First, we have the original Flametongue Weapon change from a few days ago: “Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).” According to current PTR testing, it is bugged on the PTR and inheriting the 50% damage reduction when used on an offhand weapon. However, without that bug the damage seemed consistent with current Flametongue, meaning it isn’t a nerf provided the bug gets changed. Unfortunately, the power of Flametongue weapon meant that it still seemed a slight increase in DPS to use double flametongue with a caster weapon.

As a result, meet the new nerf on the block: “Flametongue Weapon procs now deal roughly 20% less damage.” This is a pretty blatant damage nerf to our offhand FT procs and should be enough to force us into using that old staple, Windfury weapon. On the other hand of the spectrum, though, we see this pretty awesome buff: “The Windfury Weapon proc can now trigger 3 additional attacks, up from 2.” This hopefully will counteract the damage loss from not using a caster weapon w/flametongue and the damage loss from losing 20% FT damage in our offhand. If it manages to keep damage consistent with where it is now while shifting us back to using WF/FT, patch 4.0.6 is really starting to look up.

# Chain Heal’s effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.

# Hex now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

# Purge now dispels a single effect instead of two.

# Tremor Totem has been redesigned. The totem is now usable under Fear, Charm, or Sleep effects, and pulses much more rapidly, but lasts 6 seconds and has a 1-minute cooldown.

# Talent Specializations

* Elemental Combat

o Earthquake damage has been increased by approximately 10%.

* Enhancement

o Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).

o Purge no longer has its mana cost reduced by Mental Quickness.

* Restoration

o Cleansing Waters no longer fires its heal effect twice when a shaman removes a Magic and a Curse debuff with a single cast.

o Deep Healing (Mastery) has been increased to 3% per point, up from 2.5%.

o Greater Healing Wave mana cost has been increased by 10%; healing done has been increased by 20%.

o Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman’s Spirit, exclusive to short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped.

Source.

The major talking points here:

PVP nerfs: The purge nerf was beyond needed. No, seriously. I don’t want anyone reading this to be blinded by the love of their class and pretend that this isn’t a good change for the game. Enhancement’s purge cost 820 mana at 85 and dispelled two debuffs. Dispel protection on nearly everything was removed from the game. The unfortunate side of this is that annoying filler things like rejuvenation will get in the way when you’re really trying to dispel innervate but in the end this was needed. The two seconds less on hex makes me cringe a small bit, but at the same time it’s a curse and not a magic effect like fear/polymorph/and such.The change to tremor is weird- it’s a fear break when we really need it, but we can no longer just keep it down as fear protection.

Caster mainhand nerfs: Currently, flametongue takes heavily from our spellpower. Really heavily. This is part of what makes a caster mainhand so good- beyond adding to all of our spell damage, double flametongue imbues with the caster sp make for some very hard hitting flametongue hits. However, changing FT to scale from spellpower could have some negative side effects (such as the coefficient on FT being bad enough that we lose damage overall). Or, it could be so good that we continue to use a spellpower weapon to boost the rest of our spell damage, as losing the ap from not having an agility weapon won’t contribute that much to our dps. Time will tell.

Overall, my first look at the changes is optimistic. The nerfs to enhance pvp were needed (though tremor has me scratching my head a bit), and the FT change has me hopeful but scared.

A) Your items suck. Honestly, I get it: You spent all of Wrath of the Lich King workin’ hard for your purplez. You have deep, lasting, emotional connections with everything from your Heroic Sindragosa necklace to those boots from ToC that you were never able to upgrade. The idea of getting rid of them makes you sad, like you’re ditching your aging dog for a new puppy.

Get over it. I know that heroic Black Bruise is nice and you worked hard for it, but the Necrotic Touch proc has sucked since 4.0.1, and it sucks even more as a leveling item. Add into that the fact that there are blue weapons that require level 80 that have the same dps as H Black Bruise (that looks ten times better). The end result: Your weapons should be replaced by level 81, if you get lucky with drops. Stonecore (which you can queue for at 81 if you’ve found the portal), has two excellent Enhancement weapons: Heavy Geode Mace and Fist of Pained Senses. HGM has some lackluster leveling stats, but either hit or expertise can be reforged into mastery. Both of these weapons blow every weapon from WoTLK (from Pride to Heroic Havoc’s Call) out of the water. You’re hurting yourself by hanging on to your relics.

