Patch Day Coming!

Are you ready? Are you excited? I don't know what I am to be honest. I'm not pure melee, I'm not Str gems, I'm not even sure if I'm in the right gear. I've got a few pieces of caster gear and a few pieces of extra mail in the bank--including an extra pair of Gloves of the Forgotten Protector stashed away in case I need ele gear, at least it'll be T6.

I'm mostly worried about weapons. Should I have been saving up my badges for a caster off-hand that I can imbue with Flametongue for the extra casting kick? I seem to recall that I have an extra Amani Punisher saved up from a ZA run somewhere... but now that I look at it I see it's a freakin MH weapon. So basically I'm completely unprepared for tomorrow as far as weapons go. Great. Looks like into heroic MgT I go looking for a caster weapon.

I'm scanning the Enhancement Shaman thread at Elitist Jerks right now and I hope to have some summary and answers for the Enhancement crowd out there without having to wade through 123 pages of forums posts.

The best thing I found is the ShockAndAwe mod. Go and download this now. In the words of the author: "ShockAndAwe displays timer bars for Shocks, Stormstrike, Windfury (internal CD), Maelstrom Weapon, Lava Lash, Lava Burst, and your shield. It optionally shows number of orbs on left shield, stacks of MW, advises of next shock in rotation."

I'm also running some EnhSim calculations tonight to try and get optimize the following 4 areas:
1) Spec
2) Weapons & Weapon buffs
3) Gear/Chants/Gems (i.e. Enhancement Points)
4) Spell rotations

When I have results and answers I'll post what I find. Any suggestions that are working for your Enhancement Shamans are most welcome.

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.

Pawn Values for Enhancement

Pawn. It's an add-on that allows you to assign weighted values for different stats (i.e., Strength or Haste or Hit Rating). It then multiplies each stat by the weighted value and sums it up for total score. This allows you to compare items according to your own customized scale. This scale for Enhancement Shamans is often referred to as "Enhancement Points" which is a spin on the mod that started this concept "Tank Points."

If you've ever wondered, is this piece better than what I've got now Pawn helps figure that out in-game.

With Unorthodox clearing deeper into BT I figured it was time to look at my gear choices and compare those to the loots we're seeing drop. Here are the values I plugged in for Stoney:

Stat	EP
Attack Power	1.00
Strength	2.20
Agility	1.50
Hit Rating	1.21
Crit Rating	1.54
Haste Rating	1.38
Armor Pen.	0.18
Expertise	3.37
Red Socket	22.00
Yellow Socket	18.69
Blue Socket	11.00
Meta Socket	25.00
MH DPS	9.03
OH DPS	3.70

Now keep in mind these are my own customized values built around our current progression level. That is, they are probably best suited for those of you at the T6 level.

Reapplying these values I took a hard look at my gear and made some significant changes. It all started when one of our raiders was on her Enhance Shaman alt and asked me why I was wearing the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve. My answer was that I wanted the extra hit and expertise, and that the stam didn't hurt for heavy damage boss encounters. This got me thinking... was this really the best use of my gearing options?

After applying the Enhancement Points and looking at my gear I realized I could get my +hit from other sources and use a better neck piece.

I ended up replacing Coif of the Jungle Stalker with Grimgrin Faceguard that keeps my AP and damage output up there while bringing in the hit I need to replace the tanking SSO neck. Next I replaced that neck with the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might. Just those two swaps ended up being a total gain of nearly 74 EP for me which should translate into slightly more damage over the long haul.

For those of you not at the T6 level or interested in reading more into this I recommend going to Elitist Jerks (of course) and getting their recommended scales. But in case you are too lazy to click... here they are for your enjoyment:

Stat	T4 EP	T5 EP	T6 EP	Sunwell
Attack Power	1	1	1	1
Strength	2.2	2.2	2.2	2.2
Agility	1.91	2	1.69	1.89
Crit Rating	1.97	2	1.74	1.94
Haste Rating	1.28	1.48	1.82	1.98
Hit Rating	1.34	1.4	1.69	1.8
Armor Penetration	0.22	0.28	0.35	0.41
Expertise Rating	3	3	3.18	3.53

* assumes you have Blessing of Kings

As you can see my personal EP values differ slightly which is the result of extensive modeling I did for myself on Yo's Simulator.

Good luck setting up your values. Post any questions you have about EP or gear and I'll be happy to help.

Shaking Off the Rust

Whew, nothing like another few instance runs and an Archimonde fight to get the last bit of rust off the ol' enhance fist weapons. I'm waaaay behind on my WotLK research. I've spent most of my time in-game this last week just updating my UI. I promise I'll have a UI show-off post coming up. I went almost entire Ace mod based; the only non-Ace one I'm using is Segui, which I use for fun emotes and chat bubbles when I rez or pop Heroism.

Tonight I ran Arc and realized I did so without Windfury on my weapons for most of the fight. I need to find an ACE version of SmartBuff. Add one more mod that to the list of mods I already use. More to come tomorrow when we tap Teron and Bloodboil.

Dirty Shaman Chants and Cuts!

I logged in for an hour and a half today, joined the trade channel, and started advertising for my professions: "Dirty Shaman Chants & Cuts! Your one-stop shop for all your S4 needs. PST with whatcha need!"

After a flurry of activity I netted 290 gold and called it a day. I didn't set prices for anything and left it up to people what they wanted to tip. I figured I would rely on the good will of people--even of rogues--and was glad to see my trust was rewarded.

Only 1 person didn't tip me at all, when I told him he was the only person to not tip he said he paid enough for the mats that he didn't need to tip. I didn't feel like arguing that he didn't buy the mats from me so I just let it go. Besides at that moment I had a hunter who needed 4 new pieces enchanted and tipped me 100g for the lot.

Astrall Recall is OP for days like these. You want to meet in IF? No problem, brt. SW? done. Shatt. I'm there. I think I'll stay in trade channel for the next few days, and definitely through the weekend to make some more gold the easy way.

The mod Cellular helps a ton too. I don't know how I got by as a guild officer before that mod, and it proved its worth again today.

I'll be back tomorrow with more updates. Did you get your gear? How much did you pay for enchants or gem cuts?