slant

Not only was it an unintended consequence, it's annoying to do and will lead to carpal tunnel just like EQ bards. We don't actually want to twist; it should be removed and abilities/encounters balanced appropriately.

 

◊ Malan

Psst, Rob go back and answer my question regarding the Relics.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

◊ Rob

Tackling these one at a time, the MH/OH DPS->AEP first.

I decided I wasn't going to try to build a model but test this experimentally using Yo's sim.

Begin Experiment
Baseline
1600 AP, 30% crit, 17% hit, 0% haste, 0 –AC, 97.5 DPS 2.6 speed MH/OH
1000 hour sims

Examine effect of AP on DPS
1600 AP = 993 DPS
1650 AP = 1006 DPS
1700 AP = 1018 DPS

Reset to baseline, examine effect of MH DPS on DPS
97.5 MH = 993 DPS
100.3 MH = 999 DPS
103.0 MH = 1005 DPS

Reset to baseline, examine effect of OH DPS on DPS
97.5 OH = 993 DPS
100.3 OH = 997 DPS
103.0 OH = 999 DPS

Reset to baseline, attempt to find lowest AP which will give 1005 DPS.
1645 AP = 1004 DPS
1646 AP = 1004 DPS
1647 AP = 1005 DPS

Reset to baseline, attempt to find lowest MH DPS which will give 1005 DPS.
102.1 MH = 1003 DPS
102.4 MH = 1004 DPS
102.6 MH = 1004 DPS
102.8 MH = 1005 DPS
102.7 MH = 1005 DPS

Calculate MH DPS AEP
(1647 – 1600) AP = (102.7 – 97.5) MH DPS
47 AP = 5.2 MH DPS
9.03 AP = 1 MH DPS

Reset to baseline, attempt to find lowest AP which will give 999 DPS.
1620 AP = 999 DPS
1617 AP = 997 DPS
1619 AP = 998 DPS

Reset to baseline, attempt to find lowest OH DPS which will give 999 DPS.
102.0 OH = 998 DPS
102.2 OH = 998 DPS
102.4 OH = 998 DPS
102.6 OH = 998 DPS
102.8 OH = 998 DPS
102.9 OH = 999 DPS

Calculate OH DPS AEP
(1620 – 1600) AP = (102.9 – 97.5) OH DPS
20 AP = 5.4 OH DPS
3.7 AP = 1 OH DPS
End Experiment

So, what did we learn? Pitbuller's estimates seem fairly accurate. These experimentally-derived numbers are subject to a certain amount of error, and on the MH we experimentally found that AP is less important than Pitbuller's equations say, while on the OH we found that AP is more important than Pitbuller's equations say. Therefore I'm tempted to chalk this up to random error and just go with Pitbuller's estimates. You might want to link to this experimental analysis as well when you include the info in the main post. Additionally, these equivalencies were found using 2.2 mechanics: 2.3 mechanics will increase the impact that AP has on DPS (due to shocks) and therefore lower the AEP of MH/OH weapon DPS.

Important Addendum
This does not mean that 8.48 AP = 1 DPS; this means that 1 MH DPS is 8.48 AEP.

The key difference is that 8.48 AP will in fact increase your DPS by more than 1; just as 1 weapon DPS will increase your overall DPS by more than 1. (To realize why, imagine that 1 weapon DPS increases your DPS by exactly 1 after glances, misses, dodges, and crits are accounted for. Now throw in Flurry, WF procs, and Stormstrike and realize that the weapon is hitting more often than the tooltip says it is, so you gain more DPS from the nominal weapon DPS.)

 

Aett

Me and a couple friends decided to mess around one day with some threes, so we ran hpriest/macerogue, and enhance for a few games. I was running a whopping 63-ish resilience with a totem-twisting PvE spec and we somehow made it to 1900 without a problem. Me exploding kind of capped us off so I switched to elemental (346 resil, 9.6K HP unbuffed) and it sucked. Wound up going to back to enhance with a more PvP focused spec.

