I'm not entirely sure how to start this off but it stems from something I do as a Paladin every time I raid. Basically as a Paladin I switch (or twist) my librams based on the spell I am casting. I've made macro's for my spells which look like the following:

Because those spells generate a gcd and the equip occurs during the gcd but before the spell lands I get the benefit of of the Libram apporpriate for that spell. Recently I started playing with the possibility of twisting my usage of [Libram of Mending] with [Libram of Absolute Truth] so gain maximum mana regen while spamming holy light.

Basically the logic is as follows:

• Cast Holy Light and if Grace of the Naaru isn't up then equip [Libram of Mending]

• If Grace of the Naaru is up then equip [Libram of Absolute Truth] or equivalent libram.

By twisting my use of librams like this I effectively get the benefit of 2 librams from one spell at no cost.

Now after all that paladin specific stuff you might be wondering how this doesn't belong in the Paladin thread.

Well I was wondering what would happen if we extended this technique to an enhancement shaman since I also have one so I knew the theory.

The 2 relics an enhancement shaman might use are: [Stonebreaker's Totem] and [Totem of the Astral Winds]. Currently I'm fairly sure that any shaman will quickly tell you that provided you shock with any regularity the former is superior. But I wondered what would happen if you equipped the TotAW immediately or during the next global cooldown after receiving the proc from [Stonebreaker's Totem]. Then during a GCD around the end of the 10 second buff you could switch back to stonebreaker's ready to proc off the next available shock.

After some testing it appeared that it worked but I knew that a totem-twisting shaman isn't going to have time to manage their relic use in a raid situation. So I adapted a mod I'd gotten and developed a proof of concept which switches between [Stonebreaker's Totem] and [Totem of the Astral Winds] relatively "intelligently".

After having my guild's enhancement shaman play around with this in an SH run where he reported 2 minor issues with my mod (which I still feel is very badly coded) I looked at some of the other classes and realised it could potentially be extended to druids too. The key is you want to find a relic that provides a buff.

So here is the list of potential relic twisting items that I can think of:

• Prot Pallies - [Tome of the Lightbringer]
• Ret Pallies - [Libram of Divine Judgement]
• Elemental Shaman - [Skycall Totem]
• Feral Druids - [Idol of Terror]
• Balance Druids - [Idol of the Unseen Moon]

I do feel this is definitely an unintended consequence of the code which controls switching of weapons in combat. But from what I can tell simply using an appropriately coded addon allows various class/specs to achieve some of the benefits of multiple relics in the one slot without even thinking about relic management at all.

Finally here is a link to the mod that I hacked up:
http://www.distillsoftware.com/files/AsBreaker.zip
It is based on HolyLibrams which I found on curse and some of the code is adapted from the wowace ManaSurge addon.

There are a few bugs here and I'm providing this only because I mentioned in my post and some people might be curious. I'd actually recommend against using it for anything besides testing. At some stage I will goto the effort of cleaning it up and making it "raid-worthy" but that is for some other night. Currently it bugs out slightly and my guild's shaman reports that the initial switch from stonebreaker -> astral winds feels "sticky" this is a result more of our oceanic/japanese ping as the mod assumes that when you receive the buff you will be on GCD already. Also it may not switch back to stonebreaker upon leaving combat, nor will it switch back to stonebreaker upon ressurection if you die with astral winds equipped.

I do admit that there is entirely the possibility that I'll be told in many different ways I'm an idiot and that I'm wrong. My testing perhaps wasn't as extensive as it could have been but I do feel this is rather interesting and probably worthy of some discussion.

This strategy will generally work for casters, however melee would be ill advised to use it. When swapping gear, your swing timer gets reset. While I may be wrong if this is different for totems / relics / etc than for a thrown weapon for a Rogue lets say, but I was quite sure any gear change will reset your swing timer. Obviously this doesn't matter one bit if you're spamming Holy Light.. but it sure does if you're an Enhancement Shaman. This technique of gear switching just after a cast starts is also used by mages for Evocation.

Just out of curiosity, does relic switching incur a class-standard GCD (kitty 1sec), a 1.5sec GCD, or a spell GCD? This could be very important for people using 1.5-sec casts with haste, since if it's a straight 1.5-sec GCD rather than spell then there would be "clipping" when chaining abilities.

As aforementioned enhancement shaman who helped Andrast test this mod, I would like to describe my experiences with it so far.

First, the mod posted is specifically for use with enhancement shaman, enabling swapping out [Stonebreaker's Totem] for [Totem of the Astral Winds] in cases where the former's 10 second buff is active. The theory is very similar to that of totem twisting the windfury totem and Grace of air, with a couple of important differences:

1.) By "piggybacking" onto the global cooldown of a skill, swapping out the totems does not cause an additional global cooldown. Even more strikingly, our brief tests appear to suggest that if a cooldown shorter than the standard 1.5s GCD is in effect, swapping the relic slot will not cause the cooldown to be extended to a normal 1.5s duration. For shaman, this means that if the relic slot is swapped out during the 1s cooldown of casting a totem, the cooldown will remain at 1s.

