Bad Groups

[kildorn]

TBC had a huge upswing in the number of paladins, Shaman didn't catch on as heavily with the alliance however.

That said, I don't know how many stayed active at 70. But the BE Paladin was a pretty common sight leveling.

[Ingmar]

Anecdotally, I still feel like I see a lot of blood elf pallies running around.

[Khaldun]

If the rogue planned to PvP, I could see him wanting the thing, but it's really a pretty secondary item for any rogue. It's not like a raid leader deciding that a shaman should get Webbed Death or something.

[Ingmar]

If the rogue planned to PvP, I could see him wanting the thing, but it's really a pretty secondary item for any rogue. It's not like a raid leader deciding that a shaman should get Webbed Death or something.

Except Webbed Death is currently best in slot for enhancement... or near to it. I forgot about the recent development with enhance shamans main handing caster weapons though.

[Vash]

Anecdotally, I still feel like I see a lot of blood elf pallies running around.

Not surprising since it's the only option horde has if they want a pally.  Alliance has humans, dwarves, and space goats to spread the pally love around a bit.  Not to mention blood elves tend to stick out a bit compared to the other horde races, especially in plate.

[Montague]

Death knights: 15%
Druids: 10%
Hunters: 10%
Mages: 10%
Paladins: 13%
Priests: 9%
Rogues: 7%
Shaman: 9%
Warlocks: 7%
Warriors: 11%

PVE servers: -1% rogues, -1% druids, -1% shaman, +1% hunters, +some sub-1% increases to other classes
PVP servers: +1% rogues, -1% hunters

I'd love to see a comparison to the % of classes at 70 in the BC era.  The pally numbers now look ridiculously high compared to then.

IIRC near the end of TBC paladin numbers were around 4th or 5th across all US servers. The fall of Rogues is even more pronounced, IIRC they were 2nd behind warriors overall.

[Vash]

Except Webbed Death is currently best in slot for enhancement... or near to it. I forgot about the recent development with enhance shamans main handing caster weapons though.

I admit I haven't been paying close attention to enhancement shamans in Wrath but I was still under the impression that slow/slow has remained the optimum for them, with the idea that the slow off-hand weapon maximizes lavalash damage.  I can't think of any ppm type mechanics for them that would benefit from a fast weapon, especially in the off hand since I don't think there's an abundance of mail gear with hit rating to really boost the off-hand hit % (although I'm sure getting to the expertise cap is even harder for them since they share itemization with hunters who don't need any).

I could just be though since they're so rare in Wrath that I haven't bothered to pay attention.

[Ingmar]

Right now they (apparently) go fast/fast with double flametongue weapon, to maximize FT procs and static shock damage. FT is changing in 3.1 to be normalized across all weapon speeds, so that will dethrone Webbed Death but if someone gave it to an enhance shaman a month ago it would have been pretty understandable.

[Gobbeldygook]

Right now they (apparently) go fast/fast with double flametongue weapon, to maximize FT procs and static shock damage. FT is changing in 3.1 to be normalized across all weapon speeds, so that will dethrone Webbed Death but if someone gave it to an enhance shaman a month ago it would have been pretty understandable.

The key to understanding enhancement shaman theorycraft is to accept that it is absolutely impossible to just look at a shaman and have any clue if he knows what he's doing or not.  Sometimes a shaman will wear or use caster gear or weapons, sometimes he wont and all of that will be totally optimal depending on what his other gear looks like.  It's horrible and very newbie unfriendly.

Not surprising since it's the only option horde has if they want a pally.  Alliance has humans, dwarves, and space goats to spread the pally love around a bit.  Not to mention blood elves tend to stick out a bit compared to the other horde races, especially in plate.

My pet theory: Most of class prevalence is driven by racial choice.  Pay attention to the character creation screen.  You can freely click on whatever race you want which brings up a list of class choices.  You cannot 'choose a class' until you've chosen a race.  This has a lot more impact on new player class prevalence than you probably think.  Here are the classes ranked in order of number of racial choices.

Death knight: 10
Warrior: 9 (all except blood elf)
Rogue: 8
Hunter: 7
Priest: 7
Mage: 6
Warlock: 5
Paladin: 4 (unavailable to n00bler horde without BC)
Shaman: 4 (unavailable to n00bler alliance without BC)
Druid: 2

No matter what race appeals to you, you can click warrior.  That's huge.  There's a strong correlation with BC class prevalence (You can kind of see it on the graph I linked before), but the correlation mostly disappeared with Wrath.

