Just found this on the general boards, posted by Nethaera, Blizzard CM:
WoW Forums -> 2.1 Windfury Is Still Bugged!


I'm not looking for moral support saying that this is fucking lame. I know it's fucking lame. However, several months back in 1.x this change was announced and retracted by Blizzard, citing potential faction imbalance because at the time windfury was faction-specific. There was a thread on this forum discussing it that as far as I can tell has long since been pruned. The conclusion was, as I recall, warriors still needed windfury, but the advantage of WF vs GoA for a rogue was less clear. (This was with level 60 characters and talent builds.)

Any warriors/rogues want to weigh in on how much this would affect your DPS, and how much DPS you would expect to gain from white-damage-only windfury?

We will know a lot more tonight after some WWS logs. The affect of windfury for 33/28 warriors will impact both white damage and rage generation. Let's try to get some real data in this thread if possible =)

In general (based on my last wws) sinister strike(swords/fists) accounts for 25% of our damage (assuming a 1s/5r rotation) over the course of a raid. Given a 25% proc rate on that said 25% it will nerf overall white damage by no less than 6%. Over the course of a encounter or night, 6% adds up really fast. In a fight where you do 400k damage you'll lose 24,000 damage, which is quite a bit. This is only for rogues (and completely rough), god knows what this will mean for 33/28 warriors.

The original change was that it would be on white damage only attacks, which was quickly reversed.

This change means that while instant specials won't work, those regularly spammed on-next-attack abilities will still work, which is where the outcry arose.

I guess it's a nerf to the extra DPS done by warriors/rogues with a WF totem, but having a minimal effect on tank rage generation/dps/tps.

Considering Combat Potency for Rogues should have no bearing on Windfury totem evaluation. Windfury totem is a mainhand only buff and Combat Potency procs on offhand hits, unless I'm missing some subtle interaction.

While I don't have any hard numbers to present, intuitively, this will easily affect MS/Slam or Spamstring Warriors the most.

Seminarca, more energy from CP means more instant attacks (backstab/sinister strike) so that means more WF procs. (Before this change /-: )

Not figuring for specials, and given a 2.6 mainhand, assuming 100% uptime for SnD (and no further haste) and SS using ALL energy - (which means this is 'worst case scenario' - i.e. highest realistic ratio of SS procs to white hit procs)

1.82 MH speed = ~33 hits per minute = 6.59 procs/min from MH
SS every 4 sec = 15 SS hits per minute = 3 procs/min from SS

Instead of 9.59 windfury attacks/min, you have 6.59, a loss of 31% of rogues windfury damage, IN THE WORST CASE. It's still very reasonably a 25% dmg nerf to rogues, and quite possibly more than that for warriors given that WF Totem is a larger BUFF to them than it is to rogues.


Doh, yeah - forgot to add combat potency energy into the mix. So it's not the worst case - it's actually going to be worse than this. Suck.

(Adding in 1.5 speed offhand, hasted 30% gives 1.05 speed, or 57.14 atks/min, 11.428 of which will proc 15 energy for 171.42 energy/min, which is 4.28 additional SS, or .86 additional procs/min.

6.59 proc/min from MH
3.86 from SS
10.45 procs/min total, down to 6.59 = 37% loss of WF damage - I *will* claim (without doing the math) that haste effects will actually lessen the blow, since it's far easier for haste to give you 5 more attacks (on average, 1 more proc) than it is for haste to give you 200 more energy via Combat Potency (5 SS = 1 more proc), so haste will scale you towards less of your WF dmg being removed.

That makes sense, cheers.

WF damage goes down quite a bit, but the immediate damage provided by it is even less.

Rogues actually avoid the nerf a lot better than warriors.

Fallacy in logic right here - it's not how big a % of your damage it is, it's how much % of attacks it is. Since SS has added damage, I'd assume 25% of damage would be less than 25% of attacks.

