Enhancement weapon imbues

Greetings fellow Enhancement Shamans!

Today we're going to talk about what weapon imbues to use, and touch on weapon speeds.

TL;DR: WF has a 3 second internal cooldown, and with WF/WF, your off-hand steals the proc with 50% damage.

To start, let's make sure we're all on the same page.

• Windfury Weapon: "Each hit has a 20% chance of dealing additional damage equal to two extra attacks with 445 extra attack power."
• Flametongue Weapon: "Each hit causes 40.4 to 124.3 additional Fire damage, based on the speed of the weapon. Slower weapons cause more fire damage per swing."
• Stormstrike: "Instantly attack with both weapons." 
• While Dual Wielding, Off-hand weapon has a 50% damage penalty
• When in doubt, go test on a Training Dummy for a few million damage

The proper setup is Windfury 5 (WF5) and Flametongue 7 (FT), unless the mob is immune to fire then swap FT for Rockbiter (RB).

"But I was told to use WF/WF and it's bugged on this server!", don't worry, I hear or see that a lot. Retail used to use WF5/WF4, which resulted in a 36% proc rate for Windfury overall. However, you were using WF5/WF5, which we'll discuss a little later.

This was changed in patch 2.1.0 (2007-05-22), "Windfury Weapon: Mixing two different ranks of Windfury Weapon while dual-wielding will no longer increase the number of Windfury Weapon procs."

The 2.1.0 change implemented a 3 second Internal Cooldown (ICD) across all levels of Windfury. This means if your Off-Hand Windfury, regardless of rank, triggers Windfury then your Main Hand WF cannot proc for 3 seconds. A bunch of fancy math aside, it basically means your Windfury did 50% less damage than it could have, and prevents your Main-Hand from triggering Windfury for 3 seconds.

Now let's talk about "But I was told to use WF/WF and it's bugged on this server!" and "However, you were using WF5/WF5".

WF5/WF5 did in fact used to be bugged here, and there was no 3 second Internal Cooldown. However, this was fixed in Server Update Revision 88 (2014-06-09), "Windfury Weapon internal cooldown fixed".

To summarize:

• Before 2.1.0 (2007): WF5/WF4 was best since they didn't share an ICD
• After 2.1.0 and until 2014 on Excalibur: WF5/WF5 was best since the ICD was bugged
• After 2014 on Excalibur: WF5/FT is the only viable option

Now that we've determined our weapon imbues, what about weapon speeds?

• You want the slowest possible Main-Hand, to hit the hardest and try to hit outside the ICD as much as possible.
• For Off-Hand, if you're T4/5 or below, a fast OH will likely be better for you. 

           * At low gear levels a fast Off-Hand with Flametongue will do more damage than a slow OH.

           * At higher gear levels, the harder hitting slow weapons are better because of Stormstrike and overall white damage

Do note that weird situations can occur, such as Mounting Vengence Off-Hand from SWP trash, with some fast blue quest dagger; the only way to tell what's best for you is to hit up a dummy.

A special note on Stormstrike usage, as Bon posted below, the Stormstrike damage isn't all that impressive. However, you should be using Stormstrike immediately after the 3 second ICD ends to give your Main-Hand another chance at WF as soon as possible. Enhancer addon helps with this timing.

The following guides have outdated information on weapon imbues, but good information for those interested in reading more.

• 2.1.0 Enhancement guide on mmo-champion
• Elitist Jerks

For historical or amusement purposes, Windfury was previously allowed to trigger off of itself, but that was fixed in 1.4.0 (2005-04-16)

I've seen so many PUG enhas on Excalibur, one funnier than another: fast daggers in OH with WF, two fast weapons double-WF, double FT, the list goes on and on.

The most absurd thing is that minimum a half of them had at least a few SWP items.

I can only hope they find your topic one day

Thanks for contributing to Excalibur's Guide library!

P.S. Back in the days, I used to browse SWP guilds on Legacyplayers (I only found Trade Guard there so eh, I was spying only on them in the end).

I used to analyze the Brutallus kills in order to find, where do I get at least +1% to my dps, while learning more advanced "rotations" for other classes.

Here's what I would always see in enhas' performances:

This is probably not the best enha in the world, also I suppose that his OH is slow, which reduces the Flametongue % of the overall damage.

But even in that case, flametongue is still whole 2% more damage than Stormstrike. 
Believe me, most people think that Stormstike is ~30% of their overall damage because they use 2 slow weapons and it instantly attacks with both of them.

I think that if you are raiding the last dungeon of the expansion, reading at least one-two class guides is essential, in order to not fall into the double WF5 situation, for example.

  On 10/8/2018 at 8:15 AM, Bon said:

This is probably not the best enha in the world, also I suppose that his OH is slow, which reduces the Flametongue % of the overall damage.

But even in that case, flametongue is still whole 2% more damage than Stormstrike. 
Believe me, most people think that Stormstike is ~30% of their overall damage because they use 2 slow weapons and it instantly attacks with both of them.

Ah, thanks for the callout. I added a note about Stormstrike's real purpose: to try and trigger more Windfury.

