@Rounced

I've been digging into the sim and messing around with different values and the rules I've come out with
1) Expertise till capped
2) Spell hit to cap
3) Run sim to determine if FT is worth using
4) if FT > WF then Haste > hit > ap > agil> crit > int

Now the really funny part is that the more haste I had the better haste gets, start off with 6.5% haste and an EP value of 2.06, gem hasted till total haste value was at 10.95 and EP for haste is now 2.18. I've very confused on that part. To keep myself sane I'm just going with the idea that until you haste cap yourself, more haste results is more hits, more static shocks, more MW procs.

The other thing I've noticed is the with 3/3 in static shock, ES > LS >WF > FT gylphs for dps

5) Be prepared to be totally confused and run the sim multiple times...

I've generally gotten haste, AP, and Crit as my only stats > 2 EP with multiple runs of the sim. Agi has always been further down the list for me.

I do remember this quote now, and this was also my interpretation. They also made it sound like they hadn't done it yet because this would be difficult to implement. This is frustrating, because it's presumably easier to just make the imbue main-hand only and most of the community would be perfectly happy with this option.

I am wondering, if it's crit > ap because crit will help the shocks & maelstorm weapon too. It would although help to keep elemental devastion up. For level 70 I think elemental devastation is better than static shock because the crits scale with raidbuffs. Did I get something wrong?

Yeah, I'm not sure why they don't just make it MH only. Even if they were able to create a system where putting it on the OH changed the proc rate, WF/FT would be so much better DPS anybody who did WF/WF would just be wrong. I hate that there is no logical way for us to determine which enchants to use now besides thorough testing.

@Malan - Like some others already suggested:

I would not come up with EP numbers which are different for every player and change with every piece of new gear. People tend to take numbers for something that is set in stone, not as a general guideline.

A brief summary for every stat with a small description how it is affecting our tools + a generell guideline (like from the posters above) should be best. So everybody is given the chance to understand how things are affected by the stats and has a general idea about choosing his/her gear.

Also a summary of the pros/cons for the different weapons(speed) and enchants (FT/WF) and how they change your value for stats (like FT -> haste) would be nice...but I´m pretty sure thats already on your mind.

Actually to be more precise it should be this.

1. Hit until specials are capped

2. Expertise till capped

3. Hit until spells are capped

4. Crit Rating if you are below 30% melee crit (raid buffed including Elemental Devastation uptime), AP if you are above 30% melee crit (raid buffed including Elemental Devastation uptime).

5. CR = Agi > Haste (if you have less then 11% haste or more then 19%*) > Hit (after spell hit cap) > Haste (if you have more then 11% but less then 19%*) > Int > Str > Spellpower

*Haste rules are based off using a 2.6 speed mainhand enchanted with WF. If you are using a fast weapon in the mainhand with FT or WF you are a dumbass and should go back to window licking. If you are using a 2.5 speed weapon in the mainhand with WF then it would be less then 6.8% and more then 14.5%. These figures would need more testing to be conclusive, they are merely guesstimates based on other peoples work.

As for the Glyphs I stick by my rankings since the last 3 are all within 1% of each other and vary greatly depending on personal stats. I normally downrank Lightning Shield since there will always be times where we will use Water Shield and at that point the glyph is doing nothing (JoW was fixed, by the way, so mana is back to being a concern), but even without that downranking the dps gained figures I showed for Lightning Shield glyph were roughly equal to WF or FT.


4 and 5 are where it starts to get confusing (there are many more addendums I should be adding that I haven't since it is already violating the KISS rule) so why not just stick to this as the general guideline.

1. Hit Rating till specials are capped

2. Expertise till 6.25% reduction

3. Hit Rating till Spells are capped.

4. Once 1-3 are done, run your personal stats through the sim to determine the EP values for the rest.

I'm scared of them messing with it to be honest. It was months through the Beta when Windfury either didn't work at all or only worked with rank 5 or wasn't adding the proper amount of AP or the glyph wasn't working or the Elemental Weapons didn't work. They finally seem to have ranks 6-8 working properly and maybe we should just be content with that and accept that it will require a Sim to properly model the behavior. Also some people love a mental challenge and if Windfury were simple to model do you think our community would be as active.

