No, No, I'm pretty sure, all mobs have a small amount of block chance. You'll occasionally see hits that are 50-100 damage lower than they should be that are your attacks being blocked. I can't say for certain that you can proc WF off a block, but you should be able to.

thanks Nite. I put this in the other thread where it should have been, for future discussion.

a good geared warrior should be sitting at 2-3k ap before U. rogues, i understand can get 2k easy. UR alone adds 2-300 per person in those situations. across a dps group, that's 8-1200ap or 57-85 paperdoll dps over the group. in terms of real dps, that's 200-500, depending on classes/spec present. plus the shamans own dps. i fluctuate between 600 and 800 personal dps (fight dependant). total thats 8-1300 dps that I bring to a group. and ive barely begun to get the gear I want for my own boosts. and i still currently in my guild, come very high on the meters, at 1 or 2 in 5 mans, and no lower than 4/5 in raids. and thats not even getting into the WF i usually give the tank if i'm in his group, raising his agro which of course raises the ceiling for everyone, including the casters, allowing even more dps for everyone.

I was playing around with the Rogue DPS spreadsheet located at http://rogue.bleedo.net/ to get an idea of what kind of impact having an ENH shaman in a melee group woud have. The modeling for Windfury Totem and Improved Weapon Totems talent isn't factored in yet so its not 100% accurate. With that said, on the Gear_Buffs worksheet you can check/uncheck the Unleashed Rage checkbox to get an idea how much that buff adds to their theoretical DPS.

The spreadsheet has some default talents, gear, and buffs enabled and with those selections UR adds +70ish DPS to a rogue. Fulled raid buffed it was showing +100 DPS. Once Windfury is modeled properly we can get a much better idea of what the actual impact of having an ENH shaman in the melee group is. I estimate at a minimum it will be +300 DPS total for all 4 members.

Again, don't look at windfury. Look at improved windfury versus non-improved wind-fury.

The point about giving as well as receiving synergy is important as well - an enh shaman benefits from being in a melee group, while a resto one does not. There is the caveat that if you replace resto druid/enh shaman with say... resto shaman for melee group and affliction warlock, or shadowpriest/resto shaman etc, that's one more class you can slot in a different group for synergies.

The answer weather or not an enhancement shaman is worth it I think is almost always yes, unless your melees are drastically underperforming your casters, or you run a wierd raid with very little meleee dps, but you cannot arrive at this conclusion by just look at how much AP they get with just the basic totems.

The effects of an enhancement shaman are EXTREMELY obvious in terms of group synergy. With one, I could actually keep up with the rogues and rest of the dps in the raid as a fury warrior (somewhat undergeared). However, once I lost the enhancement shaman, I had trouble keeping in the top 10.

Enhancement shaman are much more powerful to warriors then rogues because of the windfury to rage synergy. Windfury procs allows extra heroic strikes here and there while still giving you a surplus of rage.

However, the effects of UR and WF on rogues are still quite amazing and nothing to be laughed at. With our enhancement shaman, the melee group in my guild (War/Roguex3/Sham) usually holds 5 of the top 7 spots on Hydross. I haven't really examined the benefit of a sham on morogrim yet but I'd imagine they're a bit biased as seed spam would skew any useful data. The other SSC fights are also quite useless in showing the usefulness of an enhancement shaman because of aggro, aoe, or range issues.

A patchwerk like fight would be really useful sometimes because dps really have no way to compare or gauge their absolute effective dps on a single target anymore. It's very hard to tell exactly how much Shaman/Druid buffs effect caster/melee groups but I think their raid spots are quite deserved and warranted. Why does our enhancement shaman have to get sick or go on vacation .

Self-buffed, I usually have about 2000AP. Talented SOE means another 217AP (w/ kings) and brings my AP total to about 2438AP when factoring in UR. 438AP + WF really is the deciding factor in keeping melee competitive with the lock/shadow priest combo that seemed to dominate the meters pre-patch.

So, I got a group together and did some testing. And before you say anything - I know this test has many issues due to the low level of the mob. The issues are:

No spell resists (poisons)
No glancing blows
No dodge, miss
Higher crit chance against it.
No armor (the sunders, I assume, took up all 24% of its default mitigation)
The rogues only had poison on offhand (I think) so that when we tested the windfury totem (/cry, see below), it would proc.

