#0 - Aug. 9, 2007, 11:18 a.m.
(OP: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=79203452&sid=1)
Updated for the 2.1 patch.
Windfury Weapon
- Scales with weapon DPS, attack power, melee haste, melee crit, melee tohit.
- Mitigated by armor and block, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 5% special attack type melee miss chance.
- Benefits from weapon mastery for 10% more damage.
- The best enchant for enhancement shamans, on both hands.
- The two extra attacks can proc flurry, unleashed rage, and shamanistic rage. They do not consume flurry charges, and don't glance.
- The two offhand attacks are affected by the standard offhand 50% damage reduction. The WF proc's attack power bonus is not.
- The windfury totem enchant for your group will proc on ALL melee attacks except for itself, such as sinister strike, sword spec, heroic strike, etc. These attacks also generate rage. Windfury totem is the best melee buff in the game for combat rogues, ret paladins, and warriors.
The Windfury Cooldown
After windfury procs it cannot proc again on either hand for 3 seconds. Since no usable 1H weapons are slower than 2.9s (or 3.9s with flurry), this means that no 1H weapon in the entire game can proc windfury twice in a row. Note that this means that windfury will proc less than the 20% promised on its tooltip. Please read "Optimal Weapon Speeds" below for more information.
- When only one weapon has windfury, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 20% chance to proc WF. This leads to a 11-18% overall proc rate, depending on gear, weapon speed, spec, and luck. Slower is better.
- In version 2.0 the shared cooldown could be avoided by downranking windfury on the off-hand. This was removed in 2.1 and the cooldown is now shared. This change reduces overall enhancement shaman DPS by 10-18%, depending on spec, weapon speed, gear, and spell use.
- When both weapons have windfury of any rank, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 36% chance to proc windfury. This leads to a 11-14% procrate with weapons faster than 2.0s unhasted and a 14-18% procrate with weapons slower than 2.0s unhasted. Slower is better. Handy reference chart:
3.0s normal, 4.0s with flurry = no swings wasted (no 1H weapons >20dps exist at this speed)
1.5s normal, 2.0s with flurry = one swing wasted
<1.5s normal, <2.0s with flurry = two swings wasted
Flametongue Weapon
- Scales with +spell damage, +spell crit, ,+spell hit, melee haste, melee tohit.
- Mitigated by spell resist, fire resist, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 4% normal spell resist chance.
- Crits at 100% damage with the elemental talent Elemental Fury
- The best enchant for elemental/restoration shamans.
- Does not benefit from the Spirit Weapons talent threat reduction.
- Useful offhand for enhancement shamans against mobs with damage shields or very high armor. Also useful if you are using pre-TBC greens.
- Benefits from 10% of your spell damage per hit. This additional damage ignores weapon speed, so if you're elemental get the fastest dagger can you find.
- When used offhand, the fire proc is not affected by the 50% damage reduction.
- FT7 adds 35dps (40.25 talented). Each proc will do 40.25*(weaponspeed) damage.
- Does not give back mana with Elemental Focus on crits.
Frostbrand Weapon
- Scales with +spell damage, +spell crit, +spell hit, +melee haste, melee tohit.
- Mitigated by spell resist, frost resist, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 4% normal spell resist chance.
- Crits at 100% damage with the elemental talent Elemental Fury.
- Does not benefit from the Spirit Weapons talent threat reduction.
- Benefits from 10% of your spell damage per proc.
- Each proc does 244 damage at level 70, 280.5 with elemental weapons.
- Procs at 9 procs per minute, which at 70 is 36.60dps (42.08dps talented).
- With stormstrike, frostbrand offers somewhat more damage than flametongue and includes a free snare. However, it gets less benefit from spell damage than flametongue, it is less consistent damage, and WF is better anyway.
- Does not give back mana with Elemental Focus on crits.
Rockbiter Weapon
- Scales with melee haste, melee crit, melee tohit.
- Mitigated by armor, block, glancing blows, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 24% normal dualwielding miss chance, or 5% if you are not dualwielding.
- Rockbiter is the best mainhand enchant if you are an enhancement shaman wearing pre-TBC green gear.
- Benefits from weapon mastery for 10% more damage. Fully talented does 81.84dps mainhand at 70.
- When used offhand fully talented rockbiter does 40.92 raw DPS, with the offhand 50% damage reduction, but is then mitigated 20-50% by the target's armor. Rockbiter should never be used offhand.