Did I mention how cool they look?

Armor is slightly less important to replace asap, but they’ll still be replaced soon. Elam just hit 83 and got Troggbane Chestguard to replace his 264 Tier10 Chest. It comes out to four more agility (counting two 20 agi gems), 60 more haste, 137 less crit rating, and a wopping 137 mastery. I’d exchange 137 crit for 137 mastery any day of the week. The only downside is losing my 4pct10, which means I won’t be equipping the Green quest reward until I can find another green that outpaces my tier gear.

Trinkets should be replaced fairly soon. Hyjal has Bileberry Smelling Salts, early Deepholm has Gear Detector. The base agility on these trinkets is huge, kicking the crap out of Herkuml War Token‘s haste, Tiny Abomination in a Jar‘s…everything, and Deathbringer’s Will‘s crit base. The haste procs are meh enough that Sharpened Twilight Scale might be worth hanging onto, though.

B) Enchant. Enchanting is your friend, and WILL make your life easier. This is a rule for both leveling and early heroic grinding- if it’s on you, you should enchant it and gem it. WoTLK enchanting mats are dirt cheap (I was buying Dream Shards at 50silver a piece last night. In total, berserking cost me 30 gold), and those enchants are still relevant. If you get an item in a heroic or five that you know will be replaced in a week, spend the thirty gold to enchant it with WoTLK enchants and blue or low-priced epic gems. No one will shame you for putting lesser-quality gems in lesser-quality items, and it’s so cheap to do now that there’s no excuse to lessen your performance by not doing it.

Now, back to leveling. See you all at 85!

I'd Spirit Tap that.

This post isn’t about Clergelam, though. As much as I love her (and wish she was already 80 so she could be my main alt), Clergelam will have to sit on the backburner for now. Because, in case you haven’t heard, Cataclysm is coming out. It’s coming out tonight.

However, while I know the impending doom of Azeroth is totally news to all of us, I have more news that ISN’T quite as common knowledge. This is good news. It’s personal news, news that makes my wallet happy and makes me as giddy as a stereotype at a Klan meeting. I got a job. And, not just any job. I got THE job.

I am officially Wow Insider’s new Enhancement Shaman columnist. I’ll be covering totems, I’ll be covering healing, I’ll be covering the benefits of being a gigantic cow person (being able to fit through doors is not one of them). I’ll be writing, and I’ll be getting paid for it. (And I’ll have my name and twitter link on a shiny “about” page.)

Please update your RSS feeds, your google readers, and proceed to e-stalk me. I promise I’ll be worth it!

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end…and this includes the usefulness of Black Bruise, heroic or non-heroic. Black Bruise’s proc of 10% of your melee damage as shadow damage is a relic of an era where our melee damage wasn’t pitiful and we stacked haste like nuclear war broke out and haste was a non-biodegradable food source. Black Bruise double dipped on Enhancement changes to nerf itself- our white/windfury damage has gone down more than a Jay Sean song (this is largely assumed to be because there was a change to armor to balance melee damage at 85), and since we got rid of haste we’re no longer hitting like Muhammad Ali within the ten seconds of Necrotic Touch, so we do like 5 shadow damage. (Maybe a little more than five. Ten at least.)

So, with no Black Bruise to fall back on, where does an Enhancement Shaman turn to do slightly respectable damage in 4.0.1? Well, the obvious choice is Heroic Havoc’s Call, but unfortunately the greater part of the World of Warcraft population does not have access to this beauty. After Heroic Havoc’s Call, Havoc’s Call is your next best bet. Unfortunately, Enhancement does not have the cream of the crop of mainhand weapon choices in ICC. Beyond that, you have Heroic Pugius off 10man HLK, Heroic Frost Giant’s Cleaver, and Heroic Gutbuster. Gutbuster will edge out FGC if you need hit, FGC will win if you don’t.

