Enhancement DPS

So I found a parse on WoL rankings for Enhancement Shaman  that was post 4.0.1
http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/Deathbringer_Saurfang/25H/Enhancement_Shaman/
The guy pulled 18.4k dps on Saurfang.  Which is very impressivve.  Its still well below the top parse pre patch.

The really sad part?
He was 17th in damage in the fight for the raid. So the #14 Enhance parse in the world finished  behind every other dpser in his raid, aside from an anomoly of a boomkin.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/pkunzzts7gps8fl9/sum/damageDone/?s=1574&e=1678#Leedsz

And this is our BEST fight.

Its a bit discouraging with other classes pulling up to 33k.
Ok so that's Mages

But lets look at the other  melee hybrids tops dps scores since 4.0.1
Feral 23.5k
Ret 22.6
Fury 26.9
Arms 18.5
Frost DK 21.9
Unholy 26.2

Now who else did the patch screw up.
Well combat got borked. I had to scan down until the 183rd ranked parse to find a post patch ranking
still it was 19.4k which is 1000dps better than the best Enhance parse.

There is a 20 plus page thread of concens on the forums.
No response from Blizzard to this point.

There is a new beta build out there.  lots of adjustments,  the only one for Shamans was increasing the cost of Chain Heal.  Hopefully our issues get addressed at some point.

Where did my DPS go?

My combat log got messed up last Wednesday on farm night, so I had to wait until last night to compare how I was doing pre and post patch.

I'll use Saurfang as a comparison.

10/6 raid   #2 on the meters @ 16046 dps
10/20 raid  #16 on the meters @ 14663 dps
a 1400 dps drop and 14 slots on the meters. Ouch that hurts.

Now some of it might be the use of fire totems. I haven't been using fire elemental since the patch.  Purely on the totems dps it looks like the fire elemental did 1750 dps and the searing did 1242 dps, so thats 500 there. No Fire Nova is another 603 dps. however that's in a vacuum.  There is also the loss of searing flames to consider, if I used the fire elemental. Searing Flames did 337 dps, in addition to that there is the Improved Lava Lash buff to consider. Lava lash is out hardest hitting ability now and a 5 stack of searing flames buffs that by 100%. Next week I'll try it with the elemental and compare.

But the thing that stick out the most to me is the loss of white damage.
4825dps vs. 2598dps
That's a 46% loss there.
Windfury dropped from  1893dps tp 1135dps

Somethings up with manifest anger as well. MH hits went from 201dps to 70dps
Spell damage stayed about the same.

Lava Lash as I mentioned shot through the roof, from  505dps to 2362dps, a whooping  467% increase.

I think a lot of this drop off is due to several things. First we had  only 1 rogue on 10/6 so I got his ToT's. However I had even better dps the week before pulling 16273 w/o ToT's. I think a big things is the further consolidation of raid buffs. Kings down to 5% and merged with Mark of the Wild, loss of the hit buffs, lowering of the haste buff, loss of improved SOE. As hybrids we lose on both the melee and spellpower nerfs.  I had to add hit, and mastery to keep my magical damage on about the same level,  I lost a ton of haste regemming and from the relic slot change, and the WF nerf. Plus they nerfed the amount of haste gained per point of rating as well.

Strat fu link to compare the parses.

Are you ready for 4.01?



So 4.01 is supposed to drop tomorrow, which means a lot of big changes for Enhancement.

New Talent tree, Changes to Stats, Reforging, New Glyphs, New rotations, its a lot.

These changes are balance around level 85, not 80, but we still have 8 weeks until Cataclysm come out, so that's 2 months of dealing with the changes on current content.

Talents and Glyphs

Lets start with spec. I'm leaning towards this 5/31/0 build for level 80. Its skipping Improved Shields in favor of Totemic Reach. Working on Heroic LK I think a larger radius is worth it.

For glyphs some more testing might be needed but Feral Spirits and Lava Lash seem to be the top 2. With the change to Stormstrike that glyph is probably not a top 3 glyph. I'll go with Windfury at least until More data is available.

Stats

The other thing we will all need to do is Reforge and Re-gem.

Agility is going to be our king stat. It provides AP, Spellpower through Mental Quickness, and Crit. We still want to cap spell hit and expertise, but not at the expense of Agi.  Since you can't reforge into Agi, you want to try and cap Hit/Exp through reforging.

