Correct.

A bit harsh but it's hard to argue against. As a fury warrior, a windfury totem is often a 200-300 dps increase. It's so amazing that with it, I place top 5 everytime and without it, I'm more near 6-9 in terms of damage done on any encounter. In the warrior spreadsheet, applying the windfury totem is an on paper calculated 220dps increase for me, and the spreadsheet is severely underrating the finer points of the totem which include weapon procs. Definitely, and I mean definitely always drop windfury totem.

I question if GoA is more of a dps increase then windfury for mutilate rogues. I mean, just thinking about it, windfury seems like the logical choice because even though the rogue is mutilate, his damage is still probably atleast 50% white. With 50% white damage, one would be quite blind to not realize the massive returns windfury would yield.

Are you able to provide any of this "proof"? Because google isn't providing anything post-TBC, all I keep reading is opinions/beliefs/suppositions, nothing remotely credible as "proof".

Tell you what, why don't you go provide us some "proof" that we're wrong. All I keep reading is made up math on your part that justifies what you want.

I am contending that the total DPS of a melee DPS group composed of warrior, rogue, druid, shaman, hunter is higher with GoA than with WF. The flametongue is just a bonus DPS from an otherwise unutilised fire totem.

Your empirical observation on the effect of WF on your personal DPS is noted, but as stated, you're effectively only 20-25% of the DPS contribution of the group.

Are you saying the rogues in my group do not get any "benefit" from windfury? I think you're really overestimating the effects of a GoA and massively underrating the effects of an extra, especially after the glancing blow change.

I have to say as a former rogue that as a Dagger specced rogue I would highly prefer GoA over WF. Dagger rogues rely on high energy cost attacks to crit in order to compete on the DPS charts so any crit% is good crit%.

In the case of 1 MS war and 3 dagger rogues GoA would indeed be a better choice. If you start getting into combat/hemo specced rogues then WF is optimal. Combat rogues generally produce 60% of their damage from white attacks so WF is such a huge bonus that even with 1 Sword rogue and 2 dagger rogues you'd probably do better with WF. Mutilate rogues also do a lot of damage with poisons from their assassin tree so WF negates a lot of that.

Your comment was almost entirely composed of your empiric observation of WF on your own personal DPS, therefore my response was composed to respond in this context.

Of course rogues benefit. The question is whether the DPS gained from a single warrior + a single rogue gaining windfury (but losing poisons) is greater or less than the overall DPS gained by GoA by every member of this 'uber melee DPS group'.

talented GoA == +88 agility to all 5 classes, which is +3-6% crit and 88+ AP on 5 people for ALL attacks ALL the time. talented GoA means talents SoE also, which is more DPS.

There are additional flow-on effects from +crit as well -- more crits means more deep wounds, which are buffed another +30% from the druid's mangle, more combo points for Seal Fate rogues, etc etc.

There is also the peripheral effect of WF and spiky damage/threat, especially for classes without strong agro reduction, such as warrior.

Using the default settings on the rogue spreadsheet w/ weapons malch/searing sunblade, adding windfury causes an increase of 120 dps on combat daggers, an increase of 58 dps over GoA totem. A warrior spreadsheet would list the dps increase to be about 200 from a windfury totem. The GoA benefit on myself is 40dps.

So in short, if it's a group with 3xrogue (daggers) + Fury Warrior + Enhancement shaman, you're looking at an increase 58+58+58+40+40=254 group dps increaes (assuming about the same dps increase from GoA on the shaman) and an increase of 120+120+120+200+0=560dps increase with a windfury totem. So a windfury is almost twice as good as a GoA. Is that enough mathcraft for you?

Wandre, what raid would have anything other than combat rogues?

I'm pretty sure the spreadsheet also undervalues the effect of windfury after its change as well. Windfury has become yellow damage, therefore reducing the damage reduction of glancing blows. The answer to which totem is better is VERY VERY OBVIOUS.

Wrong. Shamans and Warriors get zero AP from agility. This is approximately talented 300 AP with kings, which constitutes 21.5 DPS and an average of 4% crit, which is another 20 or so.

