T4 EP Listing
T5 EP Listing
T6 EP Listing
Sunwell EP
Weapon DPS EP Values
Pitbuller and Rob have shown that it is possible to convert weapon DPS into EP values. This is useful to compute the total EP of a weapon in order to compare two weapons, as seen in this post (link to where you or someone compared Netherbane to MG Cleaver). The following values are only valid for a 2.6 speed weapon. EP would need to be recalculated for any other speeds. These are presented here because 2.6 is the most common speed for weapons.
1 MH DPS = 9.03 EP
1 OH DPS = 3.70 EP
Careful! Only use these numbers for comparing weapons; do not use them for drawing other conclusions. For example, these numbers do not mean that 9 AP = 1 DPS for enhancement shamans. Why? Note the distinction between EP and AP. 9 AP will in fact increase your DPS by more than 1; just as 1 weapon DPS will increase your overall DPS by more than 1. To understand why, imagine that 1 weapon DPS increases your DPS by exactly 1 after glances, misses, dodges, and crits are accounted for. Now throw in Flurry, WF procs, and Stormstrike and realize that the weapon is hitting more often than the tooltip says it is, so you gain more DPS from the nominal weapon DPS.
[top]Using EP - Examples
First, you must make a decision whether or not to assume that you will have Blessing of Kings. As a general rule, Salvation and Might are superior buffs, so you can only expect Kings in a 25-man scenario. In this example, we’re comparing 25-man gear, so we’ll assume Blessing of Kings is active and use the T5 EP Values. Then, it’s a simple matter of looking at the stats available on each item, multiplying them by their attack power equivalence, and adding them all up:
[Valestalker Girdle]
+27 Agility (x 2 = 54)
+25 Stamina
+18 Intellect
Equip: Improves haste rating by 36 (x 1.4 = 50.4)
Equip: Increases attack power by 76 (x 1 = 76)
Total: 180.4 EP
[Girdle of the Tidal Call]
+35 Strength (x 2.2 = 77)
+30 Stamina
+20 Intellect
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 33 (x 2 = 66)
Total: 143 EP
So, Valestalker Girdle (180.4 EP) is a larger increase to melee DPS than Girdle of Tidal Call (143 EP); for our purposes, we’ll say that makes it a better item. Note that values are not assigned here to Stamina or Intellect; these stats do carry some value for raiding enhancement shamans, but any assignment of value to them would be arbitrary and is for each individual shaman to decide on her own.
Now lets compare two weapons using the weapon EP values.
[Merciless Gladiator's Cleaver]
97.5 DPS (MH: x9.03 = 880.4) (OH: x3.70 = 360.75)
+27 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 10. (x1.4 = 14)
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 19. (x2 = 38)
Equip: Improves your resilience rating by 12.
Equip: Increases attack power by 30. (x1 = 30)
Total MH EP = 962.4
Total OH EP = 442.75
[Netherbane]
96.5 DPS (MH: x9.03 = 871.4) (OH: x3.7 = 357)
+25 Agility (x2 = 50)
+21 Stamina
Equip: Increases attack power by 40. (x1 = 40)
Total MH EP = 961.4
Total OH EP = 447.05
Comparing the two weapons we can see that the difference in the MH for each weapon is relatively minor with a 1 EP difference, but in the OH the Netherbane performs better with a 5 EP difference.
[top]Hit Rating
Enhance Shaman do not require large amounts of Hit Rating on gear. Effectively, because we can get a large quantity of +Hit from talents (9%), our special attacks (windfury and stormstrike) are already hit capped. All the extra +Hit rating on your gear is going toward improving white damage only, which typically comprises between 45%-50% of your total damage. When you consider the itemization costs of hit rating compared to crit rating and AP, which directly impact 90% of a shaman's total damage, you can see why hit rating is given lower precedence. Take the talents to hit cap your specials, any hit rating on gear after that is icing on the cake.
A common misconception is that you "have to hit before you can crit." This is a fallacy and illustrates a misunderstanding of the attack table. (Note that this is in reference to white damage which uses a single roll system.)
A second misconception is that a miss is a "missed opportunity for a WF proc" and that more Hit Rating will generate more WF procs. This misconception is generated from the flawed assumption that all swings are possible WF procs. However only swings that are outside of the WF cooldown are eligible to proc WF. A good portion of your autoattack hits will never be capable of producing WF procs. A 5 minute fight with no flurry would see 115 white swings with a 2.6 speed weapon. A Shaman might look at that and think that 0.36 * 115 = 41 possible WF procs, but that is incorrect since each successful proc locks out 1-2 hits that follow, shrinking the pool of actual eligible hits. It is actually quite difficult to calculate the number of attacks that you *should* have producing WF in a given amount of time, and that is why we rely on simulators to generate the EP value of Hit Rating.
