Also, I just put in my stats. The only 2 differences between importing Yo!'s rankings into lootzor/thottbot versus this site (in terms of actual rankings) were ring and boots.
This is for the #1 spot only. I didn't look at the rankings below the #1 spot.
Also, this site is neat in that it lets us know that if we could use the rogue set armor, slayer's, that we'd have upgrades in 4 of the 5 slots compared to what's available now (and the 5th slot is the helm, in which only the Illidan drop cursed-vision is better than the slayer's gear).
Most items won't shuffle around too much for us I'd imagine, unless they were already really close on stats. These quirks that define our dps are significant when added up, but when you look at items individually, they aren't going to easily push around the item order due to things like stormstrike missing based on main hand hits etc.
Also yeah, there's even some really nice feral druid stuff that I see popping up in thottbot item weight searches.
Also, this site is neat in that it lets us know that if we could use the rogue set armor, slayer's, that we'd have upgrades in 4 of the 5 slots compared to what's available now (and the 5th slot is the helm, in which only the Illidan drop cursed-vision is better than the slayer's gear).
the formulas he's shown so far, on which I've based my objections and let him know:
Also, I just put in my stats. The only 2 differences between importing Yo!'s rankings into lootzor/thottbot versus this site (in terms of actual rankings) were ring and boots.
This is for the #1 spot only. I didn't look at the rankings below the #1 spot.
That may be due to the fact that there are only so many best items in the game; they just cannot really vary alot after all.
What I find interesting though, is that this site puts the bagde leather items (with haste) MUCH higher than Yo's Sim would suggest.
I've been following this thread for some time (long-time reader, first-time poster), and I haven't seen anything that mentioned additional gear for an enhance shaman, such as bringing a healing weapon and shield in case of emergencies. Frankly, these situations come up most often in 5-man heroics, and less and less often in 10 mans and 25 mans, but they still come up. Here are my thoughts on the matter:
Simply put: An enhance shaman should always carry at least a main hand healing weapon and a healing shield in their bags for use in emergencies.
Here's my reasoning:
Always carry a shield in case you need to off-tank a hard-hitting mob or for those "oh crap" situations where you either pull aggro or the tank dies. Combined with the 30% damage reduction from shamanistic rage, you should easily be able to survive for 30 seconds just as well as any tank (ample time for a tank to get the threat back if you stop attacking, or for someone else more suitable for long-term tanking to get aggro).
In cases where you do pull aggro - STOP ATTACKING. Just spam LHW on yourself and hope you don't die. If you keep attacking, your threat will skyrocket (especially now that you've popped shamrage) and it will be that much harder for someone to pull the mob off of you.
You may even want to carry two or three shields, if bag space is not a concern for you. One shield for elemental dps use in situations where melee is impossible (time to kill Krosh Firehand and Maulgar is in the middle of WW), one shield for healing (a healer died, or your healing just needs a little push for a while), and one shield for off-tanking (oh shit!). I've found that by far the most use I get out of a shield is healing, and the 2nd most is tanking. I almost never do elemental dps. Thus, I recommend carrying only one shield, a healing shield, if bag space is a concern. This will still provide the armor mitigation (significant mitigation) and will allow you the +healing stats you need for healing, without providing the very modest +block and +block value increases.
Additional MH weapons for use with a shield are also good. When tanking, your highest dps weapon will also be your highest threat generation weapon, so you don't need a separate weapon for that. In oh shit situations, you shouldn't be attacking, so it doesn't matter what is in your main hand (remove your weapon completely in case you die so that you save gold on repairs). For elemental dps, you will want a +damage weapon, but since my experience is that enhance shamans almost never use elemental dps, there's really no need to take up your bag space with this. Thus, you should carry a healing MH item, which are easy to find. Since the item will primarily be used for spot heals and emergencies, enchanting it with +81 healing will be more beneficial than spellsurge - you will still be wearing your enhance gear, so mp5 won't help that much - you're not going to be an effective endurance healer anyway.
When healing, you can continue to dps. If mana is a concern, stop your shock rotation, but maintain stormstrike and auto-attack since those cost little mana (or are free) and cause a large portion of your damage %. Sure, dps will go down due to the fact that you're not using your melee weapons, but if you prep your healing weapon with WF or FT, it'll still proc (do this before encounters, not during them - the buff lasts for 30 minutes, so you have plenty of time to do it). Also, your swing timer will likely be up each time you finish a heal, so even if you spam heals a swing will occur.