As mentioned in a post conveniently ignored in this thread, WFT is a 200 DPS gain even as fury; it is much greater with an Arms spec where you recieve full benefit of the totem on all your attacks instead of ignoring offhand attacks. As mentioned last page, this page, and every other thread where this has been brought up, every warrior DPS spreadsheet ever done by any person that has any sort of accuracy at all shows that the DPS gain that warriors get from Windfury is colossal. It is impossible to quantify numbers perfectly because of the high variance in spec and gear, but for a warrior GoA is the same as shifting to Berserker stance. 3% crit. That's it. WFT works out to well above a 20% damage increase outside of execute range because the procs generate additional rage above and beyond increasing damage by 15-25% depending on your damage cycle and whether or not you're 1hing or 2hing. For a warrior that is doing 600 DPS (not hard) that is an extremely conservative DPS increase of 120 DPS. Are you going to sit here and tell me with a straight face that the hunter, enhancement shaman, feral druid and rogue (who by the way, if they are combat get a better increase out of WF than totems regardless of dagger/fist/sword) are going to do 110 additional DPS with 3% crit (6% for the druid) when the numbers from GoA totem indicate that they are only going to account for around 50? Flametongue Totem doesn't even beat out poisons, so the Rogue won't use it. That means it's 20 DPS on the warrior and nobody else. Searing Totem is a good deal more damage than this. At best you've made up half the difference from a very conserative estimate of the increase in damage that a warrior will do, which completely discounts the extra rage generated during execute time that translates in to very large amounts of damage. Even a protection warrior sees a very large jump in damage (and thus threat) from Windfury totem, which allows the rest of the DPS classes to burn harder.

There is simply no competition. If you aren't using Windfury with a warrior in your group, you are selfishly trying to improve your own DPS at the cost of other people's DPS. Optimizing raid DPS is what wins encounters, not optimizing your personal DPS. The only reason to use GoA is to provide the warrior with dodge on difficult fights.

Assuming party make-up of 3 X Mutilate Rogue + Fury Warrior + Enhancement Shaman

Mutilate Rogue w/ Malchazeen + Searing Sunblade
With GoA: 1291dps=>1353; DPS Increase: 62
With Windfury: 1291=>1397; DPS Increase: 106

Fury Warrior w/ Dragonstrike + Gladiator Offhand
With GoA: 954.66=>994.97; DPS Increase: 40.31
With WF: 954.66=>1149; DPS Increase: 195

Group DPS:
GoA: 236.62 DPS Increase from GoA
WF: 513 DPS Increase from WF
=>276 DPS Difference

In short, it doesn't matter what the hell the rogue specs. No matter what happens, Windfury is ALWAYS better.

Pretty much sums it up right there. The only reasons to ever use GoA over WF in a melee DPS group are you either A) have no warriors in it, or B) the melee DPS group is also the tanking group and the tank needs the additional avoidance. In any other situation, there's really no justification for it.

Maybe when we stop raiding SSC I will switch, since T5 seems strongly biased toward mutilate, but while we are regularly fighting a boss that is poison immune, and while there are regularly good opportunities to use blade flurry, combat is where I will stay, because I care about doing well in *every* fight.

Mutilate is "viable" on a single, poison vulnerable target, but on hydross you'll be competing for last with that elemental shaman who looks real pretty dropping totem of wrath in the caster group and twiddling his thumbs between flameshocks on the poison phase.

Which is why, now that my guild is getting ready to start SSC, I've made the switch to combat swords. Through all of Karazhan and Gruul's Lair it is able to do well. But on the learning stages of a poison-immune encounter (which also happens to be a gear check), gimp DPS is not an option.

But even as a mutilate rogue, I knew that the small DPS boost that I would have gained from having GoA over WF was nothing in comparisson to what the warrior in the group would be gaining from WF.

If only there was a rogue DPS spreadsheet that accounted for these and other variables.

Edit: Take note that WF is indeed better for all combat rogues, including those with daggers, all of the time.

Already took poisons into account. The WF totem still wins out. Also, Rogue dps is not majority yellow. In fact, it's usually majority white damage, especially when you stack hit. This means that WF is guess what? STILL BETTER.

Seriously, if you're an enhancement shaman that likes to drop GoA for yourself, go ahead and do it. Just realize that it only benefits you and not your group as a whole.

I don't understand why this concept is so hard for people to understand. THE WARRIOR GETS BUFFED LIKE MAD. He alone accounts for a 200+ dps increase that pretty much trumps any benefit a GoA has even when coupled with poisons. 200+dps is actually on the low side because you're not accounting for extra rage generation or spamstring either. You're also not counting the changes to glancing blow reduction on BOTH ROGUES AND WARRIORS. This argument is extremely pointless. Drop the Windfury.

Just realized your post was a link Jaynah. Makes so much more sense now

If you're in the habit of bringing Arms warriors to a raid for their DPS than I suppose yah you may as well drop whatever you'd like at that point.

What? I'm pretty sure Arms gets an even bigger increase out of WFT than Fury does because there are no wasted offhand attacks.

Their DPS output isn't nearly as high though. When our DPS warrior is spec'd Fury, he tops the charts. When he's doing Arena stuff and we drag him along and he doesn't bother to respec, he's mediocre and hardly worth the slot until we hit 20%.

Thank you for the mathematical analysis Crazypie. It would be interesting to also see the benefit GoA gives druids and shaman.