Its discussed on page 14 of this thread.

On a fight like Void Reaver you definitely do not want to be holding back a lot. This is something we learned back when we were working on Broodlord Lashlayer. Being more careful with your threat and thus killing the mob slower will just ensure that someone pulls aggro and dies, probably mutiple someone's.

Knock Away effects like VR's are percentage based, so the higher your tanks threat is, the more threat he loses each time he gets hit by Knock Away. What this means is eventually the threat of your tanks will plateau, and if the mob is still alive at this point you are about to have a bunch of people overaggro and die. The best way to not overaggro on VR is to kick the shit out of him before this happens.

Normally on Void Reaver I go all out, including haste pots etc, sustaining 1000+ dps for the duration of the fight. Sometimes I'll pull aggro around 10%, but I am certain this wouldn't happen if other people were doing slightly more damage instead of worrying about aggro, because if I can go all out for 90% of the fight without overaggroing, every other class can go all out the entire time.

For void reaver, are people putting an enh shaman into the MT group for WF/UR? Our tank group usually has 3 warriors in it, and I'm thinking it might be more worthwhile for the tanks to get WF given that threat is all wacky. Another thing about VR I haven't had a chance to test yet, are tauren at the edge of melee range counted as melee threat or ranged threat? I routinely sit outside pounding but inside melee range.

Melee are good on VR so you want your enhancement shaman with the melee group. However, you definitely want to put a resto shaman in the tank group because Windfury is especially good against mobs that require multiple tanks.

Normally the MT doesn't benefit a whole lot from Windfury Totem because they will have a lot of rage(in some cases infinite rage) just from being hit by the mob. On VR you're going to have a couple of tanks that aren't currently being attacked, so the extra rage from Windfury is much more noticable to them.

As far as I know Tauren at max melee range are still considered in melee range. Also, be careful with outranging the Pounding, because he can target you with an Arcane Orb there.

A question about hit rating:

So according to the formula, 1 CR = 1 STR = 2 AP = 1.43 HR. Does that always apply, or does that only apply if your % hit chance is at a high level?

The reason I ask is, I used a lot of Glinting Noble Topaz in my gear to get my hit rating up to the 204 it is now. The formula noted for those calculations was with a 22% hit chance, and I'm at that right now (9% from talents, ~13% from hit rating, so roughly 22% hit). Should I instead go back and socket with +8 STR or +4 CR/+4 STR?

I was always under the impression that I should focus on hit rating UNTIL I got to 200+ hit rating, but this seems to suggest that's incorrect.

Yes, remove all your +Hit gems. Hit is not nearly as important as we thought.

I'll be editing the original post a bit later when I have more time.

I'm about the same as Stigmata, running 200 with my current boots, waiting to get Rapscallion enchanted before switching to them which will drop me to 183 Hit. I just can't seem to force myself any lower then 180 and feel good about it.

Stig also runs with tsunami/dragonstrike, so hit would be pretty important for procs as well no?

- 5 minutes = 300 Seconds
- 2 second swing = 150 swings * 2 = 300 (assuming 2.6 second weapons but sped up a bit to around 2 on average for various reasons - to go more detailed would require a proper simulation)
- Average value of a swing = 350 hit/800 crit -> 2 hits per crit ~ 1500/3 swings
- 3% of 300 swings is 9 swings -> 4500 white damage -> almost 2 solid chances at a WF -> assume 2 crit 2 non crit on - average of 600 and 1200 = 3600 (this is high end assuming high chance of crit and 2 windfurys)

3% hit over 300 swings (150 per hand) =~ 8100 with VERY favorable conditions.

Earth Shock:

(From looking at a couple parses with my stats)
- 850 average non crit shock, 1000 on crit (these weighted slightly lower then average)
- 5% less damage would be 808 and 950? (I'm not sure how the 5% multiplier works on crits)

- 300 seconds untalented = 50 shocks
- 5% of 50 for crit is 2.5 -> assume 3
- 47 shocks, 3 crit untalented
- 83% base spell hit +3% from resto on a 73 mob -> 43 shocks
- Assume all 3 of our crit shocks crit.
- 40 shocks, 3 crit untalented with hit chance calculated

- 300 seconds talented = 60 shocks
- 5% of 60 for crit is 3
- 57 shocks, 3 crit talented
- 83% base spell hit on 73 -> 49.8 shocks
- 46 shocks, 3 crit talented

- Damage difference is 40*(850-808)+3*(1000-950)+6*850 = 6930


Now, this is assuming a 5 minute uninterrupted period under optimimum conditions.

- 300 white swings across both hands assuming optimimum windfury procs in the difference period.
- 50-60 Shocks by using every cooldown.

So optimum here is at about:
-- 60 swings/minute
-- 12 shocks/minute (5s), 10 shocks/minute (6s)


So here's the interesting part -

The closest high dps uptime fight I can think of off the top of my head is probably Morogrim or Void Reaver, so I grabbed the top EJ parses and took Shabadu as an example:

Morogrim: 342s presence (5.7m)
- 262 white swings (45.96 swings/min)
- 22 shocks (3.86 shocks/min)

Void Reaver: 298s presence (4.97m)
- 203 white swings (40.85 swings/min)
- 29 shocks (5.84 shocks/min)


This tells us that cooldown isn't necessarily an issue as much as either threat or other such conditions. Or it's just really hard to maintain a full shock uptime. My own numbers for fights aren't nearly as good on uptime as Shabadu's are, so I need to work on that, or wait till my tanks build aggro a bit faster.

