That makes about a million times more sense. I stand by my "fucking lame" statement in the original post, but that at least explains why they decided to do this in a hotfix.


You completely missed my point. What would make sense to me would be that cosmetic/convenience changes (orc shoulders and a few other gear-size bugs, 30m blessings, etc) could go live with minimal testing, but any major change to game balance or mechanics would need to spend some time on the PTR first. If Blizzard is being so cautious about implementing simple, universally positive shit like not making paladins rebuff the raid every 15 minutes, I'm surprised that major mechanical change went live with no public testing, especially when Blizzard has apparently tried to make that change before and screwed it up.

Or for all I know, white-attack-only WF could have been on PTR since it went up, and no one noticed because there's no reason to do group content on the PTR right now.

"* Voice Chat - The new Voice Chat feature is now available in game. Players will need to go into the options menu under Sound & Voice to activate it. Volume sliders are available for the microphone, speakers, and game-audio fade (which automatically lowers the game audio when a voice communication is received), as is a "push-to-talk" setting. Right-clicking on a player's name now includes the option to mute or unmute that player. Muting another player blocks all voice chat from him or her; the ignore feature now blocks both voice chat and text chat from that player.
* Chat Channels- New Chat Channel controls and functionality are now available under the chat tab in the Social Window of the interface. The interface will now show the channels players are in or are available, depending on the area of the world they are in, along with new private channel controls.
* A new feature for reporting players as being AFK in battlegrounds by right clicking has been added. When enough reports are registered, a 30 second debuff will begin to count down. Once the timer is up a new debuff will appear that will prevent the player from gaining any honor while it is on. This debuff can be negated as soon as the player engages in combat.
* Daze: Defense skill will no longer reduce the chance players have to receive the Daze effect when attacked from behind by enemies.
* Non-combat pets now have the tag "Companion" instead of "Minion".
* Damage and health leech effects always affect flying players even if they are immune to the rest of the spell's affects while in flight.
* Dueling players may not use a Lightwell that they didn't create themselves.
* [Hunter] Raptors can now learn Dash.
* [Shaman] Earth Shield is now canceled at logout.
* Ankhs now stack to ten. "

WoW BlueTracker: World of Warcraft PTR Patch 2.2.0

It has since been removed from the ptr notes. as well as a few other things. Blue has not commented on it either, so I do not know if it was a mistake, if it is a preview of a future patch, or exactly what is going on.

Does anyone have any cold hard numbers on comparing elemental vs enhancement after this nerf to windfury (and nerf to enhancement raid viability) and or some numbers showing the usefulness on wars/rogues with this change

I'm glad you are happy that it nerfs you a lot less than other classes and specs while severely nerfing Protection Warrior threat.

I don't see how this changes enhancement raid viability. You still want totems in your melee group, and enhancement DPS isn't affected by this change. The change applies to windfury totem, not windfury weapon.

What I'd be interested in would be some numbers from classes that benefit from WF on the benefits of WF vs GoA under the new rules:


Combat Sword Rogue: GoA increases my DPS by x%, WF by y%
Combat Dagger Rogue:
MS Warrior:
Fury Warrior:
Ret Paladin:

Thing is, even nerfed windfury totem is just as much better than its alternatives (agility, spell damage, fire proc) as windfury weapon is from its alternatives (fire proc, +flat dps, ice proc). Why? Because the devs still haven't learned that scaling with gear is incredibly important.

Either scale everything or nothing. Otherwise you end up with tons of abilities that are at best situationally useful.

What the heck would a change to Windfury Totem have to do with Enhancements viability as a DPS spec vs Elemental? I think you misread the hotfix.

Does stormstrike still proc WF after this change?

or did it ever proc WF idk

As a dps warrior struggling to be viable in raids in early SSC, so I found 33/28 and everything was cool, now I have to go back to fury, and with a nerf. Screw it, I'm spec'ing for PvP. gg blizzard.

I'm guessing he's wondering if the difference in personal damage between Elemental and Enhancement with the change to Windfury Totem (which was a large portion of any Shaman spec's raid damage contribution) is going to make Enhancement less desireable over Elemental now? Both specs can drop SoE and WF, but some of the additional damage in those Windfury hits was also coming from UR. The reduction in WF procs, lessens the contribution of UR, but I don't think by such a degree that it's going to make Enhancement seem less viable for a melee group. Battle Shout also does absolutely nothing for Elemental.

Enhancement could already pull out very impressive personal DPS (Sebudai), and WWS doesn't directly show the contribution his buffs gave.

