Windfury Crits: Upgrade Your Weapons

Windfury Crits

Enhancement Shaman PVE and PVP. As a Tier 7 Enhancement Shaman, avid PvPer and guild leader I find there are not enough active Enhance blogs. Thus, *Windfury Crits* the Enhancement Shaman blog covering PvE, PvP, and pretty much everything else I can think of relating to the wonderful world of enhance.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Upgrade Your Weapons

I hit 50 Emblems of Heroism last night and over 12k gold so I could do some shopping around for upgrades. There was a lot to consider as I'm still in BC shoulders, boots and relic, and I'm using a green cape for my raid-hit set. As I was looking over my spreadsheet wondering where to spend my marks & gold I realized that my weapons were lacking. Yes an upgrade to shoulders or back or boots would be a nice boost, but ultimately Enhance is a melee spec and in order to maximize damage output it requires excellent melee weapons.

To put it plainly: upgrade your weapons. Weapons are the single most important parts of an Enhance Shaman's outfit.

To get ready for raid tomorrow I decided to go straight to the top of my spreadsheet and bought Pride for my OH and purchased all the mats for a Titansteel Bonecrusher fo my MH. Then I hat to hit the AH and purchase GPE and Arcane Dust for the damn Mongoose enchant. I'm really kicking myself for unloading all of my BC enchanting mats, I should have looked to see if I would still need them. Really, who would have known that Mongoose would still be the enchant of choice? And when is Blizzard coming out with a Wrath version of Mongoose for us Enhancers? I think I'll run the sim today with some other enchants and see what comes out on top.

But I digress, two shiny new bad@$$ weapons ready to rock tomorrow in Naxx.

Labels: gear, PvE, raiding, weapon enchants

7 Comments:

At December 4, 2008 1:45 PM , lindy said...

Grats on the new weapons, they are amazing. I don't suppose you made a note of the total cost of the Titansteel Bonecrusher? I know it's a lot but I'm just curious what the final bill would come to.
At December 4, 2008 2:22 PM , Rich said...

It cost me about 1,200 gold total, though very easily could have been more. I bought all the mats individually including the materials to make Titansteel, then found a guildie with a bunch of extra Titansteel he wasn't using and traded him completed product for materials.

If I bought the Titansteel on the AH it would have cost me 1,800g. And I've seen the mace itself go for 2,000g.

If you buy all the mats individually, pay to use 6 different players' Titansteel CD, and pay a crafting fee you'll be better off than buying the finished Titansteel on the AH.
At December 4, 2008 6:19 PM , Kassi said...

Grats :D

1200g is a lot cheaper than I was expecting, which is great news.

On enchants, that would make a great topic for a post: optimum WotLK enchants for various slots :)
At December 5, 2008 8:06 AM , Jaron said...

Thanks again Rich for the useful posts. I'm looking over your build and I'm surprised you went with elemental fury over reverberation. If you take shock cooldown from 6 to 5, thats a possible factor of 6/5 increased shock damage. If you add the earth shock glyph (which I can't find on my server!) it would be 6/4 or 33% improvement. Of course, it's not really that good, because at some point you're clicking MWLB over shock, but it's still a lot.

I also put those extra two elemental points into ancestral knowledge. Int is good stuff now, and a fractional increase in any stat is hard for me to pass up.

My build is otherwise the same as yours. I haven't run the sim in a while now..... way too much fun playing. So I don't have any hard numbers to support my thoughts on this one.

I'm a blacksmith, so made my on bonecrusher, and I picked up a decent offhand called "The Key". It's slow, so I've been playing with WF/WF. It seems to do ok. I've picked up a few other goodies with rep and heroics to get me Naxx ready. The rest of my guild isn't ready yet, so we still haven't gone. We are short of levelled and geared healers.

Here's a question for you: when we run 5 mans, I do great on boss fights, but can't come near our other dps'ers on trash. Do you have the same experience? It's just our lack of a strong AOE, but it's frustrating that all of the instance trash is like that.
At December 5, 2008 11:01 AM , Jaron said...

hyI just realized the above comment I made about ES isn't quite right. The ES glyph reduces the global cooldown, not the ES cooldown. That means you can just cast the next thing in your rotation more quickly. I still want it, but it's a different effect than I first thought.
At December 18, 2008 8:35 AM , Jason said...

What numbers are you looking at now with that Titansteel Bonecrusher?

I'm still using Vanir's main hand and Mounting Vengeance in the off. Getting the badge off-hand today but torn between the Heroic CoS main and the titansteel. Any recount numbers?
At December 18, 2008 2:40 PM , Rich said...

Jason, I'm assuming you're talking about Greed. That's a sweet match to Pride, the badge OH.

Greed and TS Bonecrusher are very close in terms of EP value. They are nearly identical in base weapon DPS. I went for the Bonecrusher because I needed the weapon NOW and didn't want to take my chances with a heroic and only be able to get one shot per day, if I even got in there every day.

For me it was a matter of spending gold (which I have) rather than spending time (which I don't have). A typical time/money trade-off.

If you have the time but don't have the gold then in my opinion you should do both: farm Heroic CoT:S and farm gold. If you don't get the MH weap then you should be able to get the gold in a few days.

I will reiterate my point from the article: as a melee DPS spec the most important upgrades are your weapons. Make it a priority to replace your old level 70 epics or your leveling rares as soon as possible.

Good luck!