I'm still thinking this needs more analysis, as the amount of extra damage from the shocks, along with the faster cooldown when you have limited dps windows can make a significant difference I imagine. Also, there are at least a couple fights where I'm on interrupt duty and it's made a noticeable difference.

Anyway I have some work to do, so if someone wants to tear this stuff apart a bit more (as msot of these numbers are pulled out of my nether regions), please do. This topic needs more discussion then off the cuff "resto is better because +hit", that's the same path people went down when we first got DW for gear in general. My main view right now is elemental hybrid is better up to a certain gear point, and then the 3% hit will win out from a dps standpoint over extended fights due to AP difference. Where that breakpoint is is the question. Elemental is a flat 140+ dps if used consistantly, but will never scale upwards with enh gear.

I run at around 120 hit and I know Sebudai does as well, he's posting impressive numbers on his guilds WWS parses that I've seen, and I'm certainly no slouch in my guild even with much less impressive gear.

Every point in hit is wasted on your yellow damage (assuming you have a sane talent build).

Every point in hit is not going to proc windfury more when you're already inside the 3 second cooldown from the last windfury.

It's not as mindboggling as you think. Granted, there are other factors such as weapon procs and shamanistic rage procs which make hit more important that sims/calculations show. The thrust of the theory-born results *seem* to be correct, however, as people have reported good results by re-socketting from +hit gems to +ap/+str gems.

As far as the formula you quoted, if it is truly intended to be an equivalency formula (and it looks that way), then sure, 25/22. I'd probably edit it to assume you having kings, however, making it more like:

1 CR = .9 STR = 2 AP = 1.02AGI = 1.43HR

Again, assuming that was an equivalency formula.

I run with an abnormally high hit, simply because of the gear wow has shown fit to have drop for me. I could easily get rid of 16 hit, since I still have 2 dawnstones gemmed, but I'm trying to repay the costs of my epic mount so I haven't had the cash to regem them. I'll lose more hit once I break 3 piece ebon netherscale as well, which I see coming as soon as I get one better in either of the slots since I can craft BT/Hyjal mail in those slots.

Shocking for me is pretty involved. I have to make sure not to eat Stormstrike charges so that the ele shamans we run with get the maximum benefit. Sometimes cooldowns sync up and you have to wait an extra second on a shock or stormstrike and that further messes with the rotation. I tend to give up Earthshocking entirely when I feel close on threat or am running low on mana waiting on SR.

do you have any other WWS's from a Fathom Lord fight before changing up your gear?

14.5 % of your white attacks missed, assuming you had the same hit% as me (21.56%) then you would have only missed 4ish %, this would add up to an extra 19k white damage and a 4% more total dmg.

The difference in my gear would probably be even more, give that more of my damage comes from white hits.

I'm probably missing something here.

Sadly no that's the first time I'd done the fight.
Edit - closest thing I can do is a mag fight from a couple weeks prior. Problem is that I believe this was from before I got my Arena2 weapon as well.
http://www.warbound.us/WWS/wws-20070605-2010/index.html

For those who are still wondering what sort of gains Windfury gives a warrior, the previous kill that Beatdown Brigade did was a week prior to my joining the guild. With no Windfury totem on the previous week he did around 850 DPS. This week's kill with me in the group he did 1250 DPS for a gain of 400 DPS from totems, bloodlust, and Unleashed Rage.

Yes, you are missing something here ;-)

Drill down into the melee section by clicking on it, and you'll see:
Misses (includes dodges/parries):
Misses 25 / 7%
Dodges 5 / 1%
Parries 15 / 4%

(rounding each to the whole number makes these not add up to 14.5%)

WWS misses does not = actual white misses. It's only about half as bad as it seems. His miss rate is only 3% worse than yours.

Ah of course. so ~5% less hit only equates to ~2% less total dmg in this sample?

Okay, i keep learning stuff by reading this, and the common said thing about needing 250 hit seems like not true at all.

My current char is like this, http://armory.wow-europe.com/charact...nedar&n=Mextro

I'm still wondering what i need to improve, if i did make the right choise with the offhand (untill we can finally down al'ar and he drops netherbane, i think i'm pretty much stuck with this one since arena isn't exactly my favorite place to be)

I'm mostly build to improve my group's dps, but offcourse i need to have a high dps myself on fights that have a low enrage timer.

Any tips/suggestions?

@Mextro, There isn't alot to be said really, just keep upgrading your gear, the belt and second ring are the worst items you have, so set those as a priority.

I recently dropped herbalism and took leatherworking, it cost me close to 2k gold but i eventually got it to 375 and crafted some of the BT/SSC items, if you can get hold of the plans (assuming guilds on your server are in there) that might be worth doing.

The items aren't cheap to make considering the price of the plans and a couple of the rarer parts, but will be nice upgrades.

How many of you guys that run with elemental shamans in your raid that let them eat up both stormstrike debuffs? Anytime we have one I don't bother shocking as I figure giving him a 15% boost is going to do a lot more than me ESing every cooldown.

I normally try to do SS->Flame shock->Earth Shock. By the time you get to ES, they've eaten up your SS charges.

Can anyone recommend a good combat log tracker to track my hits, misses, dodges, parries, windfuries etc?

Thought it might be a good time to do it tonight since i'm doing an SSc clear tonight... cheers