Thanks for that Aanzeijr, kind of what I expected and it now looks like Guildox have fixed that up as it no longer gives the MH weapons as options in offhand now.

Now, at the risk of an infraction I do have another questions that I figure is best asked in this thread.

Given my guild's current situation it's looking like real raiding is not going to be an option for a while so I'm stuck with LFR and Pugging for raiding and gearing up, along with valor items (thus running 5-mans as well) so I'm questioning my gearing plans based on that.

Is the 4pT13 bonus worth keeping, even at ilvl 384, over upgrading to full 397 Valor gear or should I just follow the general wisdom of ilvl being king, all other things being equal?

Are you in 10m or 25m? For me in 10m, I reforge all my spirit into crit, I don't have Elemental Precision and even without it, TC is amazing regen. I haven't ran oom yet aside from 2healing Madness of Nef. I run a high mastery high crit, low haste low spirit setup.

By reforging all your spirit into crit, sure you have a weaker tide, but you gain throughput, and more resurgences, and more out of TC, in the end, it's worth it.

Wasn't Elemental 4 piece T13 changed to a 15sec duration?
With 4 secs it drops all the time, most of the time not even reaching 3 stacks.

If you are forgoing Mana Tide for TC, would you recommend Power Torrent? Since you're getting double use out of it and gearing int over spirit seems more in line with reforging to crit and out of spirit.

So this has been my plan so far...

Gem/Enchant ---> Int
Reforge ---> Haste/Spirit (where applicable)
Weapon Enchant ---> Power Torrent

With 2pc t12 and 2pc t13, and with Heart of Unliving and [Eye of Blazing Power] and roughly 3000 unbuffed spirit I rarely run out of mana (even current 25m DS).

Of course I'd rather have [Jaws of Defeat] than [Eye of Blazing Power] for even less mana issues but a free insta-heal every 30 secs. (i think its 30 secs.) isn't bad.

Are there any other Shamans out there that DON'T use TC? I'd just like some feedback on this please . I don't like using TC because of less throughput, and its not that good on less forgiving boss fights where there isn't much down time. I also find spec'ing and reforging/gemming/enchanting accordingly for it (Elemental Precision, gear for crit, etc.) is a waste and there are better alternatives.

I'm basically trying to optimise my build without TC to have relatively no mana problems and enough throughput to rival those OP Druids.

I used to play whole T12 and T13 up to Madness without TC. After seeing how the last encounter is designed I specced out of Ancestral Swiftness, enchanted boots with Lavawalker and took TC. Also reforged out of spirit where I could.
I also used Heartsong and Darkglow thingy on the cloak before, heavily relying on spirit regen and Resurgence from HW spam.

Clearing DS again this week (no heroics due to lineup issues though) and I'm loving changes I made. I've yet to run out of mana, encounters in DS are designed perfectly for it. Im still trying to treat TC as an additional source of mana, lost ~600mp5 through reforging, but its really hard to avoid using it effectively in current tier.
If you check my spec and gear I went full mastery and crit where possible, while keeping haste slightly above 967 rating. Without taking Concussion and EPrecision TC ends up as mana gain, even with a few misses here and there.

Point is, I tried TC ages ago and didnt really like it, most likely due to boss' design, so I tried to rely on spirit, which worked nicely for me. But I highly advise you to try TC again in DS - its truly awesome in there.
Not sure if I helped actually, but there you go.

So this has been poking at me for awhile and I've been looking for a bit of a 'fix' to my problem.

I'm a button masher AKA: I'm spamming whatever button I'm currently casting until it casts and swapping to mash the next button in my rotation, multiple times until it itself casts. Getting myself out of that habit Isn't exactly an option, what this habit does is queue up spells and make it so that if a LvB procs in the middle of a LB cast and I go to cast it, it will cast the LB instead of the LvB and it turns my smile into a frown. I've tried a /stopcast macro in with LvB but that causes other worse problems since I smash that LvB button with the /stopcast in it.. well you get the point.

Using the cast LB while moving glyph causes the problem cause I can't just side-step to cause the queued up spell to not happen, which is what I use to do but ever since the that glyph implication I've found myself casting LB when I should be casting LvB because of queued up spells.

Anyone have any ideas? Lag Tolerance maybe? Idk?

Greetings.
Whilst running the LFR on my alt Resto Shaman (a toon I have never bothered crunching numbers with), Ultraxion dropped the healing OH. A quick glance at RatingBuster showed me this piece was without a doubt statistcally superior to the shield I was using. I rolled, and won. There was rage amongst the cloth healers that I dared roll on "their" item.
Why would a shield be superior just because it goes on your back, not in your hand? Stats speak louder than appearance, don't they??
Please help explain whether I was right to upgrade my slot piece, or whether there is a real reason why Shaman "have" to stick to shields.

Thank you. x

It used to be that shields could get enchants and offhands couldn't, so wearing a shield was just flat out better if your class could equip them. That is no longer the case as they share the same enchants. The only reason to wear a shield otherwise is 1) extra armor, which rarely matters and 2) equitable loot sharing with your guild. What I mean by that is your cloth wearers can't wear the shield, so when it drops you'll be the only one able to use it, and they'll still not have an item upgraded. In LFR or a 5 man environment, I'm not sure that should factor into your decision making.

Basically it just an old mindset, it isn't going to go away, but you can sleep well knowing you didn't do anything wrong by taking, assuming it was actually better than what you had.

Hi there, one quick question considering weapon choise. I have a Gatecrasher (hc version) and a No'kaled,the elements of death (lfr version). My question is which one should i use for main hand since the item lvl is really close between those two. The procc rate of the No'kaled is basicaly what confuses me the most.
Keep up the good work!

I have a humble question regarding the Starcatcher Compass trinket that I picked up earlier to save from a shard, despite the haste proc. I have rather weak trinkets otherwise (DMC:H and Fluid Death) for this tier, as my shaman has a non-raiding alt history, and when simming this in EnhSim I got this to be about on par on DMC:H. It was confusing enough that I thought I'd seek input here, given the newness of the trinket.

My question is, does this sound accurate? I don't know how updated EnhSim is on this trinket (the icd seems to be different than in the notes for example) and would like to hear a quick opinion. I know haste is a bit meh but it is a substantial value in this case. Any thoughts, given the trinkets I otherwise have access to?