Actually it's

SS > *ES > WF = FT = LS > LL

*except that the ES glyph is currently bugged and just should be kept in the bank until it is fixed.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums ->

is the Beta post I made testing the ES glyph and Ghostcrawler's reply showing that Blizzard is at least aware of the Bug and working on fixing it. Once fixed it will be the 2nd best glyph behind SS followed by all the others.

edit - looks like they just pulled the Beta forums - basically the glyph is being capped at a 1 second GCD even though it is supposed to be able to reduce the GCD to under 1 second. Ghostcrawler responded that they will be looking into it and trying to have it working properly soon.

Use this script to test the ES glyph for yourself.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - GC: Shaman's Spirit Wolves still not scaling

Fixed in next patch.

Also GC posted on the now lost Beta forums that the wolves were going to be scaling with Shaman's Hit, Stam and AP. In the thread where he responded he originally said they were going to scale with our strength but when everyone started pointing out that we no longer like strength very much as a stat he rescinded that statement and said they will be scaling with our AP.

Easiest way to test if the hotfix has gone live is to check your wolves hitpoints when summoned naked and when summoned with all your gear on. If you are interested in more detail, or want to help test the scaling factors once the hotfix goes live, copy/paste the following and run it (I just keep it macroed for easy use) to be able to open a pet tab whenever your wolves are active.

I see the top shaman are gemming their meta socket with the new [Ember Skyflare Diamond]

While I can't find someone who can cut this on my server, after getting a new helm from Naxx tonight I decided to gem the old [Ember Skyfire Diamond] and watched my intellect before and after, and it increased by...3. Is this a bug? Or does this only affect BASE int? If so its pretty underwhelming...

Just to clarify I have 792 intellect (138 + 654) and my total amount increase by 3 with this meta.

Were you by chance using the int and mana regen meta? That might be it

I'm not sure why anyone would be using the [Ember Skyflare Diamond] when [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] is available.

The first is 25 spell power + 2% int which, even with a sizable mana pool, AK and BoK, will still only come to 20-25 int (so 12-15 mp5 and a tiny amount of healing and crit).

On the other hand, the [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond] is 21 int and a chance for 600 mana, which looking at my WWS reports seems to be the normal 45 secs hidden cooldown procing once per minute for an astounding 50mp5. 25 spell power is two red gems - what price 50mp5?

Question regarding Enhancement:

Pre-WotLK I was sitting at roughly 29% crit unbuffed. In raid with buffs and procs I could see my crit reach ~45% if not more. I was wondering, did anyone ever find out if there is a "cap" on crit? By that, I mean at what point should one consider stacking up raw AP over Crit/AP+crit? (provided Hit/expertise cap are reached of course)

Crit has diminishing returns the closer to 100% you get, so yes there is a "cap" on it where eventually crit will provide less DPS than some other stat.

There is also a hard cap depending on how much of your hit table the "hit" portion makes up. Chance to crit cannot be larger than your total chance to land a hit.

There are three:

White Cap = 100 - Glancing - Miss - Dodge = 100 - 25 - (28 - Hit) - (6.5 - .25 * Expertise) = 60.07% for a shaman with no expertise who's spell hit capped (6 + 13.57 hit)
Yellow Cap = 100 - Miss - Dodge = 93.5% for a shaman with no expertise who's spell hit capped.
Spell Cap = 100 - Miss = 100% for a shaman who's spell hit capped

And this is where frequent simulation cycles come into play. 60.07% seems high, but it's possible with crit rating procs, ED and mongoose you'd go above 60% crit at some point in your DPS cycle. I suggest running the sim after every upgrade; shoot tukez has that thing spitting out results in less than a minute

It's starting to look like we need something similar for Elemental too.

Enhancement Question.

After using the simulator I arrived at:
[Stonebreaker's Totem] > [Totem of Splintering] > [Totem of Dueling]

But Im unsure of where [Totem of the Elemental Plane] fits in as I dont know its uptime.

Increase the speed value by about 50%.

There is a formula for calculating the value for weapon speed on the first page of this thread, hell it's the very first question asked and it's answered in the next post.

Also you may want to try inputting actual AeP values into Lootrank so the results have a bit more relevance, putting strength in as 1.10 when AP is set to 1 and so forth so the ranking will show the differences between the items in regard to actual attackpower instead of those massive numbers with no real link to anything.

Shaman: Enhancement

Is the post I made on the TTT about intro-raiding AeP values and it has a link to a lootlink with correct weapon speed values for that level of gear.


All that said, yes, spellpower weapons aren't anywhere near as bad as they used to be for us since Spellpower is approaching a AeP value of 1 so they will show up on your lootrank list. Leave them for the Elemental Shaman though, since they will derive more benefit then you will from them.


Edited to add a question of my own:

I've been playing with the Sim regarding weapon speed and I've noticed something strange. Matched weapon speeds work out to more dps even when using Windfury/Flametongue. Can anyone think of a logical reason why that would be true or could it be a flaw in the simulator?