HOWEVER, there is another option. Certain Enhancement Shaman have been speculating on the return of a long-lost art of the enhancement kind, a literal “caster cleave” class if you will: The Dual-wielding two handed fists of flaming death shaman.

Back in the days where Naxxramas was content, Sartharion+3 was not a minute short zerg fest for a pretty drake, and Malygos was the bane of pugs everywhere, Enhancement Shaman wielded a Torch of Holy Fire with Flametongue rank 9 in our mainhand and a Webbed Death with Flametongue rank 10 in our offhand. This was for a variety of reasons: A) Spellpower mainhands give waaay more sp than melee mainhands, and our melee damage wasn’t quite amazing yet. B) Flametongue didn’t scale with weapon speed, so a 1.4 speed dagger’s flametongue hit as hard as a 2.6 speed axe/hammer/fist. C) We used two different ranks because the icd on flametongue’s proc didn’t translate between ranks: A rank 10 FT proc wouldn’t set off 9′s ICD, and vice versa. Personally, this was my favorite time to play a shaman. It made me fall in love with the class again, and it was around this time that I started working on my sticky. (Also, it made us the premier hybrid melee dpser in Naxxramas, which was really, really fun. 6K+ on Patchwerk made us awesome.)

In a rather ironic twist of fate, it seems we might be ending WotLK in the same state we started in: Mainhanding caster weapons for maximum dps. While I personally love this idea, I know that other shaman are fond of their windfuries and manly axes and such. For them, I suggest counseling. And waiting a month. At 85, melee damage balances out and you may return to using an actual weapon. For now, however, look into a slow (flametongue does have an ICD) caster mainhand. BiS is Heroic Royal Scepter of Teranas II. With a 1.8 speed, crit rating, haste rating, a buttload of spellpower AND a red socket for an agility gem, if you can convince one of your caster friends to part with this pinnacle of flametonguey goodness, go for it. If you can’t, offer to sex your master looter until you get it.

After the 284 scepter, things get iffy. Frozen Bonespike off marrowgar has a lot of spirit on it, and while you can and will reforge that to mastery, lack of the ability to get spell hit from spirit means all of it is wasted itemization for you. Blue Socket is slightly a downer too. Regular Royal Scepter is ok too, offering no gem slot, but also lacking all of the spirit on the Bonespike. Disregard Trauma entirely-with the same speed as other accessible weapons and no stats because of it’s healyprocthing, it’s just not worth using. Valrius, Gavel of the Lightbringer off 10man heroic Lich King has an exceptionally nice speed at 2.2 seconds and a red socket, which might make it second best after heroic Royal Scepter.

It’s important to know that we’re still validating this. Since I don’t have access to these weapons(read: the only ones that are dropping are going to gear our terrible ele shaman and we don’t let me roll on caster items as mainspec. xD), and since Rawr is not updated for 4.0.1 (and won’t be), it becomes a real challenge simming these gear choices. For anyone who does have access to these weapons, Shock And Awe is updated for 4.0.1 and has an export to enhsim option, so I encourage you trying these combinations out.

On a side note: Offhanding fast daggers is bad. Lava Lash is good. Keep your Kelseth’s Seducer and whatnot. Also note that Tiny Abomination in a Jar, which was already deemed bad post 4.0.1 and the removal of haste from our gearing, is even MORE bad* with a caster mainhand. 83-155 base damage does not make for a good trinket proc.

I hope you all enjoy this foray into masquerading as a caster in melee while it lasts, and do please remember that it’s only for a month.

*More bad is not proper English. “Worse” is. I used MORE bad to get the point across. As in, “this shit’s so bad I intentionally broke the rules of grammar and risked the wrath of my alma mater to get the point across.” It’s really bad.

We lost DPS because Blizzard nerfed haste.

