Two Levels, Lava Lash, and Soloing Elites

I hit 72 last night and decided to take a look at my stats. I run Recount and did not reset it since hitting the shores of Northrend. Here are the results:


If you can't see the image:
39.1% - Swing
14.1% - WindFury
10.4% - Earth Shock
9.6% - Stormstrike
9.1% - Flametongue
7.3% - Lightning bolt
6.2% - Lava Lash
4.0% - Chain Lightning

Two things jump out at me right away. First, white damage output as a percent of overall damage hasn't changed since BC, it's still around 40%.

Second, Lava Lash even with the LL Glyph is weak. And I mean like Milhouse vs. Nelson weak. Wimpy. Lame. I'm really disappointed. I was hoping for a great showing from Lava Lash since I'm using the glyph and I moved it up in my rotation. Looks like LL is getting a demotion. I'll probably keep the glyph for now. Maybe if I go Static Shock at some point I'll swap it out for the LB glyph.

I'm loving leveling. I'm soloing 2 and 3 person quests, soloing 72 elites, and having a great time with the new content (and listening to the new music, too).

If you're not soloing elites or struggling with the 2-3 person quests here's what you do:

1. Make sure your health & mana is topped off and wait for your CD's come back up on Shammy Rage, Feral Spirit, and Heroism/Bloodlust.
2. Set up shop, i.e., get your totems down in a safe spot. I'm using WF, SoE, Mana Spring, and FT totems.
3. Pull with a LB and let the mob come to you where you can safely solo it without patrols.
4. Pop Heroism and Feral Spirit as soon as the elite is in range. The dogs will keep you healed as they do damage and will aliviate the need to continuosly heal yourself.
   
5. Save your MW procs for HWs. Don't worry about the instant LB's and don't bother with Lesser Healing Wave, go for the biggie and use it at 50% health or less. In this case use MW4 or MW5, don't worry about optimizing dps as you're soloing an elite, worry about staying alive!
6. If the wolves die before the mob is dead then pop Shammy Rage. Save that until the very end for the damage reduction.
7. Keep a health pot handy for close calls
   

Following those steps has kept me alive soloing elites. In fact, I actually had to kill Abdul the Insane not once, but twice. I must have left my totems up on the ship because as I was down below deck looting the thing I heard him yell some nonsense and then come below. I asked if I could buy him a beer and we'd be cool--seeing as how I had just embarrased him in front of his crew and all. But he wasn't in the drinking mood so I had to kick his ass again. But he is insane... so I guess you can't exepct too much from crazy people.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.