Here's a recent Brutallus breakdown for me

  On 10/8/2018 at 11:13 AM, Kynura said:

Ah, thanks for the callout. I added a note about Stormstrike's real purpose: to try and trigger more Windfury.

 

Here's a recent Brutallus breakdown for me

 

 

What does 5th row "Attack" stands for ? Just curious what it parsed

  On 10/8/2018 at 11:42 AM, Toren said:

What does 5th row "Attack" stands for ? Just curious what it parsed

Legacyplayers won't load the tooltip/data for that line. It's probably Flame Caps though, which are OP on Enhance.

Edit: It's Searing Totem

flame caps havn't scaled for years at this point. They are just as horrible for enhancers as any other melee class.

  On 10/8/2018 at 11:42 AM, Toren said:

What does 5th row "Attack" stands for ? Just curious what it parsed

Possibly a Searing Totem

  On 10/8/2018 at 12:11 PM, Bon said:

Possibly a Searing Totem

Oh. Yeah, that's obviously what it is.

On a related note, as an FYI Recount doesn't show flame totems for anyone but the Shaman.

  On 10/8/2018 at 12:21 PM, Kynura said:

On a related note, as an FYI Recount doesn't show flame totems for anyone but the Shaman.

 Ye its a real shame the searing/aoe fire totems damage is not visible to others on recount.

So shortly after my shammy hit 70 I went and did some dummy tests and found the wf-flame combo performed best.  That was March 25, only for 5 minutes, pure melee with no specials  and attacking an armoured elite from behind:

wf both
wf      74 procs    41395   34.5%

dps    395

wf mh   flame oh
wf       38 procs       25223   20.0%
flame  131 procs    19248   15.2%

dps    415.5

flame mh    wf oh
flame    134 procs    20204   17.0%
wf            48 procs    15608   13.2%

dps     389.5

Today I went back and tested it again but also checked Rock and Frost and hit the dummies for 30 minutes for each test.  First column is number of hits/procs, second is damage and third is percent of total damage.

wf - wf

melee  1847    694111      69.6%
wf          458     303292      30.4%

557.7 dps

wf - flame

melee       1847        693515    65.0%
wf                247        236334    22.1%
flame           821       137848    12.9%

596.7 dps

wf - rockbiter

melee        1821      739677     78.3%
wf                 236      204814     21.7%

528.1 dps   - started 490, climbed to 550, then dropped

wf - frost

melee         1845        695296      65.7%
wf                 300         247748      23.4%
frost             324         115158      10.9%

589.8 dps   - sat at 660 for first 15 mins, then dropped and stayed at 590.

I would suggest to anyone that when you get a significant upgrade you go and check weapon imbue combos on the dummies.  Your mileage may vary.

  On 6/24/2019 at 9:43 PM, Amur said:

pure melee with no specials

I sense some trouble here. 
I, undoubtedly, believe that WF+Fire is the strongest buff combo, but I think that comparing WF+WF vs WF+Fire MUST be with using Stormstrike, which can a) Proc another WF b) perform better with 2 slow weapons.

Also, if you are interested (because I am ), try running a fast OH Fire enchant vs slow OH Fire enchant. I am really curious which one will outperform.

Some people say that fast OH is much better when you're not geared and with the end-game gear you should use 2 slow ones. I'd, however, test the KJ fist WF + Twins first Fire in SWP.

I am now BiS, and decided to do a more formal breakdown of weapons and imbues.

Keep in mind that these might be 50-100DPS different, but that gap will only get larger with raid composition. Battle shout, faerie fire, bloodlust, executioner/mongoose, haste pots, flamecaps, sunder/expose armor, etc will likely all increase the gap between WF/FT and WF/WF.

Methodology:

• no food buffs
• no flasks
• no raid buffs
• cancelaura mongoose/executioner on EarthShock macro
• agi/mana/str totems
• water shield
• armored bossy dummy, from behind
• 30 minute sessions (the length of imbues)
• not using cooldowns like Blood Fury, haste pot, flame caps, or bloodlust
• using StormStrike and EarthShock immediately on cooldown, to keep relic and Ashtongue Talisman of Vision procced
• not rotating flameshock in for simplicity, since this is about weapon imbues
• no fire totems
• Recount hidden, to avoid confirmation bias

Did two runs for WF/FT and WF/WF for more comparison data.

• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Mounting Vengeance (FT): 1059 DPS, 1050 DPS
• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Mounting Vengeance (WF5): 1002 DPS, 993 DPS 
• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Mounting Vengeance (WF4): 990 DPS
• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Mounting Vengeance (RB): 1034 DPS
   

WF/WF is a lot closer than I expected it to be, but that might be more forgiving because I'm at 105 hit, so the OH doesn't steal MH WF procs as much as it could.

The following do not satisfy meta, but were surprisingly close.

• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Grip of Manaroth (FT): 989 DPS
• Hand of the Deceiver (WF5) + Grip of Manaroth (RB): 1006 DPS
• Swiftsteel Bludgeon (FT) + Grip of Manaroth (FT): 829 DPS
• Swiftsteel Bludgeon (RB) + Grip of Manaroth (RB: 785 DPS
• Torch of the Damned (WF5): 862 DPS

I could have done more 30 minute runs, but almost 6 hours straight is a bit taxing.