I need to get one thing off my chest, before I tackle any of this: Enhancement Shaman never wanted to gem haste. While a few of us had fun seeing how high we could get our haste levels and how quickly we could swing our weapons, gemming haste always had a sense of regret to it. This isn’t out of some weird nostalgia for a better day where shaman were shamen and we gemmed strength to prove we were badasses. It’s because haste was bad. Haste was like a sexless marriage. We were comfortable with our relationship with haste-comfortable enough that groundbreaking changes were required to make us shift from it- but there was no spark left. Despite our relationship being unhealthy, we relied on it.

So if haste was so bad, why did every shaman in existence gem it? Because it was the max dps gem, of course!

…here’s the thing. Haste was the max dps gem on fights like Saurfang/Festergut. In 3.3.5, our damage RELIED on haste. With mw procs, weapon imbue procs, static shock procs, 12 second flame shock durations, and low damage from our special abilities, our damage needed haste to stay at all competitive on a single target fight. On these fights where we could stay there and flail around with our weapons without ever needing to move, haste was a real boon.

The problem is that most fights aren’t Deathbringer Saurfang. They’re not XT-002 Deconstructor. They’re not Patchwerk. No, we have fights like Professor Putricide, Lady Deathwhisper, and Blood Prince Council. And on these fights in 3.3.3, chances are our damage could have been helped (however slightly) by ditching our haste gems. Earth Shock, fire nova, magma totem, lightning bolts were all abilities we could use from ranged when Lady Deathwhisper went Ebenezar Scrooge on the melee and summoned in three ghosts. On Professor Putricide’s green slime, Stormstrike and Lava Lash could totally have benefited from the slight boost to damage that Attack Power gave, since you spend half your time between their cooldowns running back to reengage the slime anyway. In these cases, cases we ran into frequently in Icecrown Citadel raiding, our 1,000+haste rating provided practically zero boost to our dps. We were essentially screwing ourselves over on movement fights in order to be competitive on tank-and-spanks.

There are many issues with Enhancement DPS right now, and I really want to see some changes done to it. However, Blizzard’s choice of making Lava Lash hit like a Swords Dance Lucario’s Close Combat (LOLPOKEMONJOKE), combined with the rolling of static shock into weapon attacks and the return of the 18 second Flame Shock was implemented specifically to address Enhancement concerns about our haste-reliant dps, and I’m more than glad that they listened.

Enhancement shaman have always been a cooldown dependent class. As we all know, there was absolutely nothing more frustrating in ICC than engaging a boss with your Fire Elemental on cooldown, because you were missing out on damage potential in the thousands, an incredibly unfun prospect. It made Enhancement dps incredibly frustrating to play when learning new fights, engaging bosses that were not far spread apart…or even running heroics.

4.0.1. saw a buff to Enhancement that has left Fire Elemental next to useless for us in non-aoe situations. (Playing perfectly, we can maybe squeeze out 100 more dps with a FE-fire nova last priority rotation.) 4.0.1 also saw a nerf to Feral Spirits duration, dropping it by 15 seconds.

I have a theory that these are the reasons for the high dps drop cited by some shaman in patch 4.0.1- particularly the shaman playing in the best guilds in the world. I selected the first 25 shaman I could find out of the top 80 WoL parses in 3.3.3 who also had parses for Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang in 4.0.1 and compiled some data. Average DPS among the 25 was 18026 in 3.3.3, with the average fight duration being 2 minutes and 25 seconds. That means that on average, these parses were taken after having Spirit Wolves out for about 1/3 of the fight, and having Fire Elemental out for nearly 4/5 of the fight.

Every one of these players saw dps drops, with the average dps drop being 3,258. (3027 if you don’t include one really poor outlier who saw a 9,000dps drop.) Fight length differed across the board, but the average disparity in fight times was 6 seconds-4.0.1 fights were on average only 6 seconds longer than 3.3.3 fights. (If you want to see more of the raw numbers on this, here is the downloaded excel spreadsheet. Shamandps If you are one of the shaman named here and you want your name removed, e-mail me at elamtheshaman@live.com.)

