Update on 20/51/0

Tonight I got some good comp data on the pure-raid Enhancement build of 20/51/0. Here's a look at Patchwerk tonight versus other nights as the raid-utility spec.

Jan 15 - 20/51/0
DPS : 4925
% Overall - Attack type - % Crit
31% - Swing - 44%
16% - WF - 37%
12% - LB - 38%
11% - ES - 38%
10% - FT - 45%
6% - SS - 56%
4% - LL - 57%
4% - Magma - 38%
3% - LS - n/a
2% - Spirit Wolf - 10%
1% - Searing - 39%

Jan 6 - 16/55/0
DPS : 4219
% Overall - Attack type - % Crit
35% - Swing - 42%
14% - LB - 50%
11% - WF - 29%
11% - FT - 31%
9% - ES - 22%
7% - SS - 50%
4% - Spirit Wolf - 11%
4% - LS - n/a
4% - LL - 30%
2% - Searing - 29%


My gear didn't change that dramatically and the raid makeup didn't change too much either. I think it's safe to say that just based on the Patchwerk fight those little bits and pieces here and there in the spec had a bigger impact on the overall damage than I was expecting.

As for mana consumption, on bosses I never went out of mana. Things got tight at one point on Groubbulus to the point where I considered popping a mana pot, but ended up making it through to the SR cooldown and replenished mana quickly. Mana hog? Yes, but totally managable. If you have the opportunity to try out this spec I say go for it.

I got some upgrades too, which I posted to PoaH.

Twitter, New Spec, and Random Thoughts

First, I've been tweeting as Stoneybaby so if you are on Twitter then follow me there as... Stoneybaby. go figure. It's pretty fun to tweet mid-raid and shoot out random notes about the life of Enhance. Just like when I started this blog it was pretty much out there in the ether all alone with no one to read. But hey, it's something I do for fun and I'm glad you all found me and enjoy the posts. Although I haven't yet seen any turn-ins for those who are interested in grinding Stoneybaby faction!

But speaking of this blog I've been hard at work on a big project that will take Windfury Crits to the proverbial "next level." I apologize if posts are sparse these days, I've been busy as hell at work and then at home with raids and this new project. Case in point: I started this post at 10:40am. It's now 6:30pm and I'm just now looking at it again, and I still have work to do before I get out of here tonight. Oh hi, it's now 1:00am and I'm just now finishing this post.

Back on topic: I went with a totally new and completely selfish spec last night in raid: 20/51/0. I raided in it last night (Tuesday) but haven't had a chance to compare numbers yet. The idea behind this spec is to be entirely selfish and not spend any points in potentially overlapping talents. I've posted about this before but I'll review again.

For you and your raid to not suffer you must have a Marks Hunter, Frost DK, and at least 1 other Shaman to take Enhancing Totems. With those players guaranteed in your raid then you are free to spend points on what I would consider otherwise frivolous talents. (Jaron, you'll be somewhat vindicated to see I took 5/5 Reverb!!)

Be forewarned this spec is a mana hog. Without Ele Focus or a few points in Convection, the mana consumption goes waaaaay up. But conservation is not the point of this spec.

The point of this spec is to not waste any talent points in things that would otherwise overlap with other raid members. The point of this spec is to squeeze an additonal 2% here, 1% there, and 0.33% over there. It's not going to make a huge difference upwards in raids, but it will make a huge difference DOWNWARDS in 10s and 5s, so again only use in heroic raids with the right group make up.

But then with Enhance there is only so much tweaking one can do. This spec isn't about increasing DPS by 15% or something drastic like that, it's about continually squeezing every last 0.1% extra damage you can squeeze out. Because we've all been there on the 1% boss wipes. Those wipes when having that extra 1% output will make the difference between heartbreaking wipe and starting over or kill and notch on the belt.

This spec is created with that in mind. This spec is why I continually mess with my gear, trying to squeeze every last point of EP out of it. This spec is about putting ever conceivable effort forward toward getting that kill.

And on that note... good night.

Sapphiron Kill, Stats, and Analysis

Last night we downed Sapphy on heroic with 22 people (2 empty spots and 1 offline), no deaths and 2 people not in FR gear. Yes, I was a lazy officer who didn't have Frost Resist gear (I completely missed the posts and GMOTD), sorry! I survived every attempt except for one where I got stuck in 2 Blizzards and couldn't get out so the lack of FR gear was not terribly detrimental but I expect you don’t want to have all 25 people lacking the proper resistance. All together I'd say they were very good attempts by Unorthodox and it was no surprise that we grounded the big Lich mount.

As I was reviewing my WWS stats I came across some very interesting figures. We have a guild policy against linking WWS outside the guild otherwise I would share, so I’ll transcribe the stats instead. Here are my figures for our kill shot:

Damage Out
% – Attack – % Crit
35% – Swing – 34%
13% – WF – 38%
12% – FT – 27%
11% – LB – 24%
10% – ES – 26%
07% – SS – 43%
05% – LS – 0%
03% – Wolves – 12%
03% – LL – 26%

Total Fight length: 7’08”
Total DPS time: 5’33”
Overall DPS: 2622

LOL at Lava Lash… ah boy I know I carry on about LL quite a bit, but really it’s a 36 point talent that only does 3% of my raid damage. One could argue that the 51 point talent of Feral Spirit also only does 3% of damage but those dogs have a lot of usefulness in their stuns and their ability to heal me when they attack. Believe me when I say I popped them at every available opportunity to help with healing.

It’s interesting to see the spells/ability start to separate with some becoming more prominent than others. I do believe ES was higher in the damage output than SS because I was always throwing an ES up on the boss as I was running back in after an air phase.

Lightning Shield was 5% of my damage. It proced 38 times for an average of 1216 per hit. I did not have mana problems throughout the entire fight so that’s an additional 139 DPS for the 3 points in Static Shock. I’ll take that every day and twice on Sunday.

I would like to get that DPS number up, but I suppose that will come in time and gear upgrades.

Healing was even more interesting...

Stoney’s outgoing heals:
34% – Healing Stream Totem
34% – Spirit Hunt
14% – Improved Leader of the Pack
11% – Healing Wave
07% – Chain Heal
01% – Spirit Wolf: Imp LotP

There were only 2 shamans in the raid; the resto dropped Mana Spring so I put down Healing Stream. 34% of my healing done was from that totem. It doesn’t tick for much and you don’t think about because it seems so insignificant, but over a 7 minute fight it makes a huge difference. Drop it like it’s hot for this fight.

Spirit Hunt was the next best thing. I used my wolves 3 times in the fight: right at the beginning, then around 3 minute mark and again around 6 minutes. In that short amount of time they did more healing than I did between HW and CH combined. Love me some wolves.
Hint: They are the most effective to use during the air phase because there is no tail swipe, no Blizzard, and Sapphiron is still in melee range. And Frost Breath does not affect pets.

That’s all for now. Do you see anything that could be improved here?

New Spec, New EP

New Spec: 16/55/0

This is my pre-3.0.8 primarily-but-not-quite-totally-raiding-focused spec.
You'll notice I went into Static Shock. That was an easy switch for me and Lightning Shield is already out-pacing Lava Lash as of last night's Naxx25 run. Poor, poor Lava Lash, how I want to love you! How I wish you were killer so-totally-worth-it 36 point talent. But alas, lil' LL you are what you are: I use you only when I'm one proc away from getting that 5th Maelstrom Weapon or when everything else is on cooldown.

Anyway... Everything else is pretty straight forward as I have written about before. I sacrificed points in Unleashed Rage because we're now solidly in 25 mans and have 3 raiding hunters, and usually we have at least 2 in 25s and 1 in 10s. I put those 3 points in just for soloing purposes.

I really feel like the extra point in Ancestral Knowledge is wasted, as are the points in Convection. Even without Water Shield I did not have mana issues at all last night. Granted, Blessing of Wisdom on me and Judgment of Wisdom up on the boss make a big difference.

Once 3.0.8 hits I'll respec again and probably dive deeper into a pure raiding build. But for now with all my new gear and my new spec I have to recalculate my EP values. I have a feel it's time to hit the Expertise cap now that Hit is covered.

What are your specs? What's working for you?

Eye of Eternity

So much to blog about... so little time

At the very least I want to put up a post about fighting Malygos in the Eye of Eternity. This is an awesome encounter. Blizzard did a fantastic job with it so let’s look at it from a melee/Enhance perspective.

Phase 1: No Tail Swipe, no Power buff
He doesn’t have a tail swipe so I can swing to my heart’s content and not worry about being knocked around. There’s no agro drop and really no extra melee-only damage or perils interfere with a normal rotation. On the down side the Power Spark buffs are mostly going to be in the middle so that ranged can maximize their usage. Malygos does have a huge hit box though I’m spending about 80% of my time outside the Power buff.


Hint for this phase: with 3-4 seconds to go before Vortex, save your Maelstrom Weapon procs and cast Chain Heal about halfway through. He casts Vortex pretty much as soon as the cooldown is up so it’s easy to predict the timing. He’ll also dip and flap his wings to lift off before he starts heading over. If you’re not up to 5 MW procs you can continue to swing to get those last ones you need.

Another hint: You can get off a MW4 Chain Heal during the Vortex if you don’t get the full 5 procs, just keep spamming the “Jesus Beams” button.


Phase 2: It never felt so good to be melee.
Ever see Back to the Future 2? Hoverboard anyone? These dudes fly down on their little hoverboard discs and we DPS them down then hop on the discs to go kill the other dudes. While in the air we take absolutely NO damage and have NO threat to worry about. It’s just DPS and keep up with the dudes on the their hover discs. Meanwhile, all ranged is busy running from bubble to bubble and taking damage… hmmm… sound familiar?? In this phase ranged finally at long last has to suffer the “Run In Run Out” and “Run Around Like An Idiot” tactics that melee has to endure most every boss fight. And all the while we get to hop on disc and fly around killing dudes. HA! I love it!


Notice Omen is empty--no threat table!

Hint for this phase: while on the disc follow the dude you’re killing to the side and use the strafe keys. You move slower strafing, though it’s still faster than their move speed it’s easier to maintain close distance than following them from behind.

Another hint: to keep your bearings in the 3D movement I am moving my camera around a lot—it helps to change the perspective to see how near or far you are from the dudes.

Phase 3: Aces High redux
Once all the dudes are dead Malygos gets pissy and blows up the floor. Thankfully some of the red dragonflight is there to pick you up. This phase is just like the Coldarra daily Aces High. Admittedly I never did this quest (nor had most of our 10-man raid) so this was a learning experience for everyone. Fun segment of the fight, but nothing really compares to DPSing from a hoverdisc.

We ran out of time before we could down Malygos, but we’ll be back next week for sure.

Enhancement Shaman Changes Patch 3.0.8

There's not much out there for us this patch, but I do like what I see. Here's a quick recap:

Fire Nova Totem: Now no longer generates threat.
Good stuff. We can drop these totems earlier to coincide with an AoE pull and not have to worry about it pulling its own threat off the tank.

Magma Totem: The damage and scaling has been increased and no longer generates threat.
More damage here and no threat is awesome. I'll be interested to see how much more damage it does.

Mental Quickness: Reduced the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility.
This is AWESOME. Love it! 70% of my Agi goes into SP as opposed to 100% of Int. That's another 45 SP for Stoney immediately. This will also change the EP value of Int and the relative worth of Ancestral Knowledge. Looks like we'll be leaning to leather once again.
Thanks guys for the correction! Revised 12/15: This SUCKS! OK it's a nerf. Not that big of a nerf but a nerf nonetheless.

Edit (again) 12/15 - update from Ghostcrawler (Thanks Phil for the link)
Long story short, after reading your feedback and thinking about it some more, we no longer like this change and are going to revert it. We will likely swap the positions of Mental Quickness and Static Shock as some of you have suggested. Bottom line: Mental Quickness will still convert attack power to spell power.



Lava Lash - Fixed a bug which allowed you to use the ability even if you had a shield in offhand. Now requires a 1hand axe, fist or dagger to be able to be used.
Damn, I guess I missed out on Lava Lashing with a shield.

And then there are changes to Elemental Warding and Elemental Shields in the Elemental tree (go figure!) that will have PvP implications.

• Elemental Shields: This talent has been removed. It has now been merged with Elemental Warding.
• Elemental Warding: Now reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%. Changed from only reducing Nature, Fire and Frost by 4/7/10%.
• Elemental Shields was reducing flat physical damage, not a percentage. Now properly reduced by a percentage.

Elemental Warding coupled with Toughness could make for some great damage mitigation in PvP.

The Bish Must Die!