I'd love to see a comparison to the % of classes at 70 in the BC era.  The pally numbers now look ridiculously high compared to then.

They are.  ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: A lot of people I know rolled one up as a main in Vanilla and BC, but rolled up another class during BC because paladins were so horrible at everything.  Here, >have some numbers<.  He uses armory searching, so his numbers are slightly different.

[Merusk]

I'd love to see a comparison to the % of classes at 70 in the BC era.  The pally numbers now look ridiculously high compared to then.

They are.  ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: A lot of people I know rolled one up as a main in Vanilla and BC, but rolled up another class during BC because paladins were so horrible at everything.  Here, >have some numbers<.  He uses armory searching, so his numbers are slightly different.

Yeah same anecdotal evidence here. Now that pallies are good they've started playing them as prot or ret, but still only a few holys.  One of the amusing things of WOTLK has been the number of all-plate or 4plate +1 other groups I've been in.   DK dps, DK tank, Pally DPS, Pally Healer, Warrior DPS was my last one.  Of course we got all leather/ mail drops. 

[Lightstalker]

The key to understanding enhancement shaman theorycraft is to accept that it is absolutely impossible to just look at a shaman and have any clue if he knows what he's doing or not. 

 2x Angry Dread w/Berserking  vs.  Cudgel of Saranite Justice w/+63 spellpower (lvl 77 blue) + Last Laugh w/Berserking (tanking axe)

Difference was about 1% in total DPS (60 on 6000), but it just reinforces the bit where an Enhance Shaman could pick up a Butter Knife and a Baguette and put up anything between 2k and 6k dps.  You just can't tell if they've got their shit together until you parse the logs after the fact.  I let our healers pick up the torch of holy fire and rogues pick up webbed death because anything works for me and those items are really quite exceptional for them.

[Trebes]

They are.  ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: A lot of people I know rolled one up as a main in Vanilla and BC, but rolled up another class during BC because paladins were so horrible at everything. 

I had a paladin main in Vanilla and ended up rolling a new paladin main in TBC because I decided dwarf females had better casting animations than human males.


Bad pug story:


I live in the US but play on the EU servers for reasons beyond the scope of this thread. Due to time zones, I was always playing during off-hours and if I was lucky enough to get a group I was pretty much guaranteed for it to consist of either absolute hardcore no-life raiders on alt runs or complete drooling imbeciles. There was no middle ground.

Now, I was a early 40s Protection spec Paladin in Vanilla who received an invitation to Uldaman out of the blue. The group had a healing druid, warrior tank, rogue and I believe a mage. I was there to rezz people and maybe off-tank (ha ha) because everyone knew paladins couldn't tank.

The tank didn't speak English. We had to have our rogue translate our chat into Russian and then translate back to us. The mage didn't talk at all and DPSed with Pyroblast and wanding.
Our druid was unaware of what weapons and armor druids could equip. More on the druid later.

Things are going okayish until we kill Ironaya. A loot argument ensues. The amusing thing was the druid was unaware that he could equip staves until he checked some loot site during the roll and then decided he MUST have the stun proccing staff. A great deal of argument goes back in forth in English, Russian, and English over whether procs work in furryform.

About halfway to the dwarf boss, the Russians have to go. Now, this is Uldaman. Even in Vanilla WoW it was nearly impossible to get a group on my server for this place. A tense discussion ensues. Apparently, I will tank, the druid will heal, and the mage will continue wanding down enemies and we'd all hope that we could find people to join us.

What I purposely skipped over about the run so far is the druid is a terrible healer. I had been spending more time healing than showing off my badass Ravager whirlwinds. The reason he was a bad healer seemed to be that he simply could not shut up. And he was incapable of healing and typing at the same time.

Wipes ensue.

I distinctly remember the breaking point for me being when I was tanking several of those clobberer Troggs and didn't receive a single heal (I had used a potion and my LoH was long gone by this point) because the druid was waxing poetic about the Uldaman architecture. Honest to God.

Before anyone asks, my tanking was awesome.

So I left the group, told my sob story in /g, and a 60 prot warrior and healadin took pity on me and boosted me through the backdoor to nab a Stoneslayer for reckbombin'.

[Ingmar]

Uldaman was a pain even with decent groups. I think that's the instance where I really started to actually 'get' tanking in WoW.