Now, you might be asking me why this matters. This matters because not every shaman is playing in a guild that can down Heroic Saurfang in (on average) two minutes thirty seconds, and my belief is that those of us who aren’t playing at that level are the ones noting dps increases. If you look at my deathbringer parse for this week, you’ll see 13,817 dps on a 3:43 fight. Last week’s parse, however has me at 13,441 for a 3:59 second fight.

I’m only one person, unfortunately, and for some reason I’ve not been able to get a large number others to post parses where fights both this week and last week’s lasted 3:00 or more. (If you’d like to get involved in this, please post your parse links in this thread.) However, going off my own data and some educated guessing, here’s my theory:

For Enhancement Shaman raiding the cutting edge of content who are in guilds that are able to down bosses in under 3:00, patch 4.0.1 was a nerf to damage on those short fights. It lowered our cooldown damage substantially and made an attempt at rolling that damage into Enhancement’s sustained dps. If this is true, this means that longer fights will see consistently higher damage than we saw pre 4.0.1- if you could imagine, a DBS fight that lasted six minutes rather than 2:30 in 3.3.3 would have shaman doing less dps than they would on the same fight now.

The really positive effects of this change would come into effects in Cataclysm, where we’re not at the absurdly high gear levels where we’re not at the tail-end of a year of the same bosses becoming loot pinatas and getting the pve-version of globaled. Since they’re new fights and probably will never grow to be ten months old without being replaced, these fights will be tuned to require more time than the current fights we have do, and Enhancement’s lack of reliability on cooldowns should turn into a real boon. This would mean that 4.0.1 would ultimately be a buff to Enhancement’s sustained damage per second, but the current burst nature of most ICC boss fights means the best enhancement shaman in the world are playing in an arena where everyone else has the handicap.

I’ve never been good at capitalizing on these surges of readership on patch days, which is somewhat unfortunate for my google analytics account. For me, patches aren’t leisurely days where the servers are down and I can take my time writing a sweet blog post without having the temptation of tabbing back to wow to distract me from writer’s block. The only moments of my patch day that were not spent at work/eating/drab real life stuff that is required for living were spent on the Shaman forums, working on last minute guide edits while attempting to answer every single question asked of me in my guide thread, as well doing my best to be the level-headed dam in front of a never ending tidal wave of complaints, cries of nerf, and the general overflow of hatred towards Blizzard that accompanies every patch day.

This was not my first patch day- I’ve been doing this an entire expansion, and while I won’t pretend it’s not draining to have to explain why Lava Lash’s change to a 10second cooldown is a good change, I also won’t pretend that I don’t love it. I do really enjoy helping people, I do really enjoy debating…and not going to lie, it’s pretty cool (and downright fucking SCARY) to know how many people are following my lead. (Can I stress, again, how incredibly, omfg terrifying it is to know that if theorycrafting comes out tomorrow that says agility was the wrong way to gem, Blizzard will not be the only name Shaman will be cursing out on the forums? It’s a tad worrisome. )

However, less about me. The reason for this backstory isn’t to make anyone feel bad for me- there honestly is nothing to feel bad for. I love what I do. My goal for this blog post is to address one of the main issues that I notice with forum posting in general, especially in the day or two after a major patch comes out. The issue?

JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS IS BAD. ADMIRAL ACKBAR HAS A FEW THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THEM.

Ok, here’s the deal. It has been a little over two days since a patch that has produced game-changing effects hit live servers.

Here’s a list of things you can do in two days:

1. Read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
2. Get married and divorced in Las Vegas.
3. Create a website whose entire purpose is to chauvinistically rate female undergrads at Harvard University.

