Honestly, I don't twist all that often, in fact, more of rarely such as on bosses. I raid t6 and usually sit somewhere between 1st to 3rd in dps and damage done. I have found it's better for me to worry more about timing my SS with my WF cooldown than to worry about twisting. The dps increase is marginal at best, unless you are in the tank's group. I haven't seen any noticable increase or decrease in dps in my party. I go with arms warrior/retpali/rogue/feral druid/me. I have started to gather haste gear, which has really thrown my timing off. I am at 6.46% haste, and totem twisting just seems to get in the way of or get me off my timing cycle so I scrapped it. It has made raiding much easier and I really will only twist now on bosses and that's depending on if it's a dps race or not.
Gear seems to be a tougher issue to figure out than whether or not twisting is beneficial or not. We all know that it's helps out, but it seems marginal and honestly not worth the time to do it.

When I twist though I find that if I time it with my SS cooldown than I usually get it quickly, but all these macros you guys are creating are hilarious. You are taking a ridiculously easy dps rotation and trying to make it even lazier. It's not tough to go FS/SS/ES and then flip totem in the middle. Personally I dont' like totem twisting, but that's me.


As for Tier gear T5 4 set bonus is great but T6 pre sunwell is awful not just bad awful. You can get non-tier pieces of mail or leahter that are way, way better including some of the badge gear. Fists of Mukoa are awesome I am looking forward to getting them. I want to get my haste farther up there.

The rest of your DPS is slacking pretty hardcore in that case.

You can't do a simple FS/SS/ES cycle unless you elemental. Eventually cooldowns will overlap. And as Toots showed earlier, using SS and then twisting back to back means you can't get in 2 shocks in between SS so you're pushing back your next shock until after your SS, ie: 10 seconds between shocks. And even though I'm not a big fan of totem twisting myself, if done right it will boost group dps. I fail to see how the macros I set up are any different then the add-on you have that tells when the ICD of WF is up. Instead of having an add-on warn me every 10 seconds that WFT needs to be redropped, I set it up in a macro.

Being the resto that sometimes has to respec for enhancement (and someone who has rerolled some month ago to a new guild) I found that good enhancement gear sufficient for supporting BT and even Sunwell can easily be gotten via badges and 10 mans. If you look at my armory right now you will still find some pretty large holes due to the fact that gearing for resto used up most of my badges yet it is sufficient to play. However even now I won't use any T6 enhancement piece from BT because it is so bad.

I certainly won't hit the numbers of our main enhancer in terms of personal dps. But right now its enough for about 1,7k dps on Brut (fully supported though by drums, survival hunter and retadin) and I'm pretty sure I could add another 50 - 100 easily by adding badge legs and gloves and getting a new headpiece as well as improving my rotations further (sometimes I still priorize wrongly while twisting).

Regarding said gearlist: don't underestimate those crafts using Hearts of Darkness and most often leather will perform much better than mail alternatives (Bowstitched being the exception due to the fact that the Shady dealers is rather badly itemised).

You have gimped your entire group by 3% (GoA) to hold on to 80 dps from shocks and a 1% increase in your own DPS (Holding SS).

You've found it's better for you because you never read this forum, never believed the math or never did an apples to apples comparison or when you did you succumbed to confirmation bias.

I don't want to twist either. I don't like gimping my personal DPS for the raid group. But I like my raid group too much not to.

Well, they don't get GoA.

I've lead the DPS boards before. Let me tell you: it feels good, but it's a statistical fluke. It is not our class' intent to lead damage boards. We are there to make the ROGUES lead the damage boards. We're there to make the arms guy viable, so we can all get his Blood Frenzy.

So, i really wouldn't like to do so, but seeing as i'm totally lost here i decided posting here asking for you all to kindly give attention to this:

My guild killed Brutallus some months ago, but due to some drawbacks like all our tanks quiting the game, we just recently got back to attempts at it.

I've been playing elemental for some time due to raid necessity and just yesterday got back to enhance. Normally i'd hover around 1.8k DPS for Brutallus, maintaining that more or less during all our months-back attempts and kills. The problem is that yesterday odly enough, my dps was bottom low and i have no clue whatsoever what's happening. I double checked WF imbues, weapon durability, range to the boss, cycling and such and can't find what deeped my dps by that ammount.

My group was 2xrogue, ret, ms warr and me. We were raiding with only 1 hunter and a Boomkin in the raid. 2 elementals as well, what might geta higher usage of my SS charges.

