Well, I finally said adios to my trusted PVP cleaver and welcomed in a Netherbane to my off-hand. A fine upgrade and pretty high up there on my list of weapons for an enhancement shaman. 4th overall in value for an enhancement shaman for off-handers currently. This will change come the 2.4 patch, but a darn good off-hand indeed.

Group:

• Hunter (our guild’s best dps’er on 25-person raids, hands down)
• Warrior (long time great player and tankasaur)
• Druid (feral) / Paladin (prot) swapped in for 1 boss Jan’alai
• Rogue
• Shaman (me)

Totems:

• Grace of Air Totem (sometimes twisted with Windfury for the Warrior and Rogue, but 90% GoA)
• Strength of Earth Totem
• Searing Totem
• Healing Stream Totem

Nalorakk

Just dps like mad and don’t pull aggro.

Notes:

• Heroism at about 35% health left on boss
• My miss rate is better this time at about 13%
• Crit rate (white damage): 38%
• Windfury rate: 29%
• Fire resist rate: over 20% (looks like Nalorakk resists fire a fair bit, hmmm if my spell hit was only better)

Akil’zon

I love, love this boss. Very melee friendly! Just dps like mad and don’t pull aggro.

Notes:

• Heroism at about 40% health left on boss
• Nature Resistance Totem used instead of Grace of Air /Windfury. Could have been higher dps!
• My miss rate: 15.6%
• Crit rate (white damage): 35%
• Windfury rate: 30%
• Earth Shock resist rate: over 23% (looks like Akil’zon resists a fair bit of nature damage, hmmm better spell hit will help, but will effect other melee factors)

Halazzi

Still have a few improvements to make on this boss. Seems like the Corrupted Lightning totem does get in my way of making more dps on the boss, but lasting the entire encounter was more important tonight. I even took a sabre-lash or two. Yuck!

Notes:

• Heroism at about 30% health left on boss
• My miss rate: 15%
• Crit rate (white damage): 34%
• Windfury rate: 29%
• Fire resist rate: over 30% (looks like Halazzi resists heaps of fire damage, hmmm)

Jan’alai

My first ever kill of this boss, heck…. it’s my first ever SEEING this boss. He can be a pain, but I just prioritize my targets for bird adds first, Jan’alai 2nd after the bird adds are down.

Notes:

• Stay alive!
• Heroism at about 30% health left on boss
• My miss rate: 20% ouch! Parries ftl!
• Crit rate (white damage): 27%
• Windfury rate: 25% boo!

Hex Lord Malacrass

I pulled on my PVP gear for stamina buffs. All sorts of any kinds of stamina increases so we can all survive the Spirit Bolts (Shadow) ability from the Hex Lord. Made sure I was topped up in health just before the Spirit Bolts came blasting in.

Notes:

• Heroism at about 25% health left on boss
• Group makeup was changed to Rogue, Warrior, Hunter, Hunter & me.
• My miss rate: 15.9%
• Crit rate (white damage): 38%
• Windfury rate: 31%

Add’l details on his abilities on this fight:

We packed up and held Zul’jin for tomorrow.

We were a bit tired and wanted to try Zul’jin with full rested XP, so we’ll try him tomorrow night. Note: this dungeon will reset in 1 day 3 hrs!

We are just on the verdge of getting Mount Hyjal attuned, and the patch 2.4 notes show us that Blizzard has used the nerf bat on attunement again.  No Eye attunement, you just get “Champion of the Naaru”.  No Black Temple attunement, you get the “Hand of A’dal” title.  A giant big “ha ha!” to all the people with the title.   Now anyone can run into Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, so gather up your 25-pugs and get ready to wipe!

Getting less and less turnout from our raid healers, so we farmed up some content from both SSC and Zul’aman tonight.  In hopes of getting our great healers back into the swing of raiding, we downed bosses from Lurker Below to Morogrim in Serpentshrine Cavern then turned out and downed three bosses in Zul’Aman.

• Hydross @ 6th for total damage.  646 dps. blah!

• Morogrim @ 10th overall damage for 919 dps.  Mucho good, but AoE damage rules in this fight.

• Nalorakk  @ 2nd for damage output and 831 dps.

• Akil’zon @ #1 in damage output and 797 dps.

We’re going heavy on Lady Vashj and Kael’thas this week.  Stay tuned for more.

I type in /combatlog, I update the log to wowwebstats.com, but I don’t see the correct totems for the correct owners. 

