First: I say "that shitty badge offhand" because it's ridiculous Blizzard offered a badge weapon whose speed was a little wrong for just about every class, and that because of that decision it does inferior DPS to many t5 and 6 equiv. offhands, including Dragonstrike, despite having a much higher item level. It's shitty because it isn't as good as it should be, considering its item level and its cost, and that's Blizzard's fault -- not yours.

Second: you're right that it's a cooldown thing. "But Toots, I thought we disproved that whole 'losing dps at 1.5s' thing." Well, sort of. What we proved was that haste ALWAYS improves DPS as you add more of it. What we didn't prove -- because it isn't true -- is that adding haste is always a DPS improvement at the same rate.

Haste affects 5 sources of DPS: Autoattack (obviously), Maelstrom Weapon, Static Shock, Flametongue (if it's up) and Windfury. All of these source of DPS scale linearly with haste -- 1% haste = 1% more damage -- except Windfury.

Windfury has a problem -- namely, the cooldown. It places an upper limit on the number of WF procs per minute.

Here's a simplification of a flattened WF model I've been working on.
Take a look at that bottom equation. As you approach a hasted 1.51s swing speed, the value of TimeToFirstSwing is going to approach .01s, while the value for TimeToProcAfterFirstSwing is going to be around 1.34. Total avg time between procs = 4.31.

However, bringing hasted speed down to 1.5, the value for TimeToFirstSwing shoots up to 1.5. TimeToProcAfterFirstSwing decreases to around 1.33, however the total avg time has gone up to 5.622.

Like I said -- these numbers are simplified, and as you add more and more haste, you will decrease both TimetoFirstSwing AND TimeToProcAfterFirstSwing. However, there is a pretty big hit to windfury damage as each weapon enters that period. This represents, essentially, wasted haste; a period where windfury DPS goes down dramatically while other sources of haste-able dps are increasing.

Flurry, mongoose, drums and other haste procs will have us moving in and out of these zones of decreased benefit all the time. Really, it's all about the amount of time spent in these zones. If they make up the majority of your dps time, this may explain why simulation suggests you should put Flametongue up, and why I (with 2.7s weapons and very little passive haste) am better served with dual WF.

TLDR -- Windfury has "plateaus," where increasing haste actually decreases dps from Windfury. Flametongue has no such plateau. New haste buffs put us awfully close to this plateau, close enough that passive haste or weapon speed can play a role. Simulate both WF/WF and WF/FT to find out which is best for you.

Yeah....is it "shitty" because it's a Badge item (meaning it carries a stigma) or is it really bad? I'm assuming he was talking about the 2.5 speed Vanir's Fists?

-Due to the overall buff to dps and the lowered hitpoints/abilities of raid mobs, I would say that the best place to experiment right now is inside an actual raid(if you are on farm content). From what I'm experiencing, DPS output isn't an issue right now if you properly equiped.


One of the biggest things that I have taken away from reading this forum daily pre/post patch is that the sims are great but nothing is set in stone. Randomness, what you see on this forum may not work for you if you implement it. There are a lot of shamans running 10 Agilitly gems, while others are gemming crit/AP everywhere, and both getting great results. As far cookie cutter specs, Hard core raiders can spec differently than peeps that are doing 10 mans and below. 10/

Thank you Toots, the math with this does help considerably. I've been reading all across this and the other thread about people discussing big EP drops in haste after 9%, people mentioning Mongoose/Exe beating mongoose/mongoose, and other oddities. The affect of those various hastes and a big WF plateau could really explain a lot of it.

I'll check on beta again, but that's what was screwing me up trying to create an actual rotation, the tooltip said 9 seconds with no points in imp SS and it was definitely screwing up the rotation I'd plotted out in Excel. I didn't bother to look into it any further, I figured since spell haste reduces cast times, must reduce CD's as well. I apologize for posting wrong information.

So you're saying i'm better off using My Dragonstrike or Syphon offhand than the vanir's fist? That's news to me as i based my decision at the time on your Thinktank article which said otherwise.

Has anyone re-modeled using Dual Dragonstrikes for 3.0.2? I'm aware the buffs don't stack, but they do refresh for about a 40% greater uptime overall.