We had some really short attempts as our healers are almost all new at the guild and to the fight, but even with the low time i'm guessing it's still retardly low, as i had a 3:30ish min attempt with 600 dps.

Here is the WWS: WWS Loading...

Here is my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

If anyone can give some time to look at this and maybe figure out what was happening i alrdy thank in advance.

Well, Hozzer,i did think of that as well, but i normally stay at the middle of our melee formation grp, as we do a square-thing with 4 melee at each vortex and me inside of the square. All that under Brut belly. All them had normal dps and range, so it's kinda almost uneliveable that i could get oor at that position.

I forgot to say that i twist without any macros or addons, timing my shocks, SS and twists according to the CDs i get available at the time. At first i thought that this could be the problem as i haven't twisted for some months now, but doesn't seem so...

Looking at Wow Web Stats, auto attack is accounting for only 15% of your damage. Compare this to one of my own teron WWS Wow Web Stats - almost 50%. (As you probably know)

So it looks like you were not close enough for most of the fight for white attacks, or considering what you have said it could have been some kind of bug. (unlikely?)

Okay, mate you are misunderstanding the add-on. The add-on tells me when my internal WF weapon cooldown is up, not WF totem. AS for the comment as I don't like the twisting. It's simple in a 6-8 minute fight with totem twisting I have found that near the last of the fight I no longer have mana and have to wait for a few minutes to get my cooldowns up to twist so one totem gets stuck for an extended period of time. GoA is 3 percent to my group not 3 percent to the entire raid. Finally, trying to get an arms warrior or survival hunter to raid is bugger tough on my server. Almost no one wants to gimp their own dps. Personally I have rogues who are asking to spec sub for hemo which is a nice buff to melee dps more than I have the others. And usually if our top fury warrior and our top combat sword rogue goes they can pass me in damage done. The locks tend to run out of mana and I haven't found a mage who on a boss can sustain his dps to stay with me.

My opinion on totem twisting is simple. I have read the math, and read Blizzard's comments on twisting. And frankly am glad they are getting rid of it. I find it to be a waste of mana and a waste of time. As do alot of enhance shamans. I like my melee alot. I rarely get grouped with a feral druid because rogue/retpali/furywarrior/arms warrior are more important to WF. I think we can easily lead in dps on T4/t5 instances, if we keep a sustained dps on someone. And frankly it could just mean I got my gear before the others did and so out gear them. Heck the fact that I am pushing 1.2 dps and the rest are around 1k might be the key. However, I have noticed that I am topping out every upgrade of gear I get now does less to my total dps than the rest of the melee.

Your opinion is wrong, misleading, worthless even.
Watch, and maybe learn:
Brutallus.wmv - FileFront.com

Totem twisting is a net gain to your personal dps, if for no other reason you should be twisting because of this.

If you do run out of mana, you leave WF up, and wait for your SR cooldown, or your pot cd. Although if you get lucky enough to be grouped with a paladin, you'll never need either, even while twisting. I'm really confused as to how locks are running out of mana. Not using Lifetap?

A waste of time and mana that goes to increasing your group's dps. Yes, a lot of enhance shaman don't bother, heck I don't on farm content, but there are times where that extra 3% damage done by your group is the difference between a wipe at 2% and a kill. And assuming people have somewhere near equivalent gear to you, and are properly specced, and know what they're doing, we can't lead dps, even in t4/t5 instance.

Nah, I got it. You've got an addon that tells you when 3 seconds are up after a WF proc, I've got macros that tell me when 10 seconds are up after dropping WFT. So they both serve similar purposes.

You didn't watch the video did you.
Go watch the video; tell me how many shocks/strikes I missed because I was twisting.

It is 100% possible to twist without losing shocks/SS if you are attentive about when to twist- and are willing to twist early/late. It has been shown you can let WF drop for 3-4 seconds and twisting is still a net gain for the other 4 members of the group over simply leaving WF up, thats more than 2 GCD's so you should never miss a SS or a Shock.

And gear discussions are trivial: Go read the wiki article and run the sim, take the AEP values and plug them into lootrank.

Come on now; Are we really discussing the benefits of twisting this late in this enhancement shaman cycle? (The next cycle being WotLK) If you don't like it, don't do it, but for the love of anything, don't post it. It proves you're an idiot in most EJ readers' eyes because we have figures saying it is a must as a raiding enhancement shaman. Not doing it is par with not buffing because you're lazy.

Leave this topic dead.

