That's been fixed now.

Good to hear, am i ambitious to think drinking a potion etc falls under the same fix?

I agree with this guy as a hunter. Melee groups are warrior, rogue, shamy, feral druid, X. That X should be another warrior or a rogue, only put a hunter in there if you lack other options.

I personally feel where the hunter goes is of bigger discussion then what goes in the melee group. Hunter's can fit anywhere especially of BM, but wich is better is beyond my ability to decide. Spriest, hunter, second hunter?, then like, lock and mage so that FI is given to 5 dps'ers from both BM hunters? or then 2 healers so that the healer get mana from the SP but the FI is wasted on 2 people (also chance for spell surge.. ooooo i love spell surge)

Though personally I love it when we have an extra feral druid and my group ends up...

Spriest, me, MM hunter, feral druid , pally usually. Pally has spell surge...

All of those things fall under the fix, the fix is basically making it so that even if you have your shield on your back you can still block. The only exception being when you're actually casting a spell with a cast time.

Which, unless I'm forgetting an ability warriors/bear druids have with a cast time, should only affect paladin tanks using Hammer of Wrath.

Gift of the Naaru and Slam. Of course, no one would ever use Slam while tanking, and GotN is meaningless by the time losing the ability to block matters.

Don't underestimate the hidden dps of bloodfrenzy, which is 4% more physical damage for the raid. I roughly estimated it to be worth ~250 dps in our typical raidsetup (3 tanks, 3 rogues, 1 enh shaman, 1 dps warrior, 2 hunters).

Agility only affects dodge, armor, and crit. It has no effect on parry. Parry can only be increased via talents, +parry rating, or + defense rating. And if I remember correctly, the amount of dodge gained from an improved GoA will be a little under 4% for a warrior.

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, or if it is plain dump, but I failed to get an answer through searching, and I've never played a melee class before.

We currently have only restoration shamans in the guild, and we can't afford to lose a healer to have one spec enhancement (we are actively trying to recruit one though). What I was wondering is how much of an improvement would a resto provide to the melee group vs. to the other groups (caster/healers).

If we have only 1, will he provide a better boost in the melee or in the caster group? (I assume in the caster group, but as a mage I'm obviously biased). If we have 2 of them, is the second one better off in the melee group or in a healer group, or a mixed group with mana users?

So having just 1-2 resto shamans, would one of them give enough of a benefit to the dps warrior to warrant removing him from a mana group? I know a enhancement shaman would provide a much better boost, but resto is all we have for now.

Melee group > Caster group > Healer group

Windfury is an 8-10% boost to rogue damage, much more for warriors. They can also drop SoE totem in a melee group, which is again a pretty big buff.

And Healer group > Tank group, unless the fight is threat sensitive. For sensitive fights (eg. Voidreaver), I'd give the tanks windfury over the casters. It's still probably best to give the rogues windfury over the tanks and just let them use vanish to control their aggro, but this could be a gear/skill dependent decision.

Hehe, this is surely an exhausted question.

Windfury is always the correct answer unless you have no one in the group that can benefit from it (like four ferals). This is not a complicated thing to figure out and test on ones own.


Edit: Concider GoA for it's mitigation value, and not so much it's DPS boost value.

Guess I forgot to say that the reason we put the resto shaman in the MT group is for GoA for the dodge. I used to support this because I liked avoidance. But then I started to learn like other warriors that armor and HP are key to not dieing, not avoidance. But like I said, our resto shaman, tanks, and raid leaders still like that 3-4% (?) dodge from GoA on the tank. Heck, when I tank I still don't mind the extra dodge. But is it a waste from a raid point of view?

As long as your tanks are prepared to take the hits in the first place than pure avoidance via the GoA totem is quite nice for them and the healers, this can add to how long your healers can sustain him.

Healing and Tanking are fundamental. DPS is simply a matter of time between the start of the fight and end of it (except for time limited encounters, such as 'enrage timers').

Just twist both, these are the macros I use to drop WF/GOA & WF/TA.