I've been working on my own meta achievement: soloing every group quest and every elite mob. Just me, my wolves, and some crazy dps. So far it's been going swimmingly, although I did group up for the Ring of thingswiththestuff in Zul'Drak.

Last night I started working on Archbishop Landgren for the quest Second Chances. To start it off I did a dive-bomb into the entrance to avoid the mass of Scarlet humanity outside on the steps. I still had to solo 6 mobs at once (3 outside on the ground, 1 flyer outside, and 2 inside) but that's no problem: my dogs & MW5_HW FTW. Then there are two single pulls, followed by two packs of five. I LoS'd the 5 packs into the entry hall just so I could get those damn Scarlet Harbor Guards around the bend and in melee range.

That leaves the Archbishop all alone. Er, wait... he has guards? Nuts, this is going to require some thought.

He has two Onslaught Harbor Guards with him, which are the annoying shoot-you-with-icy-arrows guys. He's got his own personal bodyguard service--but I guess if I was an Archbishop, especially and eeevvil Archbishop--I'd have my own personal bodyguards.

My first attempt was sans-heroism because I popped it on my dive bomb 6-mob fight. I didn't need to and obviously wasn't thinking ahead and didn't want to wait 5 minutes for the CD to come up. So I just set up my totems and got ready. I used the pillar for LoS and pulled with a Chain Lightning at the first guard. I popped my wolves and set them after one of those guards while I worked on the other one. I was holding up really really well and got down both guards without much hassle at all. I thought, this is going to be easy! Then I saw why it was so easy: the Archbishop bugged out in the pillar. He was evading and there was nothing I could do but pick up my totems and let the game reset him.
Attempt 1: Draw

At least that gave me enough time for Heroism to come up for my second attempt. Back to the pillar I went, put down my Totems (WF, SoE, FT, Mana), and then pulled with another CL. This time I made sure the Bish was positioned properly. He was. I went to town on him. Wolves, Heroism, rotating Fire Nova for the stuns (guess I'm glad I have that 1 point now!) and just FF down the boss. In the end it wasn't enough. Damage from 3 mobs was more than I could handle and after my wolves expired I couldn't keep up with the damage. I went down.
Attempt 2: Dead Shaman

I ran back to get my corpse and knew I would have to wait 10 minutes again for Heroism, as there was no way I'd get him down without it. I also figured I'd need to kill the adds to lower the damage taken. I Recalled back to Dalaran and met up with a guildie who gave me her Healthstone (I'm a healthstone addict). I kicked it in Dalaran for a bit then hopped the FP back to Icecrown. Dive bomb in to the cathedral, kill 6, then 1, 1, 5, and finally 5 again.

Now it's me, the Bish, and his buddies. I shouted at him that he wasn't man enough to fght me alone. He just stood there in silent agreement; with his eyes always watching, judging. So be it: The Bish must die!

Totems down, gameplan laid out (kill adds then boss), and all my tricks ready I pulled again with a CL and LoS them back to a pillar. The damn guards kept trying to get behind me so I wasted a few precious moments on positioning. I got the adds down, turned to the boss and popped Hero. Already my Fire Ele was out and my wolves were going. I got to work on His Bishness but made a few key errors. I wasn't interrupting enough of his Mind Blasts and I wasn't rotating in Grounding Totems to pick up the ones I missed. I got him only to 48% before I ran out of steam. My dogs were dead, my HS & pot used, and my last proc of MW was long since coughed up into a LHW. I saw the coming of the inevitable.
Attempt 3: Dead Shaman

And so here we are:
Stoneybaby: 0
Archbishop Landgren: 2

I'll be back, Bish. You can count on it.

Easy baby, easy

I’ve held my tongue for long enough. I’ve not participated in the endless rounds of proclamations, declarations, and other things that end with –ations. The topic has been beat to death, Ankhed up, beat down again, battle-rezzed, and completely destroyed yet again in the WoW blogosphere. And I kinda told myself I wouldn’t post about it, ever. But I’m kinda about to break that kinda-promise to myself. Right now.

Raiding in Wrath = easy.

Easy like Sunday morning. Easy like the bake oven. Easy… like really, really frikkin easy.

Case in point: last night we downed Maexxna with 19 players. Six people got locked out of the room at the start, DPS and healers alike. But she/he/it went down like a vir... (ok I’ll stop the bad metaphors).

Second case in point: Heigan went down with half the raid dead. We used 2 ankhs and I think one B-Rez and it took us 13 minutes, but a kill is a kill and a 1-shot is a 1-shot, even if it is a ghetto kill.

HINT: for phase 2 of this fight use Alt-Z to turn off your interface and just watch the lava/plaguethingy bursts. I died the second time we hit this phase then popped up and survived all subsequent phases by turning off my UI and just observing the action on the ground. Remember: a dead DPS does no DPS.

Third case in point: Last week between 2 ten man groups we cleared every raid instance, and Naxx10 twice.

This was our first night in Naxx25 and we cleared 6 bosses in 2 wings with all 1-shots.

Thankfully Patchwerk finally gave us a challenge last night. Once we figured out we needed 3 tanks because he chains his Hateful Strikes we had a successful kill. Of course until then it was pretty funny as the melee dropped like flies on the first few attempts. BAM! Warrior dead. Then me. Then a rogue. Next Warrior. Next Rogue. Dead, deader, deadest. All within the first 10 seconds of every fight.

In retrospect it was kind of funny and we were thankful for the challenge. Even with 3 tanks the healing output was incredible. You could hear a pin drop in Vent during our last, and successful, attempt of the night. Great job to Unortho healers in that fight!

So there you have it, my contribution to the “raids r ez” rants of my fellow bloggers. I’m ashamed of myself for posting one, but really, I do crave a challenge. How are your guilds doing in progression? Similar experiences?

Naxx10, OS10, EoE10 Cleared

We cleared Naxx10 (x2), Obsidian Sanctum 10 and Eye of Eternity 10 as a guild this week. And all I have to show for it is this stupid cape. HAHA just kidding. Lots of good loot went out, but through our runs in Naxx10, OS10, and a guild/pug Wintergrasp 25 I did not see one single piece of Shaman T7 loot drop. Not a one. Let's hope next week is nicer to Shamans on Muradin, or at least to this one shaman.

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.

Researching Respecs

Stoney is badly in need of a respec. I would link my current spec here if it wasn't such an embarrassment--a mashup of leveling and PvP with no clear purpose. /sigh.

With raiding starting tonight I need to take a hard look at the raid viability of a few talents.

Improved Windfury Totem - this overlaps with a Death Knight's Improved Icy Talons. Our tanking Death Knight says he has this as part of his regular rotation so my totems become moot when I'm in raids with him. The consideration is when I'm NOT in raids with him. Right now we are running two 10-man groups and I may or may not be in his group. For now I'm going to hang on to this talent, but when we switch to 25s I will reinvest the points elsewhere.

Enhancing Totems - Without points this overlaps with another DK talent: Horn of Winter. Like Icy Talons, our DK tank will keep this up all the time. However, our improved SoE Totem provides a greater boost so these points are well spent regardless of a DK's horn blowing. Furthermore, the points here also increase FT totem though those points are usually taken by a resto shaman in the group AND the SoE totems stack.

Unleashed Rage - This overlaps with a Hunter's Trueshot Aura. I will have to check with our hunters to find out if they plan on running this aura for the raid. I suspect with the amount of hunters we have in the guild one of them will keep this up. It has a 45 yard range which should suffice for 95% of raid encounters. That's 5 talent points I can invest elsewhere, unless I want to keep this talent for soloing. (For PvP I'll be setting up a different spec).

That looks like 7 points I can reinvest from the cookie-cutter spec, and to say nothing of the goofy shit I put talents in while leveling. I'm not sure what my raid spec will be right now but as soon as I decide on a spec I'll post it up here.

Stoney's Enhance Gear Comps Spreadsheet

What follows are links to Stoneybaby's WotLK Enhance Gear Masterblaster EP Spreadsheet system. The file is only partially complete but I guess it's better to put up partially complete than not at all. you should be able to view without signing in and edit when signed in. Let me know if you have any problems.

Google Spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pJQ7DpouhvwmV66yXk4zOUg

Webspage:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pJQ7DpouhvwmV66yXk4zOUg

Downloadable MS Excel:
http://www.so-money.net/Documents/Enhance_Gear.xls

Let me know how it pans out.

EDIT 12/3/08 9:00 AM: added link for the Excel doc
EDIT 12/4/08 6:00 PM: Google Doc is now editable by everyone, or at least it should be. Don't #^$% it up! :D

Maces, Mongoose, and Mounts

I dinged 77 last night which of course means Cold Weather Flying finally. What a relief it is to be back on an epic flyer zooming around the continent. It also means that when flying out of Dalaran I don't have to take the long way around on the flight path--I can hop on my mount and directly head off in the right direction.

We also did The Champion of Anguish and I snagged myself a Crimson Cranium Crusher. Going from the sleekness of Vanir's to this honking mass of stone and steel is going to take some adjusting (mentally). Replacing my first epic was a bittersweet moment. It clearly out-powers, out-dpses, and out does Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality. I was sad to see the badge weapon that I worked so hard for, but was comforted by the fact that I had it the day that 2.4 went live and definitely got my money's worth. Of course this also meant that I had to level my mace skill from 92 to 385! I did manage to hit 382 by the end of the night. Those last few points are always the hardest (axes are next).

The real question though is Mongoose. It is still viable at level 80 or do the procs scale back like the did with Crusader from 60 to 70? I couldn't find anything on mmo-champion, wowhead, or Elitist Jerks that said the Agi and Hit boosts from Mongoose were lower or that the procs were less. Since I couldn't find anything contradictory I figured I'd have to test it myself. One of our warriors swore that the PPM was significantly reduced so I downloaded Procmeter and set it to look for Lightning Speed. Through the rest of the night in Grizzly Hills I got a consistent 6.5% chance to proc. I'll keep an eye on this as I continue to level and see if the proc rate goes down. Unfortuantely what I did not check was whether or not the Agi buff remained at 120 or if that is scaling downwards. I'll check that today and post findings in the comments.

EDIT 1:26 PM: CONFIRMED Mongoose still grants 120 Agi per proc above level 70. Mongoose is fully viable in WotLK.

Hitting Hit Cap at 80

OK my fellow enhancers it's time to hit the hit cap. Or at least start preparing to maybe eventually possibly get ready to kinda get close to thinking about hitting the hit cap.

Are you ready for the final number? The goal, the target, the must-hit-this-hit-in-order-to-hit-bosses in raids in WotLK. Are you ready for it?

No, you're not.
Really.
I about fell out of my chair when I read the number.



367 for Horde
341 for Alliance

Ouch.

That number represents the spell hit cap, not the dual-wielding hit cap. It's been shown that we really only need to hit the spell cap in order to maximize our dps. Anything above that is OK, but going above it by much is not worth the trade-off in loss of other stats.

Once you get up off the floor from the initial shock of having to tack on another 190 or 177 hit rating let's take a look at why this isn't going to be so terrible.

First, the stats on gear and gems has been increased, so if you were able to hit the hit-cap before then you should be able to hit it again once you get up to 80 and start raiding. Just by replacing three pieces on my gear I am able to get to 210 with quest rewards greens/blues. Those pieces now make up my "Dungeon Hit" set in Outfitter. I expect by the time I get the next 5 levels I'll be up in the high 200's or low 300's just off reward gear.

Second, that's the hit cap. It's a hard cap but it's just a target. To maximize DPS you don't want to socket 100% hit gems and wear only greens with +hit while sacrificing other stats like AP, Crit, and Agi. There's a lot of ways to max your dps so keep your eye on the big picture when considering hit upgrades. Just as a guess, I would estimate getting up to 300+ is a raiding minimum requirement, but I'm interested in your opinions/findings on that.

Third, there's a lot of gear out there with +hit on it. Here's a search with EP filters I ran on Wowhead that lists everything in WotLK that is either Mail or Leather and has +Hit. It is sorted by total EP value. (Jaron, can you create a similar search on lootrank.com? I'm a wowhead user and have limited time here at work today)

Fourth, gems, consumables, and enchants. Clickyclick for links. The "consumables" includes links to enchants (listed as scrolls) and other than the enchants there are not many consumables to tap into. One elixir and one food buff. However, if you pop both of those you'll be putting 85 hit on yourself, which is a pretty significant number.

Fifth, the new head glyph for WotLK does not have hit, so if you're not Revered with CE and you need hit rating, you best get ye to Outlands (or rather the AH) and grind up some CE rep for the Arcanum of Ferocity.

