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)

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?

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!)

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.