Thanks for the clarification, i guess i didn't quite read it right. also there was no (direct) mention of dragonstrike on the off-hand section assuming at the time that it was written it was MH only.

Roywyn ROCKS!

Blue response in the Beta thread about the Earth Shock glyph.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> GC, bug with the Earth Shock glyph

I've been playing with the sim and it does show that for me WF FT is better than WFx2, by roughly 20-30 dps. As for loot rank I picked a number out the air 0.25 for arm pen and it fits in nicely with where I expect items to line up. Its really surprising how many caster items are suddenly rather decent

Heh, after reading the blue forum posts in regards to UR I had a bit of brainstorm, if they moved imp shocks from elemental to enchancement and either tied UR into another talent or made it a 1 point talent, i think a lot of issues would be solved in regards to rotations... Afterall how many elemental shammies ever fully invest in that talent? Thats my crazy idea for the week

Edit again: Oh and the ES/LL macro seems to be working great (set it for a 4 second reset timer)

New build on beta server and OUCH our glyphs got a swipe.

RIP. SoE glyph.

Other changes :
So good for WF (just a bug fix really), bad for Static Shock, This will significantly reduce its dps per talent point value.

Blizz has completely cornered themselves. The new glyph of lava burst and glyph of flame shock could seriously make caster gear totally viable for enhancement... Again. The only way to properly balance elemental for use with lava burst is to keep it out of reach of enhancement. The trainable thunderstorm and 51pt lava burst proposition really is the best way to go.

At any rate, using glyph of flameshock and glyph of lava burst really opens up the possibility of "slam" casting lava burst, especially since we have an open glyph slot since the SoE glyph is dead. Honestly, it might be kind of a fun mechanic. Since the flameshock won't be consumed and lasts so long, we can do a FS>ES>ES rotation for shocks, which gives plenty of opportunity to eat charges with ES and maelstrom casts. I'll need some popcorn so I can watch people try and make a castsequence macro for that mess. If slam casting lava burst with flameshock does make its way into our bag of tricks, enhancement will easily be the hardest class to play to its full potential.

Blanket .5 second GCD reduction, anyone?

I have a question.

Surefooted is 10 hit + 10 crit now. Movement speed is not optional. So what's better?

RED/CSD + Cat Speed or Swift Skyfire Diamond + Surefooted?

<edit> nm RED is better

Depends on gear. Run the sim and find out.

Enhancement

Static Shock - Now procs off any damage, instead of melee attacks and abilities.

That´s from worldofraids, it´s the otherway around from what you posted Levva so i wonder which it is.

This statement is so true it hurts, which leads me to several discussions I have had with shaman on my server recently.

Asking me "Why crit/AP over Agil?" The answer is really simple, ELEMENTAL DEVASTATION. This talent isn't a chance on proc, it states it "WILL" increase your melee crit chance by 9% for 10secs when you have a spell crit.

Looking over data posted on sims thread, I have noticed how low folks have their spell crit when doing their testing. This talent was one of the best changes that became available to us with the patch.

So now it comes back to gear, how good was your gear pre-patch, was it all leather? Do I have Mail with int on it in my bank collecting dust? It is still early, we have time, and most shamans have seen an increase in dps from pre-patch so everyone is happy.

But, 1200 or more bonus damage, and 32% spell crit or more ( depending on raid make up) will yield more dps, hands down. So now which OH imbue is better? Or is a fast OH viable at this time? As you can see Blizz is herding us to use FT, and Flame shock, Don't fight it.

Edit: with the right gear/set up a Fast OH can do equal damage or more at this time. This is where haste comes into play for stacking MW and battle trance if applicable.

First of all, before anyone says "use the simulator to find out", I can't do that because it uses processor routines that mine does not have. Yes, that means my processor is an old AMD that barely manages WoW, so while I really wish I could investigate this stuff myself, I can't. Thus, I'm really stuck offering suggestions of what to test.

