Windfury Crits

Enhancment Tips and Tricks for BWD, Part 1

Sat, 07 May 2011 22:00:00 GMT

At this point Big Crits is 6/6 heroic Blackwing Descent, with heroic Nefarian falling to our blades on Thursday night. Throughout our journey in BWD I've created my own mental check list on how to get the most of enhancement in each fight.

I lead the 25-man raid team so these quick tips are focused on those strategies; if a tip is heroic-mode only, I'll make a note of it, but I can't speak for the strats on 10-man raids. I imagine things are different in 10s, requiring perhaps a more precise use of abilities or specific movement or placement. But no matter what version you're running many of these tips still apply.

In this article I'll cover Magmaw, Omnitron Defense System, and Chimaeron. The next article will cover the half of BWD.

I talk about "defensive cooldowns" in many encounters. By this I mean Shamanistic Rage and a glyphed Stoneclaw Totem. Shammy rage is awesome for mitigating damage, and Stoneclaw is only a slight damage saver, but when used often over the long haul of a fight will save your healers some headache.

Magmaw

Our strategy is to stack everyone in melee except the parasite kiter, hunters and one healer. We focus on Blazing Skeletons and completely ignore Lava Parasites.

Put down a new Searing Totem for every new target. Any time you change targets I recommend putting down a new Searing Totem because often times the old one will just keep shooting at your previous target, and you want those ticks of Searing Flames for your Lava Lash.
Heroic: Single target priority. With the new changes to Flame Shock it may be tempting to spread your Flame Shocks and work a Fire Nova into your priority when there are multiple blazing skellies up, but I don't recommended it. At best there will be three targets in range for novas, but usually there will only be two at any given time and single target is usually a greater priority. Just stay focused on what you're killing. We're not trying to meter-whore, we're trying to take down our assigned targets.
Use wolves on cooldown. Our spirit wolves don't coincide with the exposed head phase, so use them at will. However, if you pop your wolves 5 seconds before the pull, they'll be up just in time for the first head phase.
Defensive cooldowns for Lava Spew and Magmaw Spit. It's too late to use them once the damage is out, so look for the cooldowns and definitely get a Stoneclaw Totem down beforehand.

Omnitron Defense System

What a cluster#$@& this fight is on heroic! But now that we're over the first-kill hump, I'm looking forward to tackling it again.

Make a /target Arcanotron macro. DPS shaman should be assigned to interrupts for Arcanotron because we can hit it from range. I put myself in the first interrupt group for that very reason. To facilitate fast switching, make a targeting macro.
Aggressively Purge Arcano. If there is more than one stack of his buff then I don't wait for the mages to Spellsteal; get out ahead of the purging and get that buff off him. If those buffs are stacking up too fast on him then alert your raid leader that someone is still hitting Arcano while his shield is up.
Keep Earthbind Totem handy for runaway Poison Bombs. Your hunters should be putting down frost traps and you may even have a warrior with Piercing Howl, but you should still keep Earthbind close at hand for the occasional loose bomb—espeically if it's charging straight for you. I usually look for the bombs cutting loose from the trap and put my totem in their path.
Constantly use Stoneclaw Totem. This fight is not about pure DPS, it's about dealing with mechanics and surviving the damage. If you have a DK keeping up Horn of Winter then you don't need a Strength of Earth Totem. If your raid doesn't have a DK then you'll have to swap out the two, but definitely keep using that Stoneclaw Totem to mitigate both bursty and incidental damage.
Save Shamanistic Rage for major events. I keep shammy rage available for a few special circumstances. When you are the target of Acquiring Target you should use everything you have to keep yourself alive, especially SR. Heroic mode: If there is a Shadow Conductor and Incineration Security Measure, use SR to help your healers. Likewise, if you're out of range for Shadow Conductor, pop SR as you Ghostwolf back to the pile.

Chimaeron

Use Healing Rain for the feud stack-up phase. Every heal helps, even our weak AoE heal. Healing Rain is affected by Maelstrom Weapon, so your cast time on it will rarely be the full 2 seconds. Get to the stack point and make it rain.
Time Shammy Rage for the Caustic Slime in feud phase. Caustic Slimes start 15 second after feud and they last for 15 seconds. Shamanistic Rage lasts for 15 seconds. You have boss timers, do the math.
Use Stoneclaw Totem for Caustic Slimes in feud phase, too.
Heroic: Save your last SR for phase two, though. Since there is a healing debuff, you'll want to save a defensive cooldown such as SR to mitigate the shadow DoT good ol' Neffypoo puts out.
Wind Shear all fight long to lower yourself on the aggro table. I forget to do this more often than I remember. But if you want to be pro—unlike me—you'll mash your Wind Shear every six seconds to lower your aggro. Granted, Wind Shear barely offsets the aggro from one Stormstrike, but when you do it all fight long it adds up, pushing you way down on the threat meter. All the better when Chimaeron goes after that rogue before you!

