How To Windfury Effectively

The Windfury Weapon enchant is the bread and butter of an enhancement shaman’s damage output. Weapon selection plays a key role in maximizing the amount of damage the shaman can do. This post will cover how to get the most out of the shaman’s windfury weapon enchant and which weapons will work best for dealing the most damage.

In short, shaman want to dual wield the slowest pair of one-handed weapons they can find and put windfury weapon on both weapons. This is statistically the best method for producing the highest DPS. Read on for the in’s and out’s for why this is the case.

Windfury Weapon Enchant

Windfury Weapon is one of the weapon enchants the shaman can apply to their own weapons. The tooltip reads:

Each hit has a 20% chance of dealing additional damage equal to two extra attacks with 445 extra attack power.

This basically says that the shaman has a chance on every normal weapon attack of dealing two additional attacks instantly. Essentially, this results in three attacks at one time assuming the shaman didn’t miss or the attack wasn’t dodged.

What is not shown in the tooltip is that the windfury proc (*) has a three second cooldown. That means that windfury will not trigger more than once per three seconds. Windfury enchants put on dual wielded weapons will share the same cooldown meaning only one windfury from one weapon will proc every three seconds.

In order to maximize windfury damage the shaman must take into account weapon speed. The following equation shows how windfury damage output is calculated:

weapon speed * ( weapon dps + attack power bonus + windfury proc bonus )

The biggest thing to notice is that weapon speed is a multiplier. The damage calculation from the other factors is multiplied by weapon speed. The slower the weapon the more damage windfury generates.

Weapon Speeds

The goal for using windfury is to allow it to proc as much as possible. Using a two-hand weapon that is slower than the three second cooldown gives a proc rate of 20% (base proc rate). If dual wielding and if windfury is on both weapons the chance goes up to approximately 36%. This is higher than the tooltip because the statistic only counts eligible swings and does not include swings that are inside the three second cooldown.

The goal when selecting weapons is to pick a weapon that will swing the least amount of times during the windfury cooldown. One-hand weapons with speeds in the range of 2.6 to 2.8 work best for maximizing windfury damage. Here’s a list of weapons that fit the bill.

Using a fast off-hand weapon is not recommended since it will basically steal procs from the main hand weapon. Plus those procs will be for much less damage than a weapon with a slower speed.

More Information

Two very interesting and detailed articles are posted on the Elitist Jerks web site. The articles go into a lot of theorycraft on Windfury Weapon and how it compares to Windfury Totem. They are definitely worth a read if you are interested in the mechanics and mathematics behind the damage calculations.

* Proc refers to when a weapon or item activates with a “Chance on Hit” or “Chance on Use” effect. Generally accepted to be short for Programmed Random OCcurrence. [source]

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