So windfury is the overwhelming victor in our weapon buffs for enhancement. There is no comparison. With the next patch it would seem flametongue is getting a boost but even then it doesn't look like it will catch up with windfury. What about rockbiter and frostbrand? Why should these two just be throwaways that we never use and be satisfied cause windfury just rocks them both to uselessness? I've heard people say windfury will always be the best and that's the end of that. Period. Done. But why does it have to be this way? Why can't we have a real choice so not every single enhance shaman uses dual windfury exclusively?

I don't know exactly what they should do but it's been bugging me for a while. Shouldn't all of our weapon buffs be usable and even advantageous to switch between them during a fight? Wouldn't that make us a more dynamic class? Maybe have rockbiter store charges. 5-10% of the white damage from each hit turns into nature damage that gets stored up. You can store it to a certain number and switching buffs releases the damage. I don't know if this is all ridiculous or not but I'm tired of looking at 3 out of my 4 weapon buffs and knowing I'm never going to use them.

This was brought up in an IRC discussion some time ago and it was indicated this was pretty far down the totem pole (I made a funny) in terms what they wanted to fix.

Actually, they clearly acknowledged that the non-windfury buffs should not be used and indicated that they saw no reason whatsoever to fix it. Shrug.

Maybe in the next expansion.

Flametongue is better for elemental shamans, who have a lot more spell damage and a lot less AP. Granted they don't melee as much, but there are times they get caught in close and have to shock + smack. Frostbrand is at least argueable because it has a snare proc. Rockbiter... hang your head in shame, rockbiter.

Before they changed rockbiter away from additional threat, all shaman buffs had at least SOME use (Flametongue for elemental, Frostbrand for snare, Rockbiter for tanking, Windfury for dps).

I don't really mind that WF (and flametongue to a lesser extent) is the only shaman weapon buff that's used. If they made the other's better, we would just theorycraft, find the new best buff, and use that. One of them will always be the best for dps.

Right now, WF wins hands-down over all other imbues. This is not contentious. However, simulation has shown that it doesn't scale as well with massive haste-stacking as either FT or RB. Now, this is actually really irrelevant, as this amount of haste is IIRC totally ridiculous and unachievable - somewhere around +300% haste. Current itemization allows for a maximum of about +21% passive haste on a shaman before procs; if one wants to go overboard and dig up every last haste proc, spell, and item imaginable, around +160%-ish can be achieved for 5-10 seconds when all the stars are aligned.

Basically, the gist of this somewhat-frivolous aside is that the only way non-WF imbues as they now stand could outperform or even equal WF's scaling is if they were able to hit several times within the 3-second WF cooldown period. And it seems decidedly unlikely that itemization will ever allow for this.

While it may seem a bit superfluous, I am hoping that they would add more weapon imbues - particularly for specific situations - and fix (sort of) the old ones.

One imbue I hope they make is a Cleave imbue - give a good chance (20% or a bit more) to proc a cleave or a mini-Blade Flurry effect, thus allowing for limited melee AoE.

They could have made a -threat imbue, which would have made melee shamans a bit more dynamic - the cool kids would just have swapped in a pair of imbued daggers at will but that is still more dynamic than the current imbue system.

Another idea is to give Rockbiter a -armor proc or constant effect, which would fit its name and perhaps make it more attractive. Adding an imbue that would proc a short-time +spelldamage buff could also be neat, especially if they want to drive the whole "shamans go toe to toe with spells and big nasty weapons" thing. If they wanted to underscore the role of shaman as group buffers there are certainly lots of possibilities available - spell surge-like imbues and so on.

More imbues that debuffs enemies could also be a way of spicing things up, as could imbues that cause short-time pets to spawn (would have to be managed with pet bar in order to maximize effectiveness - think of it like a random chance to proc a Water Elemental etc... could fit in with the whole attuned to elements thing that Shamans are supposed to have going for them).

Short-time imbues (30 second imbues) with both long individual CDs and shared CDs would be a good way of spicing up melee for Enhancement (need more options and stuff to use on GCDs), and could add some flavor to Elemental (choices - do I buff my nature damage or increase my burn rate, and perhaps a target <20% health damage increaser). Restoration currently lacks incentive for imbuing weapons, and this could be fixed with either long-time buffs (small increase in particular spell, or add chance to proc extra effects with healing spells) or add some "uh-oh" imbues that temporarily did great things.

The main problem with adding more stuff (particularly stuff with proc-chance and stuff that makes big changes with CDs) is that it gets harder to balance it for PvP - a solution would be to disable them for PvP (in fact, I'm all for having an entirely different ruleset in PvP, but that's for another thread).

There are a lof of things they can do - unfortunately (or not - at least it's easier), my current assumption is that WF will reign supreme even into WotLK PvE endgame.

Rockbiter should proc mortal strike debuff. It will supposedly fix hunters in arena, so it should do the same for enhancement shamans ...