druid, shaman.

Does gear currently have enough of an impact that GoA can still be better with these group makes?

I'm having a hard time convincing a shaman in the guild that WF is a greater benefit for the group in any of these make-ups. I did get him to drop WF for gruul last night but it was hard for me to make a comparison since I had just switched from an emerald ripper to the gladiator fist. According to SwStats WF made up about 7.5% of my overall damage which I know is a good amount more than the gain from poisons but I'm not sure if GoA would make up for that.

I think there is another aspect of this discussion that I dont think has been raised. In many ways, its the big elephant in the room, you need to base you decision not just on the class composition but the capabilities of the players. If your group consists of an enhancement shaman. a warrior, 2 rogues and a hunter you can't pretend that that is enough information to make your decision. This is starting to sound like a two plus two post. Let's say in the above group that the shaman and the hunter are under geared or otherwise simply not as good as the other melee. You can take the high road and say that some non-trivial percentage of the time the shaman will need to back up and heal, or the hunter will need to kite and trap. There are certainly more factors involved than simply what classes you have in the group. Throw a feral druid in there for a rogue and now it gets more interesting, how often is the druid in bear form, how often does the druid have to pop out and heal. You can argue about what to do when "all things are equal" but that's rarely the case.

And if your shaman is arguing that GoA is better than WF for a shaman 3xrogue, warrior group, I think it's pretty clear he's just being selfish, whether he knows it or not.

A quick few questions regarding windfury weapon/totem that I haven't seen answered elsewhere. I figured this ought to be as good a thread as any to ask in.

Has anyone confirmed that the Windfury totem has the same 3 second cooldown that the shaman self buff spells now have?
Does windfury only proc off of explicitly mainhand attacks? IE, do spells like bloodthirst, eviscerate, kick, pummel, envenom, feint, gouge, etc, proc it?
Does windfury increase the damage of the initial hit that procs windfury as well, or just the windfury attack that comes as the result of a proc? Also, I've heard rumors that instant attack made at the same time as a windfury proc (ie, just after the normal melee that would have procced that attack) gain from the attackpower bonus the windfury confers; any truth to that?

Not to burst your bubble, but this still havsn't been fixed. I found out about it still working like 2 weeks ago after nerfing my dps by putting flametongue on my offhand for a week. Wf5/4 is atm fully functioning and its what i use for my redonkulous dps.

Anyways, as raidleader i have the joy of making the groups and i typically go

war (ms or fury)
enh shm (me)
rog
rog
drood

Having 2 feral druids in your group brings you nothing more than just having 1 would. Also sacrificing Battle Shout kills your dps (espcially your own if your a shaman, i cant even compete on the DM's honestly without a Battle shout pumping me up around 2500 AP).

Depending on the fight i use GoA or WF. Both the rogues in my group are Combat/Daggers and typically use Poisons so i usually put down GoA. However depending on the warrior (we have one rather vocal russian MS warrior) i use WF and it usually makes his dps pretty rediculous depending on the fight.

Stormni