OK so those numbers are not impossible and shouldn't be too hard to hit, especially if you use the consumables.

Happy hitting!

Lava Lash Glyph

On Tuesday night I had some terrible fun in Hyjal and BT. I was a monster on bosses that didn't require the usual melee run-around-like-an-idiot routine.

With 3.0.3 the Strength of Earth Glyph was replace with the Lava Lash Glyph. (Interestingly, Blizzard didn't depreciate the old glyph instead they just replaced it using the same item ID so the Wowhead listing still says SoE but the tooltip is for LL). Anyway, I had to respec out of Static Shock/PvP and into my raid spec and replace the LS glyph so I figured why not give FT a shot.

At first I started out with the Prowler's Strikeblade from ZA, a 1.50 speed OH, and a WF/FT but I felt the damage output was anemic. Considering that both Lava Lash and Stormstrike get their damage coefficient from base weapon damage, you want the slower more powerful weapon in your OH. So back to Vanir's I went looking to top out my damage. And I did.

I ripped apart bosses keeping up a steady stream of damage. My rotation priority was MW5_LB, LL, SS, ES. I moved LL up in the rotation priority to take advantage of the glyph. In the end I think it worked.

I'm back online this weekend after an extremely busy week IRL at work. I'll probably be doing some more PvP.

OH! One other thing I forgot to mention, I actually did something a little different with this PvE spec--I only put 2 points in Unleashed Rage. I believe that it overlaps with Trueshot Aura. I should probably test this out, but I dished out that damage with only 2 points in UR.

2434 DPS

Just did 2434 DPS on Anetheron with Slow/Slow WF/FT, Lava Lash & WF Glyph. Will post more tomorrow as I'm in raid right now and going to be right after. Will post more tomorrow.

UPDATE 10:35 PM EST: 2364 DPS on High Warlord Naj'entus with same setup (Hyjal cleared in 2 hrs)

Replies to Comments & Questions

Thanks everyone for the comments. Your feedback means a lot to me so keep it coming. Here are two questions/comments posted earlier, and one request from me.

Bert asked: so for 3.0.2, what do you reckon to be the weapon speed of choice? since maelstrom weap deals 25% xtra dmg for OH, when imbued with FW, I was thinking of using a faster OH (i got bad mojo dagger and swiftsteel bludgeon)

Bert, the Slow/Slow WF/WF is still shown to be better than the Slow/Fast WF/FT combo, even with the extra damage for MW. It’s only between 2-5% better according to my theorycrafting and what I’ve read of others. 2-5% is really splitting hairs at some levels, especially now in World of Nerfcraft. But at an end-game raiding level where wipes at 1% on bosses are as common as Warriors whirlwinding sheeps that 2-5% extra DPS can make the difference. If I were you I’d hang on to that dagger and the bludgeon in case they want to make Fast/FT the ideal OH combo. But for now if that 2-5% makes a difference then I’d go with Slow/Slow WF/WF. If it doesn’t make that much of a difference then have fun with it!


Jaron (Azjol-Nerub) adds: Right now I have my enhance shammy specced w/ full pts in static shock and imp shields. I don't fool with Lava Lash at all at 70. Is Elem-Dev really that much better? I'm playing with EnhSim and not seeing much difference. I pvp enough to enjoy the better LS (especially with the glyph!).

The thing with Ele Dev that people love is the synergy it creates between melee and casting—which is the essence of Enhance right now. Since we cast a spell on every GCD (well, except when SS is available) Ele Dev should proc regularly and should have an uptime between 35% and 40%. That’s a 9% increase to Crit 40% of the time. It’s like Sex Panther by Odeon “60% of the time it works every time.” Ele Dev isn’t made with bits of real panther, but it is damn fine.

As for Ele Dev vs Static Shock, what is the difference that you are seeing Jaron? I’m a hardcore min-maxer so I obsess over squeezing every last drop of dps out of my Stoneybaby. I also believe raiders have a responsibility to their fellow guildmates to maximize their potential. If it comes down to 5% difference or less, that could be negligible for some but not for me. If you’re talking 10% difference in DPS then I can’t condone that.

Ultimately it comes down having fun playing your class. And I do really want to try out the Static Shock. I was just saying last night that I haven’t PvP’d on Stoney since August and I want to get back to it. That 0/61/0 spec you have Jaron is exactly one of the ones I’ve been eyeing! I’m considering yours and 5/56/0. What do you think of those? Maybe this weekend I’ll respect and glyph it up and see how it goes.


Finally, keep the comments coming. I appreciate the input and I want to know what’s working for you. I’ll keep you informed of my findings (new EnhSim is up btw and my armory profile is finally updated) and if you find a spec/gear/chant/gem combo that’s really singing for you in PvE or PvP post us a link to your armory and details on what’s working for you

Thanks again and stay tuned for more!

Hyjal & Convection

Last night was the first night I was having mana issues in a raid. We ran Hyjal and cleared the trash so fast it was... well it was like everything else right now--ridiculous. But between twisting Magma Totemsn and Fire Nova Totems, and working in Chain Lightnings, SS, ES, and LL's I was running close to OOM all night.

I spec'd out of Convection and into Concussion about a week ago and it hasn't been a problem. But man those two fire totems are mana intensive! Fire Nova Totem ended up being 6% of my overall damage and kept me top of the non-AoE classes.

The Kaz fight is always a battle against mana, but this time I actually ended the fight with more than half of my mana pool—and I was using ALL of my spells. Three things contributed to this:

1. Extreme buffing/nerfing made the fight short
2. Lots of resisted Marks meant less mana loss
3. Shammy Rage is awesome

Seriously, Shammy Rage is awesome. I can unload every single costly spell and continue my rotation in full while being drained of mana from the Mark of Kazrogal and still keep a full mana pool for the duration of SR. It’s OP and I love it.

My conclusion is that even in the most mana intensive situations (trash and boss) spec’ing into Convection just doesn’t make sense right now.

Results: Black Temple

I was finally back online last night and back in raid on Stoney. We chain pulled and AoE'd down every last bit of trash in BT and came close to a full clear in 3 hours. In the end some hiccups on the Illidari Council pulls caused a few wipes and cost us the full clear. But really, that's an awesome night: 8 bosses in 3 hours. It is kind of a let down that it's so easy, but I guess the trade-off is that we all get to into content we otherwise wouldn't get to experience.

As for Stoney, I was pleased with the performance for the most part.

Ability	Total	%	Avg Dmg	Crit%
Swing	2,322,489	40.5%	436	43%
Windfury	1,346,239	23.5%	788	41.0%
Lightning Bolt	468,521	8.2%	1535	27.0%
Stormstrike	453,131	7.9%	461	40.0%
Earth Shock	430,508	7.5%	1,233	26.0%
Chain Lightning	225,635	3.9%	1179	32.0%
Spirit Wolves	212,376	3.7%	188	11.0%
Lava Lash	149,734	2.6%	434	33.0%
Searing Totem	65,186	1.1%	214	32.0%
Fire Nova Totem	48,438	0.8%	992	33.0%
Magma Totem	9,973	0.2%	164	32.0%

What I like is that 64% or nearly two thirds of my damage is coming from auto-attack! However, the majority of the remaining requires a lot of attention.

LB & CL were only cast when I had 5 procs of MW. That's 12.1% of my total damage output that's on standby until the procs uhm, proc.

The combination of SS, ES, and LL are 18% of my total damage. This is the most important point: the key to maximizing Enhancement Shaman DPS is to maximize your cooldown usage. Throughout the three hour raid there was only a handful of times that I did not have SS, ES, LL, or MW5 available when the GCD came up. After a while I got in a good rhythm and wasn't struggling to see what was going to come up next. I also started to get a feel for whether MW was going to turn over from 4 to 5 procs in the few milliseconds and if I should hold my CGD for that 5th proc or burn it and then have to wait 1.5 sec to throw a LB.

As for fights, it was a fun night and surprising in some ways. In summary:

• I need to use my Spirit Wolves every time they are off CD, I simply wasn't using them enough
• Wind Shock is very effective at reducing overall threat when used in succession, and doing so doesn't hurt total output too terribly
  
• Amazing what a difference it makes being able to stand still and maximize cooldowns as opposed to running around like an idiot.
  

Below is the total output per fight:

• High Warlord - 1854 DPS, 6% of total damage
• A pretty bad start for the night, I hit my groove later in the raid
  
• Supremus - 2002 DPS, 5% of total damage
• You have to expect melee will be much less effective in this hate-on-melee fight
• Still, while I was in there I was making the most of it
• Shade of Akama - 1608 DPS, 8% of total damage
• I was doing 1600 DPS on this fight pre-patch
• With channelers dying so fast I guess I couldn't get in a good rhythm
• But was still outputting most of the raid damage
  
• Teron Gorefiend - 2759 DPS, 7% of total damage
• ohhh yeah! That's what I'm talking about!
• I specifically remember that during this fight MW was procing so fast and so often I felt like I was mashing it all the time
• Gurtogg Bloodboil - 1997 DPS, 7% of total damage
• I used Wind Shock instead of ES here to help keep my threat under control
• It was very effective, and surprisingly didn't gimp my DPS too terribly
• Reliquary of Souls - 1917 DPS, 7% of total damage
• meh, pretty standard, I think the only reason I was low here was from backing off to prevent killing myself with the debuff in phase 2
• Mother Shahraz - 2276 DPS, 8% of total damage
• Another all-out fight that requires just standing in one place and beating the ever living crap out of a boss
• Illidari Council - 1674 DPS, 9% of total damage
• What's interesting here is the low DPS but high total damage, but that is because I was not assigned to interrupt duty and could just go to town on the Pally.

My armory profile still has not updated since I made the changes in gear. But I swapped out 1 ring and put the +hit enchant on my gloves so that I could eat Warped Flesh or Grilled Mudfish as my buff food instead of Spicy Hot Talbuk. And as for consumables I was popping Elixir of Greater Agility and Elixir of Draeneic Wisdom. And I made sure that WF was up at 100% of the time.

Tonight is GF night, then we'll be running some old stuff this weekend for kicks (SSC, TK, MC, maybe even BWL or AQ!)

How are your new specs panning out? Are you seeing different numbers than me?

No Results

I logged in last night only to find that our main tank was having root canal surgery (ouch) so I had to pop into the tanking rotation on my feral Druid, Finnmaccool. As a result I got to watch the ridiculous dps race from the tanking perspective and did not get to test out the new and improved Stoneybaby.

Also unfortunate is that Stoney's armory profile didn't update with all the changes I made. After raid last night I re-gemmed everything (7 new epic gems in total), swapped out 1 ring, put the hit rating enchant on my gloves, and changed around all of my consumables. None of this is up on the armory so unfortunately I could not run any sims today.

On a positive note, we did a 7 boss clear in BT last night, including two new kills: RoS and Mother. Grats to Unorthodox and everyone on their new loots. It was a bit of a let down though. Despite the fact that those were fresh new boss kills and opens the door for us to tackle Council and the big Illi himself on Monday... it still felt hollow. We spent more time explaining and setting up for Mother than time in the fight itself. Normally a one-shot on a new boss would result in a total Vent "nerd-gasam" as someone put it, but this was just a big sigh from the guild and a few half hearted good jobs. In fact, the kill was so easy that we forgot to take a group picture for the website.

I love it when a plan comes together

First off, thank you everyone for the replies. Please post up details on the results you've found so others can benefit--including me! Include a link to your armory profile and let us know what glyphs you're using. Post any WWS links you have as well.

Last night I took a group into ZA to see what was in the fourth chest. (SPOILER ALERT) It's just another one of the rings from the 3rd chest. lame.

In the prep room you could feel the excitement in the air; everyone was anxious to try out their new specs and talents. I didn't want us to be cocky and play sloppy so I told them "in truth we don't know what to expect so play tight, tanks keep us moving at a decent pace, healers watch your mana if if you get low call it out, and DPS for god's sake don't pull of the tanks because we're all working off new talents here." And then I started the event.

It was like life in fast forward. killkillkillpull.killkillkillpull.killkillkillpull.killkillkillpull.Boss. WTH?!? We were killing mobs so fast my precious rotations were pointless. I was lucky if I could mash my buttons fast enough before a mob went down. Akil'zon only got off one storm, Halazzi only one bear form, and Jan'alai was at 35% before the second hatchers even spawned. In fact on Jan'alai I had to call to stop dps because we would have had him at 35% (when he hatches all the remaining eggs at once) before the first hatcher was even done. It was lightning fast. 4 chests in 31 minutes flat. Blazing.