Group makeup:
Protection Warrior (to keep the mob facing away from the mutilate rogue)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...geras&n=Zanrok
DPS Warrior (mostly Naxx/AQ40 level dps gear, a few quest greens/blues)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...as&n=Helenback
(1267AP, 21.5% crit, 95Hit Rating points)
Mutilate Rogue (TBC blues and epics)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...as&n=Edandelor
(1654 AP, 30.66% crit, 202Hit Rating points)
Combat Swords Rogue (TBC blues and epics)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...s&n=Winterwine
(1692 AP, 20.51% crit, 217Hit Rating points)

For 10 minutes, they beat on a blasted lands mob (lvl 57). I told them to go all out, such as using battle shout, etc - anything they could do to maximize their dps.

After that, we reset the mob, then did the same exercise with me in there.

BIG PROBLEM BECAUSE I'M A MORON - Windfury Totem was never active. Do to a new'ish UI and my idiocy, I had flametongue down which over-wrote the WF totem. I've verified that at no point did any of the others have a windfury attack, or even GoA. Yes, I feel like a complete dumbass. By the time I noticed what was happening, I didn't want to pollute the data that I'd already collected.

What you can gather, to a point, from this test:
You will be able to see the benefits of stacking a dps/rogue/rouge group with more attack power. I have improved totems, so the warrior gains 176AP, the rogues gain 88AP. I also have unleashed rage, of course, so depending on procs of crusader and the like, there's a 200 to 250 point AP bonus on them in addition to the SoE totem.

Ok, on to the screenies. The first top is the compilation of data *without* the shaman.
The second is with the shaman.

So, what do we see here? With all those caveats above, we see that:

Mutilate rogue gained 14.6% dps
Combat swords rogue gained 16.9% dps
Fury warrior gained 17.3% dps

I'm really really pissed at myself for messing up the windfury totem, and essentially making this a "what does attack power do for you" test. That having been said, I think it's good to know that, in a contrived situation such as this, melee dps'ers get about a 15% increase by having a shaman in their party (+ whatever GoA or Windfury would grant).

So, if the question is "Enhance Shaman or a rogue/warrior" for the 5th spot, in this contrived test, as long as the shaman would be doing at least 40% the dps of a "standard" rogue in the group, take the shaman (since each of the other 4 would be doing 15% more than their regular damage, 15% * 4 people = 60%, so the shaman only needs to bring 40% of one person's dps to break even).

And that's without Windfury/GoA totem.

Because of the messed up nature of the testing (windfury/flametongue), and the fact that this was done on low level mobs, I will not pretend to say that this is conclusive proof of anything. I will say, however, that it gives us a data point that we didn't have before.

Not in my group:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...90&s=6389,6797

In my group:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=10257,10601

Draw your own conclusions.

This seems like an extremely obvious answer. Shamans in general grant extreme buffs to melee classes from their totems. Enhancement shaman make those totems better *and* bring +10% AP that has massive uptime. Messing around with the rogue spreadsheet suggests that an enhancement shaman adds an additional 5-10% DPS to me over a normal shaman. Apply that to four party members.

Now remember that the shaman is *also* getting synergy from battle shout / lotp, which would be utterly wasted on a resto shaman.

Enhancement shaman are well worth their slot. You don't want three of them per raid, but one per melee group is a massive help.

Can we get some data on enh shamans vs resto shamans, instead of enh shamans vs no shaman? I think everyone who isn't completely retarded already knows windfury is beyond godly when given to melees.

The point the OP was asking about was restoration versus enhancement which is a lot less clear cut in terms of how much damage is added to the group.

I'm not sure how up to date the rogue spreadsheet is with regards to modeling improved Windfury, as the gains from it seem very minor (toggling it on or off adds 2 DPS which is clearly not correct at all). These numbers thus do not reflect Improved Windfury

However my unbuffed DPS (my guild is farming KZ so I'm by no means uber) is 856. Resto_Shaman brings me to 944, so +88 DPS. This is a 10% gain.

Enh_Shaman brings me to 991 which is an additional 47 DPS (+135 DPS total). This is a 15% gain.

Remember however that Unleashed Rage scales extremely well, and that these numbers do not include an Improved Windfury totem. I can safely say that an enhancement shaman increases my personal DPS by at least 5% more than another shaman, and my anecdotal evidence suggests that number is far closer to 10% especially when raid buffed.