It's best to make a macro that swaps your MH and OH for your healing weapon and shield, and another macro that swaps back, and keep those on your hotbars or bound to easy to reach keys. Swapping back is particularly annoying because most off-hand weapons for a shaman are actually "One-Hand" and simply left clicking the item from your bags will swap it with your Main Hand weapon instead of with your shield.
Edit: Yakout makes a great point below. When I wrote this, I wasn't even aware that there were any off-hand caster weapons left in the game. Gotta get me one of those!
It's best to make a macro that swaps your MH and OH for your healing weapon and shield, and another macro that swaps back, and keep those on your hotbars or bound to easy to reach keys. Swapping back is particularly annoying because most off-hand weapons for a shaman are actually "One-Hand" and simply left clicking the item from your bags will swap it with your Main Hand weapon instead of with your shield.
If you're going down the road of spot-healing with properly enchanted healing items, then this is not actually the right path to take. Forget the shield unless you're actively taking melee damage; instead off-hand a [Knight's War Hammer], [Razor Scythes], [Rockbiter Cutter], or (eww) [Phantom Dagger] of the Sorcerer/Invoker with a +81 healing enchant on it. In the cases where you continue to melee in between heals, this will reduce your DPS much less than having a shield out, plus you'll frankly get far more short-burst, non-sustained healing stats out of these. The extra Int or MP5 from a shield will be of less use for short-term healing than an extra 50 or so +heal (and possibly even a spot of spell crit).
(Yes, this also applies with spot-elemental DPS'ing, but that is, as you noted, an almost non-existant thing.)
Using my stats on the java sim and 2000 hours, I imported my aep values into Enhancer, which gives EP values to items based on the aep values from the sim, this is something i'm a bit perplexed about though, it tells me.. well, see for yourself: http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/2...ntrightdp5.png
Why is it telling me that this inferior chest is better?
I agree with Kahdrick, just didn't think this was the thread for discussion of such things. But it is something that Malan may consider putting in the first post, since he's got an "evaluating a shaman for your raid' type section.... sorry I didn't have the exact wording.
Personally, I don't use "whoops i've pulled aggro" shield + weapon macro. Aside from High King Maulgar, all other bosses would have one-shot me when i was wearing gear appropriate for fighting them. Perhaps... just perhaps, I could survive a hurtful strike from Gruul today, if I was wearing a shield and had 13k life + shamanistic rage.
I do however, always carry my healing shield + healing weapon. Though i'd be better served with a second one-handed weapon with +81 healing enchant on it... currently any weapon with 81 on it is better than any shield when you're only casting 1 or 2 heals per fight. However, that's pretty damn expensive.
I heal with macros that read like this:
/cast lesser healing wave
/equip merciless gladiator's salvation
/equip aegis of the vindicator
/equip totem of the plains
I may have a typo in that macro, not sure.
And actually I use Clique to have that macro cast when I press "Shift + left click".
I have another macro
/cast healing wave
/equip merciless gladiator's salvation
/equip aegis of the vindicator
/equip totem of spontaneous regrowth
And finally there's one for Chain Heal that includes totem of healing rains.
I actually use all three types of casts during Archimonde encounters. I'm in the melee group with tremor totem down, and we're normally swinging at Archi's tail. If there are two doomfires visible on my screen and tremor has just released me from a fear.... I know that there's at most two healers in range and unfeared for the MainTank, I spam LHW, then HW on the tank regardless of what the tank's life looks like.
We've had a bear of a time controlling doomfires, and more times than I like to count, 2 or 3 of us in the melee group get DF. I have to stop meleeing anyway, due to all the fire, so I simply spam chain heal to lessen the healing burden on others.
Sometimes on trash in the orc encampment I need to heal in the situation where most of the raid is off on the gargoyles, the tank near melee dies, and soon after our healer dies.... I'll have to finish that wave healing while those two guys run back. I'm not saying this happens every single week... it's just that when it does happen it sucks to wipe in Hyjal and essentially waste 30minutes reclearing the waves.
So those are two easy to spot times, when you can either predict healing or have time to react and heal. BT doesn't have as many times like this.... You can heal melee during the kite phase of supremus, but they can just as easily bandage or grab a HoT during that phase...heck even healing stream could probably fill them up.
Also for that guy 3 pages ago doing void reaver....
Get 3 shaman and have them stand in the pounding along with the tanks and melee.
