3 weapon swap in 5.2?

[shokbeard]

Hello i have been on the ptr doing some random things on my shaman when i noticed if an enhance shaman had the 4 piece set bonus would it be best to have 3 weapons 2 of them with windfury on them and the final one with flametounge and have a macro for wen u cast lava lash to switch to the flametongue wep and otherwise just have the 2 windfurys going for ultra fast wolves. i tried it out with just 2 weps both with windfury and i could basically get wolves on an ~40 second CD. so in short which would be more dps if a shaman had T15 4 piece the 3 weps and wep swap lava lash macro useage or just what we have been doing for the last 2 xpacs with windfury on MH adn flametonge OH. ofc would be a great help to inform me which talents u used

[Starsinn]

A weapon swap triggers a gcd and resets swing timer. It would be a net dps loss.

I realize enh has some downtime in the rotation but you dont want to be spending 2 gcds swapping weaps every 10 seconds. You would have to swap 1.5 seconds before lavalash comes off cd then switch back. 3 seconds of nothing every 10 sec.

[Deleted]

3 problems:

1) windfury has a 3 second internal CD, so even if you're using 2 windfury weapons, you're not going to see much more windfury procs.
2) equipping a weapon resets your swing timer, which you're doing 2 times every 8 seconds.
3) /equip always tries to equip in the first slot, i.e. the mainhand. not to mention that it also incurs a global CD.

[tuesday the paladin]

3 problems:

1) windfury has a 3 second internal CD, so even if you're using 2 windfury weapons, you're not going to see much more windfury procs.
2) equipping a weapon resets your swing timer, which you're doing 2 times every 8 seconds.
3) /equip always tries to equip in the first slot, i.e. the mainhand. not to mention that it also incurs a global CD.

The third one is the easiest to fix by using /equipslot 17 [weapon name] to equip something in your offhand. But still, the loss of GCDs and autoattack by continually changing weapons just isn't worth doing.

[shokbeard]

hm ok so if we were to just have 2 weps no wep swaping i understand its a net dps lose (even thought with my current amount of testing on the ptr it doesnt seem like much) but would the basic 35~ cd on wolves outweigh the dps lose of no flametogue wep? the 35~ cd on wolves was found timing out the cd on a 15 min fight on a dummy.

[Starsinn]

Without doing any testing myself i would hazard a guess that its not a gain to use double winfury.

As nzall pointed out windfury has a 3 sec internal cd so the wf procs wont happen much more often than with one weapon imbued with wf.
Have you tested the average cooldown of wolves with the standard wf/ft combo? Id be curious to know how much time double wf takes off their cd.

Also, think about the loss of damage on lavalashes. 30% is quite a bit and faster wolves may not make up for it. At least not in an average 8 min fight. Lei shei for example. What if she hides when you have wolves out? It would have been better to have lavalashed for 30% more even once or twice. Still, I like that you are thinking outside the box.

Again. Im only speculating or at least offering an educated guess.

[Eruionmel]

Well, it's been pretty thoroughly covered by everyone else. But one thing that wasn't mentioned is that Blizzard very, very clearly wants shaman to use two different imbues and, if for some reason they failed in their balancing and 2x WF became higher DPS, you can guarantee that they would hotfix something to make it a loss (probably baking more damage % into lava lash, but it could be any number of things). So it's basically a moot idea anyway.

[Razecog]

Any shaman worth his totems should know that WF has a ICD. :P