I understand and agree that the Elemental one is the "safer" totem because of the longer duration. Although, when I saw the totem information, I tried running through fights in my mind seeing if I could notice fights where I had extremely long melee downtimes and the only one I could come up with that I think we'd definitely have an issue with losing our stack would be Icehowl.

Now, ToC fights are all nice and dandy, but we're talking about a T10 totem here anyway, and with that, we'd like to compare it to T10 fights, which I assume we all will try and focus on more. The only fight we have any information on currently is Marrowgar. The big issue with Marrowgar is his Bone Cyclone move. The point of this move is to get away from him (similar to Stormcaller Brundir's Lightning Tendrils) and we all know that this means we will most likely lose our Enhancement totem's stack. It may be possible, if Blizzard doesn't change the bleed mechanic, that melee may be able to stay in the whirlwind and continue to DPS, but not all guilds may allow this and as mentioned, it may not be viable come the final release of 3.3.

So I think it might be good to keep a sort of "running tally" of which totem is more viable. If we find that a significant number of Icecrown Citadel fights favor the Elemental totem because of fight mechanics, it might be worthwhile to bring up the buff duration to Blizzard.

Some updated patch notes just came out.

Change of the elemental relic from crit rating to haste rating, aswell as increased duration;

If Blizzard really didn't want us to have any interest in the elemental totem they would just change it to only proc from Flame Shock instead of from any shock. You can keep whatever kind of running tally you want. I'm just gonna take whichever one is going to perform better and if that's the "elemental" totem, so be it.

Do you honestly believe that changing it to Flame Shock only would stop people from trying to use it? The 30 second duration gives more than enough room to apply another FS. I mean, the reason why the buff has a 30s duration is because of 2-piece T9 (Elemental).

Also yes... if none of us take charge to ensure that our items are properly designed, we may still have an Enhancement totem that proc'd 200 AP. Not to mention there's the concept of switching totems based on the encounter to which one is superior.

I guess we'll just have to wait for more boss fights to contemplate the worth of each totem.

Changing it to only Flame Shock would stop shaman of every spec from trying to use it. Clipping your flame shock dot is a significant dps loss for both elemental and enhancement so elemental would just stick to their T9 totem and neither spec would really even think about using it. They could link it to LvB though but then elemental would probably just stick to the T9 totem since it isn't linked to an ability with a cooldown so it already has roughly a 100% uptime with a minimal delay on the initial application. Best option, if they wanted to prevent Enhancement from using it, would be to just change it to spellpower, 85 spellpower stacking 3 times.

As for the totems themselves, let's break it down a bit further. Shocks are 6 seconds, stormstrike is 8 seconds and you can apply your first shock while you are moving into range. Then there is the duration difference to take into account and finally there is the ability to keep it active even if you are forced out of melee range. The only advantage to the enhancement one is that AP may have a slight EP advantage depending on your gear. My current EP for haste is 1.96 so that breaks down to 9 EP versus those other advantages.

I was talking about the initial stacking. If it was only applied with Flame Shock then to stack it in a timely fashion you would have to clip your DoT.

Yesterday I finally got a chance to get onto the PTR and play around with Fire Nova and I must say... its a cool spell that fills the large void of aoe potential that Enh shamans have gotten so used to. However as a result of it I have been doing alot of thinking lately of haste vs ap stacking in the upcoming 3.3 patch.

Alot of us currently are Haste stacking once we get the gear to produce roughly 22% haste as I have found myself that at that point this method sims slightly higher or the same as my previous AP stacking, and when I do my EP I find my haste above 2.0 EP so I know that with more gear and haste I will produce faster dps than before. But because of Fire Nova already hitting for about the same on 1 target as Lava Lash, and it producing about equal damge to 2 targets as our shocks. What happens to the our priority queued rotation at 3-5 targets?

I would imagine that we will find a rotation as such will produce far more dps than our standard single target rotation (MT,FN,SS,FN,MW,FN,ES,FN,MW,FN,SS...........) This is of course with a glyphed fire nova and it would have to be proven with simming at some point, but truly like every other aoe class their is a certain number targets required before you basically go balls out on aoe to produce higher dps. 25m Heroic Anub'arak is the perfect example of this, and If enh shamans had that spell today I have a good feeling we'd be using the fire nova glyph and the rotation above while the adds are up for that fight.