I found the main advantage of being enhance over elemental is that I have a massive number of global cooldowns to use while maintaining full damage. The fact that I can shock and purge while doing damage is huge. It's awesome seeing a SL lock go through two pets in a matter of 30 seconds.

Granted this is just threes but I enjoyed enough that I'm planning on giving enhancement a go for season 3. As it stands right now shamanistic rage is fairly hard to notice, although with mods like antagonist it's probably going to get purged pretty quickly at higher levels.

I'm probably going to go 15/46/0. The reduced cooldown on shock is extremely useful for limiting heals. On a pally you can effectively hit every other heal once you get full dps on the target. The plan we always go with is bring massive amounts of damage onto a squishy target to force the healer to stand in the open vulnerable to burns/fears while I spam shock/purge. With totems + rank 1 frost shock and a decently well geared priest, warriors don't give us too much of a problem.

 

Tsalrioth

So far I have made it to 2435 as enhance on 5v5. Hard, but fun. It can be done at least, but i cant wait for hunter/enhance buffs to see if we can go higher.

 

Rapparee

Hi Rob, I know i'm not veteran of EJ, but in this case I'm going to have to say the following:

Something must be amiss with your tank's ability to generate threat.
*currently i'm resto, due to a raider's real life situation leading to his absence on raids*

On tidewalker - when slam still generated rage for a warrior...that situation was the only time i had to use tranquil air for the entirety of the fight.
Normally on that fight, I drop only TA for the first 30seconds, then twist with GoA.

On Void Reaver - TA the entire time... not even bothering putting down WF

On all other fights in the tier5 region it was always WF/GoA. Especially Kael, the tank had tons of rage absolutely no threat problems. The fury warrior and I stayed on Kael the entire time, we didn't kill eggs. The only time I didn't twist on Kael was when an egg call was made, i stopped twisting in order to use ES if needed, as soon as the egg died, the mages and rogues were back to take care of that.
Now that I think about it.... our tank was on Kael for like 20seconds while 4 or 5 melee killed Sanguinar, so that might be the difference which doesn't require TA for our melee. That 20seconds is a big boost, i understand that.

In the tier5 instances, I pulled threat from a living tank only once. On the Vashj run-in, our tank was parried and parried her 7 times in the first few seconds, so he had very little rage left and i had autoattack on as I ran past her to drop my totems in the middle. Naturally I got like 2 crits from a WF proc, pulled aggro, had my back to her and didn't even get a chance to dodge or parry.

So either I'm a terrible crap-stain of an enhance shaman (i might be) or your tank should be able to produce much more threat. Things like WF + EarthShield + PoM + hit gems, really skyrocket the living daylights out of a tank's threat production.

p.s. Thank you for the discussion on DPS to AEP. I do appreciate your work.

 

◊ Rob

On Tidewalker, I primarily had to drop TA when we had a Venezuelan tank with 800 ping... so yeah, it was mostly his fault. I do still have to drop it during SRs regardless on that fight, if I've gotten lucky with WG rolls.

On VR, I usually don't drop TA since there's a feral druid or some such in my group that's OTing. I end up pulling aggro at 25% and battle-ankhing. If I had [Prism of Inner Calm] I would equip it for that fight.

On Kael'thas, we interrupt fireballs. (And obviously Pyroblasts as well, but everyone does that.) If your guild doesn't, I could see your tank having tons of rage. Also, me and the rest of the melee are on him within 5s of him coming out, we are able to kill Sanguinar just as emerges. So our tank doesn't really have a threat lead.

Our tank also almost never gets WF, since we have typically only an enhancement + 1 or 2 resto shamans in the raid. The resto shamans tend to go to mage or hunter groups (for WoA/GoA and Mana Tide) depending on the number of spriests we have. Typically I am grouped with DPS warrior + 2 rogues + 1 of (rogue, warrior, feral druid) depending on what's in the raid. So there's not really a chance for a tank to get my WFT.