I don't see what will be lost by changing WF. We allready have pleanty of mechanics to figure out and gear decisions to make without WF needlessly making things more difficult. In most cases, at level 80, we will be using WF/FT anyway. The possibility of WF/WF being better adds an unneccesary volitility to our gear choices. I don't want things to be easy, just to make sense. Making WF mainhand only would go a long way towards that.

I completely agree with the K.I.S.S principal you are going for here however the 1 & 3 will still generate the annoying question "When am I hit capped?" I suspect the best thing to have is a list as above and a Hit & Expertise capping section explaining how to work out if they are capped.

I would go for a layout as follows :

Gear choices
I want to know NOW - I'm a bit clueless but I promise not to ask questions section

1. Hit Rating till specials are capped (*)

2. Expertise till 6.25% reduction (*)

3. Hit Rating till Spells are capped. (*)

4. Crit/AP/Agi/Haste

5. Int > Str > Spellpower

NB. Once 1-3 are done, run your personal stats through the sim to determine a better order for the rest.

(*) See Hit & Expertise capping section for details on how to calculate if you are capped.

I can read and understand conditionals section

1. Hit until specials are capped

2. Expertise till capped

3. Hit until spells are capped

4. Crit Rating if you are below 30% melee crit (raid buffed including Elemental Devastation uptime), AP if you are above 30% melee crit (raid buffed including Elemental Devastation uptime).

5. CR = Agi > Haste (if you have less then 11% haste or more then 19%*) > Hit (after spell hit cap) > Haste (if you have more then 11% but less then 19%*) > Int > Str > Spellpower

*Haste rules are based off using a 2.6 speed mainhand enchanted with WF. If you are using a fast weapon in the mainhand with FT or WF you are a dumbass and should go back to window licking. If you are using a 2.5 speed weapon in the mainhand with WF then it would be less then 6.8% and more then 14.5%. These figures would need more testing to be conclusive, they are merely guesstimates based on other peoples work.


I want to have the best dps section
Enter your personal values from your paper doll model (or export using ShockAndAwe) then run the sim to calculate your personal EP values the highest rates is the top stat to go for.


Although perhaps those section names are a bit too "direct" we might want to be more diplomatic?

Well I don't want to change the layout really, the layout and organization took a lot of time to swap around between the original thread and the wiki.

Making WF a mainhand only enchant doesn't change anything. Removing the cooldown is what would make modeling WF a simpler affair. If they just make it a mainhand only enchant but leave the cooldown in place it does nothing to help with the modeling. I'm pretty sure that is what you meant but I just want it to be a bit more clear.

Issue is that we really don't know how Windfury is coded (and with it being broken so often during Beta I have some qualms about the developer's understanding of that as well).

What if it is currently coded to be able to proc off any melee attack, then removing the cooldown would mean that Windfury could proc Windfury. That would be bad, fun for us, but very bad for the game.

There is also the issue of how to deal with 2-handed weapons. If they make it main-hand only and remove the cooldown there would still be the possibility of a Windfury from a white hit followed instantly by a Windfury from a Stormstrike (this is assuming they remove the possibility of a Windfury proccing another Windfury). That's insta-gib level damage. Even if it is only a small percentage of the time that it would happen (4%) it would be frequent enough that it is something they need to take into account (people being killed instantly always light up the forums like nothing else).

Personally, I like the concept that the next white hit following a Windfury is incapable of proccing an additional Windfury. But that concept has issues when dealing with WF/WF dual wielding. It would also make fast/fast WF/FT viable using caster gear along with a ton of haste since then the more WFs you get the more MW procs you get and the more LBs you get to instantly cast. Cooldowns are what make slow weapons better and that may not necessarily be a bad thing in this particular case.