Now apply that to four party members. Between 20% and 40% additional melee DPS compared to sticking in a resto shaman (who won't be getting shadow priest mana), in addition to the shaman's personal DPS. I know warlocks and shadow priests are doing insane damage, but unless you're about to replace all your melee DPS with locks and spriests, don't go kicking out the enhancement shaman just yet.

Pretty much. The right answer isn't based on which is better, the right answer is based on what your guild needs. None of the Shaman builds stack particularly well with each other, having a smattering of each is pretty effective.

Isn't the answer to the OP's question very guild/raid-specific? The right answer to "what should you spec" depends on how many healers and dps you have and whether you barely have enough people to raid or have comfortable room in your raiding roster.

If your guild only has 3 healers right now, and is not willing or able to recruit more, you probably should be healing. But the better solution would be to recruit more healers.

If instead your guild has 50 people and can select whatever raiders you want, then the question is more like "does an enh sham add more to a raid than a 4th rogue?" That answer seems to be yes, pretty clearly.

Please forgive me for posting somewhat off-topic speculation, but this thread reminds me of the on-going discussions of retribution paladin and hunter viability throughout these forums. A handful of players have demonstrated signficant sustainable paladin DPS to the point of being threat-capped (~900-1000+ DPS). Similarly, survival hunters have been shown in the 700-900 DPS range while beastmaster hunters seem to range from 900-1400 DPS depending on the pet friendliness of the fight. One of the central problems in all these discussions, though, is how to set up the physical damage groups.

In the paladin thread, the base grouping is a fury warrior, enhancement shaman, feral druid, and rogue, with the paladin competing for the last slot with another rogue. In the hunter threads, the ideal group make-up of a shadow-priest, feral druid, and shaman seems to occur rarely. However, the shadow-priest would be unnecessary if JoW was consistently on the raid target. This provides additional leverage for justifying a retribution paladin in the raid.

With current dps trends, I think it is possible to justify two physical DPS groups: the windfury melee and the hunters. Consider the following arrangement:

Group 1:
Fury Warrior
Enhancement Shaman
Retribution Paladin
Rogue
Rogue

Group 2:
Resto Shaman
Feral Druid
Survival Hunter
Beastmaster Hunter
Hunter/Mutilate Rogue

In this arrangement the windfury group would lose LotP and the Feral Druid (and potentially one rogue) would lose BS and UR. In exchange, the raid would gain Imp JotC and (with the assistance of another paladin on misses) JoW. In addition, the Feral druid and hunters would have access to GoA in addition to SoE. They would also share FI from each Beastmaster, and the hunters could take advantage of LotP. The hunters would also gain Mana Tide, which, in conjunction with increased JoW uptime, should satisfy their mana needs. Last of all, both groups could get the benefit of EW, which would have a boosted uptime and potency due to GoA and LotP.

Is there merit in this distribution of physical dps synergies?

So the 'windfury group' and the 'no windfury group'.

It may be worth noting that if left on their own an enhancement shaman prefers to drop GoA since WF weapon buff and WF totem do not stack, so you'd actually have a strong argument for an enh shaman in the second group as well.

Providing you have that class makeup and aren't shorting your mana groups out of a mana tide, I think that's a very reasonable distribution of groups.

An enhancement shaman's role extends beyond just standing and DPSing. I use stormstrike, earthshock, flameshock, searing totem, and fire nova(when I have the mana to spare) to dps. In addition, I also drop weapon-swapped heals when it looks like someone is in trouble or needs to be topped off before a damage spike. If I time it correctly I can do it w/o interrupting my shock rotation or losing UR. We have more than enough to do, if our DPS cycles were more complicated, we'd end up completely sucking at dropping totems and decursing and other important shaman things.

Here's easy numbers to tell your raid leader:

Strength of Earth: +86 STR, talented: +98 str

Untalented:
-Rogues: 86 AP
-Warriors/Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 172 AP

Talented + UR:
-Rogues: 107.8 AP
-Warriors/Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 215.6 AP

Grace of Air: + 77 AGI, talented: +88 AGI

Untalented:
-Rogues/Cat Druids: 77 AP
--Rogues: 1.93% Crit
--Warriors: 2.33% Crit
--Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 3.08% Crit

Talented + UR:
-Rogues/Cat Druids: 96.8 AP
--Rogues: 2.2% Crit
--Warriors: 2.67% Crit
--Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 3.52% Crit

Unleashed Rage is +10% AP, so every 1000 AP you have (including other buffs), you gain 100 AP.

