Edit: Removed some unsupportable data.

Long story short though you do gain dps by waiting for the cooldown to fade.

Which sim used is irrelvant I am sure they all have code like this

If (ssCD < ssDelay) // ssDelay usually 10.0, ssCD is time since last ss.
{
//reset ssCD
//do the swings.
}

turn this into
if (ssCD < ssDelay)
{
if (bWfCd == false) // add this line with whatever var they are using to track the wfcd.
{
//reset cd
// do the swings
}
}

and rerun the sims. Then everyone can use whatever sim they prefer. I think they would all show a greater than 1% gain just by waiting for the cooldown to expire every time.

I've lost a bit of steam... the problem with flurry makes me think that it's a pointless exercise. Until I have a good model for that, I'm pretty much disgusted with the whole thing.

I only like models where I can test game against reality and say "look, they match!"

edit - Berg - if you have a whole armory, including talents, how well does your sim match actual dps tests? If you know something I don't, I'm all ears.

I'm looking for a few opinions here. There has been an argument between a few members in my guild over twisting GoA and WF totems or keeping WF down in melee heavy groups. One side says the DPS gained from buffing the party by twisting overweighs the gains of a full shock rotation and holding SS for the WF cooldown, the other side says the opposite is more total DPS. I'm leaning more towards a full shock rotation & waiting for the WF cooldown. Anyone dug deep into this?

I tried this out using some of the macros people had posted last week. I wasn't even in combat, just sitting in Shattrath dropping totems. I gave it about 5 minutes of use before I concluded that:
- it requires a lot of concentration on a button in your UI instead of whats going on the game world, which is probably a lot more important
- it used a hell of a lot of mana which means no emergency healing
- watching the WF buff on my weapon I noticed that unless you drop the WF totem earlier than the 9 seconds it lasts on the weapon that you ran the risk of the buff running off someone and missing an opportunity for a proc while you were refreshing the totem. If you're late on the drop, or have a decent amount of latency, you could have this happen quite frequently.

I didn't give it a lot of testing time, and didn't even try it in combat, but to me it personally felt incredibly clunky and took my attention away from anything other than the macro. Not something I'll be doing in a raid.

It is entirely possible to have 100% WF uptime and ~90% GoA uptime if your macro is bound with stormstrike (cast sequence SS - WF - GoA, spammed heavily). Use WF rank 1 if you can't sustain a higher rank, the benefit of simultaneous GoA is greater than the increase in AP on only WF procs, especially for yourself and if you have a feral druid DPSing in your group (with 34.44% unbuffed crit, 55+% crit is attainable for me with double goose, LoTP, and GoA).

If you check my armory, note that I have a Shattrath flask on but it is not affecting my stats (I'm logged outside of Hyjal/BT/TK/SSC).

So do people actually try this in raids? I can't imagine trying to do totem twisting on any encounters that require decent mobility and interrupting from shocks. If anyone has had success with it, I'd like to know.

It is only really effective in situations where the following parameters are met:

1. You aren't moving, and if you are, it isn't very far.
2. You have extremely high DPS rogues in your group.
3. You need to burn something down.
4. The fight doesn't punish you for having low mana.

I run the SS-WF-GoA macro on Teron Gorefiend where, unless I get ghosted, my job is to stand there and DPS. WWS for Teron in which no DPS classes had to kill constructs.

Glad to read this because i was planning to make Drakefist MH and S2(2.6) axe OH. It is very hard to think of putting the higher DPS weapon in my OH vs the T2 drakemaw hammer in your MH. Shaman are in the same position hunters were before and somewhat still slower is just always better.

Although it took a bit getting used to, totemweaving has become second nature to me. I totemweave WF & GoA all the time now even in 5 mans. I have the macro set up independent of my SS however and I like it that way. I've also found weaving WF & TA helpful when beginning a fight or to help lower the TPS of my group if they're getting too high.

Although I have a general idea of when I need to recycle the totems, I'm going to try and set up a custom timer using the Ace2 mod Quartz. I already use it as a castbar and GCD timer.

Depending on the fight, I'm also finding that I need to be more conservative with my shocks but most of the time, a SR + mana pot is enough to keep me going. Talents to reduce mana cost on totems is a must (Mental quickness & Totemic Focus). My biggest concern right now is sometimes the totem cycling coincides exactly with my SS CD and GCD screws me into either delaying my SS or delaying the totem cycle. I wish totems were on a seperate GCD or had no GCD at all.