I think at this point it may just be better to just be content with the game the developers have given us and feel secure in the knowledge that they also have issues with Windfury's internal cooldown and are trying to come up with ways to resolve the issue. I'm having more fun playing my shaman then ever before and even if I have to run for my life whenever I see a Ret Pally bubbling towards me, I'm still loving how the game feels.

I've bitched and moaned with the best (hell, I played a Mage for the majority of TBC and everyone knows how good they are at QQ) but right now it just feels false. Our dps is in line with the majority of the other classes and our new mechanics are a lot of fun. Sure there are things that irk me (5 point UR, lack of "selfless" buffs, doggies not scaling, certain doggy abilities not yet fully implemented, lava burst not working with MW just to name a few) but overall I'm content enough to wait and see what the developers have in store for us next.

Blame Malan

So Joe the Plumber is the cause of the Windfury Weapon cooldown? (I'm guessing you meant to post that in the Ranting about Stupid People thread).

Whoah must have had the wrong window open.

I think this would be good as a layout, though I am sure you will have to deal with questions of "What is the cap?" A lot of people don't know the math needed to get the answers.

Of course there would be some variance, but a "this is a general target" might help followed by "run the sim to get the exact numbers you need."

Possibly useful viewpoint:

Just jumped back into the game yesterday. I read through this thread with these things in mind: (These aren't questions I want answered. I am just listing the information I was skimming for coming from a ~5mo-old perspective.)
-What are the assumptions/'rules' I need to throw out.
-What are the new 'threshold' values for stats.
-How do I need to alter my play-style to make best use of the changes/new-stuff.

YMMV, but I found all of this information very easily in this thread and the Wiki. (Major props to Tornhoof, Toots, Malan, Levva, and all the other contributors.)

Personally, I'm thrilled with the changes. I've been keeping myself in the dark until the 3.0 stuff came out live so I could get all excited and read all the new stuff in a giddy flood of learning. (Mostly I ran around with my wolf pack, got my hair done several times, lamented some gear I've sharded, and thought about what to do with all the Fish Oil I had stored in my bank.)

Procs haven't been able to proc themselves for a long time. That's not something that "has to be changed" it was corrected ages ago. The cooldown was not to prevent windfury from proccing itself.

I have been informed anecdotally (I wasn't watching patch notes at the time) that the cooldown was implemented way back in 1.x as a PvP buffer.

Shaman with slow 2 handers would hold their Stormstrikes until after a WF proc, then immediately strike. 20% of the time, you'd get back-to-back procs, which at the time was unsurvivable (pretty tough today as well).

This problem would still exist if they removed the cooldown, though its affects are probably diminished by resilience.

What Malan said.

If you were actually playing a shaman back then, you might know the timeline a little better. When WF proccing off of itself was a major problem, WoW classic was still in beta. It might have lasted a little while into live, I don't remember, but it was fixed very, very early. The question of quick-succession WF procs (which, because of Stormstrike, is distinct from WF proccing off of itself) came up again when shaman started picking up huge two-handers like Sulfuras and wreaking havoc in PvP. The ability for this to happen was eliminated in a much later patch (when compared to the original WF-off-of-WF fix). Yes, both of these were a long time ago, but they are not the same problem, nor were they solved with the same solution. (Which is exactly what Malan just said, I'm just hoping that restating the history will make it stick this time. >.< )

Probably not, it's akin to politicians repeatedly stating they won't raise taxes but the entire public thinks they will.

Ghostcrawler said at Blizzcon as part of the "we want to remove the cooldown" answer that they wanted to prevent shaman from getting two really fast weapons and proccing WF like crazy. I'm sure there are many reasons but this is one.

That's not at all the same thing as Windfury proccing itself, which is what I'm referring to in the quotation you've got there.