If a gear has no hit, reforge haste or crit to hit. If it has hit reforge haste or crit to expertise.

If it has hit + mastery reforge mastery to exp.

If it has exp + mastery reforge mastery to hit.

Now our caps are changing as well. 

The 3% raid buff from a Shadow Priest or Boomkin are going away. So out new spell hit cap is 446 hit rating.

Unleashed rage is only providing  8 expertise rather than 9 and the Orc Racial for Axe/Fist is down to 3 expertise from 5. So we will need more expertise on our gear to reach 26. So 149 for non-orcs and 123 for orcs with axe/fist weapons.

For gemming  Gem Agi unless there is a very good socket bonus

Use Agi/Mastery gems for Yellow sockets

Use Agi/Hit for Blue sockets.

Rotation

I need to do some better testing with rotation as well, but since Fire Nova no longer works with Searing Totem, its out of our single target rotation. I'm also not sure where Fire elemental will come in in relation to Searing totem yet. But it looks like out single target rotation will be close to something like this.

Drop totems first

MW5-LB

SW

ST-0

LL

SS-0

FS-0

ES

SR (2pc T10)

SS

ST

Once Rawr and Enhsim are fully updated this might change, but early testing seems to indicate that our priority queue is a bit more forgiving than it used to be.

Things should be interesting.

Level 85 ratings

From EJ

Level 85 caps

Melee Hit : 120.109 which means with base 6% from dual wielding we need 241 hit to cap our specials.
Expertise : 30.0272 which means with 2/2 Unleashed Rage we need 541 expertise to cap.
Spell Hit : 102.446 which means we need 1742 hit to cap for raid bosses (at 17%)

That is a buttload of Hit.  542 Expertise is a hefty number as well.  Perhaps we will need to spend on the spell hit Talent.

Lions? We don't need no stinking Lions!

Not when we have Kron'Kar Annihilators.
Badass Armoured Giant Scorpions >>> Lion with a Tabard.

I can't wait to get one.

now with extra mana savings

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Enhancement

• Mental Quickness now reduces the mana cost of your instant spells by 75% instead of reducing the cost of shock spells by 60%.

Looks like its going to be hard to run out of mana using our normal rotation. Throwing our heals sure, but shocks and WM lightning and totems? should be fine.

Ow! That hurts!

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Elemental
•Stoneclaw Totem now has 6186 health, up from 797. Shields your totems for up to 4143 damage, up from 664.
•Earth Shock now also reduces ranged attack speed.

Enhancement
•Dual Wield now also allows you to parry frontal melee attacks.
•Windfury Totem now increases the melee and ranged attack speed of all party and raid members within 40 yards by 10%. (Down from 20%)
•Feral Spirit now lasts 30 sec, down from 45 sec. Cooldown changed to 2 min, down from 3 min.

Restoration
•Mana Tide Totem now has a 3 min cooldown, down from 5 min.

So I saw GC comment about how valuable WF/Imp Icy Talons buff was and so I figured this was coming but a 50% nerf really hurts.

I'm guessing the the change to DW is just giving us back the old spirit weapons parry buff minus the threat reduction?

The Feral Spirit change is actually pretty nice. Allows Wolves to line up better with any 2min trinket CD's, while still maintaining a 25% uptime.


There was also this update earlier in the week.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Enhancement
•Windfury Weapon now deals damage equal to two extra attacks with 4430 extra attack power. (Up from 1395 Attack Power)
•Flametongue Weapon now increases total spell damage by 750, up from 235.
•Primal Wisdom (Talent) is gone.
•Primal Wisdom (Passive) *New* - Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to immediately restore 5% of your base mana.
•Unleashed Rage is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Now increases Expertise by 4/8 (up from 3/6/9), increases all party and raid members' attack power by 5/10% (up from 4/7/10%)

Restoration
•Earthliving Weapon now increases healing done by 531, up from 167.
•Healing Wave base healing value reduced by 25%. Mana cost changed to 9% of base mana, up from 6% of base mana.
•Mana Tide Totem no longer restores mana, now increases the spirit of party members within 40 yards by 200%.

Which is them updating the scaling of imbues for level 85 and reiterating the freeing up of those 3 talent points. We do end up losing 1 expertise, which while not huge is still a loss especially considering how much rating you need per point at 85. That along with degrading hit rating at higher tiers, all adds up.