While there have been a few lists to the contrary, I have seen most folks prioritize Stormstrike over Earth Shock. This makes sense as long as WF can proc on SS. However, and I admit that its often difficult to maintain this distinction, Stormstrike while WF is on cooldown is significantly less damage (on my terribly geared character at least) than Earth Shock if the Stormstrike debuff is on the target. While a priority list isn't "difficult", and the addon that's been mentioned many times looks like it will definitely help in maintaining it, it can be rather taxing at times to stick to it given that its completely unable to be automated and very fast decisions need to be made to maintain optimal DPS. Thus, I hesitate to suggest that one attempt to optimize the sim by separating out the cases where SS and ES are both ready the same GCD by whether WF can proc or not. It may even be the case that SS is higher average damage factoring the WF procs, but I would venture that since Lava Lash is a significant source of WF procs, if one is cognizant of the WF CD but ignoring whether it actually is available, using SS direcly after LL when ES is also available has a high potential of not being the best strategy and is much simpler to keep in mind than watching for WF procs.

Now, that last point obviously depends on WF being used on the offhand which is not going to be true at 80 most likely and current level 70 raiding seems rather lackluster in terms of the benefit of theorycrafting. So I suppose the main point here is that perhaps SS > ES is not neceesarily a done deal if you're attentive enough to your WF procs.

You have completely overlooked the other benefits SS has over ES. This includes additional chances to proc MW, as well as flurry (SS & WF proc but don't consume flurry charges). On the other hand, ES has a chance to proc Elemental Devastation. The point is there's a lot of interactions here, which is why we have sims.

If blizz are herding us towards FT (which is blatantly obvious with the creation of LL) I'm wondering if FT and LL glyphs would be a good combo to use now, even with slow/slow.

Aw damn those glyph changes suck. They really want people to use FT on OH don't they. And now I can't seem to figure out what else to put in my (current) second slot. Bah...

But am I the only one that doesn't see Maelstrom proc on every hit? Granted I migth have been a little careless about watching what kind of damage it was, but it certainly felt like it with the speed it sometimes stacks up. I guess I have to go test it.

In the meantime I think I will settle for the WF/FT combo, not because I know it is best, but because I like at this time, and since nothing is solid yet I think what I like counts for a lot (if it is within reasonable tolerances both ways in DPS). Anyway my shaman is only my primary alt. Until 80 raiding or major changes I will keep an eye on these developments.

Glyphs changes are fine.

Stormstrike will still be best glyph for personal dps. Earth Shock is second best (provided the issue with the GCD being hard capped at 1 second is resolved). That leaves Lava Lash, Flametongue and Windfury Weapon contesting for the 3rd spot and if I had to guess I would say they are all going to be very close to each other in value. Lightning Shield is even in contention for that spot, but that one doesn't seem as good to me since we still use Water Shield.

Lava Lash glyph will be great for PvP if disarming becomes the new thing since you can still Lava Lash when disarmed but it will really depend on whether the glyph can keep up with Windfury Weapon or Flametongue to determine if it will be used.

Maelstrom Weapon doesn't proc on every hit. It's not supposed to, its on a PPM mechanic whose value is determined by how many points you have in the talent. Read the thread. There were numerous pages spent trying to figure out how it worked and scaled and its values per talent point.

I see... but the changes are still unfortunate for those of us at 70 who have the SoE glyph. I pretty much knew that the current glyphs wouldn't likely be greatest for level 80. Though SoE did look like it could be one of the three.

Well, as I mentioned my Shaman isn't my main, but I try to keep up with developments. Things just pace faster than I can devote the time for. So I need to search, but searching for Maeltrom Weapon even in this thread is a majoer undertaking. Maybe I missed a post when I did, or maybe I didn't look back far enough. I guess I have to do that again.
It was just the talent alone that seems so certainly worded. Which is actually badly worded.

Thanks for the help.

[EDIT] Searched and found now that I knew what to look for.

With all due respect to the fantastic work tukez has done on the simulator, I think the community still has to figure out this ppm mechanic. As far as I remember (correct me if I'm wrong), the enhsim uses 10 PPM for 5/5 MW talent. It's much, much higher on live, as everyone has experienced first hand. Thus, I think we still have to be careful to rely too heavily on the sim until this issue is resolved. That said, my own dps was pretty much in line with what the sim says, but I do not personally believe that MW is modelled correctly at the moment.