[Selby]

Uldaman was a pain even with decent groups.

It truly was.  No one ever wanted to do it either.  It didn't help that if you wanted to get all of the quests completed for the Horde side, you had to go into the outer instance area twice and into the main instance almost 3 times to get everything done.  When everything was elite, hit hard, and gave crappy loot, finding groups to do it was nigh impossible.  I was glad my mage quest went in through the back door, so I could just convince someone to tank or heal for me and I could get it done on that one mob right there.

[Fordel]

The fucking Tornado attacks. 

[K9]

Like many early instances, Uldaman's first problem is that it is in the middle of sodding nowhere.

[Rendakor]

Ulda was a terrible zone. Having to go there to train enchanting was the worst thing in the world.  I had to blow so much cash so I had enough mats to skill through all the recipes the ONE time I went there because I knew it was never happening again.

[Hindenburg]

I loved Ulda. Ran it 4 times while leveling the hunter, and at 60 went there nearly daily for shards. You're all haters!

[Fordel]

You're just a crazy person.

[Hindenburg]

I'm not the one still playing WoW

[Sheepherder]

Right now they (apparently) go fast/fast with double flametongue weapon, to maximize FT procs and static shock damage. FT is changing in 3.1 to be normalized across all weapon speeds, so that will dethrone Webbed Death but if someone gave it to an enhance shaman a month ago it would have been pretty understandable.

1. Fast/Fast nerfs both stormstrike and lava lash pretty heftily, using daggers (Webbed Death) over same speed axes / maces also cuts AP contribution to 70% of normal.
2. Flametongue doesn't scale as well as windfury (Read: Flurry up-time).  The coefficient on lava lash makes it a decent OH though.
3. Flametongue scales with weapon speed right now.
4. Flurry up-time increases as weapon speeds decrease (procs off instant attacks are unaffected by weapon speed, charges are consumed faster by fast weapons).
5. All of this combines to lead me to believe your guild's shamans are fucking clueless.

EDIT: Forgot something.  Using TBC or later caster weapon as melee is straight-up fucking retarded as weapon DPS is lower than average and extra iLevel is given.  Each DPS on a weapon is worth 14 AP before you factor normalization on special attacks, the difference between a iLevel 213 (lvl 80 heroic raid) caster and melee weapon on the main hand damage contribution is equivalent to 924 AP.

[Gobbeldygook]

5. All of this combines to lead me to believe your guild's shamans are fucking clueless.

Arbitrary shaman with webbed death that I picked out.  I threw him into EnhSim, turned on full raid buffs, wf/ft, final DPS of 5645.  I set his off-hand to 2.6 speed and imbues to wf/wf, changed nothing else.  Final dps: 5611.  Yes, webbed death is a very good weapon even for an enhancement shaman.  The extra flametongue damage and spelldamage really does outweigh the lost stormstrike, maelstrom weapon, and lava lash damage.  This is retarded and thankfully being fixed in 3.1.  Spellpower weapons can work as a stop-gap measure because slow spellpower weapons are available and shaman do a lot more spellcasting than they used to.

If you really doubt me, just fire up EnhSim or Rawr (Rawr is inaccurate, but way more user-friendly) and play around with it for a while.

[Lightstalker]

Glyph for Flame Tongue adds 2% crit, each imbue.
fast fast releases more FT hits
fast fast releases more Lightning Shield hits
Current FT normalization *is wrong*  because FT scales more strongly with raid buffs than normalization in base damage can compensate

Decreased melee damage is not as significant as the increase in spell damage - the big concern is that spell damage does not yet get piped through spirit weapon's threat reduction.  Running 2x FT imbues with the same spell level will cause 15% of FT hits to just disappear, mixing ranks reduces the loss to ~5% overall - more than compensating for the reduce rank on the OH.  That's because an Enhancement Shaman is balanced between spell and melee damage.  When I run melee weapons I'm 45% spell damage, with caster weapons I'm 65% spell damage.  A lot of weapon comparisons are damage neutral because what I lose in melee I make up for with spell damage - and vice versa.  Of course that also means I can't work out an upgrade without a simulator - the target dummies are no good due to raid buff scaling being such an important part of the equation for spell damage.