Hexx Lord only got off 2 rounds of Spirit Bolts. We killed Zul'jin in record time and with one rogue stuck outside the flames (sorry Oldbie!). We definitely could have finished faster if I didn't call for a bio break along the way.

If you have not torn up ZA I highly recommend you get in there with a group and rip it apart.

As for me? How was the newness? It was awesome--until WF ran out and I forgot to refresh it. Damn me and my mod reliance! Before my WF expired I was keeping up a solid stream of damage and keeping up with the DPS Warrior who was doing Warrior things all over the place. He was basically AoE Melee and I was able to keep up with him just through single target damage.

The pace of play for Enhance is much faster, couple that with the increased speed of kills and it means I'm spending a lot more time with my head buried in my action bars and much less time with my head up watching the action. This could be a problem later on, but hopefully it also has to do with just getting used to the new play mechanics.

As for spell rotations, on bosses I find it thoroughly enjoyable to get into a groove with shocks, MW5_LBs, SS and LL. In fact, I don't often find myself wondering what to hit next as usually when my GCD is up there is only 1 spell that is ready for action.

Key points to remember for boss fights:

1. Keep FS active, it does great damage over the long haul. Edit: some are saying FS is a dog because it can't crit. I'll have to look into this.
   
2. Don't use MW with less than 5 procs. Edit: 4 or less resets the swing timer and reduces dps so only use with 5 procs.
   
3. If you get in trouble you can use MW for a Healing Wave on yourself
   

Two other quick points:

• The ShockAndAwe mod is incredible. I'm relying on that for keeping track of Maelstrom Weapon procs. If you don't have it go grab it now from wowinterface
• MW5 Chain Lightning = good times! I was throwing CL so much on trash I felt like an Ele

I must say Enhance is really coming together beautifully. In the words of the A-Team: I love it when a plan comes together.

Stoney's Bear Mount

So much to say about this.

Should I talk about the 11 months of work in here? The fact that we would be rolling in bear mounts if I didn't take a break from the game in August? Should I reminisce about when we first stepped into ZA and were wiping so bad that most of the guild stopped running it forever--well, until my groups started getting close to the 4th timed chest and then many wanted to come in and partake in the loot. Should I bring up the heartbreaking 1% wipes on Hexx & ZJ? Or the night we wiped 10 times on Jan'Alai due to my stubbornness? What about when the mace dropped off ZJ on our first kill and an initiate won the roll over Awl and I gave it to the initiate--and Awl didn't speak to me for a few days. Or two weeks ago when we missed by 30 seconds? So many experiences. So many times I took groups, pushed them to their limits and tested them against the clock; pushed to the edge and brought back again. So many strategies laid out, pep talks given, and tongue lashings administered. So many damn Healthstones!

The bear mount is the culmination of all of this for me. To most it's a mount and a helluva fine trophy mount at that. To me, it's every wipe, every win, and every moment of my time I've invested up to this point in the Burning Crusade. This represents the blood sweat and tears of hundreds of hours of work, practice, and play.

To be honest, I did loot it to myself. I took advantage of my position of power and asked the raid if I may be so bold as to take it. Almost everyone said for me to take it. But almost isn't unanimous. No one spoke up either in raid chat or in a whisper to say, stop. But I know that some wanted to do so. And so I broke our loot guild policy. I do apologize to you for taking advantage of my position. I promise you this mount means more to me than it possibly could to anyone else. That's not to diminish your desire for it, but only to say the meaning it takes on for me. I mean, I couldn't even look at Awl and Dwarfknight on their mounts for the past two weeks. And when we blew our chance at another one this last Saturday I was devastated--and pissed.

To some it may seem strange to wrap up so much emotion in a virtual item, but again to me the item is symbolic. Raid leading is not easy. I've endured plenty of name calling both to my face and behind my back. I've driven some away and pulled some in closer. I've managed conflicts and dealt with drama. I've yelled at people for their mistakes and apologized profusely for my own. I've cool hot heads and breathed vigor back into those who stopped caring. I've earned this fucking mount.

Amani War Bear with 4 Minutes to Spare!

Done! Did it! Complete! Tonight Unorthodox earned its first Amani War Bear.

Congratulations to Awl, Paladin extraordinaire of Unorthodox and a good friend who was with me from the very beginning of Zul'Aman and stuck with me through all of our trials and tribulations.

Before we started I gave everyone a quick pep talk about Sunday's run and how we missed by 30 seconds. It could have been hesitating at bosses, or taking too long to loot, or any number of things. We all agreed to keep moving forward at a solid pace but without rushing and getting into trouble.

We did just that. We took every shortcut we knew. We didn't CC. We left it on Free For All loot the entire time. I didn't even bother to pick up the loot for DE. Eagle went down fast. Next to bear and we ripped him apart. Things were going smoothly even when on Jan'Alai's trash we had to face down 2 Flame Casters in the first pack and 2 again in the 5 pack around the bend. Things got a little dicey at one point because I didn't allow any CC and I kept missing the interrupts on the volleys. We were getting pummelled with fireballs, everyone's health was low and it looked like chaos in there. To the healers credit and the with no deaths; we recovered and got up the the platform.

Jan'Alai dealt us 3 deaths--one mage died twice and one of the healers bit it at the end (I think). It was a sloppy kill whereas our other two kills and clears were nearly flawless. We had 16 minutes left on the clock. Our previous best time was with 12 minutes remaining. I knew we had it at that point but I couldn't let it show for fear of the raid thinking it was in the bag and getting sloppy.

Awl and Lasthope, our Prot Pally and Feral Druid, kept the raid moving along through Halazzi trash. I got smashed to little bits by the gators on patrol, got a rez from Arkuss our Shadow Priest so the healers could keep moving. The pulls were coming along perfectly. With one mob still up the tanks would move forward and pull the next group. Mana was running low but we had to keep pressing forward. Up to Halazzi's room and the patrol was just coming around the bend. The patrols in this instance seem to be on a perfect rotation--as long as you are on pace to get the 4th timed chest.

With the three packs dead in the lynx's room we still had over 6 minutes on the clock. Everyone was anxious and ready to go; people calling for the pull but I needed healthstones and I'm sure others did too after the MC mobs and Flame Casters took their toll. It was OK at this point to take a minute to be sure everyone was buffed, had full mana and a healthstone. But the group couldn't take it anymore, they were on the edge of their seats and itching to down him. And we did.

We unleashed holy hell on Halazzi. It was going so fast I didn't know what phase we were in towards the end. When he did his split into the final Phase 2 and we got hit by the Transfigure it totally caught me by surprise--I thought we were already in the split phase! Awl peeled the lynx off Nosferot, the resto Shaman, and we just completely decimated the boss. At 2% with everyone alive and full health people were starting to get excited. A quick shout to finish stong and we did just that.

Halazzi dead.

4th chest opened.

A journey that began 10, nearly 11, months ago was completed for the very first time in Unorthodox.

Before we opened the chest Zhentar, Warlock and long-standing member, told the raid that he is rolling on the mount but if he wins his roll goes to me. Nearly half the raid chimed in with their agreement. I was really moved by the sentiment. Thank you everyone for offering It means a lot to me because the bear mount is more than just a prize, it's a symbol of a player's dedication to overcome a very difficult challenge as a team member. For a raider to offer up that symbol is very moving. It means more to me than you'll know--and believe me I will take you up on that!

When ZA first opened we set out to just gear up and get some loot. Then we started clearing timed chests and we got better and better at it. By the time we were getting close to the third chest the instance started to take on a new life for us as a team. It became a new challenge and a very difficult one that required flawless execution and cutting every spare second of slop out of the raid.

With our first bear in the guild I want to say congratulations to Awl and to everyone who's run ZA with me. Thank you for the hard work, for ever second saved, and for every sacrifice made.

We'll be back in here after every reset until the patch to collect as many bears as possible!

Bloodboil Dead & Why I Hate Him

We smashed down Gurtogg Bloodboil last night bringing the guild up to 5/9 in BT. Congrats to Unorthodox on this kill! It took us a few weeks but we downed him last night in what would have been a nearly flawless kill, if it wasn't for me dying early on to a Cleave. There's so much bouncing of aggro between the tanks that it is hard to avoid if you end up in the wrong position, which I did once and I saw a rogue do once as well. But this isn't the reason I hate Bloodboil.

The reason I hate him is that I have to stay below the threat levels of not 1, not 2, but 3 tanks. You can't be below 2 and slightly around the 3rd. In fact, you can't even be anywhere close to the 3rd tank's threat level.

At one point I was well below the Druid and Warrior tanks and hovering slightly below the Pally tank. The Druid called out for a BoP to wipe the debuff stacks he had so Gurtogg switched to the Warrior. The Warrior got knocked back out of range so he switch to the Paladin. I saw this happen and saw I was way too close in threat. I stopped swinging and started backing up. As I'm backing up out of melee range he decides that in fact I am too close in threat, bounces aggro to me, one-shots me, then proceeds to one-shot a holy Priest and a Warlock before the Paladin can get control of him again. All of this happened in about a 2 second timeframe. BoPKnockbackPallyBackupOneshotOneshotOneshotPally. BAM!

Every attempt after that I sat back until the first Fel Rage--one full minute cooling my heels. Totems down for the Rogues but otherwise just one full minute of watching the threat meter and yelling at the hunters to Feign Death.

The Fel Rage phase is supposed to be there for the dps to pound his brains out without consequence, but until we brought in an extra healer I spent most of those phases healing the Fel Enraged person. I noticed that when I was not helping out with the healing the target died. My meager 1250 LHW's might not be much but I'm spamming them as fast as I can and it made a difference. Once we brought in that extra healer I was able to actually do some damage during that phase.

All said, this fight is a perfect example of the hate on melee.

Using WoW Web Stats

Greetings from hazy, hot & humid Hong Kong. I'm in China traveling with my girlfriend for the next 12 days; she has to work in HK this week then we are off to Beijing on Friday for tourist activities. I won't have a lot of updates as I will not be raiding this week so I'm going to catch up on some things I wanted to blog about anyway, starting off with WWS.

I use WoW Web Stats to record every raid. I run a simple mod called AutoCombatLog, which automatically turns on Combat Logging when you are in a raid instance, then shuts it off again when you leave the instance. Pretty simple really. The same thing can be accomplished manually by typing in a slash command (I think it's /combatlog ) but I know I'll forget so I use a mod. Recount, an in-game meter mod, is great for a quick look but nothing beats the accuracy and details of WWS.

After getting the combat log uploaded the first thing is to click on your toon's name and look at the first level of damage data. I'm looking to see what is my percentage breakdown of Swing, Windfury, Stormstrike, and others. Typically I want to see around 47-48% damage from Swing (aka white damage), 30% from Windfury, and 7-8% from Stormstrike. If these numbers are out of whack then I know right from the start something went wrong. If Swing damage is low it's probably from misses. If WF is low I probably went for a period without WF on my weapons (doh!). If Stormstrike was low then I was not working in SS at every available moment.

In our Black Temple raid on Tuesday 9/9 my numbers were:
Swing - 47% of total damage (37% crit)
Windfury - 29% (36% crit)
Stormstrike - 9% (37% crit)
The WF is 1% lower than I would expect, but not so far out of range that I am worried. The crit numbers are right on for me and my gear. So far, so good.

Next I click on the Swing line. Do not click the word 'Swing' itself as this will take you to another page that shows everyone who did 'Swing' damage in that raid. Instead if you click on the line it will show you the detailed breakdown. Here I'm looking at the breakdown of the miss percentages.

Miss % is total number of misses, parries, dodges, and other (evade, immune, absorb) divided by the total number of Swings. In this case my Total Miss % was 12.7% which is a bit higher than I'd like to see it. However, I recently made some gear changes and reduced my total hit rating by about 12 points so I expected this number to go up. My Parry % was less than 1%, which means that I am standing behind mobs the majority of the time. If the parry % is higher than 1% then you are standing in front of the mob far too much.

Everything looks good at the high level so let's look at boss fights. To do this find the link that currently says "Full Report" hover over it, and then click on the first boss that pops up. For me it's High Warlord Naj'entus. Here's some key numbers:
Dmg. Out to foes : 292,244 (7 %) - that's OK but not stellar
DPS time : 4'57'' (90 % of presence) - the 10% where I'm not doing damage is either during the bubble or healing myself after the bubble is popped.
DPS : 983 - not good, I should be up over 1000 dps on a boss fight.

983 DPS is not ideal. Looking at the table below I see my miss % was 16.5%, but then I remember I stack stam gear for this fight which means I'm sacrificing hit rating. That loss of hit gear prevented me from keeping the 1k DPS mark. However, a dead DPSer does zero DPS. I'll have to see about making different gear choices for that fight next time (and maybe buffing with Spicy Hot Talbuk)

With that figured out I problem solve through the other bosses using that dropdown at the top of the page. There is even an option to see "All Bosses" or "All Trash" which is handy for other reasons.