In the next article I'll cover Maloriak, Atramedes, and Nefarian. Then we'll move on to Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the Four Winds.

May all your hits be crits!

Optimizing your Enhancement gear - the easy way

Mon, 02 May 2011 19:01:57 GMT

I love to tinker with my gear, run sims using EnhSim, and test for the utmost optimal combination for my shaman. Unfortunately things are increasingly complex these days with reforging and so many loot options in a progression guild with half the heroic bosses on farm.

It used to be that one piece of gear was a clear upgrade over another because it either did or didn't have your best stats. Now, we can take a piece with suboptimal stats and reforge it. Is that item with hit and haste better or worse than the item with mastery and crit? Should you gem for hit and reforge for mastery, or enchant for mastery, gem for agility and reforge for hit? So many questions.

Today I'll give you the cliff notes version version to optimizing your gear. The key is in one simple fact: you can refoge your way to hit and expertise caps—and you should.

Agi when you can

Agility is the single greatest stat for enhancement, but we can't reforge into it, so we have to get it wherever we can. For starters, always go with enchants that give you agility, and when you can't get agi from enchanting then look for mastery.

Gem sockets should be:

Red: Delicate Inferno Ruby (agility)
Yellow: Adept Ember Topaz (agility and mastery)
Blue: Glinting Demonseye (agility and hit)
Meta: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond

With the current socket bonuses and gem qualities, it's only a sliver of a difference between pure Delicate Inferno Rubies, and optimizing for socket bonuses. The BiS setup for enhancement shaman in this tier does, in fact, gem for socket bonuses.

The one caveat here is expertise. If you are far short of expertise then you will want to use some Precise Inferno Rubies to bring your expertise up. This will most likely be the case for pre-heroic dungeon geared enhancement shamans. If you don't have any expertise on your gear then you'll need to use an enchant and a few gems to get close to that full 26 Expertise.

Wowreforge

There are quite a few web-based optimization sites out there. Most people know Ask Mr. Robot, and I go there for my feral druid (currently my only other level 85 character), but for enhancement shamans it's suboptimal because it never hits my caps properly. For enhance optimizations head to Wowreforge. It does one thing and and it does it better than any other site: it optimizes just reforging while taking two caps into consideration.

Once you get some decent gear and are able to come close to the hit and expertise caps, you should gem and enchant as I recommended above—agility and mastery—then reforge to hit the caps.

Load your character from the armory using the boxes on the front page. Use the interface to adjust any gems or enchants, then scroll to the bottom and enter in your stat weights. Currently I'm using the following stat weights -- aka EP values -- with the ones in bold used in Wowreforge:

Agility - 2.50
Strength - 1.06
Intellect - 0.81
AP - 1.00
Crit - 0.80
Hit (uncapped) - 2.46
Expertise (uncapped) - 3.00
Haste - 0.60
Mastery - 1.23
Spell Power - 0.78

Next enter your appropriate caps. If you're unsure of what the caps are your race refer back to this article. As for stat weights after cap, I always keep expertise as zero, but I'll put 0.25 in for hit. A little extra hit is OK, but any extra expertise is mostly wasted. After you've entered in all the stats, hit Optimize and let it run.

In a few short seconds it returns up to five scenarios for optimized reforging. Click through them to see what you think is the best. Nine times out of ten Wowreforge will hit the caps right on the head, or only have one or two extra points in hit. It may seem strange to reforge out of hit on one item, then back into it on the next, but when you nail the caps on the head, that end result is all that matters.

TL;DR

This is supposed to be the "easy" guide, right? Let me summarize:

Enchant for agil or mastery
Gem with Delicate, Adept, and Glinting
Then hit Wowreforge for everything else

And you're done working that new piece of gear into your rotation.

May all your hits be crits!

Getting the most out of EJ

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:30:50 GMT

Today's Windfury Crits article is quick and easy, but still something important to staying on top of changes for enhancement, or any class/spec for that matter.