And here’s a list of things you can’t do in two days:

1. Plan a good themed-brunch.
2. Develop accurate conclusions about class balance based on anecdotal evidence.

Here are Surreality’s logs from last Tuesday, October 5th and Thursday, October 7th. Here are Surreality’s logs from yesterday the 13th and today the 14th. Deathbringer Saurfang had me at 13,500 this week, up from last week’s 13,000. (Do remember that I’m in 264 mixed with 277 and 232 boots, so my damage output is less than many of you have come to expect) Professor Putricide had me at 9,000 this week, up from last week’s 8,500. Blood Princes had me at 9,400 this week, up from last week’s 9,000. Festergut had me dead this week because some jerk druid called out a malleable that didn’t exist that caused me to miss a spore and die to pungent blight, so we can’t test there. Rotface had me at 11,300 this week and 11,000 last week. All in all, if I were to draw a conclusion from this week’s raiding, I would say that this patch provided a slight dps buff to Enhancement shaman.

The twist is that we can’t draw that conclusion. I can’t draw that conclusion, you can’t draw that conclusion, and random shaman posting for the first time about how his dps dropped 3,000dps overnight can’t draw that conclusion. For one, I’ve made no mention of fight length, of buffs/debuffs present, whether or not I flasked this week and didn’t flask last week, etc. All of those would have an impact on my dps. Second, though, and perhaps more important: I could simply have been better this week. Other people could simply have been worse. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read my guide 8 times from start to finish- if you jump straight into raiding after spending zero time on the PTR and no time practicing, your DPS -will- suffer. On the flipside, I’ve been so incredibly psyched for 4.0.1 to hit and to try out the new Enhancement (which I am having a blast with, btw), that it’s very likely that I did so well because I was really invested in playing the past two nights…which is something a lot of us have been lacking while raiding ICC.

This is “dummy” testing on a higher scale. This is why we sim, taken to the Nth level. Forming a conclusion based on two night’s raids, no matter how high an opinion of yourself you have, is scientifically and mathematically wrong. A raid night isn’t a controlled experiment, where all your variables are accounted for and controlled. A raid night is a night where you tried your best to learn new abilities and down new bosses, and there’s the possibility that you did it correctly or incorrectly. This isn’t to say that any information collected from raiding is a bad thing- just that there’s not enough evidence within one raid week to form the kind of conclusions that are being thrown all over the forums right now. It’s like trying to write your dissertation with a single source, and that source is Wikipedia.

So please, please, please, keep posting observations. Keep up the discourse about what works and what doesn’t work in the shaman rotation. But please, please, please don’t continue (or start, or even validate others doing it) posting cries of nerf OR buff, because right now, on the Friday after 4.0.1. went live, we quite simply don’t have the tools to tell yet.

(And please remember this for any subsequent patches and such. If you don’t, Admiral Ackbar will find you.)

This has led to a lod of problems for us in the past, to be quite honest. Don’t get me wrong- in the first tier of Wrath of the Lich King, when 280 spellpower was a lot and no one was armor pen capped, our ability to combine our collective raid’s powers and go captain planet mode was a godsend. We won meters in naxx because we got 280 spellpower, 13% magic damage taken, 25% sundered armor, AND 687 attack power, and it was awesome.

But as Icecrown Citadel has made painstakingly clear to anyone who has been paying attention, scaling with every buff in the game is not OMG SUPER AWESOME past the first few tiers of content. When 687 Attack Power was 1/5 of our total attack power, it’s contribution to our dps was startling. When it starts becoming 1/10 of our total attack power, the buff starts adding less dps in the grand scheme of things (especially next to gear stats like Armor Penetration and Pure Weapon DPS). This also meant that any time we were missing a buff, our dps went down. Sometimes by 50 dps, sometimes by 500, but every buff missed added up.  By the end of Icecrown Citadel, what was once our greatest gift became one of the main reasons our dps blew.

Simply put: Wrath of the Lich King’s highest iLevel gear was supposed to be 239 or 245 before Blizzard decided to include hardmodes. We were designed with somewhat less base damage output than other classes, but that was countered by our scaling with buffs. When we broke past the barrier that those buffs were originally designed for, and gear levels started getting crazy, we ended up shafted.

