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

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