Offhand weapon enchants
Flametongue and frostbrand don't scale with enhancement gear, so there is a breakpoint where WF5/WF5 beats WF5/FB and WF5/FT. This breakpoint is roughly at 60dps weapons slower than 2.0s and 800AP. In short, before the breakpoint offhand enchants are ranked as
FT = FB > WF5 >>> RB
Once you've got higher DPS slow weapons and gear,
WF5 > FB = FT >>> RB
Elemental Weapons Talent
The elemental weapons talent adds 40% to overall windfury damage, not just the attack power bonus. This was changed in 2.0.1. This was a huge buff and is one of the main reasons why enhancement shamans did competitive DPS in 2.0.
Ancestral Knowledge vs. Shield Specialization
Both talents are very weak and a forced waste of five points. Ancestral knowledge is somewhat better than shield spec.
Anticipation vs. Toughness
In the best case scenario wearing full tier 5 armor with a gladiator's shield, 5 points in toughness gives roughly 2.5% damage mitigation. 5 points in anticipation gives 5% damage avoidance from the front. Do not spec toughness, it is an underpowered talent.
Spirit Weapons: Does It Work?
[BUG] Intial tests showed that spirit weapons does not work. When presented to the developers in the bug report forum, they dismissed the findings saying that tracing the NPC's thread showed that threat reduction was in effect. More testing is indicated.
Unleashed Rage: Does it generate threat?
Unleashed rage used to generate threat. This was removed in the 2.0.10 patch. Still unknown how much this change will help enhancement shaman threat management. Testing is needed.
Thundering Strikes Bugs
[BUG] It's unclear whether the thundering strikes talent affects Windfury or Stormstrike attacks. If it does, they would have a 5% lower crit rate. Combined, these two attacks account for roughly 50% of shaman DPS. More testing is needed to reach consensus as results have gone either way.
Shamanistic Rage
- Early testing in January showed that shamanistic rage is a flat 35% on hit proc. More recent tests have shown it to be based upon a set procs per minute. More testing is indicated.
- Shamanistic rage causes power gain threat at the rate of 1 threat per 2 mana restored. If you get 6000 mana from shamanistic rage, it's the same as if you healed for 6000 damage.
The new Elemental Focus Talent
- As of 2.1, elemental focus procs on every offensive spell crit, giving 60% mana back. This was done to boost elemental sustainability. Level 70 elemental/resto shamans commonly have a 25-35% crit rate, so this change is very significant. Hybrid PvP enhance/elemental "suicide spec" shamans were nerfed by this change, as they have less than 10% spell crit. It does not work on heals.
- In 2.0.1, elemental focus procced clearcasting on crit. This was nerfed in 2.1 to a 60% mana refund. This hurt sustainability a great deal, both in pure mana usage and that shamans will now always be in the five second rule.
- Chain lightning does give three chances to proc elemental focus.
- Elemental mastery no longer gives 2 free spells; instead you get one free spell and 60% of the cost of the spell cast with the talent.
How to gear for enhancement?
Four stats are important for enhancement shamans. They are:
- Tohit: If you don't hit, you can't WF. WF procs give damage, crits for flurry and unleashed rage, and mana with shamanistic rage. Enhance/resto shamans can get 9% tohit from talents. The first 5% is absolutely essential and should be your top talent/gear priority, as 5% is required to totally eliminate misses with WF and stormstrike.
- Attack power: Measures how hard you hit. 1 STR = 2 AP.
- Crit: Crits do damage and proc flurry and unleashed rage. Enhance shamans can get 5% crit from talents, but this doesn't apply to WF or stormstrike.
- Haste: Due to the 3s windfury cooldown period, haste is less desirable for shamans than other classes. Unless it pushes you through a threshold where your weapon attacks faster than 1.5s or 3.0s, haste will still be a buff, and will still increase the number of windfury, unleashed rage, and flurry procs. Tests have shown that haste is still the most valuable use of item budget point for point, so long as it doesn't drop your weapon speeds faster than 1.5s after all haste modifiers.
Don't sacrifice too much of any one stat for another. Simulations on the EJ forums have mathematically generated the following stat values. They're only as good as the sims that created them, but the sims are quite good. Note that these haste values assume that you're not <1.5s fully hasted. In valuation (pawn) terms:
AP = 1, STR = 2, Haste Rating = 2.2, Hit Rating = 1.08, Crit Rating = 1.51, AGI = 1.3384
And in equivalency terms:
1 AP = 0.5 STR = 0.45 Haste = 0.93 Hit Rating = 0.66 Crit Rating = 0.75 AGI