We'll assume at base levels that every melee class has 2k AP buffed. So UR will add another 200.

So, untalented, a Shaman will bring:
-Rogues: 163 AP
-Cat Druids: 249 AP
-Warriors/Shamans/Other Druids/Paladins: 172 AP
--Rogues: 1.93% Crit
--Warriors: 2.33% Crit
--Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 3.08% Crit

Talented:
-Rogues: 204.6 + 200 = 404.6 AP
-Cat Druids: 312.4 + 200 = 512.4 AP
-Warriors/Shamans/Other Druids/Paladins: 215.6 + 200 = 415.6 AP
--Rogues: 2.2% Crit
--Warriors: 2.67% Crit
--Shamans/Druids/Paladins: 3.52% Crit

This is baseline, and will scale upwards nciely with gear, untalented won't. A basic earmark is an Enhancement Shaman is probably worth about 500 extra AP over base and 2.5% crit to everyone in their party. This is BEFORE such things as bloodlust, or even Windfury which can scale effective damage much higher in the right parties.

Then there's other things like rogues who get even more agility from talents, etc.

A combat rogue in my guild provided me with the following information using the Rogue DPS spreadsheet. His gear is almost 100% Karazhan gear. The DPS values listed is his theoretically maximum amount possible, i.e. operating at 100% efficiency.

Fully raid buffed with no shaman in group: 1215.52 DPS
ELE/RESTO shaman in group and no talented totems: 1315.49 DPS
ENH shaman in group with Unleashed Rage and talented totems: 1396.09 DPS

At maximum efficiency, the ENH shaman adds +6% more DPS than a ELE/RESTO shaman. This is substantially different from the +15% Disquette was seeing. I would much prefer his number be the correct but I'm inclined to think the Rogue DPS spreadsheet is closer to the truth. Assuming +6% DPS is accurate, an ENH shaman would need to achieve roughly 75% of the rogue/Fury warrior DPS in order to output the same amount of overall DPS of a pure melee class.

Interesting data. Thanks much Rescorla.

And how much dps are the mages/warlocks losing by not puting the ele/resto shaman in their group? In 25 man raids you're going to stack your groups for the benefit of the raid, and in most cases you'll be able to have the players such that there's not a lot of wasted efficiency. Granted, guild class population will affect how easily it is to set up your groups (and also note that with the current patch it's no longer possible* to switch characters between groups while in combat), but from my rather small experience with the 25 man content, we can get pure dps group, a pure magical dps group, and then usually a hybrid group (might have an extra rogue that we stick in the OT druid's group, etc.). The groups aren't always perfect, but I would never stick an elemental or resto shaman in a melee dps group - maybe the MT group (but at least the pally/lock/tree druid) would be able to benefit from mana tide.

Also, consider that an enhancement shaman can cure poison/disease or purge while dpsing (freeing up healers), or can interupt spells without their dps suffering (as much as a rogue watching their energy or a mage having to /stopcasting to cs).

So really, the question of how much more dps a enhance shaman vs. non-enhance adds to their dps group, while interesting, doesn't matter, b/c you'd only want a enhance shaman in a melee dps group and wouldn't want another shaman spec in there.

Oh, i just looked at the actual data here. My test only did "no shammy" vs "enh shammy". I didn't say anything about "some shammy" vs "enh shammy".

..And look at that, when we look at your data with "no shammy" vs "enh shammy", you get... 14.9% (compare to the 15% approximation my testing gave).

Looks like the testing and the spreadsheet match up pretty good. It's kind of nice when that happens.

Edit: Yet again, i show my idiocy, however. I forgot that I didn't have a WF totem down in my test. So in my test, an Enhancement Shaman would add much more added dps than 15%. Again, with the caveat that the mobs they're beating on are low level, and they aren't raid buffed. The level of the mob shouldn't matter much when considering percentage gains, but the raid buffed part would matter, because adding 200AP to someone with 1500 AP matters more than giving 200 AP to someone who already has 2000.