Loads O Fire
Senior Member
Jun 28, 2008, 3:24 AM
Post #8 of 10
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Re: [jamman] Help my character suck less.
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It's not the speed of the weapon you should be worrying about, it's the max damage. As a shaman, max damage is what you want on your weapon, regardless of DPS.
Actually, weapon speed is what you should be worrying about as a shaman. A lot of people don't think it does, because the theorycraft behind it gets pretty complicated.
The reason you use slow weapons, isn't because of stormstrike (Which many people think is the reason), its because of WF. Windfury has a 3.0 second cooldown (Which most people don't know, so they stack fast weapons to make it proc more often). With a 3.0 second cooldown, dual-wielding, getting flurry procs, it should be proccing every 3 seconds regardless of what weapon speed you are using. If you are using two slow weapons, your windfury is going to proc just as often as two fast weapons, and two slow will deal much more damage.
Of course, two slow help with stormstrike, but 80% of a shamans DPS comes from white attacks, and WF procs, so its important to be using the right speed of weapons.
For example:
92.7 DPS offhand with 1.7s attack speed, will be less DPS for an enhancement shaman than a 78.6 DPS 3.0 offhand.
Oh and something else I forgot. Slow weapons are best for anything that uses flurry (Warrior, shaman), the reason is because 25% faster attack speed effects a 3.0 second weapon more than it does a 1.8. At 70, flurry should ALWAYS be up, on my 61 fury warrior, its always up.
Its easy to argue that a faster weapon, with more DPS is of course better than a slow one with less DPS, but the fact is, its wrong. PreBC when WF didn't have a cooldown, that would have been true. The faster the weapon, the better. Windfury used to proc off of windfury.
Weapon Speed Interaction
Weapon Speeds play an important role in maximizing DPS from Windfury procs. The goal is to chain WF procs every 3 seconds, as soon as each cooldown ends. Both the OH and the MH need to be as slow as possible to achieve this(they do not need to be matched in speed, just as slow as you can get it). The idea is to reduce the number of swings made during the time that windfury is on cooldown. Since the cooldown is 3 seconds, weapons speeds are preferred to be close to that speed, generally this means 2.6 - 2.8 under current itemization. The idea is that a faster weapon would proc a WF, and then strike again within the cooldown window, which means that windfury would exit cooldown and your weapon would still be on some significant portion of its swing timer, unable to proc another WF.
Many shaman will correctly use a slow MH weapon but use a fast OH such as a dagger, generally because its easier to find fast OHs than slow ones. This combination however means that your OH is much more likely to be the first one to hit outside of a WF cooldown and will "steal" the potential chance to proc, placing your main hand on lockdown. In order to maximize the potential for MH procs the OH needs to be as slow as possible.
^From http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t20765-shaman_enhancement/
(This post was edited by Loads O Fire on Jun 28, 2008, 3:30 AM)
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