Weapon Speed

Quick update on adding flame shock to your rotation. I tried it out and if you have a lot of haste (over 500) you can alternate between earth shock and flame shock instead of doing flame shock and two earth shocks. I recommend you also get the elemental totem from frost badges for extra haste if you do.

Anyway, I had a question about weapon speed recently.  It’s something that usually comes up while leveling, but I still see level 80 shaman running around with daggers.  I’ll tell you about how weapon speed effects shaman DPS and how to figure out how much of an effect it has.

The first thing you need to know is the formula for DPS.  DPS = attack power / 14.  Mathamagic it and damage = (attack power/14)* weapon speed

What this means is that the higher your weapon speed (the slower it is,) the more damage you do when you hit. Why does this matter to a shaman?  Windfury, Stormstrike, and Lava lash are all instant attacks.  They hit the same number of times no matter what your weapon speed is.  So, to take advantage of this, you want to use slower weapons to hit as hard as possible.  I’ll outline how you might figure out which is better.

I’ll use myself when in a raid (8000 average attack power,) and a 2.6 speed weapon.

Damage = (8000/14)2.6 = 1485 extra damage on my windfury, and stormstrike

Now the damage if I use a 1.8 speed dagger instead:

Damage = (8000/14)1.8 = 1028

As you can see, I’d be losing out on 456 damage on every proc (228 on the offhand.)  In 8 seconds you can expect to have 5 instant attacks on the main hand (1 stormstrike and 4 windfury hits) and 2 of the offhand (1 lava lash and a stormstrike.) That’s 2280 damage on the main hand and 456 on the offhand every 8 seconds.  Or 285 and 57 DPS.

This means a weapon would have to have 285 more DPS for it to be a main-hand upgrade and 57 DPS upgrade to be an offhand upgrade.  I hope it’s pretty clear that you should never use a fast weapon in the main hand.  The difference can be even worse if you’re lucky with windfury.  The weapon in the offhand could be an upgrade if it’s much, much better.

The short of it:
Never use a fast weapon in the main hand.  Use this formula to find out how much more DPS a fast weapon has to have to be better than your own:

((attack power/14) * (slow weapon’s speed – fast weapon’s speed))/8

Shaman Basics Redux

Hihi.  I’ve been having some people ask me how to DPS as enhance lately, so I wrote up this post. It reviews the basic stats and goes into more detail on the actual rotation.

Hit Rating

Hit rating is the most important stat for shaman up to 14% spell hit (17% if you don’t have a moonkin/shadow priest.) More hit rating is still good, but don’t gem for it after 17% spell hit.

Crit Rating

Enhancement shaman are very dependent on crits. Crits activate Flurry, Unleashed Rage, and Elemental Devastation. You’ll want 20-25% melee crit to keep these abilities up almost all the time. Don’t gem for it unless you’re under 25% crit buffed.

Expertise

Windfury, stormstrike, and lava lash can all be dodged. It’s especially bad when stormtrike is dodged since you lose out on two attacks, an opportunity to proc windfury, two opportunities to proc maelstrom, and two opportunities to crit. This is above and beyond the DPS loss from being dodged in the first place. You’ll see dramatic DPS increases when you start getting expertise. Mobs generally have about a 6.5% chance to dodge. I’ve found that 25 expertise for 6.25% is a good sweet spot. You’ll pretty much always have to gem for expertise to get enough.

Armor Penetration Rating

It’s not a bad stat for shaman to get, but it doesn’t do anything for our spell damage or do anything to proc our other abilities. Never gem for it. Worry about upgrades that have it since you’ll probably be trading hit rating or expertise in its place.

Haste

Haste can be a good stat for shaman if you have top-tier gear. The tier 10 set bonus and diminishing returns on crit let it creep above most other stats. If you’re just gearing up or have less than full tier 9 gear then don’t worry about it. If you have great gear then it’s about as good as attack power. It’s good for gemming yellow slots.

Attack Power

Consistently a good stat for shaman. The best to gem for once you have hit and expertise taken care of.

Summary

What should you gem for? Hit till 6%, expertise till 6.25%, spell hit till 14%, then attack power for the rest. If you have top-tier gear, gem haste if you have any spare yellow slots.

