Is Grimgrin really this bad? I calculated the AEP values and it seems like its one of the best options in the game. Certainly better than T4 or the Coif, no?

I suppose the real question is: What is a good estimate for AEP for the Relentless Earthstorm Diamond given T5ish gear? If its not over 50, then the Grimgrin is even better than T6 according to my (probably horribly wrong) math.

I hate that this post seems over simplified and on the border of reportable, but the following is the best way I can figure to say it.


Meta = win.

You should be critting enough that the 3% is a pretty huge upgrade, there are similar talks going on in the feral druid thread, but yes, the meta is that good.

Ok, there I think I explained it enough to make it not sound like a bullshit post.

Regarding Twisting, GCDs and Shocks:
I've been trying twisting with GoA/Tranquil and I've been pretty pleased with the results. DisquoDice is pretty damn good. I have been running into the same issues with shock timing. Encounter mechanics usually prevent a perfect twisting situation, which is standing in one place, and hitting something. I've been getting better at it, and the only advice I can give is: make every GCD count.

Firstly, it's best to drop the twisted totem right after Windfury. This means you need 2 GCDs to refresh the Windfury buff and restore the twisted totem. Using DisquoDice, you can look at the shock/SS bars and see about how soon they will be available, relative to each-other. You can also take a look at the WF cooldown bar. SS and Shock frequently come up near each-other, so usually you need 2 GCDs to keep those up, too. What you want to avoid is a situation where you are delaying abilities due to the GCD on others. Windfury totem is critical, Stormstrike is damn important (other people use my SS charges), and shocks are also important to proc the totem. The least important thing on the list is the twisted totem. If you need an extra few GCDs, leave Windfury down for another 5s to get another pulse (Pulses every 5, buff lasts 10). The situation you want to avoid most is leaving down the twisted totem and letting Windfury fall off, so if you are looking at DQD and it looks like there is a GCD-cluster-f**k coming up. Drop Windfury early, do your SS/shocks, refresh other totems or whatever, and then keep twisting.

In the end it's playstyle and practice. I try to lay non-twisted totems while moving, if the encounter mechanics allow for it. Example: Void Reaver, when stepping back out of the pounding, refresh mana/str/searing. It's just a matter of trying to not let the abilities that need refreshing stack up on you.

Hi, I am having some trouble getting the most out of my guilds enhancement Shammy. he is one of the highest attendance members in the guild and I'd like to have him included in our Kael fight but his DPS is just to low to merit the spot while we learn the fight. SSC WWS here is the most recent clear of SSC and Kael WWS is the most recent attempts on Kael with him there. A few things to note about him; he tanks the mace in Phase 2, he does the dagger debuff on Thaladred in Phase 3, and he does twist totems. Here is his Armory, I would like any advice you have that you could give him to improve his performance in the Kael fight.

Im not really sure what you want from him. You have him doing a lot of different rolls, of course his dps is gonna be pretty low. Especially with totem twisting you have to factor in how much he's giving the rest of the group(if its a well placed melee group with warrior and rogues itll be several hundred dps at least, probably more around 1k),

He'll also do very minimal dmg on thaladred. Do you not have another warrior who could apply the dagger? Its a really rough job for a shaman, especially since you want him giving melee totems.

I took a look at his actions on Kael attempt #9, using the Browse Combat Log, and you've got some problems here.

There's a good chance that your log is bad, there seems to be a lot of shit missing from just the first page of it. The log shows him doing brief damage to Thaladred, a few hits on Sanguinar, Flame Shocks on Capernian (you should brow beat him for being in range of her, that's really fucking stupid), and then suddenly jumps to him hitting the Cosmic Infuser.

Either your log is bad, or your shaman went afk for huge stretches at a time.

His DPS is going to *drop* from using the dagger. Have a Rogue or a Warrior handle that role. It doesn't look like he had Battle Shout the entire attempt. That's bad.

[e] Good god he was meleeing Capernian as well. Good grief, you need to have a talk with this guy. The further into the log I browse its definitely a combination of the log being fucked up, and him running around not knowing what to do apparently.

No he should be doing a hell of a lot better than 500 DPS on that fight with the gear he's got.

I hear what you are saying about Phase 1, however, there is no record of him even hitting Telonicus in phase 1, and barely any record of him hitting Sanguinar (like 5 hits... that's it). Either he DCd off an on during the fight, or he was afk, or whoever did your logging doesn't have their log set to 200 yards. One or more of those things are true. Either way he shouldn't be meleeing Capernian as that's just asking to die.

Also, you said you run 3 tanks, that should be good enough for all the weapons. He shouldnt have to tank something, but if you have him tanking something, thats fine, just prepare to have his dps be slightly lower during that part(only if hes smart and using watching his hp, pots and healthstones). But for the most part he should be able to do dps then. More then likely I have to agree with Malan, and say your combat log is screwed.