You said you raid with a ret paladin in your previous post. In that case have a healing/prot paladin judge Wisdom and the Ret paladin can maintain it 100% of the time. With JoW up it is impossible to even run low on mana twisting. You net dps even if you just do a Totem Twisting Macro, although watching it manually nets you more.

Raid DPS > Personal DPS for raiding success, even if it's a marginal increase. Want to make a counter argument about that? And if you gain personal DPS by twisting, why aren't you doing it? I find raiding Tier 6 content with the rest of your raid group doing sub 1k DPS very questionable.

In terms of Weapon, the badge main hand is slightly behind (as in, differences that can almost be ignored) the slow BT weapons and Dragonstrike. The S3/S4 PvP weapons are still the best until you can obtain Hand of the Deceiver from KJ and Mounting Vengeance. The badge offhand is the same as BT weapons since it has really good stats.

The good armor pen gear don't lag behind in AP too much. Unfortunately all ArP gear from BT suck aside from Illidan's ring, IIRC.

Okay, let me attempt to explain this once more. I never said I don't do it at all. I stated that created macros for all your attacks was redundant and that I didn't like twisting and preferred not to do it except on bosses where it is needed. Twisting is a good benefit to raid dps, but it's a waste on mobs unless you are practicing. And I find I generally miss a cooldown or fall behind my cycle when twisting regularly.

Thank you for agreeing with me about the Weapons. Unfortunately doing arenas, as an enhance shaman is like being a tank. I walk in pop heroism drop the totems and get beat on until someone dies. I have yet to find that entertaining, and the gear I agree on as well.

My point was I felt clearly stated, but perhaps I didn't express it as clearly as I had hoped. Totem Twisting is a benefit, a pain in the neck to do and a drain on your mana, and I feel a waste to use on trash. However on dps race bosses or on bosses where I don't have to move alot than I will twist totems, but alot of the time I find myself taking my cooldown times to hit myself or melee with a heal over twisting, especially on bosses such as Najentus and VR where heals are sometimes needed (What i wouldn't give for a consistent raiding CoH priest).

As for the dps being under 1k on bosses in Hyjal and BT, I had not thought of the fact that everyone should be over it. Before raiding with my current guild though I raided with other BT raiding guilds and was usually top 3 with only 4-5 people being over 1k dps. Perhaps it's just the server I am on, I guess I will have to talk to our raid leader and figure it out.

Okay, I finally watched your video. And have a few questions and a comment. There was a period of time where you went like 30-40 seconds at half mana never dropping below it. Exactly how did you do that? Secondly, no you never missed a shock, however you were delayed in doing your shocks, there was a decent amount of time between shock cooldowns being up and you using them. I am not talking 5 seconds or anything but possibly 2-3 seconds some times. Is that due to lag or totem twisting. That brief interlude was the missing that I was talking about. I don't mean I completely miss it just that there is a standard delay at times between shock cooldown up and shock up. However it was an impressive enough video where I am going to try to work my totem twisting macro in more often. I couldn't tell what your group makeup was in that fight, but I did see your white and your WF crits. Which where nice but seemed a bit lower than what i assumed they would have been. or what I have put out raid buffed, but perhaps my group makeup might be better for personal dps.

Hmm, okay, after reading that it seemed more like an insult. My point was I was hoping for your numbers to be dramatically better than mine seeing as how your gear is better than mine by a large margin. I am in mostly crafted and Hyjal gear, and was hoping for a larger increase in personal dps by the time I would get into Sunwell.


Editing change
Okay, I see where I screwed up in my math. During all my calculations, I had looked at the large number of total damage lost by delaying by 2 seconds say an earth shock or flame shock. I apologize, and admit that the total dps of totem twisting is worth doing it even with a mana loss.

Here is the math that I used, forgive me if it's crude.

I average 1100 dps without totem twisting 1250 on a stand alone boss.
Now lets say I begin totem twisting and delay my Flame shock, by one or 2 seconds, that gives me a net loss of one or two ticks meaning anywhere from 150-300 total damage lost. Factor that would happen every 13 seconds when both GCD's and shock cooldown would meet. There are approximately 4 total ticks lost per minute and in a 8 minute boss fight that would mean a total of 32 ticks lost equalling a grand total loss of 9600 damage lost at best which brings it to 26 personal dps lost.
Totem twisting has been stated that it gives you a 3 percent personal dps increase which would mean 33 dps gained by totem twisting. So that means you gain 7 dps by totem twisting.
By not totem twisting you in essence if each guy were averaging around 33 dps per second so you would cost your raid a total of approximately 140 dps on average.
Now granted this is very basic and rudimentary math. I am probably missing something out of it. I thought about factoring in delayed earth shocks, but ran into an astronomically high number so I am sure my math was wrong on that one. I figured in the end if you delayed your earth shock by a second or two you would still get them in and maybe cost yourself approximately the same personal dps loss.