DPS Rotation

Shaman are now designed with a priority system of DPSing. You have lots of abilities on short cooldowns and you want to use them as much as possible. The goal is to use the most damaging ones over the less damaging ones since you’ll usually have more than one available. I’ll start with the basic queue for leveling/early grouping:

Lightning Bolt (with 5 stacks of maelstrom weapon so it’s instant)

Lightning shield if it’s down

Stormstrike

Earth Shock

Lava Lash

The spells higher on the list should be used first. The most important thing is to use lightning bolt when you can. The rest can be switched around a little without losing much DPS. Once you get used to doing this you can add a fire totem to the mix:

Lightning Bolt (with 5 stacks of maelstrom weapon so it’s instant)
Lightning shield if it’s down

Shamanistic rage if you have the tier 10 set bonus

Magma Totem if it’s not down

Stormstrike

Earth Shock

Lava Lash

Fire Nova

Even though magma totem is an AOE totem it does a fair amount of single-target damage. It lasts for 20 seconds with just one global cooldown so it ends up being better than most of your other spells. You’ll notice at the end there’s fire nova. If you’re keeping up well with your rotation you’ll probably only use it once every 30 seconds or so when you get a GCD with nothing to drop. It’s still extra damage even on single targets. The rotation can get hectic if you’re not used to it. You can use searing totem instead since it lasts 1 minute so you don’t have to worry about it as much.

Ghostpuppies

Spirit Wolves are just awesome. Make sure you use bloodlust after you summon them if you can. For fights under 6 minutes it’s better to summon them twice than summon them once with bloodlust. If everyone is sated and bloodlust is off cooldown then you can lust just your wolves if you like.

Glyphs and Flame Shock

The two clear glyph winners are improved stormstrike and improved windfury weapon. Imp Spirit Wolves is pretty good for the third one. After the next patch (3.3.3?) things will be more interesting. Flame shock DOT will crit and will tick more quickly with haste. Flame shock benefits a lot more from spell power and does more damage than earth shock even with stormstrike. After the patch the best glyph for the third slot will probably be flame shock.

This means you’ll be using flame shock when the DOT isn’t on the target and earth shock otherwise. A castsequence macro is pretty good here so you don’t have to watch yet another cooldown. It’ll automatically toggle between earth shock and flame shock when needed.

/castsequence reset=9 flame shock, earth shock, earth shock

You can do it manually, but I certainly don’t have that much attention to give. You can tweak the reset time a bit depending on your haste. You can’t always shock right at cooldown, so you want it to reset back to flame shock

Mods

There aren’t any must-have mods for shaman, but a few of them can help.

-Dominos bar mod and Autobar are very good for giving you more bars to work with saving space. Shaman have a lot of utility spells and there just isn’t enough room for all of them in the default UI.

-Shockandawe is the main enhance mod out there. I use it to keep track of lightning shield and some other spells. It has a priority guide that’ll tell you what spells to use next, but I don’t use it.

3.1 Test Realm Changes

MMO Champion had a big info dump now that the test servers are live.  Nothing’s making me super excited, but PvP will change for shaman without losing too much.  I’m also including some changes in the last small patch.

First, some glyphs:
*Glyph of Feral Spirit — Your spirit wolves gain an additional 30% of your attack power.

It’s hard to say how much DPS this will give us.  It does increase the utility of ghost wolves significantly by making them heal for more, so it’ll be a great glyph for PvP regardless.  I’ll report more when I can test it.

*Glyph of Hex — Increases the damage your Hex target can take before the Hex effect is removed by 20%.

PvP again I assume.  It’ll increase the time to break from really quick to… still really quick. Not worth the slot.

*Glyph of Windfury Weapon — Now only 2% boost instead of 5%.

It was also incorrectly still giving attack power as well.  I’ll talk about it later, but they’re changing flametongue, so it’s unclear what glyph is best in the next patch.  For now, windfury is still pretty good.

*Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem — Your Stoneclaw Totem also places a damage absorb shield on you, equal to 4 times the strength of the shield it places on your totems.

I think this will give you a 4K or so damage shield. I’ll have to test it to be sure.  It sounds really good, but it’ll take practice to use well.  The big thing is that it’ll stop you from using tremor totem, so it’ll be situational in PvP.

Class Changes:
*Tremor Totem — Now pulses every 3 seconds.

This was actually hotfixed already.  I’m disappointed because they did this right when they said they were going to improve our PvP utility.  It’s not the end of the world, but I’m going to miss the near-instant pulses.

