Originally Posted by Paenor

Well someone had to take the plunge. A while ago, in the other thread I said I'd try to post some real world numbers, so here they are. (Yeah yeah, in yet another thread, FT/FT vs WF/FT discussion spreading everywhere, blah blah. This thread is actually about comparing weapons, so here is my real world comparison in order to show fast weapon FT/FT's crazy scaling is more than just theorycraft. If it really bothers people that much that I post this here instead of cluttering up the forum with new threads then I just won't bother anymore.)

Weapon setup: Haunting Call (50 spell power), Webbed Death (Berserking)

Here are my Patchwerk and a Thaddius kills from last week. Currently Thaddius (10317 dps) is ranked at #3 dps for shaman on WMO, and Patchwerk (5503 dps) is not too far off the leader board all things considered.

However, before writing this off as 'not being the best', look at the other factors that make me feel this is worth looking at:

- Gear. Just in case you armory me, since those fights I have picked up a Blue Aspect Helmet (~180EP gain over t7.5), T7.5 gloves (~40EP over T7), and finally swallowed my pride and took the Wrymcrest Necklace of Power (~200EP over CoD) and I'm still a few slots behind the people ahead of me on the meters. I am still wearing a few pieces 10man gear and am far from BIS for example.

Note: Those EP values are based on the numbers I was seeing at the time of the upgrade. Haste was hypervalued for quite a while. I'm at the point where it's worth 3.4EP a point. However, I'm single digits away from having the valuing nosediving to 1.4EP. I suspect this has to do with static shock eating too many stormstrike charges.

- Fight length. We were months slow in putting together a 25 man guild and only now are getting well geared. As a result, fights are longer. Many of the Patchwerk fights on the leader board are a minute faster; that's almost half the fight duration. That is a massive difference in heroism/bloodlust/pot duration. One of the Thaddius fights was 50 seconds faster.

- Comparison to other classes in the raid. While the other people on the meter aren't setting any records, I believe that after you take gear level into account they are still a good comparison to 'normal' DPS. Believe what you will, but the other people in the guild aren't bad. Many frequent EJ, and some do experimentation of their own. Before TBC/WoTLK many were competitive with the top DPS of their classes at the time. Up until right now, thanks to a really good loot week after those kills, I had average gear amongst my guild.

I also might just be talking out of my ass here, but after the Thaddius fight while I was waiting for someone to inevitably post the meter (I just use statiscl and a guildmate uploads to WWS/WMO since I noticed Recount behaving strangely in FT/FT dummy tests) I was thinking that my DPS wouldn't be high and was unhappy with my performance. Without the meter I thought I could have had a substantial improvement. Still do. Especially with the new gear.
For more evidence of FT/FT's crazy scaling you can look at the Loatheb fight too I guess. I didn't post it because my spore spawned in the healers and they didn't' get out of the way so one stole my buff. As a result, my (and some other's) buff uptime is painfully low. Edit: Oh I remember part of the reason why now. I spent most of the time on the 11 debuff side.

As a small suffix: it is worth noting that threat (for the time being anyways) tends to be somewhat of an issue at times. Since Spirit Weapons doesn't effect much of your damage with this setup, I've (rarely) run into some situations where I've had to stop DPS because I was getting uncomfortably high (105%). That being said, if you can bribe one of your paladin friends to toss you a hand of salvation in an emergency, it's more than manageable.