Patch 4.0.1. changed all of this. 4.0.1 saw the end to Blessing of Might’s existence. It saw the end to Heart of the Crusader and Sanctified Retribution. It gave us drastic reductions in scale from sunder armor and curse of elements. All in all, after counting in losing 46 Attack Power from Improved Strength of Earth, 60 AP from losing Mental Dexterity (+AI is now mana now), 74 from losing the agility on the now non-existant gift of the wild, 687 from improved blessing of might, and 231.4 from Blessing of Kings (I have 2314 agility. Kings/MotW are now 5% stats, not 10%, meaning a loss of 231.4AP), I lost 1098.4 attack power from buffs alone. 1208.24 in all, once you add in Unleashed Rage.

And that’s not all that Enhancement lost last patch: We now have to deal with 13% less armor reduction for our stormstrikes, windfuries, and white attacks. We now have to waste 80 more points of itemization on hit that could have been used on crit/haste/mastery because of the loss of 3% hit, and we deal 5% less spell damage to a debuffed boss. We also lost 10% melee haste and 3% overall haste (windfury nerf/sanctified retribution removal), meaning a loss of 13% melee haste on top of all the haste we’ve itemized out of. (Could be a good part of why so many of us are noticing slow stacking maelstrom weapons now.) We lost 3% crit. We also lost Demonic Pact’s scaling with the casting lock’s spellpower. It now scales with OUR spellpower. This means that those nice locks who procced DFO/Glowing Twilight Shard and fed us with 600+ spellpower are no longer doing that, and we’re buffing ourselves with maaaaybe 350spellpower.

And yet, despite the total and complete nerf to buffs- a change one would expect to kill a spec so reliant on buffs- Enhancement wasn’t killed in 4.0. In fact, it’s damage remained somewhat consistent with 3.3.3 damage. I personally saw a slight damage increase on Saurfang (13,500 rather than my usual 13k, but my gear blows), other reliable sources have reported dps losses. We don’t really have enough data yet to make a substantial claim other than “We’re not mages who have been buffed to stupid heights” and “We’re not fury warriors, crying into their shadowmournes.” We’re fairly consistent with where we were previously.

And overall, this is a good thing. This means that Blizzard found a way to remove our reliance on buffs for all of our damage. As a whole, our base, buffless damage has gone up. While right now it sucks-and don’t get me wrong, it does suck. I wanted SO much for this patch to come out and for me to just hold the #1 spot on every fight in the raid tonight- we have to be aware that it sucks because while our class got buffed, the buffs we’ve relied on for so long have been nerfed. And to come out in the end fairly even with where we were before is a very good thing, and bodes well for us not having another expansion of playing Captain Planet and only succeeding in the first tiers of content.

P.S.: I got a new helm tonight and now I look like a Rhinoceros. This amuses me to no end, as Rhinoceri are my favorite animal. Also, it allowed me to reforge hit and expertise to exact caps, which is always nice.

POACHERS GONNA POACH

PSS: I’m not used to getting a lot of comments on my blog. To be quite honest, I’m not used to enough people reading my blog for me to get comments. So I apologize to all 7 people who commented today who I did not reply to. That’s not me trying to be a jerk, that’s me not thinking to log in and accept comments. I’ll get better at it, I promise!

Also, thanks to Sinlai of Slane Baanrit on Silver Hand for being the one to bring this to my attention.

In preparation for my Giant Slayer’s Compendium (everything you need to know about Enhance 4.0), I’ve been doing some research to try and come up with concrete data on what our priority system will be the day 4.0 hits servers. To that end, I’ve spent the better part of an hour and a half exporting stats by hand from a level 80 beta version of Elam and simming him with a variety of priority rotations to see which rotation would be maximum dps.