For example, if I lay down a Searing Totem for the entire Solarian fight, I will see not only my totem but the other two Shamans I raid with as well.  Most damage meters don’t provide the right data either, lumping the totem damage output into overall raid output.

Our dps classes in our guild spam damage meters all the time (gets annoying even if I am on top of the meters), so I decided to look deeply into WWS parsing and see what (if any) I can do to remedy the inaccurate shaman totem syndrome.

Unfortunately, the WoW combat log does not keep the names of the pets with their owners.  In WWS, you assign an “Actor” to a mob type (i.e. player, pet, mob, totem) and if you have a pet for tha actor, WWS will provide a space to assign the pet to an owner.  However, for shamans the totem names are the same (e.g. three shamans pop Searing Totem and therefore you will see three Searing Totems doing damage, but we cannot identify any one totem to a shaman).

I started keeping track of totems by having my fellow shamans throw down a lower rank totem when they are using the same totem type.  I plant a Searing Totem VII and my other shaman buddy throws down a Searing Totem VI.  If I scan the combatlog, all my totems with VII are assigned to me, all totems with VI are assigned to the other shaman in the raid. 

The end result of all this is…. I’m missing out on 8.9% of my total damage output in the WWS reports.  Based on this fact alone, I might be changing to SWStats because it uses the WoW API to identify pet owners correctly.  More testing in store for me.

Can you believe it?  After patch 2.3.2, we hurled into SSC and 6 Nether Vortex drops in less than 2 hours.   

Another installment of my combat in Zul’Aman as an enhancement shaman, this time with no rogues and no dps warriors!  Oh mah gowd!

First off for the night, a run to Gruul and his ogrekin.

After a pretty quick Gruul run, we split into two teams: one for Zul’Aman and one for badge farming in Karazhan.  I am still after the fist weapon Fury off-hand from Nalorakk so I hopped into the Zul’Aman raid.  14% drop rate? More like 1.4% for me!

For the record … Nalorakk deaths 6: Fury drops 0.

We missed the 20 minute timed run by 1 minute (a silly wipe that everyone knew would happen and yet we still bungled the trolls and got nailed). 

Party:

• Prot Warrior
• Feral Druid
• Hunter
• Resto Druid
• Shaman (me)

Buffs were agility with Grace of Air totem, Strength of Earth totem, Searing totem & Greater Fire Elemental totem, as well as Mana Spring totem (for resto druid & me).  The guild leader (feral druid) asked me to switch from Grace of Air to Windfury totem, so I changed that almost 2 minutes into the fight.  I’m not sure if the Prot Warrior was having any trouble, but the Windfury would surely help him.

I was 2nd in dps for Nalorakk, not bad considering I was up against our guild dps captain, the hunter.  He is usually #1 dps in our 25-person raids, so I’m not feeling too bad about it.  And check out the 976 dps for the fight!  That might be one of the highest dps I’ve had vs. a proper raid boss. 

 Well, I thought maybe I need to step it up a notch, so I went to the Eagle Avatar Akil’Zon with a melee friendly fighter’s anticipation.  Low and behold, it paid off!  #1 in dps for this fight and I love the 934 dps I managed for the fight.  Almost to the holy grail of 1000 dps for a raid boss.

I peeked at my miss rate here and it was up at 20% vs. Akil’Zon.  Need to look at that some more.  My +hit rating was 150 the entire time in Zul’Aman.

Halazzi, the Lynx Avatar, is one boss fight I like almost as much as the Eagle and Bear avatars, but I often die once during the fight.  I was even asked to place my shaman self in front of Halazzi in order to split up the Saber Lashes and you can guess how I ended up…. taking a dirt nap!

Dps dropped a lot mostly because my potion/flask ran out and I died twice vs. Halazzi.

Overall, not too bad considering I had to shift a lot to take out totems.  I was tops on totem duty, even though my dps could have been much higher on the boss if I ignored the Corrupted Lightning totems. 

/target corrupted

I had the same gear on as Nalorakk and Akil’Zon and my miss rate vs. Halazzi was 16.4%.

Totems dropped for Halazzi fight (probably should have dropped Nature Resistance totem to resist the Corrupted Lightning totem damage):

• Grace of Air Totem
• Strength of Earth Totem
• Searing Totem
• Mana Spring Totem  
• Fire Elemental Totem
• Stoneskin Totem (when I told to take a saber lash!)

History of some bosses I’ve battled.