There is no magic value of +Hit that an Enhance Shaman needs We need as much of every stat as we can get, but hit rating is just less important than the others. That does not mean that the goal is to have low hit rating either though. Rogues and Warriors require large amounts of +Hit to be effective because of their energy/rage feedback system and because they do not have talents that can hit cap their specials before considering hit on gear. Enhance shaman have no such feedback system and are able to hit cap specials through talents - therefore, hit rating above and beyond your talents is great to have, but is not a necessity.
[top]Haste Rating
Haste Rating will directly increase the contribution of white swings to your DPS - 1% Haste will generate 1% more auto attack DPS. Prior to patch 2.2 Haste Rating became the superior stat, but the 2.3 patch reduced its EP value closer to that of Hit Rating.
Modeling at one time indicated weapons hasted between 1.51 and 1.41 speed will actually experience a sharp decrease in potential Windfury DPS. The range of 1.51- 1.41 speed was believed to cause the main hand to always finish a swing just before the end of a WF cooldown, making you wait longer for the next eligible swing that can proc WF. If hasted in this period for a long duration, you could expect WF DPS contribution to decrease. However, you'll also experience many more white swings during that time, and so the loss of potential WF procs should be offset by the increased white DPS. It is no longer believed that the 1.5 to 1.4 hasted speed will actually cause any decrease in DPS - you should notice an overall increase.
There is no need to worry about the 1.51 - 1.41 hasted weapon range. The original claims about the supposed DPS loss had done no empirical or simulated testing to back up their modeling. More recent testing has indicated that whatever potential WF DPS is lost because of swing timer issues is more than made up for by the gigantic leap in autoattack DPS.
[top]Intellect and Mp5
Intellect on gear is not a significant source of DPS contribution. Pater has a short writeup exploring this here.
Mp5 is almost universally agreed to be a hunter stat that is wasted on enhance shaman gear. Note that the more you decide to contribute in a "hybrid" manner (healing to top off yourself and others) the mana pool will become slightly more important, but not such that you should sacrifice significant DPS upgrades to hold on to 15 Int on another item. The combination of Judgment of Wisdom and Shamanistic Rage (use it early, use it often) should prevent you from running out of mana even in full rogue leather gear - unless you're having to spot heal.
[top]Expertise Rating
Patch 2.3 converted weapon skill rating into weapon expertise rating, which converts into Expertise skill at a rate of 3.9423 expertise rating:1 Expertise, and reduces the chance for your target to dodge and parry by 0.25% per point of Expertise. 103 Expertise Rating is required to achieve 6.25% dodge reduction, which is the maximum observed value of any NPC. As an example, [Shoulderpads of the Stranger], which used to provide 10 dagger skill rating, now provides 10 expertise rating (all weapons).
The parry reduction element of Expertise will have only marginal use in raid settings: mobs cannot parry attacks made from behind. Many bosses randomly turn to cast attacks and can parry while turning, but this possibility is too random to value significantly. Unlike parry, mobs can dodge attacks from behind and Expertise is currently the only way to reduce the number of dodges. The dodge reduction element of Expertise will vary from encounter to encounter: it will be useless against bosses that are constantly casting (e.g. Shade of Aran, High Astromancer Solarian, Reliquary of Souls) because mobs cannot dodge while casting, but useful against mobs that do not cast or only cast instant spells. Expertise has been shown to affect yellow damage as well as white damage, so under the second circumstance it is actually more useful than hit rating for enhancement shamans.
We still don't know how Expertise's dodge and parry reduction affect the one-roll white attack table. For now, the community is assuming that it converts dodges and parries into hits that do not have a chance to crit. On the other hand, we are now confident that Expertise will allow yellow attacks to crit, since they are resolved through a two-roll system. Thus, we will estimate expertise rating to be similar to the weight of hit rating, with some exceptions.
First, expertise rating is only useful in chunks, because there is no concept of having 2.5 Expertise - the Skill values are all rounded down to whole integers. To get around this, you first need to sum up the expertise rating across all your items, divide by 3.9423, take the floor, and multiply by 3.95 again. This gives you a "white hit rating" equivalency. Note that this makes expertise rating EP discontinous.[footnote]http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Discontinuity.html[/footnote] One expertise rating may be worth 0 EP because it is not enough to give you an extra skill point -- e.g. you go from 14 expertise rating to 15 expertise rating -- while a jump of two expertise rating at the same point may have a surprisingly high EP -- e.g. you go from 14 expertise rating to 16 and thus 0.75% dodge reduction to 1.00% dodge reduction.