I did manage to redeem myself in the Shade of Akama fight--one of the few fights that favors melee--by doing 1491 DPS and 9% of total raid damage. I was only at 8.3% miss and interestingly 53% of my damage was from Swing, but for that fight we had a constant Drums of Battle rotation going and I was popping Haste Potions so I was swinging so fast I was getting in more hits during the WF 3 second cooldown.

That's a quick look at WWS and how to use it to analyze your raid performance. If you have any questions please feel free to post, or if you want me to look at your WWS and give some feedback feel free to leave a link below.

Zul'Aman Timed Run: Greatest Thing Ever

Whoever came up with the idea of the ZA timed chest run deserves a raise. Or if they already got one then give them another. I have to say that ZA has proved to be one of the most challenging and thoroughly enjoyable instances I've played in my 3 years of WoW. Now I am slightly biased because I love troll content. I loved ZF while leveling and I loved ZG in pre-BC, so naturally I'd be a fan of ZA. However my love this time goes beyond just the models and skins and gets to the heart of the instance: its timed reward system.

The instance was released 10 months ago and I still find it exciting to clear and challenging to work towards that last timed chest. When we got the 3rd chest for the first time in our guild I went bananas. I was as excited for that as I was for our first Zul'Jin kill.

While ZJ and clearing the instance is a goal, there remains another goal: the bear mount. So despite having cleared ZA we have not mastered it and so we have not captured the trophy of ZA mastery. And that is the ultimate goal; not just the mount but the complete mastery of the instance. That is the brilliance of the instance: despite having it on farm, we still have more to accomplish in there.

To give you an idea of how far we’ve look at the timeline of ZA in our guild:
• 11/16/07 – Nalorakk gets skinned
• 11/30/07 – Akil’zon gets killed
• 12/7/07 – Halazzi gets hated on
• 2/2/08 – Jan’alai gets jacked
• 2/4/08 – Hexx Lord Malacrass? Done.
• 3/11/08 – Zul’Jin loses his other arm and we get to experience the lovely music of ZA for the first time
• 6/5/08 – We crack open the 3rd timed chest

It took us four months to get our first full clear. It took another three months to get from 2 to 3 timed chests. Three months of shaving off time, minute by minute. It has been nearly 3 months since first getting that 3rd timed chest and we still have 5 more minutes to take off the run to get the 4th chest.

In the same time frame our guild went from wet-behind-the-ears in SSC to being 4/9 in BT. We are plowing through Black Temple in 25 man content and have not yet mastered the ZA challenge. The challenge is why I keep coming back to ZA and why I love it.

To me, ZA is pure awesomeness.

The Hate on Melee

In my time off I've had a chance to reflect on my adventures in Azeroth. Growing up pre-BC as a Boomkin was amazingly fun despite that I barely understood the game mechanics. I just knew I absolutely loved the hybrid Druid class. Then comes raiding and MC which meant only one thing: resto. Along comes Burning Crusade, I get Finn to 70, get frustrated trying to heal 5 mans as resto--back when we were all in greens and blues. I started Stoney and fell in love with the enhancement tree. End game for Stoney proved to be a challenge of running in, running out, and always running around. In Karazhan Prince was the only "run away bravely" fight so I didn't know what was in store for me until the night we hit High King and Gruul's Lair. To this day, not a Gruul's fight goes by on Stoney that I don't either a) get decimated by a Hurtful Strike or b) have to run out of melee range and sit back to let the OT's catch up on threat.

Looking back now I wonder why the hate on melee? Melee is not a minority spec by any stretch of the imagination. If you consider the 27 talent trees (9 classes x 3 trees) 10 of the choices require melee range: feral druid, prot pally, ret pally, 3x rogue, enhance, 3x warrior. That's over 1/3 of the spec choices, 5 of 9 classes that can be melee, 2 fully dedicated to melee 100% of the time. I can understand pre-BC where your raiding role was predetermined by your class and the only ones within melee range were the prot warriors and rogues. Yet one of the intentions of BC was to break classes out of that strict end game spec determination. One would think the boss fights would reflect the new possibilities. But they don't.

The largest problem facing melee dps is of course the 10% threat threshold. Ranged dps has to pass 30% of the tank's threat in order to pull aggro, however in melee range that cap is reduced significantly to only 10%. That is a pervasive problem regardless of boss. That problem aside, melee faces four challenges that do not haunt ranged:

1. Run In / Run Out - when you have to get out of melee range to avoid the boss' phase/talent, e.g. High King or Leo's whirlwind.
   
2. Hurtful Strikes - "2nd highest on threat" sounds like a great idea, until the OT's rage runs out. I also consider aggro drop & target switching abilities
   
3. Minimum Distance - any splash or AoE effect; ranged has far greater space to work with while melee is cramped around a hit box not big enough to avoid splashing everyone.
   
4. Run Around Like an Idiot - Kill this, then change targets and kill this, then change targets again. Ranged just has to turn, maybe, whereas melee has to run around like an idiot.
   

Let's take those four problems and see where we as melee face them. For this I'm only considering 25 man raid instances and only up to Black Temple. In fights where everyone (ranged and melee alike) are affected by one of these problems I do not count it (i.e., RI/RO on Solarian is everyone's problem) What follows are the list of bosses by instance and what problems melee faces with each.

Raid	Boss	RI/RO	HS	MD	RALI
GL	High King	X			X
GL	Gruul		X
Mags	Mags	X
SSC	Hydross
SSC	Lurker	X	X*
SSC	Tidewalker
SSC	Fathomlord
SSC	Leo	X			X
SSC	Vashj	X		X
TK	Al'ar	X
TK	VR		X
TK	Solarian				X
TK	Kael	X		X	X
MH	Rage	X
MH	Anetheron
MH	Kaz'rogal			X*
MH	Azgalor			X
MH	Archimonde			X
BT	Naj'entus			X
BT	Supremus	X	X
BT	Akama
BT	Teron
BT	Gurtogg	X
BT	RoS	X	X
BT	Shahraz
BT	Council	X			X
BT	Illidian	X			X
Total		13	5	6	6

* Lurker doesn't technically have a hurtful strike, but when the tank and the OT get whirlwinded out of range and you happen to resist it... the results are bad.
* Kaz's war stomp is not a splash effect but can be easily outranged by all but melee

Did I miss anything, or overestimate on any fight?
By far the biggest problem melee DPS faces that ranged DPS does not have to face is the Run In/Run Out scenario. Nearly half of all bosses (13 out of 27) require melee to play the hokey pokey.

The only boss fight which I can say explicitly favors melee over ranged is Phase 3 of Zul'Jin where everyone gets the Energy Storm debuff: cast a spell and take 1250 in damage. One phase on one boss that punishes casters. That's it. Rough times mages and warlocks, rough times indeed.

I would love to see a little more melee love in the next expansion. Maybe bigger hit boxes on bosses, and absolutely more caster-specific hurdles such as in Phase 3 of ZJ. What other ways could the developers balance the fights to make challenging for both melee and ranged?

Sunwell Trash

I got my first taste of Sunwell last night. After our raid we decided to give the SWP PuG a go. We got about 10 people from Unorthodox and maybe another 10 from outside the guild. We were lucky to get 5 mages, which made it a lot easier. The idea here, if you are not familiar with it, is to clear the first robot patrol, and the first multi-pack. Then on the 2nd pack you kill everything but the dragonhawk. After you have everything down you zone out, that entire pack respawns, and you zone back in to clear them again. The first mob is on an 2 hour respawn timer and you can basically go at it as long as you have the group for it.

Some groups doing it have been lucky to see weapons or patterns drop. For our first foray into SWP we saw a lot of Sunmotes, a few gems, and the Wand of the Demonsoul. I was hoping for either of the JC designs Hard Khorium Choker or Hard Khorium Band. Neither dropped in the hour or so we were in there but I was happy to settle for a Sunmote. I will save these and when I have 5 I'll find someone that does have the pattern for the ring and pay them to craft it for me.

Recent Stats

It had been over 1 month since I ran the last WWS for the guild. The CombatLog.txt file was 512MB, so large it made my dual-core beast of a computer sluggish as hell. I was curious to see my own performance as well as the rest of the guild's.

I'll use a consistent format: % of total damage | % crit | % Miss


SSC
Overall DPS: 1071
Swing - 47% | 39% | 10%
Windfury - 30% | 38% | 3%
Stormstrike - 8% | 35% | 1%
Notes: this was a five boss clear night. my highest dps is always on FL Karathress at 1371 because there's no start-stop nonsense like the rest of the bosses.

Hyjal & TK
Overall DPS: 1017
Swing - 47% | 35% | 12%
Windfury - 28% | 30% | 3%
Stormstrike - 8% | 34% | 1%
Notes: we went in and took down Azgalor but didn't have enough decursers for Archi so we headed off to the long-forgotten Tempest Keep.

Hyjal
Overall DPS: 1217
Swing - 42% | 38% | 13%
Windfury - 27% | 39% | 2%
Fire Nova - 9% | 8% | 2%
Stormstrike - 7% | 42% | 2%
Magma Totem - 6% | 7% | 3%
Notes: In Hyjal it's tough to shine if you are not a mage or warlock, but by twisting my Fire Novas and my Magma Totems I'm able to really pump out the dps on trash. I can't emphasize the importance of Fire Nova totem on these trash mobs. It was 12% of my damage on trash! It has its own threat table so the damage does not cause you to pull aggro, and the 800+ damage it does far outweighs just having up a Magma Totem the whole time. If you are in Hyjal you need to be dropping Fire Nova every time its up, and Magma when it's on cooldown.

Black Temple
Overall DPS: 965
Swing - 47% | 40% | 14%
Windfury - 28% | 40% | 3%
Stormstrike - 9% | 42% | 2%
Notes: This was our first foray into BT. We got down High Warlord and Supremus (another melee-hating fight btw). Looking at these stats I see could use some more hit to reduce my white damage miss percentage. It seems that number has been climbing over the past few raids. Maybe I'll start using Spicy Hot Talbuk instead of Roasted Clefthoof. Also, I know we were all a bit gun-shy for our first night. (OK enough excuses, more DPS next time)

Black Temple--First Experiences

Tonight we ventured into BT for the first time as a guild. We brought as many veterans as we could. The trash pulls were really easy, especially after handling the overwhelming waves of Mount Hyjal.

We started with High Warlord Naj'entus and downed him on our second attempt. That fight is a flat-out healer check. The amount of damage the raid takes is mind boggling. When you pop that bubble everyone in the raid takes 8500 damage. That's 212,500 worth of damage that needs to be healed up, and fast. If you take the bubble burst followed by his Needle Spine you're toast. The first attempt I ran with a combo of PvE and PvP gear to try and maximize my DPS while still being able to handle the damage. I didn't survive the burst followed by an unlucky splash effect from a local Needle Spine. I didn't follow my own advice: dead dps does no dps. Thus for the second and successful attempt I ran in all PvP gear except trinkets and weapons. We had a clean kill and got some great loots in the guild.

edit to include screenie:


Next we started clearing up to Supremus. His huge courtyard makes it feel like an endless amount of pulls, especially as we couldn't really figure out how to get the flying dudes to land. Eventually we realized they were leashed and moved up into their space. Again, easy trash. Hell the healers were DPSing.

Supremus isn't a complicated fight, just a heads-up fight. It's a ready-check fight. Stay out of the volcanoes. Run if he targets you. DPS as much as you can. It's possible to do this fight without taking any damage, not likely, but possible nonetheless. We downed him on our first attempt and moved on to Shade's trash.

edit to include screenie:


At this point we knew we didn't have time to get to Shade of Akama but decided we could at the very least learn the trash pulls. We killed a few, learned what to kill first, what to CC and what can be ignored until the end. All in all, it was an excellent night. Two bosses down on our first shot.

Patch 2.4.3 for Enhance Shamans

For a sub-patch (is that the right term?) there are a significant amount of changes taking place, and not just bug fixes but gameplay improvements, UI changes, nerfs and buffs. Here are a few key pieces for enhance shamans:

Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
This will affect Purge on enemy targets. Currently I do not know if Purge attempts to dispel non-dispellable effects, but I can only assume this is an improvement.

Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue’s health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.
Oh man oh man. Rogues will actually require resil? One calculation I saw was that to achieve the pre-patch level of mitigation a rogue would need well over 430 resilience. Now when we have that damn rogue down to below 3% I know my Stormstrike will waste him and not just bounce off his cheat.