MACRO 14 "G/WF" INV_Misc_QuestionMark
/castsequence reset=9/combat Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem, stopmacro;
END
MACRO 15 "TA/WF" INV_Misc_QuestionMark
/castsequence reset=9/combat Windfury Totem, Tranquil Air Totem, stopmacro;
END

The WF icon will be up initially, when you click it, it will turn to GOA/TA, when you click it again it becomes a question mark, when it goes back to the WF icon, you know to repeat the cycle.

I did read about the massive gains a enh shamans provides to melee groups in the previous pages of this thread and on other threads, but I was wondering if those gains are still massive when untalented. This answers my question pretty nicely, thanks a lot.

The thing is - I have disagreements with the rest of my guild's officers on how an ideal group setup would look like. Yesterday for Gruul's Lair I asked the raid leader to give the first shaman to our caster group (a typical sp + shaman + bm hunter + 2 mages group) and the second one to the melee dps group (2 rogues, 1 warrior, 1 retadin). I explained that warriors in particular receive massive gains from shamans (as I had already read here) and should be high on priority for them - the particular raid leader is pretty open minded, and did as I asked. But immediately the shaman CL strongly protested on officers chat that only enh shamans should be put in melee groups, ever.

Later on there where even whines from a paladin for the shaman in the caster group, that he should be on the healer group instead, because I "want the shaman 'just' for DPS".

I will probably tinker with some shaman, rogue and warrior spreadsheets tomorrow so I can have more arguments the next time something like that comes up on our officers chat. Of course, I'm not expecting all the answers on a silver plate and I will keep digging about this here and also at the official forums, but if someone could point me out to more arguments I could use, that would be greatly appreciated.

Didnt see this answered in the first pages of the thread, but can someone please explain to me why WF allegedly is "much" better for Combat Sword rogues than Combat Daggers?

I think we can disregard CS producing more DD(direct damage) finishers than CD in the typical bossfight as you rarely have spare combopoints apart from during AR use.

Is the only difference the fact that BS uses more energy than SS, thus resulting in a lower amount of possible proccs due to specials?

What about the AP component of WF, does that benefit one specc over the other? Especially if we assume that CD has more WF proccs overall?

Or maybe larger number of special attacks/finishers and specc nullify the bigger "hitcount" from the faster daggers, resulting in the same amount of proccs so the simple fact that swords with a bigger dmg-range makes them come out ahead?

I imagine it is primarily because sword spec procs can proc windfury (and so on).

Well a WF procc from swordspecc isnt anything special is it, apart from the fact that it increases overall proccs. Regardless i have allways assumed that a daggerbuild has the overall bigger number of hits on target.

I've been looking up and couldn't find anything saying windfury totem procs have a cooldown that the windfury weapon has, so the only thing I can think of that would make it better for sword rogues that the extra attacks procced by SS will be both stronger and happen more often than the extra attacks procced by backstab. Which in the end can be a reasonable difference, but needs to be calculated. All in all it can't be night and day though, as rogues are already known to do at least 50% of their damage through white damage, which should get the same benefit from windfury totem regardless of sword or dagger, assuming the proc really doesn't have a cooldown.

Regarding "Why WF is Better for Sword Rogues than Dagger Rogues":

(It is great for both btw)

Windfury (totem) is an instant attack with an attack power bonus provided to the main hand weapon. Seeing that the damage range of a Sword white hit and a Dagger white hit are very different coupled with the fact that the Sword Rogue maintains more special attacks through energy cost of Sinister Strike being lower than backstab and Sword Spec producing 5% more attacks we see WF benefiting the Sword Rogue slightly more.

Assuming that WF totem is not affected by weapon normalization (is it?), both rogues will proc WF off of 20% of their white attacks and pretty much balance. The Sword Rogue will get (5% # of attacks) + ((# of SS) - (# of BS)) more attacks than the Dagger Rogue that can proc Windfury as well.

No normalization to Windfury Totem (or Windfury Weapon)