I'm also going to go out on a limb here and guess that your Shaman is throwing on a shield for tanking the mace. Cutting to just phase 2 of attempt 9 - Wow Web Stats
all of his hits and crits are in the same damage range which certainly seems to indicate 1h weapon activity.

So to recap - Phase 1 - subject to all the woes that melee are, only being able to DPS 2 of the 4 bosses
Phase 2 - tanking, 1h and shield
Phase 3 - chasing Telonicus
Phase 4+-..?
Wow Web Stats
Doesn't seem so bad to me.

Bar issues with meleeing Capernian and being stuck on a role that he is VERY poorly suited for (dagger on Thaladred)
Hiplainsdrif - WWS
(Being unable to get any sort of runspeed buff makes switching targets atrociously hard)

Here is a cut of my own raid's second Kael kill:
Wow Web Stats
My DPS shows decently
Looking at specifically phase 4 (may not have clipped it exactly so some of Phase 5 is in there)
Wow Web Stats
Your shaman's DPS when given free reign to DPS is in fact better than mine. If you're worried about his DPS I can say reasonably that it is because you are squashing his DPS on portions of the fight where he can contribute rather than having him just stick with melee for totems/Unleashed Rage. (Also note, my parse cuts out phase 1)

Have your shaman tank the staff, not the mace. The mace hits for almost 1k more from what I remember. The staff is easily tankable without a shield and just full burning it with late-cast interrupts.

Don't grab any of the weapons. The dagger is a dps drop, and you hurt people a lot more when dispelling MC then a rogue or warrior would. The axe gives some big numbers and isn't better then normal DW.

Your shaman seems fine in SSC. As for kael...

I notice your rogues don't do a lot of damage to Telonicus either. I also notice your shaman is barely under your rogues, despite being given a couple jobs where he couldn't fully dps.

The only time I can actually find him meleeing Capernian appears to be while a wipe is in progress. Looks to me like he's committing suicide, which is exactly what he should be doing. 27k damage on Capernian is probably the 5% of his damage that's coming from lightning bolt/chain lightning. Edit: nevermind, Malan's right, he's trying to melee Capernian. And not dying every time he does it. There's no justice in the world.

By the way, having your shaman put on a shield in phase 2 and then keep the dagger debuff on Thaladred in phase 3 is going to absolutely fuck his mana. He's blowing shamanistic rage in phase 2 when he doesn't have an offhand equipped, and then he's not getting enough melee presence to get a good shamanistic rage off in phase 3. He'll do a lot better if you take him off one of those jobs, or just let him tank the mace without a shield. My guild used a similar setup to control the mace, only I didn't have a shield on and the rogue was throwing stuns. Tell Vasher to stunlock the mace (which he's not doing according to WWS and I can't imagine why not) and tell Hiplainsdrif not to put a shield on and I think it'll work out better.

You're posting a WWS of your guild wiping on the melee-unfriendly portion of Kael'thas, you have your enh shaman in a utility role that gimps his DPS for most of the fight, and you're saying he doesn't do enough DPS. It's like bringing an OT prot warrior to Lurker for the adds, and then dropping him when his dps on Lurker isn't high enough. Unless I missed something your shaman is doing his job, it's just that the job you've given him doesn't involve dealing much damage. Edit: Well, he's doing his job except that he's meleeing Capernian, so yeah, you should probably smack him in the head a few times before you bring him back to Kael.

I have been doing a lot of research looking at other shamans weapon combos, trying to figure out what I should do next, if anything. Currently, I use Dragonstrike/Syphon. A second syphon would go to me, next time it drops (more than likely), but one other warrior is interested in Rising Tide, but I would get that if he wasn't around that night. Granted, I am talking about if I want them.

I did some testing on blasted lands mobs just to see my proc ration of MH to OH windfurry with the Dragonstrike/Syphon combo. I did this by just tallying the WFers as they procced manually. After all that testing, it rounded out to about 3 MH procs to every 4 OH procs, so in other words, I am getting a decent amount of OH procs.

So, here is the real question....for those of you that are this anal about testing this stuff, whats your ratio of MH to OH procs? I don't like getting more OH procs than MH, but I don't want to freak out about it. And if so, what would be the best combo to go with? I see and read a lot of people here that use RT/Syphon, but some people also use dual Syphons. I understand that by using a slightly slower weapons speed in your MH, you would achieve more MH procs, but with a 2.7/2.8 combo like I am using, I am not getting that so far.

My dps on fights like Terron hang around the 1300 range (last Terron kill). My group is almost always two rogues and two DW warriors.

Thoughts? I know this question has been tossed around a lot, just want to get as many peoples opinions as possible.

I've been an avid theorycrafter but lately I've begun to notice something odd.

While putting in my stats in Yo!'s sim and I allways seem to get absurdly high AEP values for Hit rating.