*Bloodlust and Heroism – Now puts a debuff on you preventing you from using or gaining the benefits of them for 10 mins. They now have a 5 min cooldown. (Previously had a 5 min debuff with a 10 min cooldown)

Well, it’s a nerf to raids that have two shaman.  It’s a kind of buff for ones that have one shaman since they can use bloodlust again after a wipe.

Talents:
*Improved Stormstrike (Tier 8 ) now has a 50/100% chance to grant you 20% of your base mana when you Stormstrike.  Stormstrike (Tier 7) now affects the next 4 nature attacks but only lasts 10 secs now. (Previously only affected 2 attacks and lasted 12 secs)

They buffed base stormstrike to have the effects of the current improved stormstrike.  I suspect this was added to help shaman in arenas where it’s very hard to get mana back with shamanistic rage.  Right now I don’t have enough mana to keep magma totem down, so it’ll be nice to have in raids.

*Unleashed Rage (Tier 6) is now a 3 point talent. It now passively increases your agility by 1/2/3% in addition to causing your critical hits with melee attacks to increase all party and raid members’ attack power by 4/7/10% if within 45 yards of the Shaman. Lasts 10 sec.

Not as good as the original announcement, but still better than it is now.  3% agility will be pretty negligible, but any buff is welcome.

*Toughness (Tier 4) now increases stamina by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of increasing armor value.

A nice buff for PvP shaman.  Not much else to say.

*New Talent: Frozen Power, Tier 6, 2 point talent – Increases the damage done by your Frostbrand Weapon if it is enchanted on your main-hand weapon by 10/20%, and your Frost Shock has a 50/100% chance to root the target in Ice for 5 sec. when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.

This could be very helpful in PvP.   It’ll be worthless if the root breaks on damage, but it could give us some great utility if it doesn’t.  Losing windfury damage is huge, so I’ll have to play around with it to see if I can kill people any better.

If you’re curious, these are the specs I’ll be playing with on the test realm.

PvE Build

PvP Build

Early 3.1 News

Shaman are getting a bit of love in the upcoming patch.

-Unleashed Rage – reduced to 2 ranks, now also increases your critical strike chance with melee attacks by 1/2%.

This is a long time coming.  Other classes were able to provide this benefit with one or two talent points and they received a personal benefit as well.  This brings UR in line with them and frees up a few points.  The good thing is that you can now max out Dual Wield Specialization and Static Shock without losing more important DPS talents.  Myself I’m looking forward to Earthen Power for arenas.

-Spirit Weapons – now reduces all threat, not just melee threat.

It’s a nice bonus overall.  For those of us that kite or offtank it could prove troublesome, but it’s much better than getting squished when you aren’t paying attention to threat.

-Totem streamlining: The Mana Spring and Healing Stream Totems have been combined. The Disease Cleansing and Poison Cleansing Totems have been combined.

I’m just glad for the extra space on our bars.

-We are also working on giving Enhancement and Elemental more PvP utility.

I’m cautiously optimistic here. Enhance shammys do a lot of damage in PvP if we can stay alive, so buffs to us can easily get out of hand.  I’m afraid of getting buffs this patch only to get our damage nerfed next patch.

-Chain Lightning – now jumps to 4 targets but does less damage. We wanted to make the distinction between Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning more clear.

This is annoying.  Far more often we fight groups of 2-3 than groups of 4+, so we’ll be missing out on damage.  There must be a reason for this aside from people’s inability to read tooltips.

Glyphs

I haven’t talked about glyphs yet. A few are changing in the patch, but only windfury really makes a big difference.

TLDR version: Windfury >Stormstrike >Lightnng Shield (=Earth Shock?) > Flametongue > Flame shock > all others.

Glyph of Earth Shock: The old one didn’t work right anyway, and this updated version isn’t much better. It reduces the global cooldown of your shock spells by .5 seconds. This lets you use another ability half a second sooner after you shock. It’s not a bad glyph overall, but it’s hard to say how much benefit it’ll give you. It could be good if you have low latency and a trigger finger.

Glyph of Lava Lash: Adds 10% damage to your Lava Lash. It sounds better than it is. Lava Lash for most people is 3-6% of their total DPS. 10% of that is .3-.6% of their total damage. Other glyphs give more benefit than this one.