2 of them resto, spamming chain heal. One of those resto is in the main tank group with windfury totem down.
1 of them enhance with tranquil air totem in the melee dps group.
No one ever moves out of the pounding area.
I as an elemental shaman have survived being hit by several bosses. Supremus and Theladred come to mind. Although neither was due to pulling agro, more dealing with proximity on switches. Having a shield would give you a substantial amount of mitigation, especially with SR. Whether you can use your macro and have SR ready to pop when it happens is the much more difficult question.
Interesting, since he doesn't have the windfury 3 second cooldown implemented.
...
He makes no differentiation of offhand and mainhand WF procs due to weapon speeds
should be at least partially offset by
He doesn't increase dual wielding WF rate to 36% (instead of 20%)
I think an analysis of the average & worst case scenario effects of ignoring these points is in order.
He doesn't have the stormstrike bug implemented
SS "bug", as I understand it, will occur at about the same rate your Stormstrikes are missed/dodged/parried. Which on my meters is 10% of the time. Stormstrike is 9% of my damage. +/- .9%
He has no section for raid debuffs
...
I don't think he has enchants on there (mongoose/crusader)
Shouldn't matter all that much in terms of relative stat weights, though this will affect that "This is your DPS" line.
His simulator is incredibly basic compared to Yo's.
It's not a simulator. It's not doing what simulation does (allow us to research new theories). It's just offering a quick, direct answer to the question of "what gear will help me get stronger." Think of it as theorycraft light: a flat model, based on proven formulas and research but removing the complex fiddly details under the assumption that they won't significantly affect gear selection. This makes it far less accurate in predicting real DPS but almost as accurate in making gear suggestions, all without the intensive CPU effort of simulation.
Is this assumption valid? That's for us to determine, and so far I ALSO found to more or less model what I have discovered using Yo's/Thottbot.
I think it's interesting these guys are using "DPS" as a sort of relative indicator similar to EP but more accessible and potentially more useful. If you don't expect that "this is your DPS" line to be anything more than a relative indicator, this site is an intriguing new tool.
My biggest problems are that he's missing some gear, that there's no option to remove BoP gear from professions you don't have, that it offers quest and rep rewards that are faction specific to everybody.
Last edited by Toots Hepcat : 12/13/07 at 4:11 PM.
paradox - Just a guess, but the EP values on those tooltips might not be considering the gems correctly.
Is that something I should report to the Enhancer developer then? I don't think it has anything to do with RatingBuster which just gives the summary and isn't included in any calcuations as far as I can tell.
Why is it telling me that this inferior chest is better?
Thanks
Enhancement Itemization Points != EP values. Personally, I turned them off and only use "AEP."
Think about it, man -- if the item has 166 AP, how the heck is it going to have less than 100 EP?
EIP is some other kind of analysis, which I don't understand but assume (from the name) is a breakdown of how much of the item's itemization budget was spent on Enhancer friendly stats (rather than stuff like Int, Stam or Resilience).
What is it you "use" for "AEP"? All I have for the stat weights is Enhancer.
Another question about the stat simulator.. when you add a trinket, say the hourglass, is that just the proc on the hourglass or does it add the crit rating too?
Paradox: the crit is already added to your paper doll stats, so no it just adds the proc.
As for Enhancer, I turn off the display of every stat weight system EXCEPT for AEP.
I get my EP from Yo's. I enter it using /enhancer EPNumbers AEP CrazyShamanStats <stat weights>.
Incidentally, I'm a little bugged about Enhancer's rounding system and the fact that it defaults to a high-end raid value for meta gems. My hit rating is worth 1.56 and my crit rating 1.64. Both of these round to 1.6, and so Enhancer things Crit Rating = Hit Rating. That, combined with the meta gem thing, leads it to suggest that [Helm of the Claw] is an upgrade (I'm fairly certain it isn't).
If he wants to have a rudimentary tool that is mostly good, then he's got it right.
If he wants to help people achieve MAXDPS.com, then he doesn't have it right.
When I see the name that the site has, along with gear recommendations in front of people, which will occasionally result in someone choosing the wrong piece of gear, I have a logic problem with that.
If some n000blet goes to the site and finds out that with his 1.3 daggers he really needs to load up on +hit (because the site doesn't respect the 3 second cooldown), then the site is doing a disservice by a) not showing how bad his dps really will be and b) recommending more +hit so that WF will proc more. Can't WF unless you hit!