Activated beneficial effects from jewelcrafting trinkets can no longer be dispelled.
If you are a JC and use the trinkets this should be good news. Though Stoney is a JC I don't use the JC trinkets because I have better ones for both PvE and PvP. I'm curious, can you use the trinkets in arena?


Magister's Terrace nerfs listed here.

This seems to be a pattern of Blizzard's: release content erring on the side of difficult then after a few months nerf it for the masses. In some regards I'm disappointed to see what I've earned, most often the hard way and early on, be brought down a notch for the sake of the masses. But on the other hand I suppose it's the nerfing that keeps the semi-casual players interested and thus subscriptions high--so I can see how it is a good decision from a business point of view for Blizzard. But I digress, I posted here about how to get your enhance shaman into an MgT run as most groups were only looking for CC classes. I expect groups will still be looking for CC classes but the nerfs should make it easier for us enhance shammys to get in runs.


Earth Elemental: This pet will now leash back to its totem when pulled beyond 50 yards away.
I've never had a problem with this but again I suppose any bug fix is a worth a fix. Anyone know of any specific cases where this was a problem?

That covers 2.4.3 for Enhance Shammys. Enjoy!

Archimonde Fight

Last night we spent three hours working on Archimonde. I must say it is far more fun than the Lady Vashj fight. Though we wiped continuously for three hours it was very easy to see what was causing the wipes: usually the first person to die. Unlike the Vashj fight where there are 6 groups of people, each responsible for 2 or more things and when you wipe it is difficult to know what exactly went wrong, that is not the case with Archi and is a nice change.

Our best attempt was 43% and I think we were all so surprised to have him down that low that we all got excited and took our eye off the ball. Other than that most of our attempts were in the 60-70% range. We tried a few different variations of strategies but decided the best route was to have range stay clustered together around their healer & decurser, but still stay spread out enough to avoid multiple people being Air Burst.

I must say this is a great fight to be a shaman; this is the kind of fight where the utility of the class shines through. With my spells, totems, and talents I was able to support my party as well as keep myself safe and healed.

I had down Tremor Totem for my melee party and it saved me during fears quite a few times. When I got Air Burst after I landed I was able to heal myself up before getting back into the fight. Also, Insta-Ghost Wolf was awesome to get away from the Doomfire.

As for damage, well that doesn't really matter. Archimonde is pretty squishy and goes down fast. The trick is to be sure that NO ONE dies. We did have a few attempts where we lost someone early but were able to hang on and recover. But for the most part one death means two which leads to three, four, five, ten, wipe. And almost that fast.

Once I was the first to die--my mouse froze up and I couldn't click my Tears of the Goddess. It was early on so there was not much chaos and the raid was able to recover nicely from my untimely splat. After that I keybound the tears to prevent further hard landings.

I'm disappointed the raids reset this morning, I would go back in and fight him for another three hours tonight. I guess Archimonde lives to drain the tree another week...

Third Timed Chest in ZA

We did it. We nailed the third timed chest in ZA last night. It was close, I mean real close. We had 60 seconds to spare, maybe less.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty details of it I have a caveat: Stoney wasn't on this run. In fact, there was no enhance shaman on this run. OK, I did bring in Stoney for the Hexx Lord kill, as that is extremely difficult to do without an Enhance Shaman. But as far as the timed loot is concerned I tanked it on my druid, Finnmaccool. I really owed a run to our of our raiding rogues, Zorren, and it does not make sense to have 2 melee dps in the 10 man run. So I gave him the melee spot and tanked it on Finn. Having put that caveat out there (this is after all an enhance shaman blog not a feral druid blog) let's get on with the details.

We do Bear, Eagle, Lynx as our kill order for timed chests. Bear and Eagle both went off without a hitch and we saved both Tanzar and Harkor, who is by no small coincidence a distant relative of our uber-hunter Farkor despite Farkor's protestations otherwise.

For the Lynx boss we cut across the top of the waterfall and go in from the backside, killing one AoE pack, jumping through a hut and in the end skipping 4 pulls versus going in from the main entrance. This takes us directly to the Tamer and his 2 crocolisks on patrol. I must confess at this point I did not think we would make it to the boss in time. Our previous best run was about 3 minutes short of killing Halazzi, and that was with a 7+ minute boss kill. We had a Warrior (our guild's MT) and a Druid (me) tanking this time, versus the Pally tank we had on our previous best attempt. I was not expecting to get there and clear it in time, but I kept quiet about it because I wanted to see how close we could get.

We got to the chamber and the patrol was coming around to the entrance right at that moment. We picked up the pat and the next two pulls, with our Shadow Priest surviving the Mind Controls of the Amani'shi Flame Casters. We got to the boss, assigned healers and tanks and had 6 minutes on the clock. And then the magic began.

We DPS'd him so fast that he only got Fenzy off twice--normally he does it four times, once each time in Phase 1 just before shifting out to Phase 2. We were absolutely crushing him. As he came out of Phase 2 the second time, meaning we were dpsing from 50% to 25%, I called for heroism and I think it was a good use there. We barely even touched that phase and he split out. In the split phase he only got 2 totems down before he was back in combined phase and ready for the final stretch. It was blazing fast DPS. In 5 minutes he was done, and we freed Ashli for the first time in our guild.

The other thing that I think helped us dps him down so hard was that we had 3 leatherworkers in the tank group. Why was that helpful? Drums of Battle rotation!! That means for 75% of the entire fight that group was hastened. Granted that group only had 2 dps'ers, but it was hunter Scuttle and rogue Zorren. However I do believe it helped me and the MT keep a generous threat lead allowing for all of the dps to go all out.

As for loot? Bah. Bear dropped Elunite Imbued Leggings, which were subsequently DE'd. Eagle dropped Tuskbreaker which was given for an off-set. And damned if Ashli didn't give us the crappiest ring ever: the Signet of Eternal Life, which went to our Shaman healer alt for his PvP set. I hate that we DE'd so much, but no worries the real accomplishment was in reaching the timed chest.

Now for the long hard crawl to the 4th chest and the Amani War Bear mount. In case you are not familiar with the timed run, you get 15 minutes added to the clock for killing the bear, 10 minutes for the Eagle, and that's it. You have 45 minutes to kill 4 bosses. As of last night it took 44 minutes for us to kill 3 bosses. Jeez.

My game plan is to keep running that same route and shave 2-4 minutes off the run each week. When we get to the point that we can do 3 bosses in 35 minutes on a consistent basis then I'll change our kill order and we'll start working our way towards MY mount!

Azgalor Down

3 wipes. 4th attempt = kill



The 4th attempt was spot-on. We SS'd the healers that got Doomed. The shaman's used Ankh for self-rez, and the druids brought up those healers that went down and we couldn't get an SS on before they expired.

We did something different than the bosskillers.com playbook. We tanked the boss at Thrall and the Lesser Doomguards at the Tauren Warriors. We had 3 OT's for the dooms, 3 dps, and 2 healers. The Doomguard dps was all melee in an effort to reduce chance of Rain of Fire on the main tank. The ranged and healers we split into two groups and given general areas where to stand then instructed to spread out from those points. Resto druids were reminded to keep the tank HoT'ed at all times, especially as the silence CD is up. A quick reminder that the MT is the main healing priority of ALL the healers and off we went.

The trash was rough, as always. But we made it through, as always. The first Distract was successful, buying us a few more seconds to get HS, top off mana, and get into position. But the 2nd distract was resisted and so we engaged.

The fight was very well executed by the whole raid. Everyone was doing their job: Healing, DPSing, tanking, running out of Rain of Fire, running to the doomguard section when Doomed.

By the end of the fight the Tauren Warriors and the 3 OT's were completely overwhelmed. At that point Azgalor was at 3% so I called for the rogues to sprint over to Az and help finish him off. He went from 3% down to 1% very fast, and like all 1%'s on bosses that lingered for a while, maybe just a few moments longer than it should.

And then he fell.

We got 2 Gloves of the Forgotten Protector and 1 Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher. I was the one taking tells for the Warr/Hunter/Shaman gloves and when that went out my screen lit up with 8 tells from people wanting to spend DKP to be one of the first to get T6 in Unorthodox. As for me, my Gauntlets of Rapidity rate 175.15 EP versus versus a meager 156.92 for the Skyshatter Grips. It's simply not worth it for me to spend the DKP.

We then went and practiced wiping on Archimonde. Fun! Congrats to Dwarfknight, Shawck, and Siobhann for guild-first T6.

Recent Stats

It took me half an hour to crunch the raid numbers from the last few weeks, but here's the results of some recent raids:

ZA Run
938 Overall DPS
19% of total damage, just edged out by a damn good Warlock
Breakdown:
44% Physical (38% Crit)
27% WF (36% Crit)
7% Stormstirke (35% Crit)

Hyjal
We took down Rage (1 shot), Anetheron (3 attempts), and Kaz'rogal (1 shot, guild first kill) this night
1233 Overall DPS
6% of total damage; beat out next nearest melee by 1.2 million damage
Breakdown:
38% Physical (33% Crit)
24% Windfury (32% Crit)
13% Fire Nova Totem
7% Magma Totem
7% Stormstrike (30% Crit)

That was the first run that I started twisting my Fire Nova in with my Magma totem and it had a huge impact on my overall numbers. What is interesting is that the Fire Nova Totem nearly double the damage of the Magma totem. I was cognizant of the Fire Nova cooldown and used it as often as I could--to great effect.

The next night as we took on Azgalor and his trash the numbers were not the same. Earth Shock, Stormstrike, and Fire Nova were all at 8% of my total damage. This is due to the nature of the trash mobs for that clear. More Gargoyles=less AoE on the ground. And more casters=me and the melee team picking up some and trying to bring them into AoE range.

Haste Potions

I woke up early this morning to see the girlfriend off to work, then got to work myself... farming Terocone. The stuff is a pain because it gets over-farmed very quickly. But waking up early and spending 30-40 minutes circling Terokkar nets me about 50, as opposed to the same route in the afternoon gets half of that amount.

I use the cones for Haste Potions. Mmmm, delicious. With haste gear, Heroism, Drums of Battle, dual Mongoose procs, DST proc, and a Haste Pot my weapon speed drops from 2.60 to 0.92 or lower. That 0.92 is the lowest I've seen but I'm not always staring at my character screen as I would like to stay alive in boss fights and stay out of the Rain of Fire/Death & Decay/Infernos/Whirlwinds/et al. I'm sure there's an add-on out there that will display my swing speed, I'll see if I can find one.

If you are not using Haste Potions, give it a shot. Like everything with haste it's important to stack lots of it. I'll see how low my weapon speed can go and report back.

Just a quick post today. I've decided to get a job, so off to do some job hunting.

Bindings of Lightning Reflexes

Last night the pattern for Bindings of Lightning Relfexes dropped. I had this item crafted for me by the top raiding guild on our server a few months back. It was great to see the pattern land in our guild. I can say despite paying over 3k gold for it a earlier in the year, I'm very glad that I did make the purchase when I did. That's my philosophy on gear: take your upgrades as the opportunity presents itself. Gearing properly is such an important part of being an Enhance Shaman you can improve your output dramatically by making the right choices.

If you are Enhance and you don't have the Bindings yet then here's what you need:
4 x Heavy Knothide Leather
4 x Primal Air
4 x Primal Water
12 x Wind Scales
4 x Heart of Darkness

The mats are easy enough to come by save for the Hearts of Darkness which drop off trash in Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. I got my Hod ahead of our progression by paying a raiding guild for them, and if your guild isn't up to that level then you will have to do the same.

In my opinion, if your guild isn't up to MH/BT yet it is all the more reason to go out and get these bracers made. Yes there are other bracers out there you can get and some very decent ones, too. But the 27 haste rating on these makes them ideal for pairing with the Left and Right Fists of Brutality. And believe me, once you start stacking haste you will fall in love with it.

As for these bracers they rate 120.09 for my own personal Enhancement Point (EP) calculation. What the hell is that you ask? Read here. I'll also post some tips on creating an your EP calculator in Excel in a future post.

Kaz'rogal Down

This week is Mount Hyjal Week in our guild, Unorthodox. We are dedicating ourselves to getting to and killing Archimonde. After the reset yesterday morning we marched in there last night and took down Rage, Anetheron, and then finally Kaz'rogal.



We had a clean one-shot on Rage, followed by a wipe in Anetheron then a kill and then off to the horde camp. We saw Kaz on Monday as well, but I was tanking in Finn so I didn't get to experience the unique boss fight from a mana-user's perspective. Tonight I did get to face him on Stoney.

