Kind of off-topic, but... Is there an easy way to get to these? DM is annoyingly buggy these days, and there's lots of groups that you have to kill in order to get there, going the normal way, some of which seem to be chain pulling more groups now. I just spent an hour or so trying to get there and died a few times to strange chain-aggro that shouldn't have happened, and my inner door key magically disappeared during one of the deaths, so I got annoyed and quit. I'm guessing you can't just sneak by Kromcrush, nor would I imagine he be easy even at 70. I'm probably making it a lot harder than it is, if these guys are actually a viable alternative to Blasted Lands mobs... I hope, anyway.

[e] Actually I tried again, and Kromcrush is easy with an earth elemental to play with the adds. Overall it's still a pain to get through solo, though.

Does anybody have Executioner/Mongoose performing equivalently or better than double Mongoose right now? I was surprised to find that running double Mongoose with my current gear would result in a slight increase in dps (about 5 dps). This increase would be the same regardless of weapons (I was testing the dps increase of different weapon upgrades at the time).

Exe/goose turns up a few dps better than double goose for me, even with only 224 armor pen. Base crit is almost 36%, so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it.

I've got a question of my own. How many of you end game shaman actually wait for windfury cooldown before stormstriking? I've never done this; it didn't seem like it'd make much of a difference since I had dragonstrike and dst. Since I've replaced my dragonstrike, I've been a bit curious. With totem gcd being 1 second in patch, I think the extra work would be worth it if it does in fact increase my dps by 20 like Yo!'s sim suggests.

Just looking for a little bit of feedback, exploring something new should be fun.

Yo would it be possible to to model in resilence in your simulator? I know i can aritifically lower my crit rating but it does not factor in lowered damage on critical strikes. I plan to gear up for arenas with highest possible damage and I am not entirly sure if 2.11 eap on crit rating is actually better than 2 on str that i see in model.

I don't always wait, no. I do tend to wait if I have a lot of GCD incoming at the same time. On Teron I usually don't bother though, I just spam those buttons :P.

And Executioner/Mongoose comes out about 10 dps better for me, too.

This is a very Good Question, and there are others related to it, such as armor, that are equally important.

I've been thinking about this for a few weeks (I am preparing to gear up for a run on the arena), and I've come to the conclusion that EP just doesn't cut it for PvP. Personal survivability stats come into play as well, in a way they don't in PvE. I don't know what the answer is -- but in either case, it belongs in the PvP forums.

One thing I've wondered if people have considered is that having an elemental shaman in your raid makes stormstriking on cooldown a little more worthwhile, since more of his lightning bolts will be affected by the debuff. How would we calculate this?

Windfury can proc from either autoattacks or stormstrike.

I have a pair of 2.6s weapons, whose average swing time is around 1.98 (after flurry, 2x mongoose, passive haste & Dragonstrike are accounted for).

These weapons swing about 10 times per 10s. Stormstrike swings 2 times per 10s. That means that, in the abstract, Stormstrike accounts for at least 1/6 of my chances to proc Windfury.

However, stormstrike can't miss. Autoattack swings can. I have about 17% to hit, giving my swings an 11% miss chance. This means that I actually have an average of around 8.9 swings per 10s. SS really accounts for around 18% of my WF proc chances.

But all this depends on using SS when Windfury is not on cooldown. You actually don't miss a lot of damage by holding back your stormstrikes, but you potentially gain a lot by shortening the windfury lag.

Shocks and strike should come off cooldown at the same time once every 16s or so. If they come off cooldown and WF is still in cooldown, I shock. If they come off cooldown and WF is NOT in cooldown, I strike. Decision is easy, and I put my WF cooldown counter (Enhancer -- thanks for this wicked tool) just on top of my SS and shock cycle keys on the hotbar so I always have the information I need to make it.

It is my guess that it would be very, very difficult to modify Stormstrike usage by Boomkin/Elemental if there's any rogues. My gut feeling is that it would end up averaging to 'not matter all that much', but it depends on how many SS's you delay, and by how long. Unless the numbers add up to an extra 2 or 3 full Stormstrikes, it probably doesn't matter much at all. My assumption is that the Elemental/Boomkin will get 1/2 of the Stormstrike charges, per SS, on average.