Edit: Quick, rounding math is giving me about 8% less WF procs for Combat Dagger given my last WWS parse. Going further, and as a warning my estimate will be a little low due to WF attacks doing more damage than regular attacks, I was getting just under a 1% loss in total DPS for Combat Dagger.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here, this is a pretty significant nerf to tank threat generation and dps.

HS makes up a small portion of our melee, nearly every other attack that could proc WF previously was an instant (Devastate, Sunder, Revenge etc).

If Neth's post is correct, then the thread title is wrong, it already exists in-game.


However, the location of the response was strange, it was in a thread asking for the 3 second cooldown to be removed.

My preliminary Napkinmath™ still shows WF being better for rogues than GoA + DP MH / IP OH. Of course, that kinda says how strong WF was to begin with.... :P

I'm in SSC right now (off-night joyride) and windfury has yet to proc from hamstring. Purely anecdotal. We're logging it for WWS so i'll be able to check after the fact. If I don't play like a moron I can give a vague baseline for the impact on 33/28.

What's infuriating isn't that they changed the ability, it was one of the best buffs in the game and it could certainly be seen as unbalanced. What gets my goat is the lack of communication and context from the developers. If one of them had posted "This needed to be changed because of W and X, and if it pushes the game too far Y and Z, we'll make changes Q and R. Never fear, we have our eyes on this." But that didn't happen.

But this doesn't correlate at all. If a skill was only usable once in an entire fight, but did .5 million damage, and you did 1 million damage over the entire fight, that one skill wasn't "usable for 50% of the time".

SS Attacks / (Melee Attacks - Windfury Attacks + SS Attacks) = % of total attacks that were SS (yes, I know this is ignoring finishers/shiv).

I just did the math for my guild. It worked out to be a 1.5% reduction in my damage over two actual fights which I used to extrapolate the change onto.

Numbers based on past fights and this is "napkinmath(tm)" I've just approximated at various points because I wanted a feel, not some Steven Hawking-esque proof.

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To give people an idea of the effect on sword rogues;

My sinister strike (yellow) attacks make up 136 hits from 797 attacks (recent mags kill) or 175 of 1202 (morogrim kill)

MH speed = 2.7, OH speed = 1.5 ; Gives 1.8 OH hits for every MH hit, so MH hits = 236

Instead of 136 + 236 (372) proccing WF it is now only 236. This is 36% less.

So, across 797 attacks, 55 of them ended up with a WF hit, and 1202 ended up with 97.

36% of 55 = 19.8
36% of 97 = 34.92

Total Damage against Mags = 533,000
Total Damage against Morogrim = 774,000

Approximate MH white damage average = 800 raid buffed. Adjust for WF = 1000

Loss of damage against Mags = 19.8 * 1000 = 19800
Loss of damage against Morogrim = 34.92 * 1000 = 34920

Percentage loss of damage due to WF fix (Mags) = 19800 / 533,000 = 3.7 %
Percentage loss of damage due to WF fix (Moro) = 34920 / 774,000 = 4.5 %

So, let's just say a 4% damage loss.
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Worse than when I first did the math. Thanks to those that pointed out the errors.

you have a percent (of damage lost) for just your white damage?

Pewsey, was the 797 attacks including only MH+SS+evisc attacks or did you count offhand swings in there as well? Because I calculate that I lose over 35% of my WF attacks compared to your 16% when only considering those three (offhand obviously cannot proc WF attacks).

to be honest, the amount of mechanics that this nerf hits is irritating.

Assumedly 20% of those 797 attacks were the Windfury Proc though? If so you'd be looking at 136/664 instead so about 20% of attacks unable to proc WF - not a huge difference to 16% but something that leapt out.

Ah bugger something else I missed in my analysis... I was using the same approach as Pewsey the first time, then I forgot my offhand attacks, now I have forgotten to subtract WFs. Hold on, can WF attacks proc WF still?