If you haven't faced Kaz, here's his gimmick: Mark of Kaz'rogal. It drains 3000 mana and then if you dont have any mana to drain, it turns you into a bomb. I must admit I was a bit off my game last night and I wasn't prepared for the fight. However, here are the tactics I did use:
1) Only dropped 2 totems: WF for my all-melee group and Mana Spring (duh)
2) Stopped shocking, need to conserve mana
3) Kept up Water Shield - his War Stomp procs 1 consumption so thankfully I was eating those water globules quickly.
4) And of course Shamanistic Rage and Mana Pots.

I still ran out of mana with about 15% health left on him so I think I could have played my cards better. My strategy was to wait until my mana pool was about 50-60% then pop Sham Rage. That turned out to be too late. At that point I was marked again and was losing mana faster than I could gain it. In the end I was too low on mana to risk being in melee range so I ran out and away from everyone, then my Sham Rage CD was done but I couldn't get back in melee range in time so I just had to sit outside away from everyone and blow up.

Next time I will pop Sham Rage earlier in the fight, maybe around 75% and as I'm marked. Then I will pot at my first opportunity. Hopefully between totem and Water shield I will be able to keep up for 2 more minutes, then drop Heroism when the Sham Rage CD is up again.

Either way, we're on our way to Azgalor who drops the Bow Stitched Leggings and the token for the T6 gloves! I'll probably let someone else get the gloves, but I want those legs!

Re-gemmed

This week I decided to upgrade my gems. It started out by paying DKP for one Bold Crimson Spinel. Then I realized that I have all of these Badges of Justice in the bank that I'm not going to spend any time soon. OK, I could get Trousers of the Scryer's Retainer over the Cataclysm Legplates I'm wearing now, but I just got the legs, and we are probably only a few weeks off tackling Azgalor who drops Bow-stitched Leggings. When those drop I might want to switch out for the Tunic of the Dark Hour to keep my hit rating up. Besides, I just want to enjoy my T5 leggings while I have them.

Getting back on topic... I spent a few badges on a few epic gems. Specifically, 90 BoJ on 6 epic gems to cut into either Bold Crimson Spinels or Inscribed Pyrestones. I intentionally mis-socketed two items: I filled my Coif of the Jungle Stalker entirely with Bold Crimson Spinel, and put one Bold and one Bright Crimson Spinel in my boots. I lost the +8 AP on the helm and the +3 Hit on the boots. That wasn't a problem as the Enhancement Points of both being socketed as such outweighs the loss of the socket bonus. But since I replaced two Sovereign Tanzanite I ended up losing 12 Stam and therefore 120 HP. This shouldn't be a problem... buuut... for some reason in SSC last night I popped a Fel Strength Elixir which was another 100 HP down the drain, and with no Blessing of Kings my HP fell to 9099 raid buffed--the lowest it's been in months. I was quite disturbed and of course for the Leo fight having low HP is quite a liability. Granted my attack power was also 2004, which is the highest it's ever been (before combat buffs start kicking in) and my crit was sitting comfortably above 30%.

I enjoyed the high AP but decided it was too much of a liability anyway and popped a regular Elixir of Major Strength for the second attempt and kill. I didn't use a Flask because we weren't sure if we were going to Mags or Hyjal next (Leo was the only boss standing in SSC other than Lady V). We ended up going to Hyjal and one-shotting Rage, incidentally.

With my gear re-gemmed I haven't had a chance to crunch the numbers in WWS yet, but the loss of 3 hit was not tragic--my miss percentage stayed below 10%. And being in the high 1900's in AP out of combat made me quite happy.

Anetheron Down

Congratulations Unorthodox on downing the 2nd boss in Mount Hyjal!

Horde camp here we come!

We got a very late start because we had three healers who couldn't make it due to working late. Fellow guild leader and shaman Shawck respeced to resto, we pulled in a priest recruit and a paladin recruit and got started about half an hour late. After a one-shot on Rage and a wipe on Anetheron, Shawck's WoW crashed and we had to wait half an hour for him to repair it--no other healers were available. I worked on the positioning for the next attempt. With Shawck back online we cleared through the trash and took down the boss with a very clean kill. Very few deaths, lots of great healing, and heads up playing by the raid when they got infernos dropped on their heads.

I was pleased with my performance and was totem twisting of a different sort. I would drop Fire Nova totems every time they were up, the Magma totems when it was on cooldown. It was not the least bit mana efficient, but who cares? A quick drink between each pull and I was good to go. Other than the late start and the long break, it was a very fun night.

Enhancement Specs

I really only run with one spec now and that is the PvP focused one because it barely sacrifices any utility in PvE. This is the spec I stole from Push, Diivide, and all the other top arena Enhancement Shamans: 0/47/14

The 2 points in Guardian Totems and 2 in Imp Ghost Wolf make it the PvP spec of choice. The 2 second improved cooldown on Grounding Totem makes a big difference in long arena matches. And the Imp Ghost Wolf I love for chasing down crafty Druids. You think you can Travel Form away from me? HA! Frost Shock + Ghost Wolf and I'm on you. I'll even chase Taurens deep behind enemy lines in AV--I actually get past the usual wall of defense because I'm a bit less conspicuous in Ghost Wolf. That poor druid will be dead before the rest of the horde around him knows whats going on. Getting out is another matter...

Back to the spec. I'm not going to get into the Elemental Devastation debate. You can read all about the myth of that here. I went down that road one week and decided it was garbage. I am however going to point out how important the Nature's Guidance is for raiding as well as Totemic Mastery. Simply put, if you don't have points in Nature's Guidance as an Enhance Shaman you don't belong in a raid.

Prior that spec, I was spec'd 0/44/17 with 5 points in Anticipation being helpful when I did pull aggro (save my butt vs. Gruul a few times) . Also the Improved Reincarnation I considered to be a benefit to the raid. I took Tidal Focus and Healing Focus 3/5 to throw a few Lesser Healing Waves to the MT during some particularly nasty boss fights.

That's actually one of the great things about being a Shaman: so much utility. I can be a chart-topping dps'er and with one eye on the tank can toss in quick heals as back up when say 2 MT healers get Watery Graved in the Tidewalker fight. In fact I specifically keep my MT-Heal macro hotkeyed during that fight. I never used Healing Wave, only Lesser. And being an Enhance Shaman I'm never worried about going OOM. 15 seconds on swings on the boss and I replenish my mana completely.

Now in this spec the Toughness helps across the board against ranged & melee whereas the Anticipation would be a liability against Warriors and less helpful against ranged. Toughness is also unique that it reduces movement slowing effects by 50%, which is of course a huge help to keep from getting kited.

The biggest question for me was should I go 3/3 Mental Quickness and 4/5 Unleashed Rage, or 2/3 MQ & 5/5 UR? I ended up going with the 3/3 & 4/5. I think the extra heal power helps when I have to backup heal our druid and the reduction in shock will help in the final throes of a tight race to eek out one more wicked interrupt despite being so close to OOM that it hurts.

Not Much Action

Stoney's not been getting much action recently. I was out of town for the weekend--back to see my family for Mother's Day and so I didn't run ZA or Kara. Then due to some nasty spring showers my return flight was canceled and I missed our Monday Mount Hyjal run, which is too bad because I do enjoy Hyjal. On top of that the resto druid in our 3v3 is being punished by his parents and his keyboard was taken away! So not much action for arenas lately; in fact I didn't even get in throw-away points on Finn last week.

For raiding, this week we got a very late start in SSC on Tuesday and only got Hydross, Lurker, and Tidewalker down. One shot each. But the trash clearing and boss killing left us with no time to take down a fourth. We went back in on Thursday and finished off Leo and Fathom Lord Karathress. Then hopped over to Mags and one-shot him.

I took the token off FL for a shiny new pair of Cataclysm Legplates. According to my EP numbers it's about 10% better than my Vengeful Gladiator's Linked Leggings once socketed. I was debating putting in a Bold Crimson Spinel, but decided against it as I would be upgrading these legs again in Hyjal with Bow-stitched Leggings or could spend 100 Badges on Trousers of the Scryers Retainer. We have some gems sitting in the guild bank available for DKP so it's just a matter of being sure I put them in something I'm going to keep for a while. Being pretty sure I'll replace these pants sooner rather than later I just went with the Bold Living Ruby. And of course the Nethercobra Leg Armor.

Damage-wise in the raid last night I was putting out some good numbers. Once again I was over 1100 dps overall, but boss fights saw lower numbers to the nastiness of the Leo fight. We actually had a very clean kill on Leo this round. The healers did an awesome job keeping everyone alive. We won't mention how a certain Enhancement Shaman raid leader pulled the boss by running up to show where warlock tank stands and ended up aggroing the Spellbinders. Nope. Not going to mention that you can proximity pull them and it's not like the Mags fight where you have to damage-pull them. No mention of the 1/2 raid wipe as a result of that.

Ah well, I'm typing aimlessly at this point because I can't hit the Publish Post button because my internet is down. I better stop now before this becomes a massive nasty wall of text. Too late? Yep. (Yay for neighbors with unsecured Wi-Fi!)

The Second Most Important Thing

What is the most important thing to topping the DPS charts? For enhancement shamans I’d say the most important thing is gear. Well, gear and spec. OK, gear, spec, and constant shocks & Stormstrikes. One could say that makes what I’m about to say the fourth most important thing, but realistically if you are serious about raiding as an enhancement shaman you should have the spec and the shocks/Stormstrikes down pat, no questions asked. That again makes gear the single most important thing with what I’m about to say the second most important thing. Moreover, what I’m about to say as the second most important thing trumps spec and spells, because without it everything else goes to waste. What is it?

Staying alive.

A dead dps’er does no dps. Watch the 0/21/40 Warlock rip aggro too fast off the tank. Watch him die. Watch him continue to be dead and do no damage. Same goes for a bad enhancement shaman that Stormstrikes too early in a boss fight, or maybe even just starts out too early gets some unlucky windfury crits, rips aggro, pulls boss, and in a best case scenario dies. In a worst case scenario the tank can’t recover aggro, the Mage Ice Blocks, three healers die and it’s a wipe.

Similarly, Blizzard is quite fond of the “stay out of the fire/void/water/lava/poison/etc” type of encounters. Gruul: move out of cave-ins. Lurker: get under the water. Zul’Jin: avoid cyclones in phase 3, get out of the pillars of fire in phase 5. Rage Winterchill: run from Death & Decay. And along those lines there are whirlwinds to avoid on bosses (High King, Zul’Jin, Leo), times when aggro is dropped, and adds to pickup, kill, and/or avoid. Not to mention environmental damage.

All this adds up to a lot happening to everyone in the raid, and lots of hurt for the healers to fix. You might not get a timely heal so don’t take chances. Instead take measures to ensure you stay alive. Here are the things I do to be sure I’m up and about throughout the entire boss fight:

1) Don’t start until the tank is good and ready. On fights like Gruul and Void Reaver I wait a loooong loooong time. I know I’m going to out-threat at least 1 of the 3 or 4 tanks. I want them to have as much of a lead as possible.
2) Use health pots. Sounds logical right? You’d be surprised how many dps’ers don’t show up to raids with health pots. Or that don’t use them. Buy the mats on the AH, find a potion master in your guild and have them make you stacks—procs FTW.
3) Healthstones. In my guild we call it “Stoney Crack” because I’m addicted to healthstones. I ask for fresh HS after every wipe and before every boss fight. I want to be sure everyone in the raid has every opportunity to stay alive, but also, the HS is the first thing that I use.
4) Lesser Healing Wave. Yeah, you can heal yourself! Go figure. In fact, if you are spec’d right you even have +healing based on your AP. Throw yourself a heal.

Seems logical right? Not breaking news here; not telling you anything you don’t already know. But how often do you pop a HS, a pot, and throw yourself a LHW? If you die on a boss fight with either HS or pots on CD then you've failed--except of course for those 27k Hurtful Strikes. ouch.

I’ll throw out one other tidbit. OK two-—I’m feeling generous, maybe it’s the Guinness talking. First, hot key your means to heal. Be it HS, pot, or LHW, keep them close at hand. I learned this in the fall as we were taking on Lurker. After taking a Whirl followed by a Geyser (or vice-versa) then scrambling to get my mouse over to the health pot section of one of my action bars as my life ticks away 500 health at a time from Scalding Water and a close call or two and a death or three, I decided to make full use of my mouse. I have a 5-button mouse and in real life the two thumb buttons on mapped to Ctrl+V and Ctrl+C for quick copy and paste functionality as I’m Excel-ing my way through the day. So in WoW I have them bound to my HS and health pots; occasionally to a auto self-cast LHW. Pressing a button is 0.5 to 1.0 second faster than seeking and clicking—-and often makes the difference between life and death.