Glyph of Lighting Shield: Adds 20% damage to your lightning shield. If you specced into static shock, lightning shield probably makes up about 3% of your damage if you use WF/FT and 5% of your damage if you use WF/WF. 20% of this is .6% and 1% respectively. It’s probably one of the better glyphs to use.

Glyph of Stormstrike: Stormstike charges make your nature spells do 28% bonus damage instead of 20% bonus. It might not sound like much, but earth shock, lightning shield, and lightning bolt make up a lot of your overall damage. 8% ends up being about 2% total damage increase for me.

Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem: Reduces the cooldown by 10 minutes. The benefit to your overall DPS is going to be negligible, but if you enjoy the elemental’s utility, it’s a very nice thought to be able to use it whenever you bloodlust.

Glyph of Flame Shock: Increase flameshock duration by 6 seconds and it doesn’t get consumed by lava burst. I actually had a lot of fun with this one. If ever you’re rooted or or can’t get in melee with a mob, it allows you to have two lava burst crits without losing flameshock DPS. The extra duration is also nice in pvp when fighting rogues since it stops them from stealthing that much longer. Straight earth shock usually does more damage, but with this glyph you can use flame shock with two earth shocks for a bit more damage.

Glyph of Flametongue: Increases spell crit by 2% when you have flametongue enchanted. Doesn’t stack if you have both weapons enchanted with flametongue.   This is a good one if you took the talents Elemental Devastation and Elemental Fury.  The overall increase in damage will be about .6% but you get the added bonus of extra Elemental Devastation procs.  A good alternative if you don’t spec into static shock.

Glyph of Lightning Bolt: Increases LB damage by 4%. The difference is negligible since LB only makes up 10%-15% of our damage.

Glyph of Windfury Weapon: Changed to make windfury proc 25% instead of 20% of the time. This is misleading due to the weirdness of windfury mechanics. It won’t give you 5% more windfury procs, but it will help. I talked about how much of a difference it made on my last post. I had about a 10% increase in damage using it with WF/FT and almost no difference using WF/WF.

Test Realming

I played around on the test realm a bit and so far it’s good news.

The change to windfury glyph is surprising. It has almost no effect on WF/WF but a huge effect on WF/WT. I was getting about 2000 DPS on the boss dummy on the live server, but consistently hit 2200 DPS on the test server. WF/WF was almost identical on both servers so I don’t suspect any stat weirdness making the disparity.

Ghost wolves have been fixed so they’re getting benefit from our stats. They’re doing about 100 more DPS and have 3000 more health.

And something unexpected. They fixed it so that if you have WF/FT you can just cast windfury and flametongue to refresh the buffs and won’t need to use a macro.

For the Horde!

Finally got the achievement to kill all the alliance leaders.  It was surprisingly painless to get the final one.  A week ago I was in a pug of 40ish people and we got the other three down in one go.  Most of those people came back this week for him.

You probably need to do this achievement in two days no matter how many people you have.  They’ll catch wind that you’re killing world bosses and they’ll be waiting for you.  Try to do Ironforge or Stormwind first and leave the other one for another day.  Most importantly, don’t advertise on publc channels.  /who 80 dalaran and whisper people if you’re short.  It only takes a few organized people to stop a raid.

Guide: Thrusting Hodir’s Spear

This quest seems to give everyone trouble, so I’ll give a walkthrough on it.

To start, you’ll be given a Spear of Hodir.  Target a blue protodrake (Wild Wyrm) flying around the area southwest of Dun Niffelem and use the spear on it.  Once you pull the dragon to yourself, it’ll pick you up and you’ll be given vehicle controls.  It’ll start flying around the area with you attached.

The first phase has you jabbing the drake with your spear until it reaches 20% health.  You’ll be given a ‘grip’ buff that goes up to 100 stacks.  If you run out of grip, you’ll fall from the dragon and probably die.  You can use parachutes, divine shield, etc. to survive if this happens.  Each of your attacks reduces your grip and you’ll be running out of grip at a constant, increasing rate.  You have a couple minutes to attack the drake before you lose grip faster than you can get it back.  Occasionally you’ll get a message saying the dragon is about to swipe at you. Use the dodge button if you can.

1 is grip.  It’ll increase your grip buff by 10.

2 is dodge.  Use then when you get a message saying the dragon is swiping.  Has a 4-second cooldown. Can be used even if you have a global cooldown, so hit it as soon as you see the message.\

3 is small thrust.  It does a bit of damage and costs 5 grip.
4 is the big thrust.  Does about 10X the damage with a 10-second cooldown and a cost of 15 grip.  Stops you form dodging for 4 seconds.