So, back to the haste question, because we all know that Blizz will have alot of fights with multiple targets to dps, should we just say screw haste stacking as it produces little to no extra dps with a aoe rotation or perhaps its time for us to build 2 gear sets, one with ap stacking for an aoe environment and one with haste stacking for single target dps? It would be interesting to know how much extra dps is provided by haste stacking on a single target with our BIS gear setup for 3.2 vs just ap stacking. Currently I'm at work (lol) but when I get home I will answer my own question.

Just some food for thought.

While it would be a DPS loss to clip Flame Shock, isn't it already a DPS loss to activate the current design of the totem because I assume Elementals would use Earth Shock twice after the initial Flame Shock to activate it?

I think some Elementals might actually like the totem more if it were Spellpower. Although some people may not even upgrade to the T10 totems for awhile since they aren't much of a difference, and we have no idea if T10 will be purchased the same way as T9.

I can say that I am in no way trying to say that the Elemental totem doesn't have advantages over the Enhancement one. Although, some of these advantages are either very small (shorter ramp-up time) or they aren't necessarily an advantage unless the fight mechanics cause them to be. I mentioned that Lord Marrowgar already provides a fight where the Elemental totem is better simply because of his Bone Whirlwind.

Although, in regard to haste EP... I'm not sure if you read MMOC any, but we've been talking a bit about haste's EP calculations in EnhSim and how at times they can be inaccurately portrayed by inhuman reactions, etc. Levva had a couple good posts describing a few of the issues. I created a graph of haste's EP values from 0 to 30% in .5% steps that will give you a good idea of what I mean:

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...haste_0_30.png

Note that these were calculated while I had 4/5 T8 and now I'm in a tad bit different gear that could result in a slightly different looking graph. The script that created each EnhSim file did take into account melee haste as well as spell haste in the proper ratio.

I'm mostly looking to get a "windfury-viable" weapon speed when fully buffed (including Flurry) and I have to take my haste into account when doing that.

Frost Shock actually, due to Booming Echoes (more damage + shorter cooldown on Frost Shock). The problem is, both Frost and Earth Shock only have a 25 yard range, which again pushes us elementals closer to boss. It doesn't matter much, since a lot of us are already using Searing Totem (20 yard range) these days, but it does make one wonder what the devs are thinking.

@Rouncer: ah, sorry, I misunderstood you there, mea culpa.

You do realize that Windfury has nothing to do with the haste fluctuation, right? Windfuries cooldown has been proven to be variable around that 3 second mark such that there can be no fine tuning for that specific cooldown. The easiest way to think about the cooldown is as if it was 3 +/- 0.2 seconds and that is how the Sim attempts to model it.

Personally, I have never seen the haste EP values that other people talk about and I have tried changing all my gems in rawr to haste and various other things in an attempt to inflate it's value. I think this is for a very specific reason that I really haven't had time to validate as of yet. I am an engineer so I use hyperspeed accelerators for my glove enchants and that has been a constant in all my testing of haste's EP values. So every minute I get a large infusion of haste rating and that seems to level out my haste EP values to show more realistic numbers. Haste is still showing a very large EP value but just not over the value of AP and I think those values I am getting are validated by the Sim since using a gemming priority of AP or a gemming priority for haste is giving me basically the same results.

Following is Rawr exports of my current setup into EnhSim 1.8.4.1 and then ran for 10k hours for 10 min combat samples with default Rawr buff setup.

Current Gear - Prioritizing AP
5022 AP
426 Haste Rating
8166.15 dps

Prioritizing Haste (keeping hit at same level just swapping AP for Haste)
4702 AP
586 Haste Rating
8166.47 dps

Pretty close, which is why I stick to AP stacking since AP affects Magma totem so AP stacking should be better if Magma totem ends up hitting more then one target. True, the same type of argument could be made regarding Chain Lightning in haste's favor since it should stack Maelstrom Weapon faster.