Yes SS does and still will proc WF, this change is the totem only, not the shaman enchant.

I was finally taken on an SSC/TK raid last tuesday, even though our regular enhancement shaman was already there. We had read how some guilds had great success using 2 enh shaman - one for the melee dps, one for the tank group. I'm not sure if the effect of the hotfix on tank tps will change our mindset on raid composition or not.

I have 3 WWS parses(soon to be 4) since this hotfix went in that we can compare to old parses.

Mother Shahraz pre-hotfix: WWS
Mother Shahraz post-hotfix: WWS
Gurtogg Bloodboil pre-hotfix: WWS
Gurtogg Bloodboil post-hotfix: WWS
Reliquary of Souls pre-hotfix: WWS
Reliquary of Souls post-hotfix: WWS

We should have a parse from Illidari Council in the next day or so also. Anyway, based off of my limited experience with these changes I really don't think they're that big of a deal. I need to see a full clear of Hyjal and Black Temple to be certain, but I'm pretty sure melee dps will still come out on top, just like it always has, and I think arms warriors will still be completely viable. I certainly feel like I'm still worth my spot in the raid.

The only class this change is really questionable for is arms warriors. We'll have to see how that pans out, but Blood Frenzy is worth a ton of damage so I think they're still fine.

I really don't care that they hotfixed this instead of putting it on test. It's certainly not worth quitting over. Class balance is an ever-changing thing and if warriors are somehow not viable after all this, guess what, Blizzard will fix it.

As far as melee being overpowered, I'm not so sure, but they're pretty damn close. If anything I think mages and elemental shaman are probably a little underpowered. Warlocks, hunters and shadow priests are fine in my opinion.

Well, not quite. Prot threat generation takes a hit from this. OT situations where we have to maintain threat without getting constantly beat on is going to be even more affected.

List the situations in which this is the case. Voidreaver? Maybe Gurtogg? For my guild it's pretty rare. Quite often our protection warriors don't even get a shaman in their group to begin with.

The tank group is the last place I put a shaman, and run with 4+ every raid. Does everyone really give their tanks Windfury as a serious priority?

If you're talking about personal damage, since shaman use WF weapon that's not going to affect anything. I think what you're trying to say is that the group gets less damage because UR contribution is lessened due to nerf in windfury for the group members because UR affects them less? I seriouly doubt that's going to be to that severity, especially when enhancement shaman have improved SoE as well as improved WF

in all seriousness, this nerf doesn't hurt raid dps that much, but people are making it out to be a lot more severe than it actually is. Kind of makes you wonder how alliance did dps before TBC, heh

Yeah this seems to be a weird trend. We normally have at least 4 shaman in our raids aswell, but even if we didn't, the shaman would almost always be going in dps groups.

-ninja edit-
I think I do pretty well for myself damage-wise, and it's not like I can vanish. If anyone is going to over aggro it's going to be me, and I don't really hold back on any encounter. If your MT is having trouble holding aggro without Windfury, that's something you should probably look into further because they're most likely doing something wrong.

Yeah, I'll definitely organize a tank windfury group if we have a warrior OT. So on Gurtogg or Void Reaver, for sure, the tanks get Windfury. But that's about it.

If you run with two enhance shamans like Blood Legion then it makes sense. But we usually have one enhance, one ele, and then ~2 resto. I'm usually going to put one resto shaman ina hunter group, and then the other in a healer group over a tank group.

If you have a Fury Warrior, you're hurting his DPS if you don't put a WF Totem in the tank's group on fights where Melee DPS only damages the boss. My gear isn't that good and I can hold a constant 1000-1300 TPS in an optimal group setup when I really want to do maximum DPS.

I always use a windfury totem in the main tank group. It's not the only thing you gain, there is also a strength totem and bloodlust, and maybe agi in some occasions. Like I said before even Teron/morogrim do not hit had enough to supply me with infinite rage. We don't use threatmeter crap, so I have to be sure I'm ahead of dps going all out.

The problem here is that, without threat meters, you can never be sure if your DPS are actually threat-capped or if they're buff-capped in terms of DPS. If they're threat-capped, yes it is the better idea to stick your shaman into the MT group. But at any point where your DPS are not going to be able to surpass your tanks in threat, putting that shaman in a DPS group becomes better for your raid DPS.


As for Bloodlust, if it's a fight that does require Bloodlust on your tanks in order to maximize threat generation, you can just swap a shaman into the MT group, have them hit BL, and then swap them back into the DPS group.