Our tanks definitely aren't the best in the world, but our two best prot warriors are pretty solid, we have a couple mediocre prot warriors (aforementioned 800-pinger and someone else who's just not that good) and about 1 great feral druid and 1 mediocre feral druid. Our server is kind of a recruiting backwater so we don't have a lot of options in this regard.

 

◊ Rob

For people interested in the new 2.3 loot, I input most of it into an Excel spreadsheet to compare it with my current loot. Note that there's no accounting for the 3% crit on RED and my value for weapon expertise is an estimate (1.8 times as valuable as hit rating, but only 75% of the time since 25% of the time bosses will be casting.) I thought this would be useful to share, in case people wanted to compare their own items (just replace the top rows with your own gear's stats).

Attached Files

Loot comparison.xls (39.5 KB, 159 views)

 

◊ Kasi

I'm kind of in an interesting position here. I am in a BT/MH guild as elemental and that is what I plan to stay as. However there is no enhancement shaman in the guild (or for that matter no good ones on the server it seems) and I have been able to be in a position to pick up items for enhancement that the hunters or rogues don't want to save them from sharding. I looked through the start of the thread (and I've read a fair bit of it) but was looking for some way to reliably rate gear at the T6 level (with having only a few Kara pieces and not much of any T5 gear), with some special consideration taken for badges/ZA loot that might compete in 2.3.

I was using Sebudei's AEP calculations of 2.2 for str, 2 for agi, 2 for crit, 2 for hit, 1.9 for haste and .33 for armor penetration and made myself a list of items to pick up. I'm not sure if thats a proper AEP as I tried Yo's sim and got different numbers but then again I didn't input everything properly I think. I was wondering if anyone was willing to help and either over PM or IM I could talk to them and ask some specific questions about gearing choices for enhancement. I don't want to litter this thread here with stuff since it will get it too far off topic imo. So if you're willing to help send me a PM. Thanks.

 

Torrential

I really don't have a problem seeing this. You can bet that when other teams look at his they see a UA lock, mages, and a balance druid and want to kill them. He also has blessing of freedom and cleanse to keep him going. Sure it's not the easy road but they obviously make it work.

 

• Disquette

Awesome Rob, thanks!

----- sig ---------------
Discoepfeand - rogue / Disquette - shaman
A stormstrike / shocks /watershield timer-bar addon: http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/9729/
"Moogle has mentioned this in passing a few times but never elaborated on it. Perhaps we can entice him to respond." - Malan

 

MalgorTB

Thought it would be interesting to test out different weapon speeds in Yo's simulator. With 100 hours as the config, and no options changed, here are how weapon speeds ended up with DPS:

So, we can see that, in general:

(2.x / 2.y) = (2.y / 2.x)

Now I only used 100 hours, and this would need more than that for anything definitive, but I thought it was worth reporting on. There are folks on the main boards claiming that if you have a 2.4 and a 2.8, to put the 2.4 as your main hand. The simulator, however, seems to show they are about the same.

Edit: Running that particular scenario with 1000 hours of hack and slash put them both at exactly 934 dps.

 

◊ Rob

I thought about this some more while I was doing something else, and it occurred to me that the reason MH DPS seems to be relatively more important than expected, and OH DPS seems to be relatively less important than expected, is that the MH will receive more WF procs due to the fact it's rolled first during a Stormstrike. So, I'm not sure which estimate is truly better: Pitbuller's {1 MH DPS = 8.48 AEP, 1 OH DPS = 4.24 AEP} or mine {1 MH DPS = 9.03 AEP, 1 OH DPS = 3.70 AEP}. Intriguingly, 9.03 - 8.48 AEP = 0.55 AEP = 4.24 - 3.70 AEP. This coincidence is too delicious for me; I'm gonna have to go with my estimates and assume that they are correctly accounting for the MH having an increased number of WF procs.

