Shaman Totems vs Paladin Blessings

[Kevin]

Windfury does not affect ranged attacks. The current Windfury + SoE is slightly better than BoK + BoM for melee dps, but also keep in mind that you can't use poisons or other temporary weapon enchants and Windfury at the same time. If it's a fight where Alliance players choose to use sharpening or weight stones, then the advantage is negated. With the new nerfed windfury, Windfury+SoE will be worse than Bok + BoM for melee dps. And that's even assuming that you're in a group with a shaman and that the encounter does not require moving around. Plus, BoK gives more life. Also, paladins can give their auras to their parties on top of their blessings.

Right but nerfed Windfury + GoA + SoE > BoK + BoM easily. GoA scales for melee DPS as well, fully ranked and talented it's 88 agi which is over 4% crit for a warrior and 3% crit for a rogue. Crit scales with weapon damage. Windfury scales with weapon damage. SoE and BoM don't. Kings scales with gear as well but right now even with the scaling it's not as strong. You have consider that with raid wide totems the melee DPS will have all 3. And at least in the older dungeons (MC and BWL and even parts of AQ40) you can learn where to put Tranquil air so that it hits the melee DPS but not the tank becuase those are static positioning fights and you can play with the location to get it to work, I have to assume the group would be able to get it so that melee DPS can raise the damage cieling by 20% so that the extra damage matters. Still a lower cieling but I'm not sure that matters.

If you want to look at the mostly irrelevant totems and blessings stoneskin + healing stream ~ blessing of sanctuary + judgement of light. Since healing stream will get benefit from +healing the damage reduction (I don't count either of those as healing, I count them as damage reduction) is pretty much equal. But those combos don't really matter that much in most raid situations. Though horde would have that little addition all the time and alliance wouldn't because not a lot of paladins spec to blessing of sanctuary, but that doesn't really matter either.

The question of getting the judgement up and keeping it up alliance side seems pretty irrelevant. You can apply it from a decent range and it is safe to assume that you will have one or two paladins with 3/3 lasting judgement meaning it stays for 40 seconds even if the paladin can't get up there and swing.

Regarding hunters, GoA <<<<<<<<< BoK + BoW + JoW. Way way way worse. Horde hunters put up far less dps than Alliance hunters, because Horde hunters have to spend much more time drinking in the middle of combat. The hunter is the class that benefits the most from paladin blessings vs shaman buffs.

Cutting edge encounters, I can agree, easily. Older stuff (after you are geared really well for it) I don't always agree. I've got a horde hunter and when we first started MC I had to drink in most boss fights or deal DPS without using mana. Now my mana pool nearly always lasts the whole encounter even going all out, and a demonic rune is generally enough mana back to get me to the end. This is mostly because we know the encounters better and because as we gear up more our raid DPS is better and the encounter finishes faster. I also know that BoW + JoW does not prevent an alliance hunter from having to FD and drink. It does extend the mana pool a fair bit but I'm not sure it extends it enough.

I'm not sure on what the proc rate of JoL is, I would believe 50% though. Rhok is 2.9 speed. 15% speed quiver is 2.5. So that makes it easy to figure out as 59 mana/5. Blessing of wisdom is 40 mana/5. That puts you at 99 mana/5.

I figure you stay at the fully buffed totems so I'm getting 88 agi from the totem. Current gear I would get 36 agi from kings + a slightly extended mana pool. So I'm up by 52 agi which is 104 AP and 1% crit. So 7 DPS from AP and in my gear that crit would be at least 1 more DPS more likely 2. I can go about 110 seconds till OOM (I do get some base regen in in the shot rotation). So in any fight that lasts 110 seconds or less. I win. Longer fights I will lose but by how much? MC, BWL time from start to end, yeah I'm covered for most of those. A demonic rune can extend that time to drink by at least 20 seconds more though I admit you can't always take the life hit for that even as a hunter.

In that 110 seconds the alliance hunter would be getting 2178 mana back. That + more regen would be another 40 seconds or so before needing to drink. So were I alliance I would have to drink about every 150 seconds vs every 110 seconds. I put out 780 or so more damage in my 110 seconds. So in fights that last 110 - 150 seconds I lose. In fights that last 150-220 seconds I'm back to winning again because we both had to drink once. And while the alliance hunter won't have to drink as long (thanks to the other regen going on) I'm not going to worry about that.