2.) The "stickiness" issue that I reported is, as Andrast described above, due to the way that the mod is coded. Its current incarnation is simply too affected by lag for those of us with Oceanic or Asiatic pings, but this can be worked aroudn through the use of a timer within the mod. Although this ends up resulting in slightly less uptime for the secondary relic, it is still a definitive net gain versus not relic swapping. Once this issue is solved, relic swapping will provide the benefit of both relics at once, with no loss of control or global cooldowns, even for melee classes with instant attacks and abilities. For those of us here in EJ who use all the in game mechanics possible to eke every ounce of effectiveness out of our characters, this is a potentially huge discovery -- it lets us get more effectiveness out of our characters for no cost, using items we already have, through commands that are essentially nothing more than /cast and /equip macros.

It is fairly clear, in both our opinions, that this behavior is not intended by Blizzard and that it will likely be changed at some point in the (near?) future. However, this basic idea has the potential to change the amount of options that paladins, druids, and shamans have in any given encounter.
If you have an enhancement shaman, I encourage you to download this mod and try it out. Keep in mind the stickiness and resurrection issues noted above, but downloaded it and see for yourself. Make sure you have the two totems mentioned, with stonebreaker equipped and astral winds in your inventory.

I'm looking forward to hearing the community's thoughts on potential uses for this idea. Many, many thanks to Andrast for creating this proof-of-concept mod and for letting me help test it out.

Edited to add: Evidently I forgot that not only ranged weapons, but also relic swapping reset the swing timer. The concept still stands, however, for ranged classes that do not worry so much about their autoattacks.

This is something I wasn't aware of since being a holy pally the absolute last thing I care about is my swing timer. I just went and tested swapping some librams against wolved in terokkar and it does indeed reset my swing timer.

The technique, however, does seem entirely valid if you could switch gear at the appropriate time which is difficult to do in practice or if the swing timer wasn't horribly significant. A prot pally might still be able to use it but a dual wielder like my enhance shammy might be better off avoiding it. I'd imagine it would be still be interesting to discuss the dps increase and if that might be worth interfering at all with the swing timer but I wouldn't know where to begin answering that particular question. The other classes/specs I mentioned might still gain benefit from this although I focused on enhancement shaman since I happen to pretend at playing one in my spare time.

One thing to note in re: Elemental shaman is that the [Skycall Totem], if memory serves, does not have an internal cooldown like the [Stonebreaker's Totem]. So swapping misses out on refresh opportunities.

Im gonna try and work out from tonights logs if switching idols causes clipping of autoattacks for druids. Did some quick testing with having a macro on mangle, shred and rip for changing to the best idol for that move but that attacks are so fast so I need some timestamped logs to check. Im gonna run with my macros for the whole BT raid tonight and check the logs, ill be back with some conclusion later.

People in the Enhancement thread already considered totem switching. Unfortunately, relic switching does reset your swing timers and makes it (most likely) infeasible.

I have considered doing something similar to this before, but decided it was not worth it. They are a few issues concerning this.

What event do you use to determine a spell has been cast:
SPELLCAST_SENT: This will not work on casting any spell that is longer then the GCD. Since if you spam your button as the cast is ending it will send a SENT event before the spell is finished and you will be put on GCD prematurely. It is fine with spells with same cast time as GCD since SENT is only sent when not on GCD.

SPELLCAST_START: This will work fine, except it is slightly laggy. It doesn't occur as you send the spell that will successfully start the cast, but when the server tells you your cast has been started. So it will make you GCD longer depending on your ping.

You also have the issues for healing using it if you ever stop casts when you switched a Relic; you will still be on GCD from Relic switch even though you aren't casting. The times that I would ever stop my cast is because I need to heal someone else or they will likely die. It is the worst time for it to happen.

Also, does anyone know if spell haste effects the GCD incurred by weapon swapping? If it doesn't it would be useless for any class with spell haste using instants or 1.5s casts.

Yes it does. Try doing an instant and swapping gear 1/2 way through the GCD, it will reset the GCD. Fairly certain that swapping is a 1.5s GCD regardless of class, but not positive.

Make sure you are in combat when you do any tests related to this.

Switching do indead clip the autoswing, but then to the next question is it still worth to change? Changing on mangle gives 2.xx% crit and some extra attackpower for 10sec, switching on rip gives 45x6=270extra damage on a 5cp rip and switching for shreds gives extra damage done. I dont really know how to calculate this but it feels like extra crit, ap and damage is always welcome, the trade-off is one meleeswing every now and then. My average autoswings ranged from 250-280 damage during the bosses i dpsed on tonight, Najentus-Supremus-Teron-Bloodboil-RoS. To me it looks like it might be a dpsincrease switching idols, but as i said im too tired to do the math right now. My dps-rotation looks like mangle> 2-4 shreds (depending on amounts of crits and how much time left on rip)> rip at 5cp when energy is up for a new start of rotation.

One of my resto shammies reported that he didn't like the constant switching as he would cancel his casts. As a Paladin though I very very rarely cancel my casts and only do so for my cleanse and BoP macros. I should add a counter into my mod so I can get a better idea of how often i'm being given that GCD.