I did a quick search of proof, but could not find anything conclusive on the icd. Was there actually a test conducted with a large enough sample size to create a confidence interval? The combat log is also notoriously incorrect with timestamps so all data would be skewed anyway. I feel like you would literally have to run a private server to test this with accuracy. I think its pretty obvious that there is an inner cooldown on windfury procs which means, to me, that it makes more sense to figure out how to work around it then ignore it. Howver i do agree that we cant reach a weapon speed where we can fine tune to an inner cooldown; I just think that pushing/ignoring haste to a point where it is significantly over/under the 1.5 area will yield better results than just ignoring the cooldown.

Their has been alot of testing to determine that the WF cd is infact 3.0 +/- 0.2. Rouncer and others went to great length to determine this 6 months back or so.

I just read through this thread and I didn't see any tables or charts that consolidated all the information into one data set. So, the +/- .2 is not a confidence interval but more of a rule of thumb. I would say that this still means that there will be a lull in windfury procs when approaching 3, 1.5, 1 etc weapon speeds. It might be hard to conclusively pinpoint what this cooldown is and how it affects us, but I would say that the best solution is just to stay away from multiples of 3.

Spell Comparison from Patch 3.3 - PTR Build 10676 (Posted on MMO-champion.com)

As there are procs not only for melee and casterin general, but melee slow weapons, too, it's most likely that they are on actual weapons. Probably to have the "fun stuff" on the end raid weapons here, too, like on the old ( and refreshed in Onyxia's case) weapons from level 60 raids.
I'm sure, though, that they will still have other stats, too, unlike the ones that were reintroduced.
Only thing I find odd so far is that there is no proc for melee fast weapons (not counting the daggers).

There isn't anything for two handers either. My initial reaction was that "dagger" was a blanket term for 1h and "slow melee weapon" was a blanket for 2h. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a dagger would have a runic power gain on it seeing as Death Knights don't even know how to pick them up.

Conversely dagger could blanket fast and slow could blanket.. slow.

i was doing some fast math with our T10 4pc bonus
taking numbers of geting MS5 stacks from forum as 5 sec for haste build and 7.5 sec for AP build and 8000ap for haste b. and 9500ap for AP build
15% chance on prots give proc every 6.6 full stacks so for
haste build it will be every 6.6 * 5sec = 33sec
AP build 6.6 * 7.5sec = 49.5sec

avarage AP will be
haste build ((8000*0.2)*10sec)/33sec ~ 484ap
AP build ((9500*0.2)*10sec)/49.5sec ~ 383ap

if my math is ok then it looks like we will be still stacking haste

This is the stuff I don't like to see, you are just randomly making up values and then stating how something will actually work. Lets try this with real values.

Using the BiS set and changing the race to Orc and both weapons to the 258 axes so I can push the haste gemming as far as possible I get a set with 5419AP and 957 Haste Rating. Regemming for an AP priority changes it to 5839AP with 546 Haste Rating.

Haste set runs 9138 dps with the ToEW and AP set runs 9134 dps with ToQE. Haste set fires off a 5 stack LB every 6.2 seconds and the AP set every 6.6 seconds.

So Haste build gets a proc every 40.9 seconds and AP build gets a proc every 43.6 seconds, making the average AP

haste build ~ 265 AP
AP build ~ 268 AP

Look at that, almost the same amount of AP from that bonus. Seems like those who want to stack haste will still stack haste and those who like to stack AP will still be stacking AP. Maybe Fire Nova will change things one way or the other. So if you want to start working on the math for that, be my guest but try to use realistic values and not just random ones pulled out of thin air.

I like those procs because unlike most procs which <Increase physical damage by a %> which only uses like half our damage sources it converts it to Shadow damage buffed from Spell power which generally hits over 3k in a raid as of t9 content.

Also. I think it has much relevance but the haste stackers to my knowledge don't use ToEW anymore because of the lower uptime and you can spend upwards of 20 seconds without a proc from the start of an encounter.

It's still part of the current BiS build which is what I used for the comparison.