The strategy here is to do enough damage to get into phase 2 without losing your grip or taking too much damage from swipes.  It’s hard to give a general strategy since some time’s he’ll swipe a lot and you’ll want to dodge them, and other times he’ll barely swipe at all and you’ll be losing out on big thrusts.  Unless he’s swiping every 4-5 seconds, you’ll be safe using big thrust.

What I do is start off with a big thrust, use grip, then do alternating small thrusts and grips until big thrust is available again.  Grip a few times after the second big thrust to get your grip back up to 50 or so.  Even though big thrusts stop you from dodging, you still get 6 seconds between thrusts that you can still dodge.  Keep doing this until phase 2 where the wyrm will try to swallow you.

Phase 2 is simple.  You need to smash 1 to pry open the dragon’s jaws.  You’ll get a stacking buff every time you pry.  You’ll also lose a percent of your health every second, so you have a very limited time to finish the dragon off.  3 will be your final attack button that will kill the dragon instantly (you only have to hit once.)  The more you pry, the better your chances are to hit.  You’ll need a minimum of 10-15 stacks to kill the dragon with your first shot, but always try to kill it if you’re about to die.  Don’t get too frustrated if you die, since you won’t lose durability.

It’s important to note that the dragon does damage equal to a fraction of your health, so having a whole lot of health won’t help you live longer.  You can go naked if you’re worried about falling.

Happy hunting!

More AQ Chain Funness.

Did a bit more of the AQ Gate chain.  I was able to solo a raid boss, the Twilight Corruptor, with a bit of effort.  I ended up taking 232000 damage throughout the fight, so it was all about keeping myself healed and mana’d up. I couldn’t use elementals or ghostpuppies since he mind controls when there’s more than one thing attacking him.  It was extremely fun.

I also got to do the big Eranikus event in moonglade.  It was so cool to actually see it this time around.  Back in the original gate opening chain my computer couldn’t support all the people, so I couldn’t tell what was happening.

Oh, and I love being a tauren.

Windfury or Flametongue?

Edit: This page is no longer accurate as of the 3.08 patch.

There are two ways for shaman to imbue their weapons.  Windfury on both weapons or windfury on the main hand with flametongue on the offhand.  All other combinations are the wrong answer.  A lot of people lately have been saying that flametongue on the offhand is the obvious choice, citing the Elitist Jerks fora and the Lava Lash bonus, but it’s just not that simple.

Well, the simple answer is to attack the target dummy for a few minutes and see which does better.

Windfury is complicated.  It’s an instant attack with a hidden, three-second cooldown.  It activates on any autoattack, stormstrike, or lava lash.  It also does half damage on the off hand.  These three factors all come into play with shaman DPS.

First, instant attacks work on this formula:  Damage = DPS*speed.  Where DPS is the DPS of your weapon + attackpower/14 and speed is the speed of your weapon.  This means that with slower weapons (higher speed) you get more oompf for your attack power.  Slower is always better for windfury.  At most you can get one windfury every 3 seconds, so you want it to hit as hard as possible.

Second, windfury only does half damage on the offhand.  Lava lash can sometimes trigger windfury, so it can sometimes cause you to have extra offhand winfuries instead of mainhand windfuries.  Overall, though, this isn’t that big of a deal.  It’ll give you more windfury activations overall so any detriment is offset by extra damage output.

Flametongue is more simple.  It does a flat amount of damage depending on your weapon speed.  It also does extra damage equal to 10% of your spell power.  Unlike windfury, this means that faster weapons do better since you’ll get more flametongue attacks.  Flametongue is always inferior on the mainhand weapon.

The main difference between these two is that you’ll get more maelstrom activations with double windfury.  Each windfury can trigger it. Stormstrikes/lava lashes have a higher chance of triggering maelstrom with slower weapons.

So, which is better?

With WF/FT you get:
Better, but fewer, windfury procs.
Steady damage with the offhand.
Spellpower bonus from flametongue

With WF/WF you get:
To use two slow weapons to give you higher stormstrike damage.
More maelstrom procs.
Better scaling with attack power
More consistent ‘on hit’ procs.
More value out of agility and armor penetration

What does more damage will change depending on your stats.  I personally run WF/WF since I love the extra procs and it does more damage anyway.