Cataclysm Viability of Obsidium Cleaver

[Silegy]

Hello fellow enha shamans!

Intro: A lot of people are questioning about gearing up their new characters, because evryone wants iLvl and bla bla bla. And on the contrary to some more lucky classes (casters, hunters), we get no dedicated weapon from FL trash, while you dont see 359s from BWD trash all that often in AH anymore.
Thats why I decided to tes Obsidium Cleaver on my shammy. Basically I was wodnering whether the loss of some attack power (because Str still gives us 1 AtP) can be worth trading for the weapon damage boost.

Sample character: I tested this weapon on 373 ilvl enha shammy with Claws of Torment in Main Hand slot and Maimgor's Bite in off-hand. Enchants are Landslide in MH and and Hurricane in OH (I know that most of people say that double Landslide is superior, but I go from personal experience. LS on OH meant 1500 dps loss for me even compared to Avalanche. If you want to discuss proper enchanting, please, visit the 4.3.4 Enhacement Discussion thread.)

Damage sample: The damage sample was 5 million damage on Raider's Training Dummy.

Results:
a) Main Hand: With Obsidium Cleaver in MH and Maimgor's Bite in OH, the DPS didn't change* in comparison to Claws of Torment in MH and Maimgor's Bite in OH.
b) Off-Hand: With Obsidium Cleaver in Off-Hand and Claws of Torment in Main Hand, the DPS didn't change* in comparison to Claws of Torment in MH and Maimgor's Bite in OH.
*Note: DPS change smaller than 1% is considered as none for this test. Sample DPS was 22500 DPS

Conclusion: Obsidium Cleaver seems superior to any weapon with iLvl lesser than 359 and seems to be on pair with 359 weapons that give Agility.

So... if you have a brand new enha shammy, go grab yours in Auction house! :cool:

[jaern]

Yeah, Cleaver is a pretty good weapon even for Enh Shamans. I've been using one for pretty much all of FL and just recently upgraded it to the HC version because drops have been sucking big time. The weapon dmg has a huge effect, I've been doing 177k LL crits now.

[Lolmaru]

top end damage is what really counts on a weapon. So be looking for that.