For the past four years it seems a canned response on guild applications is “I read Elitist Jerks.” As if that evidenced an ability to play the game. I've found that statement usually means, “I opened the site and skimmed some stuff, and I think you'll be impressed that I know what EJ is, but I didn't read all 15 pages of posts about my class/spec because I was overwhelmed. Because I suck.” The truth is that for any one spec there is enough information on maximizing performance that you'd think the optimal gear/gem/reforge/spell combination would put a man on Mars. Being an avid EJ reader, today I'll disseminate my tips to getting the most out of the site everyone loves to say they read.

401 not 101

The first thing to remember with EJ is that the site exists to help you maximize your spec for end-game raiding. It is not how to start a class, it's not how to level, and it's not even quite about how to start raiding with your fresh 85 decked out in questing greens.

The threads dive into the most minute details, drilling down into whether another 100 haste would help, or should you clip at the 2^nd or the 3^rd DoT tick. Manage your expectations and come to EJ for the 400-level class, not the 100-level “intro to” class. If you are looking for intros, check out WoW Insider or head over to the Twisted Nether wiki to look for bloggers with current information.

New Guide Format

Now that I've spent the last two paragraphs telling you that EJ is not the place to go for an introduction to your spec, I'm going to completely contradict myself. Because I can. And I did. Or did I?

Since Patch 4.0.6, EJ has revamped its main threads to include an incredibly detailed, and highly organized introduction to each spec. Each mechanics thread leads off with an outline about the class including standardized abbreviations, ability explanations, optimal specs, gems, professions, and rotations. The Marksmanship Hunter thread is one such example with amazing detail in a cleaned-up and outlined format.

Even with this, I still recommend only coming here once you have basic mechanics and some experimentation under your belt.

BiS vs. Mechanics

Some classes separate gear discussions from mechanics. For example, the enhancement community is blessed with an amazing enhancement-only dps simulation tool, EnhSim. As a result, an entire meta-game of finding the absolute, singular, and wholly-indisputable most optimal theoretical Enhancement Shaman possibility has developed, and turned into its own thread.

Explore your class section on the forums and find the most relevant threads.

Now that you've found the best threads, you must subscribe. Just like how you already subscribe to Big Crits on YouTube, Like us on Facebook, and Subscribe to our RSS feeds – you do that, right? Good, you are the superfan I thought you were – you should subscribe to the threads on EJ that mean the most to your class. Be sure you're logged in, then go to the Thread Tools and choose Subscribe to this thread.

You'll be taken to a screen with choice about notification frequency and folder for organization. I highly recommend the Daily updates by email option.

Even if I'm days behind in my EJ emails, eventually I'll get to them and absorb the whole conversation in one sitting. If an applicant to Big Crits wrote that they subscribe to EJ threads, then I'd know they actually mean business, because it is the number one way to stay on top of the theorycrafting for your class.

Enhancement, specifically

We're fortunate to have a large theorycrafting community for the world of enhancement, so the threads are updated regularly and there's always a lot of discussion about our crazy spec. I recommend subscribing to the following threads:

Unleashing Elements, a Cataclysmic discussion – required subscription if enhance if your main spec
BiS gear and set-up discussion – Fun thread about the meta-game of BiS using EnhSim
EnhSim for Cataclysm – only if you're really into how the mechanics of the game are implemented in EnhSim.

It's important to check back to your class' main section with each new patch. In the past, new threads were created with each patch, or thereabout, and so to get the most up-to-date information you'd have to subscribe to the latest thread.

I thought this would be an enhancement-specific article, but it turns out to be much more broad-based. I hope you found some useful information, regardless of your class. What did I miss when it comes to staying on top of the latest theorycrafting on EJ? What do you recommend?

May all your hits be crits!

Windfury Crits & Enhance Shaman 101

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:00:00 GMT

Back in April 2008 I started blogging about the life and times of an enhancement shaman on my personal website. The blog was called Windfury Crits, and at the time it was the only active Enhancement blog out there. In February 2009 I moved WF Crits over to Big Hit Box, a collaborative blog focused on all things melee. After getting hired at WoW Insider for the enhancement shaman position I let BHB slide into oblivion, eventually cancelling the whole thing. Then in November 2010 I left WoW Insider because I did not have enough time to dedicate to full weekly articles. And thus I went dark on blogging about enhance for nearly 6 months, my longest break since starting in writing three years ago. Admittedly, I was a bit busy with this show you may have heard of about WoW raiders...

Here we are now in April 2011, I'm bringing it back to Bacon: the return of Windfury Crits. I'll address everything enhancement-related, even if it's just in short bursts. You can subscribe to the Windfury Crits-only thread here, but of course I recommend subscribing to the full RSS feed for everything: blog posts and videos alike.