My understanding from tests I've done is that gear switching isn't affected by haste so if you're stacking alot of it and casting different spells as a paladin you may be better off not switching librams. However for pallies the main reason I can see to stack has would be to spam a single spell. I've been libram switching on my pally for a while now and haven't had any issues with FoL or HL. I definitely agree that some people may have different preferences and that the gain from doing this is relatively small compared to just learning to play better.

Although, beware that there the GCD is triggered twice for instant cast items (most likely caused by latency). As a balance druid when I twist my idols, it extends moonfire GCD by triggering a secondary GCD about .1s after moonfire is cast making the moonfire GCD 1.6s instead of 1.5 when used with macro. However, I feel that the benefits outweigh the harm.

This type of effect is impossible for me to observe with my latency. If someone has a good idea on how to test it I'd love to know.

Even though our white damage is far lower than dw classes, some rough math I did a while ago showed a loss of ~12 DPS switching between two Idols in a slack-ish ~14 second cycle.

Prot and Ret Paladins cannot effectively Relic-twist:

1. I tried switching out my [Libram of Repentance] while the Holy Shield buff was active and the block chance on my character sheet went down by 5.33%, indicating that I lose the bonus from the Libram even if I take it out after casting HS. While I do not have the [Tome of the Lightbringer], I imagine it would be about the same (perhaps someone else can confirm?).

2. Consecration's damage is recomputed per tick, so switching the [Libram of the Eternal Rest] mid-Consecration causes you to lose the extra spell damage.

3. Judgements are reapplied and recomputed every autoattack/Crusader Strike, so switching out the [Libram of Zeal] causes you to lose the extra spell damage on the Judgement.

4. Point #3 also makes the Holy T4 2-piece bonus relatively useless - it seems the intention was for the Holy Paladin to judge his extra healing Seal of Light and have the Ret Paladin refresh it with Crusader Strike, but since the Ret Paladin himself is not wearing 2T4 Holy, the extra healing is lost as soon as the Judgement is refreshed.

5. Technically, you could twist between the [Libram of Righteous Power] for Crusader Strikes and the [Libram of Avengement] / [Libram of Divine Judgement] when judging, but as is the case for Feral Druids and Enhancement Shaman, changing Relics resets the swing timer, causing Ret to lose significant amounts of DPS, especially with their long swing timers.

I do have both librams and the one that drops from mother applies a buff during which time you can switch to [Libram of Repentance] without losing the buff. Notice how the badge one is a passive Equip bonus but the mother libram states "increases your shield block value by 186 for 5 sec"(emphasis mine)

But I'm not 100% convinced that the frequent swapping with such a short buff would provide much more mitigation/avoidance and is probably more trouble than it's worth.

This thread got me thinking: How about Mages/Priests/Warlocks changing their wands (or even the MH/OH as well) depending on the spells they cast?

Perhaps something along the lines of using a [Carved Witch Doctor's Stick] with a [Runed Crimson Spinel] when you're dotting for maximum spell damage, then switching to a [Wand of the Forgotten Star], when the spell crit rating will help with Imp. SB uptime.

It may not even have to be reasoned out for Imp. SB - what if the spell crit rating made your theoretical SB DPS higher since dots don't scale with it anyway?

I experienced this same situation and agree that there is a small BUT highly noticeable delay between casts when you switch from Lhw to CHeal using a totem swapping macro -I learned this lesson in Sunwell which was not fun.

Don't forget [Totem of Living Water] for downranked Chain Heals.

There is one situation in which it's absolutely worth it for Feral Druids to switch relics (and weapons) in combat, and that's upon shifting.

I have the following macros set up, and they work beautifully:

/cast Dire Bear Form
/equip [stance:0] Pillar of Ferocity
/equip [stance:9] Wildfury Greatstaff (I switch the 0 and 9 when I want to change which staff the macro equips, rather than rewriting the item name).
/equip Idol of Terror

/cast Cat Form
/equip Staff of the Forest Lord
/equip [stance:0] Everbloom Idol
/equip [stance:9] Idol of Terror (switched for grinding)

/cast Healing Touch
/equip Gavel of Naaru Blessings
/equip Touch of Inspiration
/equip Idol of the Emerald Queen (I used to use Avian Heart here, but I find that in general I want to switch on my lifebloom idol when I start healing at short notice).

The biggest problem with this setup is, as previously mentioned, that if you hit one of the macros while inside a GCD it will restart the GCD without shifting you, which in the worst case can strand you in bear with a boss barreling toward you. However, with practice, you can avoid doing this, and the instant swapping of weapons can be an enormous help, particularly when you have to switch from DPS to tanking at a moment's notice, your tanking weapon's armor makes a huge difference.

I used to do the relic switch on my shaman but I eventually took it out of my macros completely. DPS classes may not have the same issue but in certain fights, especially as a healer, an accidental GCD trigger could ultimately lead to raid deaths. Any encounter in end game that may have you move all of the sudden can cause this GCD and it is not something you want at all. What I ended up doing was just equipping the relic that benefited me the most over all and switching manually when I felt I should.