S1 weps are easier to get if you’re casual
this surprises me, i thought slow/slow double windfury was the thing
The main issues appear to be armor, glancing blows and the halving of off-hand weapon damage. In contrast, Flametongue hits for full damage (albeit with spell hit issues) and is further boosted by Curse of Elements.
Something to bear in mind is that most of what you see as advice on the Internet are people simply repeating what they heard rather than doing the analysis themselves - or listening to the people who have.
ive done tons of in depth googling, its a LOT of slow/slow on every guide ive seen and every comment. think yours was the first that actually said ft oh was better. not saying youre definitely wrong though. looking forward to more testing on the issue.
edit: found these things that back WFx2 being best
-Has a 5% special attack type melee miss chance. (basically the windfury procs can’t miss if special attack hit capped, which every shaman should be)
-The two extra attacks can proc flurry, unleashed rage, and shamanistic rage. They do not consume flurry charges, and don’t glance. (no glancing blows for the proc’d attacks. flurry only benefits, doesnt consume.)
-The two offhand attacks are affected by the standard offhand 50% damage reduction. The WF proc’s attack power bonus is not. (even though only getting half base damage from the offhand, you still get the full attack power bonus? this point is still kinda weird to me, but i can see how it could be more powerful than flametongue)
Don’t they require a high arena rating to get, though? The first 2 tiers of BS craftables only require things that can be farmed up in the open world and heroics.
Not worth the chance of taking in my opinion if you want to be competitive. There is no safer option then getting the crafting profession maxed now. Which is why I spent the time doing them on my four toons.
Still dont know which I am playing so I rather be ready then regretful since I have ample time to do it.
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S1 and s2 weps had no rating req
Many pservers added ratings to them so that may be why you’re hearing conflicting things but in original tbc they did not have rating reqs until s3 gear
dont think rating was required until season 3, just arena points. could be wrong but
Huh. I recall them being out of reach for me back in the day because I didn’t do arenas. I thought helms, shoulders and weapons were gated behind higher arena ratings, and those rstungs were reduced/removed as seasons progressed.
i cant find any solid info on season 1 as it was in season 1, so as i said i could be wrong. if anybody has any real insight or a link feel free to share lol
Please post legit next time.
I think he’s just asking how much better the weapons are in comparison as you progress.
Chill dude lol.
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And if OP wants to PvP for arena gladiator weapons (LOL!), then he will also need to go hammer smithing anyway for a win herald to get into a high enough bracket for shamans.
Can’t high rank arena to get the gladiator maces without a [win]herald, doesn’t want to craft the dragonmaws for pve dps.
Only real alternative is to be true casual and try to get some heroic / kara axes or maces.
Entirely depends if you go 21/40 or the more typical 0/44/16. Elemental fury and darkmoon card crusader makes FT offhand far better, with or without a slow OH weapon.
Best setup is still dual dragonmaws for the haste, as WF/FT actually scales way higher with haste as its not bottlenecked by WF CD timers.
ive done tons of in depth googling, its a LOT of slow/slow on every guide ive seen and every comment.
Largely because they’re just repeating what they’ve heard rather than doing in-depth analysis. What you’re reading on two different guides isn’t two independent sources of information - it’s just people copying one another without adding any meaningful contribution of their own.
Probably the biggest issue waiting on Beta tests is whether or not a certain Windfury bug exists. Some (old) accounts have Windfury buffing both weapons. So if you put Windfury on both weapons, each weapon has a double chance to proc Windfury rather than a single one.
If this is the case, it’s most likely the case that Windfury on both weapons will be the better scheme. If Windfury works as described, the proc chance for dual-WF is significantly lower.
Note that all of what you’re describing has been accounted for in the various sims (there are multiple independent sims turning in the results I described above - you can find discussion of them on the Shaman discord).
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Entirely depends if you go 21/40 or the more typical 0/44/16. Elemental fury and darkmoon card crusader makes FT offhand far better, with or without a slow OH weapon.
Right now, we’re not seeing any path to 21/40/0 being a viable spec. While it does slightly more AE damage (since all of a Shaman’s AE damage is Elemental), it can’t match the ST damage of a conventional spec. When you look at the breakdowns of physical vs. magical damage on an Enhancement Shaman, there simply isn’t enough magical damage for a 21 point investment in Elemental to be justified.
Best setup is still dual dragonmaws for the haste, as WF/FT actually scales way higher with haste as its not bottlenecked by WF CD timers.
As I noted above, we simply don’t know at this point.
Going off decades-old Elitist Jerks posts and private server experiences gets us close, but remember that we’re playing on a Retail engine. As a result, if Blizzard wants to replicate the bugs that existed in Burning Crusade, they have to explicitly re-introduce those bugs into their client/server software. This means that not only do they need to know about various obscure bugs but they need to make a decision that those bugs were essential for the play experience.
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IIRC one of the reasons slow/slow is favored is the bug allowing an extra auto with the flurry buff, and to prevent the OH autos from eating too many of the flurry charges.
This is the first I’ve heard arguments for otherwise.
Matching the weapon speeds is best for many a reason, another one being the infamous “38%” proc rate chance of double WF. WF would nearly always proc on the mainhand with tied weapon speeds.
This “interaction” may not actually occur in TBC classic which would really ruin double WF dps on single target.
I recently read through that entire old elitist jerks guide. It makes a great case for the hammers, and has the numbers to back up the slow weapon speed advantage with normalized WF proc rates.
Are you saying that the whole thing is based on a bug with WF? That it wasn’t functioning properly in 2.4 back then?
This guide:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081003015241/http://elitistjerks.com:80/f47/t20765-shaman_enhancement/
Correct, and if I recall, that “38% proc rate” with double WF was fixed some time in WOTLK.
Now I don’t care what state of WF procs are, but there is a precendent here that Acti/Blizz may not allow WF to have that increased proc rate.
In Vanilla Classic, they removed WF’s ability to proc off itself or other on hit affects, which did exist in Vanilla. Going off of patch 2.4, you cannot have two different ranks of WF to overcome the 3 second global cooldown of WF proccing again per weapon.
There is a good chance (but not 100%!) that the increased proc rate of having double WF weapons may not exist in TBC Classic, just due to them importing the DATA of TBC to the classic client which uses the modern backend where that is not the case. In a similar way to how stacking reck procs for paladins, a workaround using spellbatching sit spam was needed.
For sure this will be the FIRST thing people start testing in the beta/prepatch.
Ahhh, ok. From the elitestjerks post:
Windfury Proc Rate
When you are wielding a two handed weapon, or are using a shield, your chance to proc windfury on any landed attack outside the 3-second cooldown is 20%. When you dual wield weapons, the chance on each landed attack outside the 3-second cooldown is approximatedly 36%, if and only if both weapons are imbued with Windfury.
Analysis of the combat log shows that if you sum all hits, the proc rate while DWing is 20%, but that includes hits you make while inside the 3 second cooldown, which cannot actually proc WF. When you remove the ineligible hits the observed proc rate from the eligible hits becomes 36%.
So it seems we’ll have to see if TBC Classic replicates this behavior of counting the 20% proc chance on “ineligible” DW swings inside the 3 second window.
Thanks for pointing this out. It did not occur to me when reading this originally that the improved rate was considered a bug of sorts.
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Yep, lots of known unknowns to consider and test for!
Also props to Loryn for testing some older elitist jerk info above, but its ALL going to need to be thoroughly tested as Classic =/= Original.
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