So I will admit that I am wrong 140 dps on a boss fight definitely is worth twisting over regardless of mana or timing issues. Great now I have to rework all my timing. However I still believe that holding onto your SS to maximise your WF potential is worth doing unless someone can show me the math stating that it's not.

I was in a Tank/Tank/Hunter/Hunter/Enh. Shaman group and I put down 1777 dps on the run that video was recorded, with no Ret paladin in the raid. Occassionally our holy paladins will put up JoW if they can spare a GCD, which explains the periods where my mana doesnt shift much. I would be suprized (and disappointed) if I had not matched the Sim dps for my gear and raid/group setup.

Some shocks were delayed for SStrike, unless WF was on cooldown; check out the video at 0:34 and again at 1:07, you will see that WF and ES both come off cooldown at the same time, so ES ends up being delayed a bit more than 1 GCD to fit around SS. As far as I can tell those are the only delays due to twisting (there are a few half-second overlaps where I screw up, but there I am at fault in twisting too late).

Holding your SS is, textbook, a net gain in DPS. Generally I will hold off SStrike for the WF CD unless that would cause it to clash with the shock CD. In that case Ill just SS with WF on CD so I dont clip my Shocks, this happens at 2:13. Furter, see how at 1:30 (and again at 3:20, and 3:35) in the video, where SS and FS come off CD at the same time but WF is on CD, I chose to shock rather than SS. Sometimes delaying SS will actually be a net increase in the number of shocks if the delays occur at points where SS and Shock CD's would naturally coincide.

The flaw in your math is that shocks and SStrike will clash wether or not you twist (if you are resto). If you only ever twist during periods where it will not cause a GCD clash with shocks/strikes you shouldnt be losing dps when twisting. From the video you should be able to see the GCD, so you can see how often I miss a shock/Strike because of the GCD induced by totem-twisting (as far as I can see I don't). Those are the only dps losses you might incur twisting; when a totem GCD pushes back a shock or SStrike GCD. Personally I can keep these knock-backs to less than once every minute or so, and then usually pop up when the other totems need refreshing.

Losing 2 seconds in every 13 is a pretty big over estimate; I can see maybe half a GCD delay on 1 shock in the 6 minute video so even losing 2 seconds a minute is larger than should happen with good play.

If you are elemental then, of course, it all becomes super trivial:
0: SS
1.5: FS
3.0: WF
4.5: GoA
6.5: ES

Repeat ad infinitum (this will never, ever, Ever cause a clash of GCD's, if you do not delay SS for WF). Im not sure why so many people (seem) to use a SS>WF>GoA macro to twist; this macro forces clashes to occur which are not necessary.

About to pick up the Vanirr's offhander to match my S2 main and was worried about the difference in attack speed. The sim's I used didn't seem to add up correctly and show a minuscule increase in DPS from S1 offhand vs the minimum 32DPS+ i was expecting with Vanirr's. I was assuming it might be because of WF cooldown and was hoping if someone could clear up whether having a 2.6main and 2.5 off would cause WF procs to leach to offhand more than main, or if I need a better sim. Assuming 1500attack, 320ArP, dual goose, and 31% crit.
Hate to burn badges on a negligible increase because of mechanics, but I'm fairly certain this should be worth the price.
All help appreciated.
-Keonka the Mangler

If you drill down far enough you can see that Ryla had 18 white hits for Brutallis Attempt #10, compared to 200+ for each rogue. The ret paly only has 33 white hits, the MS war only has 31. Definitely seems like the group was bugged or in a weird spot.

What sims are you using? If you haven't already, try Yo!'s, which is generally considered to be the best around, and double/triple check all your values, raid buffs, etc. Unless there's something very strange going on with your gear, there should definitely be an increase in DPS between a S1 OH and Vanir's.

Just to clarify -- no, no it isn't possible to twist without losing shocks. It isn't possible to just shock and SS without losing a bit on either rotation. The GCD will inevitably be in effect when the ability CD is over, and you'll push the cycle of that ability back a bit.