For the inaugural post I'm going to summarize what you need (and probably already know) to get started as an enhancement shaman

Get capped

Every raiding enhancement shaman should be both spell hit capped and expertise capped. No matter what your race, the final numbers remain the same, however the raw numbers to get there are different depending on your race. Here are the final numbers you should see in your character screen in-game or on the armory:

17% spell hit
26 expertise

Here is the breakdown by race:

Dwarf

Mace Specialization cuts down on expertise required, but obviously only when using maces. Given the current mace itemization in 4.0.6, if you're not PvPing then you're going to end up needing the full expertise.

Spell hit: 1742
Expertise rating with maces only: 451
Expertise rating with axes or fist weapons: 541

Draenei

Heroic Presence makes up for some spell hit, making Draenei an excellent choice alliance theorycrafting. Some days I definitely miss Stoney being a female Draenei... oh that accent!

Spell hit: 1639
Expertise rating: 541

Orc

With Axe Specialization, Orcs are usually the best choice for Horde shaman from a pure theorycrafting standpoint, given current tier itemization of course.

Spell hit: 1742
Expertise with axes or fist weapons: 451
Expertise with maces: 541

Goblin, Tauren and Troll

Goblins have enough damn racials, they don't need any more. Trolls are the true underdog of the perpetually under-dogged Horde. As for Tauren, they're just kinda there picking flowers.

Spell hit: 1742
Expertise rating: 541

The best method to hit these caps is to reforge first, then go for the gems and enchants to hit the number on the head.

Speaking of reforging

Reforge out of the following:

Haste
Crit

Reforge into the following in this order:

Hit
Expertise
Mastery

Haste is our worst stat. If you have a choice between two pieces of gear, one with haste and one with anything else (hit, crit, exp, mastery) go for the non-haste piece every time. Of course that doesn't mean you should pass on a 346 to 359 upgrade, even if it means taking on some haste. Take the upgrade and go reforge.

With patch 4.0.3 we went back to slow weapons in both hands (2.60 speed) with Windfury imbued on the main hand and Flametongue on the off-hand. Of course some of us never bothered with the caster main hand and FT/FT setup that was working in early 4.0.1. As a GM of a progression guild that was a bit hypocritical of me—to sacrifice anywhere from 200 to 1000 DPS because I didn't like having a caster main hand. Actually, in retrospect, it was pretty frigging dumb. Thankfully the developers came around with a nice patch for us and back to the life and times of Windfury.

After all, what's the point of a blog called Windfury Crits if you're not even using Windfury?

Spec

I use 10/31/0 for raiding. The points in Improved Shields can be moved around to Improved Fire Nova for fights like heroic Maloriak. Come patch 4.1 we'll end up using Fire Nova a lot more, but for now, those points can be moved around as you see fit.

Glyphs

Prime: the Glyph of Lava Lash is our top pick, followed by Stormstrike, Windfury Weapon, and Feral Spirit. Currently, I'm using SS & WF as they simmed out better for me than any combination.

Major: Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is excellent for raiding, especially if you're in a 10-man raiding group because it effectively combines two totems into one. Lightning Shield is just one less thing you have to worry about. For the third spot I recommend Ghost Wolf for the extra speed, or Stoneclaw Totem for progression fights. I can't take credit for putting Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem into my PvE spec -- credit goes to Hogman from Premonition who told me he uses it on every cooldown on high damage fights. Good idea! I've been using it a lot on heroic Omnitron Defense System.

Minor: I just use same three in both of my specs so I don't have to worry about reagents: Water Walking, Water Breathing, and Renewed Life. In over four years of playing enhancement I can only think of one time that both Astral Recall and my Hearthstone were on cooldown resulting in getting stranded or, god forbid, using the flight path.

Rotation

This deserves a post of its own, but I'll do my best to keep this short and simple. The idea behind the enhancement shaman "rotation" is that it's actually a priority system. We don't start at spell #1 and work our way straight down to the last one. Instead, we use the first available spell, then start over from the top. Sometimes, the last spell on your priority list might not get used for a long time, but that's OK. Just stick with the system and you'll maximize your DPS

ST_0 – If you do not have a Searing Totem down, or if it's down but not attacking, then put one down first
LL – Lava Lash
FS_UEF – Flame Shock with the Unleash Elements buff
MW5_LB – Lightning Bolt with 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon
UE – Unleash Elements
SS – Stormstrike
ES – Earth Shock
SW – Spirit Wolves

That's enough to get you started playing your level 85 enhancement shaman.

May all your hits be crits!