Windfury After the 2.1 Patch

Much to the sorrow of shaman-lovers everywhere, it’s being nerfed. Yes, our most beloved weapon enchant and the basis of so many dual-wielding enhancement builds won’t be so great in the near future. Exactly when is still up in the air, since the patch is currently being testing, but it’s going to happen, and it’ll have the Jedi saying, “It was as if millions of voices shamans suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced respecced.”

There’s a great critical analysis of Windfury after the 2.1 patch over on the Warcraft forums, but here’s a quick summary. Windfury procs will now have a three-second “invisible cooldown,” thus limiting the potential burst damage (those double-procs were just too much for some non-shamans to survive tolerate, I guess ). Procs will still happen about 20% of the time, but there’s a catch: off-hand procs have been nerfed to 50% of the damage they used to add, and they will trigger the invisible cooldown for both weapons.

This means you’ll either want a high-damage, low-attack speed off-hand weapon (even to the point of lower DPS) to counteract the decrease or you won’t want to put windfury on your off-hand weapon at all. Naturally, this takes the wind out of most dual-wielding enhancement builds (no pun intended).

I don’t think the change will be too harsh on non-epic shamans, who can simply put flametongue or rockbiter on their off-hand weapons and achieve a relatively respectable, albeit somewhat reduced, DPS. As the writer of the post points out, however, very high-level shamans will suffer from the other weapon enchants’ lack of scalability. After all, when you’re swinging naturally high DPS weapons, the static boost from rockbiter is a much smaller increase than the scaling boost of windfury.

To those of you who don’t like crunching the numbers (I sure don’t), I say go with a windfury/rockbiter combination or respec. I hear resto is all the rage this season.