For those who aren't aware, "losing shocks" means that over the course of a minute of a cycle, you have a total of 6 or more seconds of lag after the shock CD is up. This means you do one less shock per minute.

Watching your video, I can see that this happens to you. It has to. There simply is no way to weave 3 10s cycles with a 6s cycle and not have one of them suffer, and since shocks are the less important of the three, that's what gets pushed back.

Shocks, however, are not unimportant. They are a significant portion of our DPS, and each shock per minutes "lost" to the GCD does have an affect on our personal DPS. Think about it: if you can pull off 10 shocks per minute, you're likely to see 15% of your DPS from shocks. That means each shock is worth about 1.5% of your personal dps.

This is why holding SS is *NOT* a "textbook" GAIN in dps unless you do not lose shocks because of it. And it is inevitable that you do. You now have three cycles -- two that have a 10s period, one that has a 6s period one that randomly varies between 10s and 13s. While it is certainly possible that shocks will come off cooldown during a 2 or 3 second wait and can be safely used immediately, it's equally possible that they'll come off cooldown during a 1 or 0 second wait and need to be held NOT just for 1.5s, but 2.5s.

When you twist, you trade shock dps for 3% crit for your group, and it's good because 3% exceeds the value of your shocks. If you can maintain 8 shocks per minute, it's about equal personal DPS.

When you holds SS, you trade shock AND strike dps for a slight increase in windfury DPS. Simulation shows that trading the strike DPS for windfury DPS is a good move, about a 1% increase in DPS. However, it will not by default show you the cost of losing time on your shock cycle -- you need to manually decrease shocks per minute by 1. When you do that, the gains from holding SS go away.

This is ignoring lag, reaction time, etc. Factor those in, holding strikes can be a net loss of DPS.

I know it feels more "pro." But it is just isn't all that. Even if you were able to do it and lose no shock damage, it's tricky for a slight gain.

EDIT: Holding totems is a bit of another issue. Basically, you're withholding a >6% buff to 4 people for 1.5s about two times a minute. With folks doing 2000 dps when WFT is up, that's decreased to 1886. Accross 4 people, that's 456 dps. Therefore, the 3s loss of WFT is a loss of 1368 damage per minute. It is possible your extra shocks will exceed this, and I've executed this strategy before with success. However, it's a close call. These days I tend to err on the side of safety and pay more attention to the environment, doing a 2-1-1 shock cycle and being careful to never miss a WFT drop.

Sure it is: spec elemental for 5 second shocks, I posted the rotation above.
0: SStrike
1.5: Shock
3.0: WF
4.0: GoA
6.5: Shock
10: SStrike

If you are resto there are going to be clashes, but that is not a function of twisting, it is a function of shocks and SStrike.

Your Shock/SStrike pattern looks like this:
0: SStrike
1.5: Shock
5: TWIST
7.5:Shock
10: SStrike
13.5: Shock
15:TWIST
19.5: DONT SHOCK - SStrike is nearly ready.
20: SStrike
21.5: Shock
...

So you can see that, due to the natural timings of things you pretty much hit a 20second cycle with resto sub-spec. And you can fit in both twists without any GCD clashes; this cycle does not even have WF down-time.

GCD clashes are NOT due to twisting, they are due to the SStrike/Shock interplay. If you are losing dps due to twisting, you are doing it wrong. Simply put, twisting should not increase the number of delayed shocks, if it is you are twisting at the wrong time (alot of people twist after SStrike, this is the wrong time to twist because you cant fit two shocks in between GoA and the next SS, you should be twisting after you shock)

Watch it again, and every time a shock is delayed write down if it was delayed due to twisting or because of SS. I did it myself to double check and with 1 exception (where I screwed up my twist), every delay was due to a clash of the shock CD and SStrike CD; twisting was not the cause of the shock being delayed.

[e]
During that video, according to WWS, I cast: 32 SSs and 47 shocks in 5'56".
That equates to: 5.4 Strikes per minute 7.8 shocks per minute.

I wasn't perfect, but when you account for the fact I delay my SS for WF, I was pretty close to the ideal (6xSS, 8xShocks). Within the bounds of lag, human error, and WF delay, it is reasonable to say I did not miss shocks or SS due to twisting.

[ee]
The fight was 5'56" not 6minutes, if you allow for 1 more shock and SS during that last 4 seconds then the stats look like this:
33 SSs and 48 shocks in 5'56".
That equates to: 5.5 Strikes per minute 8.0 shocks per minute.

i.e. I didn't lose any shocks at all during that video,