In cases where you do pull aggro - STOP ATTACKING. Just spam LHW on yourself and hope you don't die. If you keep attacking, your threat will skyrocket (especially now that you've popped shamrage) and it will be that much harder for someone to pull the mob off of you.
I actually disagree with spamming LHW, it heals for so little over what you get hit for even with SR up. I would rather take my chances with my combined dodge/block/parry/miss in a raid setting and let the healers do that job instead.
If you use Pawn and just change the string provided in the OP, you don't have to deal with most of that sillyness.
Is it better to just disable enhancers AEP values option and use Pawn for that then? Like you said, just changing the values of the string in the OP to that of the simulators?
Paradox: the crit is already added to your paper doll stats, so no it just adds the proc.
As for Enhancer, I turn off the display of every stat weight system EXCEPT for AEP.
I get my EP from Yo's. I enter it using /enhancer EPNumbers AEP CrazyShamanStats <stat weights>.
Incidentally, I'm a little bugged about Enhancer's rounding system and the fact that it defaults to a high-end raid value for meta gems. My hit rating is worth 1.56 and my crit rating 1.64. Both of these round to 1.6, and so Enhancer things Crit Rating = Hit Rating. That, combined with the meta gem thing, leads it to suggest that [Helm of the Claw] is an upgrade (I'm fairly certain it isn't).
Enhancer accepts up to 2 decimals. It didn't use to by has recently. All my values have 2 decimals and I'm having no problems with it. Also, Helm of the Claw is actually a very nice item. Its the best helm heading into ZA or T5 content. The only reason I replaced it with my T4 helm is I knew people wouldn't understand that its better (that and it looks hideous).
Yo's simulator is producing some... odd results. Something is definitely amiss with it, as I'm consistently getting EP values in the 6-7 range for all non-AP/Str stats except APen, for which I'm getting around 1.
It's best to make a macro that swaps your MH and OH for your healing weapon and shield, and another macro that swaps back, and keep those on your hotbars or bound to easy to reach keys. Swapping back is particularly annoying because most off-hand weapons for a shaman are actually "One-Hand" and simply left clicking the item from your bags will swap it with your Main Hand weapon instead of with your shield.
I've found that using the 'QuickWeaponSwap' mod does this pretty well, it's easy to find on cursed. I keep my dps weapons sets and my healing weapons on keybinds so I can drop quick heals in battle. I've gotten 4k+ crit HWs, so it's definately useful every now and again.
If he wants to help people achieve MAXDPS.com, then he doesn't have it right.
See, I'm a skeptic, too -- but unless one can PROVE one's assumptions, one isn't really theorycrafting. Here's a good assumption to start with:
If some n000blet goes to the site and finds out that with his 1.3 daggers he really needs to load up on +hit (because the site doesn't respect the 3 second cooldown), then the site is doing a disservice by a) not showing how bad his dps really will be and b) recommending more +hit so that WF will proc more.
Well, again, there are lots of reasons to use slower weapons, of which the cooldown is only one. MaxDPS does show slow weapons being better, but the amount of the disparity seems low. If you enter a pair of 1.3s weapons, you get a "DPS value" that's about 4% lower than if you enter a pair of 2.7s weapons (on Yo's it's more like 17%). As a result, there are some bad suggestions in there such as Stellaris and the Stormreaver Warblades, and Guile of Khoraazi is way over-represented. In any case, the best weapons are 2.6.
As for hit rating: using 5-man dungeon stats (1000 AP, 15% crit, 15% hit), your "DPS per 10" ratings are Hit Rating: 1.60, Crit Rating: 2.73, Strength: 4.18 with 1.3s weapons, vs 1.77, 2.85 and 4.38 for 2.7s. So actually, it's upvaluing HR with SLOW weapons (just checeked, yo's does the same) -- but it's also making it blatantly obvious that strength and crit rating are more important.
Does the site suggest maximum DPS? The gear this site claims is best is the SAME as the gear other methods claims is best, so maybe. As an armor upgrade selection site it does really well even though its weapon choices are off. However, I don't think it's impossible to find some way to generally express the 3s cooldown's effect on DPS in a flat equation -- say, each .1s of speed beyond 1.3s is worth 1.2% additional damage -- derived from simulations.
Last edited by Toots Hepcat : 12/13/07 at 5:59 PM.
12/13/07, 11:55 AM
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