Any fight that goes over 330 seconds I should lose since there won't be anymore windows of we both drank the same amount of time. Those will all be I had to drink more.

And really that math is very rough. The fight can probably be shorter than 5.5 minutes to swing the advantage alliance side. But really that is what you need to do, on a basic level, to see who gets more for the buffs. This is of course assuming the hunter has a shaman. And to be fair I should put at least mana spring (not tide that tide shaman won't be in with hunters). Again assuming the hunter gets a shaman (they go to tanks, melee and healers before they go to hunters for us). That would just change the windows of drinking and slide things out a little farther. Just redo the calcs with alliance getting 74 mana/5 more (since mana spring is 25 mana/5) and you should be close enough. Hmm I also didn't factor in the larger mana pool from BoK.

Raid wide totems would simply ensure that all hunters got GoA and mana spring. We still lose out the longer the fight goes and win as long as the fight is shorter than base mana or 1 or 2 drink cycles will get you. We don't scale as well though. The crit from GoA is a scaling factor, but hunters are able to push 600 agi without buffs (maybe more) which starts to make kings close the DPS gap even more.

Tranquil air, like blessing of salvation still pretty much doesn't matter as both alliance and horde hunters will be using FD for aggro control. It only matters if you get crit strings at bad times or if an FD is resisted.



What about caster DPS with raid wide? All casters would get mana spring and tranquil air (agian I figure you can learn the positioning to keep tanks out of it). Healing stream is probably going to be > Judgement of light for damage mitigation on a caster, it's 35 healing/5 and seal of light at 61 per proc 50% proc rate is 30.5 for a 2.5 second cast spell. Healing stream does get some benefit from the +healing on the shaman too. Does that matter much? I doubt it. The damage cieling is 10% lower, and the mana pools are still smaller (25 mana/5 vs 40).


If you let the resist totems be raid wide, or the cleansing totems be raid wide that could cause problems. Paladins don't give the whole raid 60 fire or frost resist. Raid wide totems would let a couple shaman (consider range on the totems) do that though. Those would have to stay party. Same with the cleansing totems. They already give some advantage in ZG and AQ20 (and yes you have to think about those places and think about groups that aren't in MC and BWL purples being in there). I also agree that mana tide should stay party only and get a buff even as a party only totem as it is only 1160 mana over the course of 12 seconds and with the 5 minute cooldown that is really only 19 mana/5. Yes I am saying that mana tide when considered over the long haul is in fact worse mana/5 than mana spring if you only use one or the other, which of course is not what you do. Since you can only have one or the other down you do spring and then tide when it is up so it's just a "kick" to the rate. Use them both and you actually should end up getting 43.3 mana per 5 (In the 300 second window you get 288 seconds of mana spring at 5 mana per second and 12 seconds of mana tide at 96 2/3 mana per second for a total of 2600 mana / 3000 seconds or 43.3 mana/5).


Keep the resist, cleanse, and mana tide totems party only and even with raid totems 5 paladins out buff 5 shaman. I think one shaman could out buff 1 paladin though. 25 mana/5 for every that gets in the range (and I'll assume 30 yards, I'll assume they have the resto talent), 88 agi (this is a raid shaman 12 points in enhancement for the totem buff is like 11 points in prot for a pally to get blessing of kings) for everyone and I take that over windfury because when looking at all physical DPS classes it will help the raid more), 88 str for everyone as well. Of course the agi might not be there and you place it so that much of your ranged DPS at least can get benefit from it. A single paladin could not do that. But I think if you look at 2 pallies and 2 shaman that pretty much goes away.

I didn't talk about blessing of light because with healing way in the game now it is pretty much irrelavant too. It only made flash of light comparable to lesser healing wave in raid situations and healing way will actually make healing wave better than holy light in a raid. Paladins still have more longevity though, so the healing issue isn't that big of a deal. Shaman burst better, paladins last longer. I think the healing sides are pretty fair while being different.


Yeah I think some raid totems would be good. Since only one totem of that type can affect a person (I can't have mana tide and mana spring on me at the same time) more shaman placing the same totem only affects the range. Totems are still harder to use and in most cases even with being able to get more totem effects on people are not going to really be all that imbalanced.