It's entirely possible that I'm 100% wrong.

BTW, the newest version of dqd now supports a /dqd arena flag (thanks Rob!) which changes stormstrike to 9 seconds from the normal 10. I don't have it auto-check for 4 piece gladiator, but you can set it yourself. It also is now translated into french (thanks Fluweel!), and it supports windfury events both as they are now, and as they will be in 2.4 and onwards (Huge thanks to Hedin!).

Enhancer, of course, does a whole lot more than dqd does, but if you want the minimal set of bars, I plan on keeping it updated for stuff like this. My main project going forward will involve playing with Ace3, my rogue mod, and a new graphical affect (I think it's new) which should look pretty cool if I can make it work.

Just to clarify, if rogues are using DP on the OH and getting WF on the MH and do not have romulo's vial equipped (I hate that f'ing trinket ), then they won't be stealing Stormstrike debuffs.

That is definitely the case. Also, our hunters don't use scorpid pets, so that is not a concern. If we assume an average of ~1 second.

Let's assume a 5 minute fight (300 seconds).

Stormstriking on Cooldown w/ twisting
Normal rotation: SS, FS, WF, GOA, ES, SS, WF, GOA, FS, SS, WF, GOA, ES -- repeat. This cycle takes 30 seconds and there is a small area where your shocks are on cooldown, but you don't want to earth shock immediately following the stormstrike application.
# of stormstrikes: 3 (1 SS per 10 seconds)
# of shocks: 2 FS, 2 ES (1 shock per 7.5 seconds)

Assuming stormstrike debuff stays up for 3 seconds (or two lightning bolts, one closely following the stormstrike and one 2 seconds later) every 10 seconds, then we have a straight 30% uptime over 300 seconds.

Stormstriking when WF Off Cooldown w/ twisting
This is where I'm not quite sure how to do things... but if we assume the stormstrike debuff still stays up for 3 seconds, but with a ~1 second delay on every stormstrike (stormstrike every 11 seconds instead of every 10 seconds), then we've got a 27% uptime on stormstrike over 300 seconds. Of particular note, 300/10 = 30 stormstrike debuffs. 300/11 = 27.27 stormstrike debuffs.

I don't know if that helps at all, but that's just something I've been tossing around for a while.

Good call, my bad.

That's all well and good, but the uptime isn't nearly as important as what is eating the SS charges. In fact, given that it's a two charge debuff with refreshes coming at best every 10 seconds, I'd say there's really no point at all in calculating the SS debuff uptime. You generally only care about debuff uptime when it's a persistent useful debuff (Imp Scorch, CoE, Misery, etc., etc.). If those fall off, it's a problem. If SS falls off, it almost definitely means those charges were used.

Ideally, it's an elem shaman since boomkin are generally sticking to arcane spells against bosses. If SS and FS are paired together, then even shocking on cooldown shouldn't eat a SS charge before the elem shaman can take advantage of it.

Just thought I would throw this out there, if you have BM hunters, they are most likely using Ravagers or Wind Serpents. The Wind Serpent special attack will eat your Stormstrike. As it's been said, its usually an Elemental Shaman, or in my case, Wind Serpents and Elemental Shaman (when we actually run with one) that steal my Stormstrike debuff most of the time.

And I thought I read something here on EJ that said that the initial application of a Deadly Poison stack, being the first one applied, will actually eat a Stormstrike charge, but the additional applications and DoT ticks do not. I will try to find out where it is and post a link. If it's wrong, ignore this.

It does not. If it was posted it was misinformation.