To pick a Shaman that isn't a regular poster on EJ:
Patchwerk:  5526 dps WF/FT with 2x Angry Dread (2.5 speed) 
Patchwerk:  5595 dps FT(10)/FT(9) with Cudgel of Saranite justice (lvl 77 blue caster weapon) + Last Laugh (fast KT tanking axe)

Cudgel of Saranite Justice + Librarian's Paper Cutter can be an end-game weapon set for an effective Enhancement Shaman - and is dead simple to pick up on the AH.  Before they 'fixed' the Brunnhildar Axe you'd get 2x FT procs per hit and the BIS end game weapons were White vendor items.  So while it may be fucking retarded, it is also empirically effective. 

The planned normalization will not dethrone Webbed Death, but will remove the incentive to equip a fast caster weapon in the main hand.  There are other normalizations being tossed around on EJ that would dethrone Webbed Death... but there are no reports of a slow offhand in the Ulduar loot tables yet so fast offhand may be here to stay afterall.

[Khaldun]

We've never had an enhancement shaman in our guild, so this is really interesting to me.

Speaking of my guild, a facepalm moment--a DK in our guild who was struggling with tanking in Heroic AN (is a long time DPSer) decided on our third try on the final boss that it would be a good idea to turn on Path of Frost after jumping down into the hole so she could get out of the Brood Pit quickly.

With one person still falling down behind her. Onto what was now solid ground, not water. The healer, in fact.

I see him die, but I'm already on my way down the stairs to where we buff, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it was even possible to die there. Took us a minute to figure out what had happened. Sigh.

[Trebes]

We've never had an enhancement shaman in our guild, so this is really interesting to me.

Speaking of my guild, a facepalm moment--a DK in our guild who was struggling with tanking in Heroic AN (is a long time DPSer) decided on our third try on the final boss that it would be a good idea to turn on Path of Frost after jumping down into the hole so she could get out of the Brood Pit quickly.

With one person still falling down behind her. Onto what was now solid ground, not water. The healer, in fact.

I see him die, but I'm already on my way down the stairs to where we buff, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it was even possible to die there. Took us a minute to figure out what had happened. Sigh.

Every DK in my guild loved pulling that shit. Repeatedly.

I ended up bubbling every time I had to jump down in an instance because I knew one of those pasty windowlickers were going to try to wipe us.

Our shamans loved doing that too, as I recall.

[Koyasha]

Point your camera directly down (and I think hold your right mouse button, looking down, at the moment you hit the water) if you're jumping into water from a potentially fatal distance and have a water-walk class in your group.  This causes the water-walk buff to be bypassed, it seems, but you can then hop back to the surface of the water and walk on it just fine.  It's apparently some method to detect your intention to dive, even with the buff on.

[Sheepherder]

5. All of this combines to lead me to believe your guild's shamans are fucking clueless.

Arbitrary shaman with webbed death that I picked out.  I threw him into EnhSim, turned on full raid buffs, wf/ft, final DPS of 5645.  I set his off-hand to 2.6 speed and imbues to wf/wf, changed nothing else.  Final dps: 5611.  Yes, webbed death is a very good weapon even for an enhancement shaman.  The extra flametongue damage and spelldamage really does outweigh the lost stormstrike, maelstrom weapon, and lava lash damage.  This is retarded and thankfully being fixed in 3.1.  Spellpower weapons can work as a stop-gap measure because slow spellpower weapons are available and shaman do a lot more spellcasting than they used to.

If you really doubt me, just fire up EnhSim or Rawr (Rawr is inaccurate, but way more user-friendly) and play around with it for a while.

I really don't trust sims to provide exact numbers, but even the general trends I'm seeing have me wondering what the fuck Blizzard was on.  Also, the way spell damage, weapon speed, and flametongue interact is so horribly broken if what you're saying is true.  Almost as bad as my fury warrior doing 25% of his damage through deep wounds.

[Der Helm]

Point your camera directly down (and I think hold your right mouse button, looking down, at the moment you hit the water) if you're jumping into water from a potentially fatal distance and have a water-walk class in your group.  This causes the water-walk buff to be bypassed, it seems, but you can then hop back to the surface of the water and walk on it just fine.  It's apparently some method to detect your intention to dive, even with the buff on.

You'll probably have to walk/run forward as well, at least that is the way I bypass my own water-walking when I need to dive.

[Shrike]

Enhsim is a very good predictor of what enhance shaman should be able to do. It's only quirk is the so-called windfury chasm at 1.5 hasted speed on your weapons (not going into it here, either).