Next, we must account for the fact that Expertise, unlike hit rating, also effects the yellow damage from special attacks in addition to the white damage from auto-attacks. To correct for this, you need to multiply by the ratio of melee damage to white damage, or (Yellow % of damage + White % of damage)/(White % of damage). Also, because white crit rate as a percentage of landed swings decreases as hit rate goes up, but with the two-roll system, yellow crit rate stays constant, we must adjust for that. Finally, we must multiply by the EP of 1 hit rating, to convert our "hit rating" equivalency into EP
[top]Weapons
A frequently asked question is how to wield weapons with differing speeds but similar DPS values, such as using a Rising Tide and a Syphon - is it better to put one weapon in the main/off hand over the other? Simulation results indicate that it makes little difference which hand the slower weapon is wielded in. It appears that in general, a 2.x/2.y = 2.y/2.x.
Optimizing enhancement shaman DPS requires running two slow weapons with Windfury Weapon on both weapons.
The best way to choose between multiple items in the same slot is to run Yo's simulator, once for each item, using the stats that you would have with that item equipped. Do not post asking which weapon is best: find out for yourself by running the sim. That said, here are some general guidelines, current as of Patch 2.4.
[top]Main Hand
Current best in slot weapon is [Hand of the Deceiver].
Arena weapons from the latest season (e.g. [Vengeful Gladiator's Cleaver]) are likely to continue the trend of being several DPS better than the best available PvE weapons.
[Rising Tide], [Syphon of the Nathrezim], [Talon of the Phoenix], [Claw of Molten Fury] and [Dragonstrike] are roughly equivalent items and rank just below the S3 weapons.
[Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality] from the Sunwell badge vendor is simulated at within ~10 dps of the S3 and T6 weapons.
Orcs should prioritize axes for the +5 Expertise racial bonus. This is applied per hand non stacking, so an axe/mace combo only applies expertise to the axe, and an axe/axe combo would apply 5 Expertise to each hand (which would be the same as having 5 Expertise on an armor item).
The differences in DPS within these "tiers" are relatively minor. Which weapon is best for you, or which weapon to mainhand and which weapon to offhand, can only be found by using the simulator with your stats, and no general conclusions can be drawn.
[top]Off Hand
OH itemization is fairly poor early on in raiding, but changes in patch 2.3 have added several new options in KZ and ZA that help fill the gaps. If you are not yet raiding, the best choices for OH in a WF/WF setup is a 2.6 speed Gladiator weapon from Arenas, a crafted [Runic Hammer] or a blue one-hand weapon available in several heroic instances. Failing that, you can use a green 2.6 speed weapon from the Auction House.
An epic dagger with high dps (such as [Malchazeen] or [Guile of Khoraazi])and imbued with Flametongue can be used to temporarily replace a green or blue OH weapon. This comes at the cost of reduced Windfury procs, reduced Stormstrike damage, and a reduction in Flurry uptime. This should be seen as a stopgap measure only, not a weapon that you should commit to using for long periods of time.
Current best choice (As of patch 2.4) for an offhand is [Mounting Vengeance] followed by any of the Season 3 Arena weapons ([Vengeful Gladiator's Cleaver]).
Next set of choices include [Rising Tide] and [Syphon of the Nathrezim].
[Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality] is within ~10 DPS of the S3 and T6 weapons and is available off the Sunwell badge vendor.
[top]TwoHand Viability
2H weapons are strictly inferior for PvE DPS situations. Talents and mechanics of shaman DPS at lvl 70 are built around DW. 9% +Hit while DWing through a 0/42/19 build allows all special attacks to be hit capped through talents alone, while a 2H will only receive 3% of the hit benefit. DW also scales better with AP. 2h effectively gains (1.0 * 0.95 hit rate) = 0.95 from AP and DW gains (1.5 * 0.74 hit rate) = 1.11 from AP. The more +hit you have (until we reach cap) the greater the difference between the two is. At a certain point (easily reached when raid buffed), this difference in gain from AP will outweigh the bonus base DPS of a 2H weapon over similar ilevel 1H weapons.
The second largest benefit you bring to your group is Unleashed Rage, and your Flurry and UR uptime will take a large hit from using a 2H, as strings of dodge/miss/non crits become compounded by a single, slower swing time. Threat concerns are even more problematic with a 2H because of large WF procs, requiring that you heavily pad your threat against a tank.
And finally, as mentioned in the Windfury Proc section, DW with WF on both weapons results in an increased chance to proc WF off either hand (36%). 2H weapons will not benefit from that increased proc rate