Let's think a bit (since I'm a bit out of the enh stuff for awhile) about the flurry problem:
- basically we know, dodged/missed swings do not take up a load, while glancing does
- so we have several types of swings which can occure during flurry:
- - glancing white swing (can be skipped due to the attack table)
- - normal swing (non - crit)
- - crit swing
- - normal windfury (non - crit)
- - crit windfury
- - normal stormstrike (non - crit)
- - crit stormstrike

so let's sum up, (1 - dodge) is called dodge for simplicity here, I assume yellow hit cap

white swings: (1 - crit)^3 is the probability that we don't crit in 3 swings

Now for the following let's assume an average weapon speed of 2.6

So the next question simply is:
How much time do these 3 normal white swings take?
- 3 * 1.3s = 3.9s, we attack on average every 1.3 seconds, call it aatimefor3 for now.
But we're talking fully flurried, so it is 1. ((2.0/2)*3)

We can exactly have ONE windfury proc in these 3.9s, it does not matter which swing it procs, just if it does (and does crit) or does not.

So we get an additional: 2 * dodge * (1 - (1-wfprocprob)^3) swings from wf, basically the probability we proc wf in those 3 swings and we actually don't miss those swings.

And finally we get a certain amount of stormstrike swings in 3.9s, since we get 2*dodge in 10s:
2*dodge*(aatimefor3/10), we actually do have to add the stormstrike swings to the possible wf proccing swings too.

So at the end we have the following equation for flurry uptime:

flurry := 1 - (1- crit)^(3+ 2 * dodge * (1 - (1-wfprocprob)^(3+2*dodge*(aatimefor3/10))) + 2*dodge*(aatimefor3/10));

Addendum:
One thing i forgot, if it actually procs windfury, the next round of flurried swings probably has no 3 swings to proc wf.
We need to actually include this, this gets complicated though:
For simplicity we could assume, that really only aatimefor3/3 swings can proc windfury, meaning instead of 3 swings we actually only have 1.0 swings, but that does not really solve the inclusion of stormstrike.
Worstcase scenario, our 3 swings don't proc wf, but stormstrike procs wf, which then crits. We only then have a 0.0 seconds window for wf to proc (3.0s - 3.0 cooldown).
I guess we should simplify that to: (1 - (1-wfprocprob)^(3.0/3)

So the simplified version (with corrected wf cooldown) looks like:
flurry := 1 - (1- crit)^(3+ 2 * dodge * (1 - (1-wfprocprob)^(aatimefor3/3)) + 2*dodge*(aatimefor3/10));

Plotted that looks like:

Thanks for the detailed write up! I'm off to Pennsylvania atm, but will read it more carefully later.

Given the rewritten flurry equations + a few other fixes here and there for (close to optimal 2.4 gear) my current equivalency values are:
CR: 1.854 EP
HR: 1.831 EP
HasteR: 1.810 EP
Expertise: 3.156 EP
ArmorPen: 0.321 EP

This is fairly similar to the calculated values from Yo's sim. Keep in mind that especially CritRating,HitRating and HasteRating are very close together, so these exact values are correct for that gear only.

The gear for the above values is: Pastey.net - paste bin

I've added RC3 of my weo2 program with the changes described above.

Well, the comparison would be rather simple.

Run two sims with you waiting to SS and you not waiting to SS. Note the DPS difference.

Take your elem shaman's avg. LB strike (accounting for hit/crit/raid buffs and debuffs/etc.) and multiply it by 1.2, subtract the original expected LB strike value, and multiply that difference by the # of stormstrike debuffs lost by waiting to SS outside of cooldown. Then divide that total by the length of the fight and compare with your expected personal DPS gained by waiting to SS outside of WF cooldown.

Whichever is the greater contribution to raid DPS should be the determining factor.

Shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes.

An interesting twist that would affect calculations *very slightly*, could happen if windfury works for us in a similar way that it works for classes who get it via totems. If you check the roguecraft 101 forums, you can see that windfury actually acts as a temporary buff that increases attack power (for ALL attacks) for a teeny bit of time.

http://elitistjerks.com/683746-post2062.html

From memory, this is how Windfury Weapon used to work when it was just an additional two white hits. You could open your stats page and see the AP value jump up when WF procced. I think it's pretty unlikely it still does since there are so many yellow attacks with "does weapon damage +x" (even though ours is the only one with +AP).