Yes, it's a fucked up class. Most of the blame can be laid on the artificial WF 3sec internal cooldown. This is what causes WF to scale more poorly with raid buffs as opposed to FT. Despite this, I still find the subclass a lot of fun. Of course, whenever Blizzard changes anything in the class, this scaling issue keeps coming back up. It does need fixed and fixed badly. Patch 3.1 (so far) just looks like a partial fix and more institutional-sized bandaids.

I"m one of those shaman that run 2xAngry Dread. I like it that way and I bloody well hate daggers. I probably would pick up a handful of dps with a Webbed Death, but it'd send our rogues ballistic. I could live with their displeasure, but the fact is this situation shouldn't exist and Blizz needs to damn well fix WF once and for all.

Now for the edit for brain-dead spelling errors and the comment that you should not be running 2xWF. The difference between WF/FT and WF/WF isn't huge, but it is significant; moreso than FT/FT vs. WF/FT (at least with my equipment on the sim). WF/WF would have PvP advantages, but Blizz has stated repeatedly that for the cooldown to be removed, they want WF mainhand only. I think even with the CD removed WF/WF wouldn't be outrageously overpowered, but I'm biased and that is their O-fficial stance on shaman imbues at present.

[Vash]

Yes, it's a fucked up class. Most of the blame can be laid on the artificial WF 3sec internal cooldown. This is what causes WF to scale more poorly with raid buffs as opposed to FT.

Blizzard really really wants enhance shamans to use slow weapons with WF (for whatever reason) and that 3 sec internal cd was a bandaid fix they added in a patch shortly after the launch of TBC.  They added it because fast/fast (typically daggers) with WF/WF was putting out insane levels of dps and that was the best solution they could come up with apparently.

I mean without the cooldown, I think you could literally proc WF from one of your WF attacks which deserves its own Yo Dawg comment that I can't possibly do justice. 

[Hindenburg]

Ahm, back in the day you could.

[bhodi]

Sword specialization extra attack procs also could proc on themselves, as could the thrash blade if anyone remembers that one.

[kildorn]

The cooldown was due to WF's code breaking on DW. It was already patched to not proc itself earlier than that.

When TBC came out, you would commonly get quad procs of WF (4x mainhand or 4x offhand hits) due to it bugging out. The ICD was to stop that. It was hilarious for leveling though, a quad mainhand proc would practically kill any leveling mob.

[Gobbeldygook]

Blizzard really really wants enhance shamans to use slow weapons with WF (for whatever reason) and that 3 sec internal cd was a bandaid fix they added in a patch shortly after the launch of TBC.

That's not correct at all.  The 3 second cooldown was there since patch...1.11 I believe, but shaman never noticed it because they all used weapons with 3+ second swing times.

Edit: Thanks kildorn for reminding me.  They added the 3 sec cooldown when they made windfury weapon stop proccing on itself.  You were getting x4 procs because of a bug involving wf rank 5/wf rank 4; each rank had a different cooldown.

[Ingmar]

Right now they (apparently) go fast/fast with double flametongue weapon, to maximize FT procs and static shock damage. FT is changing in 3.1 to be normalized across all weapon speeds, so that will dethrone Webbed Death but if someone gave it to an enhance shaman a month ago it would have been pretty understandable.

1. Fast/Fast nerfs both stormstrike and lava lash pretty heftily, using daggers (Webbed Death) over same speed axes / maces also cuts AP contribution to 70% of normal.
2. Flametongue doesn't scale as well as windfury (Read: Flurry up-time).  The coefficient on lava lash makes it a decent OH though.
3. Flametongue scales with weapon speed right now.
4. Flurry up-time increases as weapon speeds decrease (procs off instant attacks are unaffected by weapon speed, charges are consumed faster by fast weapons).
5. All of this combines to lead me to believe your guild's shamans are fucking clueless.

EDIT: Forgot something.  Using TBC or later caster weapon as melee is straight-up fucking retarded as weapon DPS is lower than average and extra iLevel is given.  Each DPS on a weapon is worth 14 AP before you factor normalization on special attacks, the difference between a iLevel 213 (lvl 80 heroic raid) caster and melee weapon on the main hand damage contribution is equivalent to 924 AP.

This has jack shit to do with my guild's shamans. The only enhance shaman in my guild is still happily using his slow/slow fist weapons. Go read EJ, I didn't make this shit up. 3.1 is killing it but fast/fast as I described it was working very well. /shrug