The stats in question: (totally unbuffed, not even totems, kings not added either)
1636 AP 30,1% crit, 6,53% hit (103 rating), 4,31% haste, 175 ArP, Dragonstrike + Rod of the Sun King and Ashtongue trinket (see armory link..)
In the buff section I assumed BoM, MotW, SoE, a flask and +20str Food)

The gear is mostly MH/BT gear with some residual t4/5 items.

The AEP values I get are:

AP: 1
Crit: 2.21
Hit: 3.88
Haste: 1.8
Agi: 1.95

Whilst all stats appear to be reasonably within bounds of the suggested AEP values of the first post the hit rating jumps out considerably. So either I am messing up with the input, the sim is wrong or hit rating does increasingly become more valuable as the other stats go up (which doesn't sound all that illogical actually).

Do other "end-game" shamans get similar results?

Edit: *Facepalm*

Ok now getting :

AP: 1
Str: 2
Crit: 2.08
Hit: 1.88
Haste: 1.82
Agi: 1.84

Do you have the AP->Spell damage setting turned on? (could be a bug)
Also, are you entering your hit % into the sim including your 9% from talents? If you only enter what your actual rating from gear is I could maybe see the sim saying "whoah this guy needs hit rating bad."

I don't. Hit is either on the same level or a tiny(.05-.1) better than the 2ish that crit/str/agi/haste for valued me.

Just a random thought I had on the drive home from work, brought about from the fact that I wanted to justify using the [Brooch of Deftness] instead of [Pendant of the Perilous]. (and yes, I know that's a horrible thing to do - start with a conclusion and then build support for it :p ).

Anyway, expertise is a smidge better than we have it listed now because of the stormstrike bug. To illustrate, take the following reductio ad absurdum example in which a mob has a 50% chance to dodge you.

Assume:
50% will be dodge/parry
main hand and offhand have same weapon. MH averages 2dmg, so OH averages exactly 1dmg.

Thought experiment:
swing 100 times. How much damage will you do?

50 Main hand stormstrikes will land for a total of 100 damage
of the 50 MH hits, 50% of the OH SS's will also be dodged, so you will do 2 * 50 * 50% * 50% (OH penalty and dodges) = 25 damage.
For a grand total of 125 damage.

Note that if you had no dodge/parries, this would be 2 * 100 + 1 * 100 = 300 damage.

Because of the stormstrike bug in which the OH only swings if the MH lands, increasing expertise has a "coefficient-greater-than-(1+critRate)" effect on yellow damage compared to white.

Does it matter much? Meh, not really, but in the interest of completeness I figured I'd throw this out there as another "shaman mechanics are pretty screwed up" note. It's probably something like .01 or .02 additional value we should assign to the expertise rating, which is beyond the rounding most people use anyway.

Eww.

Yeah, I missed that. I just checked the Capernian deaths and went back a bit. I guess I've never actually tried to melee Capernian when I wasn't trying to speed up a wipe, but I just assumed that he wouldn't be able to do it and live.

this is what our guild does for Kael. We shove the shaman to help the warrior pull the staff down and handle interupts. From there he does nothing but beat on stuff with full dps gear on for the rest of the fight.

Then again we run with 4 tanks+1 dps warrior who throws on a shield for part of that fight to 'tank'.

once phase 4 hits it's all the other warrior/rogues job to run around stabby stabby the mind controlled people. Let the enhancement shaman burn full bore on kael+eggs. If you have spare shamans have them throw down earthbind to slow other folks down (might work, just thought of it now). Let those with intercept/sprint/stuns handle the MC folks. Might cut into their dps but rogues>shamans for this thing as the dagger will more than likely be a weapon they choose instead of one for the shaman which is a big downgrade.

You have a shaman who's out-damaging ALL of your rogues, a guy who never once died early and you're wondering if he's pulling his weight?

Yeah, his numbers seem a little low, but damn, you want to work with this guy. He's obviously a good player.

Ignoring the RED, Grimgrin Faceguard is slighty worse than Forest Prowler's Helm and slighty better than Skyshatter Cover and Coif of the Jungle Stalker.

But just tell us what's your EP for? I use a regulary a "2,2 Str 2 Agi 0 Stam 0 Int 2 Crit 2 Hit 1 AP 2 Haste 0,3 Arp" string for comparison and all sockets are epic.

Using lower assumptions will not bring such a different result that it's worth considering Grimgrin Faceguard.

RED should be anywhere between 40-80 score points. With "2,2 Str 1,5 Agi 0 Stam 0 Int 1,5 Crit 1,4 Hit 1 Ap1,5 Haste 0,25 Arp" the score difference between T4 and the ugly leather mask is ~ 65 for rare gems.

And please notice that you should substract between 0,1 and 0,2 from the non-ap/str values to simulate the worth of your Mental Agility Talent.

should i trade in my double syphon maces for the new season 3 weapons?

Use the simulator and see if it's an upgrade? Christ. You don't even deserve those weapons...