So, to summarize:
Pitbuller is theoretically correct, but does not account for the fact that Stormstrike attacks first with the main hand, giving the main hand a higher number of Windfury Weapon procs. The result of this is to increase the AEP of main hand weapon DPS and decrease the AEP of off-hand weapon DPS. The weights of MH and OH DPS are thus:
1 MH DPS = 9.03 AEP
1 OH DPS = 3.70 AEP

If someone wants to repeat my experiment with a different baseline set of stats (I used 1600 AP, 30% crit, 17% hit, 0% haste, 0 armor penetration, double Mongoose, no trinket procs, no Dragonstrike proc), they could confirm my results by reproducing them or show that my results are flawed.

An obvious shortcoming in these AEP values is that they assume a 2.6 speed weapon. Slower weapons will be worth more AEP for a given DPS. Feel free to calculate that if you try to confirm my results

 

◊ Malan

Well played. I'll need to add some appropriate bold lettered warnings that we are not equating DPS to Attack Power though.

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Skiace

I would take even 2 points in Healing Focus over 2% shock damage, if for nothing else besides solo utility. This is assuming you're not twisting and don't care about totem mana costs, as was mentioned earlier.

 

• Toots Hepcat

Thanks for the great work, guys -- but I still feel that weapon speed must play a factor in weapon to AEP equivalency calculations.

In other words, perhaps it's not 1 MH DPS = 9.03 AEP, but 1 MH DPS = 9.03 AEP@2.6s

It doesn't matter all that much if you're already restricting your upgrades to 2.6s or slower. But finding out the role weapon speed plays would help answer important questions, like how much you lose, say, going from a 2.7 MH to a 2.4. It could also help predict just how crappy your offhand would have to be for [Malchazeen] to be an upgrade.

And yes -- I do intend to do some simulations to find this out.

 

◊ Rob

Yes, this much is blindingly clear. Due to WF and SS being non-normalized, slower speeds will have a higher AEP value for 1 MH DPS (i.e. we might see 1 MH DPS@2.8s = 9.50 AEP, or similar).

With current itemization, the only weapons worth considering are 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 speed; feel free to calculate AEPs for the other speeds and report back.

 

◊ Malan

Hmm. So does that make a comparison between AEP values of a 2.6 and a 2.7 or 2.8 weapon possible?

Vyktianity already has over 75 billion followers. The first verse in his book "Gift of the Wild" is "In the beginning Vyk cast lifebloom and then maul."

 

Pitbuller

Rob you are absolute right and thank you for doing some testing that I should have pasted before. I dint want to speculate how MH and OH will get WF procs because then I have assume what kind weapons speeds was used. And I totally forget SS mechanism(mh first). Thats why I assumed both hands get same amount of WF procs.

If i could see how much dps% my Mh and Oh do then this will be piece of cake.

AEP for Mh wDPS = (14/1.1) * (Mh dps / total physical dps)
AEP for Oh wDPS = (14/1.1) * (Oh dps / total physical dps)

I assumed these decimals 2/3 and 1/3.
Maybe some genius simulator maker will add these values to his java applet.

Ps. "9.03 - 8.48 AEP = 0.55 AEP = 4.24 - 3.70 AEP" I expected this kind a behavior.

EDIT: damn I am slow. 8.48aep is number what isnt gear/speed depency. Just like all AEP values in front page are base values with varietes with your gear/weapons speeds

 

Yasuhiko

I'll want to talk to you about that later =D
I can't find any good enh tips anywhere, it seems.



On to my main topic: I have a question. Using enhancer, with "best possible gems," on the PTR, I get an AEP of ~250 for the Cyclone Helm, but live gives me an esimated AEP of 175. Is there a reason for this? Is it a change to RED? I was wondering if anyone had a clue, and I figured this would be a good place to look.

It's worth mentioning that I updated Enhancer a last night for live, but not PTR, which is why I'm curious as to what exactly changed.

 

Pitbuller

We need to invent new Abbreviation Wdps, wps or something.

 

Yasuhiko

I've always used PDPS and MDPS to signify the difference.

 

panny