I hope blizzard doesn't catch wind of this and nerf it. They put WF and GoA on the same totem for a reason.

I was going to post this exact sentiment earlier but figured I'd be accused of beating a dead horse. They really cannot have intended people to do this type of totem stacking given how the totem elements work.

Well, it's a possible mechanics bug that works in the favor of the player, so we can expect a fix sooner rather than later probably.

I was using a SS->WF->GoA cycle and that was just not working for me since it was dependent on getting that SS off before the rest of the cycle. I think I'll try switching to a WF->GoA->SS cycle, or WF->SS->GoA. Overall tho, I hate doing it. I find it hard to focus on what's going on around me when I'm stressing over making sure the totems go down when they have to. I'm mostly hoping it gets "fixed" so I don't feel guilty for not doing it.

Where would I go about finding the simulator to check what items optimize my dps?

The first post of this very thread.

Im curious as to peoples thoughts on the effect of using a higher dps, fast weapon with another weapon buff in the offhand.

At some point, Slow/Fast(Purple) WF/FT has to be better than Slow/Slow(green) WF/WF.

I know the OP says to move to an AH green rather than an epic dagger, but I find it hard to believe that the dps difference cant be made up by sheer DPS on the offhand with Flametongue helping as well. Not to mention the MH will now be unencumbered by off hand WFs...

I think we are starting to get to the point of going in endless circles with this post. There are only so many times that someone can do the math on fast offhands with our horrible imbues like FT and rockbiter- It's already been tested in the numerous other threads that gave birth to this one, and the answer is still WF/WF with slow weapons.

Thank you all for a sane discussion and an excellent collection of valuable enhancement shaman information.

After reading 30 pages, I have noticed that there is no mention of down shifting. Twisting is mentioned (TA & WF), but I think down shifting is also a useful tactic instead of dying to wipe aggro.

Down shifting - Changing weapons/items in the main hand, off hand, or both so as to achieve a reduction in aggro, but not lose the benefits of buffs from talent and item procs.

An example is to equip [Blackout Truncheon] in your off hand to dramatically decrease your DPS while still keeping UR and totems down for the group. Not only does it seem like a more realistic solution than suicide-ankh, it maintains the synergy of the raid and allows you to shed hate. Granted, it is at the cost of personal DPS, but you can just as easily up shift back to the slow offhand when your aggro cools off.

I realize this is a tactic and not a further exploration or clarification of mechanics or itemization, but it is a tactic only possible by the existence of many of the mechanics that you have theorized and tested.

I downloaded Pater's java sim, and changed the lines that fired off SS to the following:

Then I made a SPAM_SS constant, which can be true or false. If it's true, it SS's whenever it's lit. If it's false, it waits until WF is off cooldown.

I used the standard stats that come with the Java sim, and the standard equipment (gladiator OH, Decapitator MH). All I changed was the SS latency to 10.5 for a little more realism.

I ran a few sims, and my results were:

Spamming SS whenever it's lit: Avg DPS = 772
Waiting on SS until WF is off cooldown: Avg DPS = 791

So, according to Pater's sim (which, by the way, is pretty sweet), waiting for WF to be up before firing SS seems to be a decent DPS increase. Would be interesting to see if this is true in real life as well.

There is probably only 1 fight that I can think of where I'd actually need to do this - void reaver. In other cases, our tank has enough TPS where I will never catch up to him. And on void reaver, its a 100% agro wipe to battle anhk so you can continue to go full steam on it.

If you need to drop aggro and "shaman vanish" isn't a reasonable option, you're much better off to stop shocking than to reduce your melee DPS, due to the 15% threat reduction from Spirit Weapons. Ankhing up is quite reasonable on Void Reaver which is really the only fight where this is a severe problem. (Hydross is very aggro-sensitive too, but that's because of the constant drops... I don't see weapon swapping as effective there.)

On what are you basing this? waiting for up to 2.9 seconds in bettween each stormstrike _CANNOT_ possibly be better, without doing the nunbers each second you have to wait is 10% longer time in between your SS, over a long fight that is massive.

The problem I find with Battle Anhking is that you lose all your buffs which for me is like 800 AP which pretty much gimps my dps hardcore for the rest of the fight. Downgrading looks great, never thought of it.