Finally, I have a WTFOMGHOLYS#!& heal macro. The macro pops everything I have that can possibly heal me in one click. I stopped using it in raids where healers are quick to respond and a HS+pot combo results in about 3 subsequent over-heals, whereas popping a HS will save my ass long enough for the healers to react and top me off. But, if you want the macro it’s something like this:

/use Master Healthstone
/use Crystal Charged Focus
/use Cenarion Healing Salve
/use Bottled Nethergon Vapor
/use Super Healing Potion

The “Master Healthstone” will use any of the three levels, and since it shares a CD with Crystal Charged Focus you won’t burn both. Next just for laziness I include the two instance-specific heal pots followed by the general one.

Happy dpsing with your new-found extra long life. LHW FTW!

Ah, to AoE

Our first night in Hyjal on Monday was a smashing success and I'm sure we'll be back again on next Monday to down Anetheron. I was trying to do the WoW Web Stats on that first run but apparently the Java applet is broken right now. I did want to see the WWS data because the Recount data I had showed something very interesting: I was top on DPS for melee, but the mages and warlocks KILLED IT.

Those fights are AoE crazy and with a Paladin tank once he gets 2 ticks on Consecration off those mobs are going to stick to him like glue. Seed of Corruption, Blizzard, Arcane Explosion, you name it, the AoE'ers were having a field day. It was madness!

I would drop a Magma Totem, but really what's 125-150 damage per tick compared to those casters? I had my fun on the the Banshees but oh to be an AoE'er and bomb those AoE targets! Hyjal is a field day for mages and warlocks.

Once I get the WWS up I'll take a look at my damage and see how I fared. I recall that Recount showed my miss at only around 8%, which is very nice.

Mount Hyjal: First Experiences

Last night was a big night for us as we stepped into Mount Hyjal for the first time. Of course someone went up and talked to Jaina Proudmore and got the event started before we were all ready--heck most of us had yet to even zone in. That did not start things off in on the right foot but the rest of the night went smooth as can be.

The trash waves were nuts. We had 2 bear tanks, 2 warr tanks, and 1 main prot pally tank. Plus we had me and a dps warr to pick up odds and ends when there were too many casters. I was main assist for the night and found the hardest part was helping the tanks get the caster mobs down into the AoE. But despite having to almost entirely single-target kill all the casters our melee dps team was up for the challenge. We did have three rogues, that fury warr and me. Plus the bear tanks switching to kitty when their targets were down.

We made it through the first few waves and wiped on the 8th wave on our first attempt. Our second attempt we saw the boss and 1-shotted him! Awesome job to everyone on the kill.



We got to Anetheron on our 2nd attempt and wiped to Infernos. Same story a second time. Some revisions to that strategy and we will get him down.

Overall Damage & DPS

Yesterday as I was prepping for our raid a fellow Enhance Shaman pinged me and asked me what was my AP & Crit%. I get these random pings every so often as I'm pretty well geared--probably geared ahead of my guild's progression level thanks to lots of hard work collecting badges. I replied I'm at 1562 AP and 29.65% crit, to which he replied that he is at similar levels. He asked for some suggestions on gearing so we found each other outside of the Aldor bank and like two dogs sniffing each other's privates we started inspecting one another.

I have a helpful inspection mod that summarizes the target player's key stats so I quickly noticed he was at 140+ hit rating. As we were comparing notes he told me I should get more hit as I am currently at 113. As an aside, I don't know how one goes from asking advice to doling it out, but that's not the point here. As I've read there is no magic number of hit for shamans, we get a good deal of it from Nature's Guidance but in truth I would be sacrificing something in AP, crit, or my new favorite: haste. I'm in no rush to start stacking hit; as long as my miss % stays around 10% during 25man raids I'm happy.

Next we launched into a quick discussion about dps in raids. For some reason I was overcome with a brief moment of modesty--I don't know what hit me!--and said my raid DPS is somewhere in the 800+ range, topping out at 1000 on good nights. And like all good random people in WoW I was immediately one-upped with a "oh well I top out at 1200 and am usually around 1000 dps. Yeah, you need more +hit." OK, now he's gone from asking advice, to doling out bad advice and lousy oneupmanship.

Despite being put off it got me thinking, what is my damage like? I went back to some recent WWS summaries and realized I was being quite modest--and also talking about overall sustained DPS, and not a flash of Heroism-inspired burst damage. Here's a few snippets of damage in both 10 and 25 man raids:

SSC - 4 boss power clear night

• 1,041 DPS overall on the night
  
• 9% of total raid damage, 2nd in damage meters
  
• 1,254 DPS sustained throughout the Karathress fight!
  
• 12.8% miss--wow that was higher than I thought
  
• 44% of my damage was from white swings, 27% from Windfury, with 36% and 38% of those two being crit strikes, respectively

ZA - 4 bosses down, took in some guildies for a gearing run

• 767 DPS overall on the night
  
• DPS during boss fights was mostly 970+, though Jan'alai I do significantly less because I'm killing one of or both of the hatchers
  
• White damage was 45% of my total, with 37% of that crit and only 10% miss
  
• Windfury was 29% of total damage and 35% of that crit

Gruul/Mags Night - another gearing run for some that still need T4

• Only 885 dps, 2nd in the raid right behind our main s-priest
  
• But that low overall DPS number is to be expected consider all the running around in the HK and Gruul fights
  
• 968 was my best dps against Mags.
  
• Overall white damage was 47% to total, with only 31% crit and and 13.9% missed
  
• Windfury was higher with 30% to total damage but yet only 28% of that critting.

I think that last bullet is the most interesting. Windfury contributed 30% to total damage which was the highest of the three examples given, but yet it was the lowest crit of the three. What this means is that I was landing more Windfury's off my main hand than my off hand. Now given that my gear was the same on both nights, I wonder what else is at work here? Is it the Blizzard RNG at work, or is there some way to time my shocks and stormstrikes...? Anyone have any thoughts about this?

But overall, it just goes to show at even at 113 hit rating I more than make up for the misses with increased damage. Though I still might go to Yo's Simulator to and try to tweak my raid gear choices a bit for Monday's raid.

Death is the Best CC

I didn't play Stoney at all yesterday. I logged on to cut a gem for someone, grabbed all the Shiny Fish Scales and Fish Oils that I had sent to myself from Finn and Nix, disenchanted some stuff, and then that was it.

Part of the problem was that we didn't have the right raid makeup for ZA last night so I canceled the raid. No raid usually means no playing on Stoney. Why is that you ask? It may sound arrogant, but Stoney has become too leet for 5-mans. OK maybe not too leet but I struggle running 5-man instances without Salv from a Pally. My raid gear has a good amount of haste stacked: 96 Haste Rating and while that only translates to 6.09% more fastiness (did I just make that up? yes) that is before DST procs and flurry procs. I end up being completely unable to control my aggro--something I know all enhancement shamans face and our Ele brothers and sisters feel too. Add in the fact that I'm starting to stack leather thus making myself squishier and you get one instantly-dead shaman after an unlucky string of crits.

My options? I can run 5-mans in my PvP gear. It's a gearing downgrade plus with all the resil and armor I can survive long enough to take a few hits for the tank to taunt, me to pop a pot and the healer to toss me few heals. Or I can only run with paladins, but considering they are sadly few and far between in our guild that is easier said than done. I could also run instances completely devoid of Stormstrike and Flame/Earth Shock. But what fun is that?

Really though I've been trying to run heroic Magister's Terrace. I love running it with my guild because we have some awesome tanks and healers. And it's a challenge for me because I go in as one of the CC'ers. Yes, you read that right: I go as CC. For those enhancement shamans out there that are unable to get into heroic MgT groups because of our supposed lack of CC you are missing your unique, unbreakable form of CC: killing a clothie caster. Death is the best CC. My group knows I'll pick up the warlock; I usually rip him down maybe only take one unlucky spell in the face. Here's how I do it.

They key is to start with a Grounding Totem down. You have to do this at least 10 seconds before the pull to ensure your cooldown is up again. When the tank pulls there are going to be multiple caster mobs and you won't always catch your mob's spell in the grounding but you need to have it down early. For the packs on the lower level the tank is going to LoS pull for the most part, so start out peaking around the corner and after he pulls Purge the Fel Armor. He won't recast it, it will get him to pay attention to you and not the tank, and the slightly less spell damage helps. Once he's around the corner if your Grounding Totem has been sucked up already then drop another. Start beating on that lock. Hard. Now here's the trick: on his first cast Earth Shock him even if your Grounding Totem is down and would suck it up anyway. You have 40 seconds before the totem despawns so let it suck up the second cast, if there is one. You need to abuse the CD's blizz gives you. This way if he goes for a quick cast after the first one is shocked your totem picks it up and you have your ES ready for the third cast. The rotation is Grounding, Purge, LoS, Grounding (again if needed), Earth Shock, let Grounding absorb, Earth Shock.

If you let the totem absorb the first cast and you shock the second one, you're completely without means of interrupt on the third cast. And worse, if he gets a heal from the Physician or a Blood Knight you are now behind in the cooldown rotation and going to start taking Immolates and Incinerates. And the latter blows up the former making you one crispy shaman.

When there are Magisters in the group you're going to take a spell in the face because you can't control which spell gets grounded. But for the most part my CC-via-death works wonders. I HIGHLY recommend practicing on regular mode to get a feel for it. Once you do, you're ready to take your CC to the big leagues.

It's gotten to the point that I ask tanks to assign me casters in other heroic runs now. Since my aggro can't be controlled we decided to use my powers for good and not for evil! That rotation plus windfury crits on a clothie = Shaman CC

You read it here first! Shamans have crowd control! It's called: death, and it's unbreakable. Take your sheep and go home magey!

Kiting Coilfang Striders

Last night was our third attempt in 8 days at Lady Vashj. The fight is nasty. Phase Two is pure unadulterated chaos. Everyone is doing at least two things. Some people are doing three or more. We are struggling with this fight right now and only have two barriers down in our best attempt. My role in this madness is that of the Coilfang Strider kiter.

I run the fight in full PvP gear, except with Shard of Contempt instead of Battlemaster's Determination, and I start with both my left and right Fists of Brutality. (The Medallion of the Alliance helps in the first phase if someone in melee range gets static charge while we are rooted.) When phase two starts I have time before the first strider appears so I get prepared. First I click off salv--actually I made a macro for it because one attempt I forgot to do it right away and was frantically clicking off buffs while I was running to the strider. I ended up clicking off my flask and Blessing of Kings. The macro is simple btw:

/cancelaura Greater Blessing of Salvation

Once that's done I equip my s2 axe and my s1 shield. My armor goes up to 13k and my resilience to somewhere in the 320 range. This will actually allow me to absorb a hit from the strider if something goes horribly wrong, or suck up a cleave if a naga is too close to the edge. We've found that a loose strider is a guaranteed wipe so I do everything in my power to stay alive.

The other thing I have prepared for the fight are Swiftness Potions. They are very easy to make and saved my butt in a few close calls. While I'm waiting the 50 seconds for the strider to pop up I spend my time dodging Vashj's forked lightning. I need to keep my bearings because when the strider pops that side will call it out "Strider at west!!" and I need to be running to the west and not the east. A split second can make a difference in keeping that thing off a healer. Everyone is instructed or net or stun the strider as soon as it shows up on their side giving me an extra few seconds to pick it up. And then the fun begins.

Constant Frost Shocks on the strider keep it slowed and angry at this ol' shaman. I drop Earthbind Totems whenever I have the chance. I always kite clockwise so that when the 2nd strider pops--we are not yet strong enough at this fight to get 1 down in 50 seconds--the 2nd kiter can pick it up and also run clockwise. For most of the fight I can walk backwards and frost shock while keeping it at a safe distance. I found that running from it required me to run back to it when I needed to frost shock. Now I just calmly walk backwards along the the platform doing my best to keep it off the edge where the healers are standing and acting as Tainted Core relays. And also keep it out of the middle where the healers (shield clickers) and melee wacking away at the nagas are standing. Everyone that can net the naga does. Everyone that can dot the naga needs to do so and for the most part does. I frost shock every 6 seconds, walk backwards at a nice pace. If I think it's getting too close I will drop an Earthbind, turn and run about 20 yards and then wait until it's 25 yards away to continue my cycle. And yes 25 yards on my shocks, not 20, thanks to my S3 gloves.

That's the plan. Following that I'm able to stay alive and keep the strider focused on me, consequently giving more time for the raid to kill those tainted ele's and loot their cores.