The problem, one I’d like some input on because it’s really confusing me as the sim was just updated this morning with Rouncer’s proper Lava Lash damage formula (http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t82621-enhsim_updated_thread/p20/#post1759278), is that the rotation we’ve all been assuming would be top dps isn’t. (MW5LB, SW, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR for those following along at home.) To give you a sense of what I’m looking at, here are my dps results for the course of the night, linked from lowest to highest:

1. MW5, SW, SR, LL, ST, SS, FS, ES- 10,533 DPS
2. MW5, SW, SR, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES- 10,553 DPS
3. SW, MW5, LL, SS, ST, FS, ES, SR- 10,573 DPS
4. MW5, SW, LL, ST, SS, FS, ES, SR-10,584 DPS
5. MW5, SW, SS, FS, LL, ST, ES, SR-10,615 DPS
6. SW, MW5, SS, LL, FS, ES, ST, SR- 10,616 DPS
7. MW5, SW, SS, LL, FS, ES, ST, SR-10,618 DPS
8. MW5, SW, SS, LL, ST, SR, FS, ES-10,626 DPS
9. SW, MW5, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR-10,636.11 DPS
10. MW5, SW, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR-10,636.78 DPS
11. MW5, SW, FS, SS, ST, ES, LL, SR-10,639 DPS
12. MW5, SW, FS, SS, LL, ST, SR, ES-10,644 DPS
13. MW5, SW, FS, SS, LL, ST, ES, SR-10,652 DPS
14. MW5, SW, FS, SS, ST, LS, ES, SR-10,654 DPS
15. SW, MW5, FS, ST, SS, LL, ES, SR-10,668 DPS
16. MW5, SW, FS, ST, SS, LL, ES, SR-10,670 DPS.

We can see some trends develop in this stream of numbers:
A). As we can see from examples like 9&10 and 15&16, firing off your five stack of MW yields about 2 more dps than holding it and using Feral Spirits.
B) Shamanistic Rage with 2pct10 belongs at the end of your priority. Any time I tried creeping it up sooner resulted in some of the lowest dps sims I had.
C) I started out my testing with Lava Lash being a high priority, but every one of those sims were near the bottom of the barrel. Out of the first 6 sims, the only time SS is ranked higher is the 2nd, which is so low a dps value due to how high I valued shamanistic rage as well.
D) You can see a logical progression emerge. LL is replaced by SS by the 7th sim, but was replaced by FS at the 11th sim, and SS is pushed back further again by Searing Totem at the 15th and 16th sims.

Glyphs used for all of these tests were Windfury, Feral Spirits, and Lava Lash. Glyph of Flame Shock, despite my overabundance of haste, simmed at a 117 dps loss in the max dps priority rotation.

Stats were from Elam, transferred to beta:
MH/OH DPS: 250.60
Str: 145
Agi: 1670
IntL 195
Spirit: 165
Mastery: 0
Melee Crit: 47.55%
Melee Hit: 21.44 w/ DW
Expertise: 136, 11 under beta cap.
AP: 4432
Melee Haste: 27.90%
SP: 2401
Spell Crit: 27.92
Spell Hit: 18.11

Talent Spec: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#hohZfIG0s0hRGo (The point from acuity is counted in base stat configuration- that talent isn’t in the enhsim gui.)

Questions:

Am I overlooking something? According to my simmed results, our priority in 4.0 should be:
Maelstrom Weapon 5 Lightning Bolt, Feral Spirits, Flame Shock, Searing Totem, Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Earth Shock, Shamanistic Rage…but that’s not what our common sense was telling us in the past. It’s possible LL isn’t being calculated accurately, but Rouncer’s testing and formula were sound and Ziff implemented it as is as far as I know, which means it should be calculating correctly.

Additionally, the EnhSim offers a choice of waiting for a 5stack of Searing Flames before using Lava Lash. Any sim where I replaced Lava Lash with this option, I lost about 10 dps. If I followed Lava Lash 5SF with a regular Lava Lash in priority, I’d get the same number as the sim without LL5SF. This makes me think that Lava Lash in it’s basic form as just LL will be used no matter what the stacks of Searing Flame on the target are, which should almost always be 5. The 10dps loss is indicative of no Lava Lash going off during the first 10 seconds of stacking Searing Flames, since there was no non-5stack Lava Lash there to press. (Hope that makes sense.)

So yea, data. Make of it what you will, give me some feedback, and hopefully we can figure out something concrete.