Totem Twisting (Enh)

At some point (probably numerous points), you're going to have some rogue or dps warrior tell you that a good shaman will totem twist. Here is the basics of what totem twisting is:

Windfury (WF) Totem is not a static buff. The way that it works is that the totem "pulses" and provides a temporary weapon buff lasting 9 seconds. That buff gives a 20% chance to get an extra swing with an AP modifier. Note that it will not overwrite other temporary weapon buffs like poisons or sharpening stones. While that buff is in effect, you can drop a Grace of Air (GoA) totem, providing a boost to agility until the end of the WF Totem, at which point, you drop another WF Totem, then another GoA. This rotation of totems is what is known as "totem twisting".

Now during retail TBC, there was no real consensus, even among top shamans, as to whether or not totem twisting was useful. On the surface, it looks like a no-brainer. You get additional agility for the entire melee party of your raid at an 83% uptime (a minimum of 1.5 seconds out of every 9 is spent with WF Totem down instead of GoA, so it's not a perfect 100% GoA uptime), which means more AP for rogues and hunters and more crit for everyone.

However, there are several issues with totem twisting that serve to make it of only mild use.

The first is that enhancement shamans have very limited mana pools. Assuming that you're resto sub-spec (which is *generally* preferable, especially at high gear levels), you benefit from the reduced totem costs and it is possible to keep twisting going with Shamanistic Rage. At lower gear levels, this generally just isn't possible, as the mechanic for SR doesn't provide enough mana at low AP levels to keep twisting for extended fights. Additionally, at lower gear levels, the elemental sub-spec is sometimes better dps than the resto sub-spec (as the lowered CD of shocks provides a better dps increase than the hit % of the resto sub-spec). Totem twisting with the elemental sub-spec is just a terrible idea, partly because of the increased totem costs and partly because...

Totem twisting involves delaying personal dps abilities. You'll lose about 20% of your shock damage and 10% of your stormstrike damage while totem twisting because you'll be locked in GCDs when those abilities come off cooldown. Because of the varying CD timers of our abilities (6 seconds for shocks, 10 seconds for Stormstrike), we don't have a clean rotation that we can macro. Enhancement is not a 1-button spec, no matter how hard you try. When you twist, that's a 3 second lockout that you're not doing anything else. This leads to a significant increase in time where shocks or SS are off of cooldown, but cannot be used because you yourself are in GCD. With the elemental sub-spec, this is even more pronounced, because you've got a 5 second shock timer, increasing the amount of time spent in GCD even without twisting. How much this affects raid dps depends on your gearing vs. the gearing of your rogues and warriors. If you're a Kara-geared enhancement shaman in a group with a double glaive rogue, your dps loss will be more than offset by your party's increased damage. But it's impossible to make a blanket statement one way or the other because it depends on the personal dps of each party member.

Finally, the benefit of twisting assumes that you never clip a WF Totem. Mobility, latency and user error can all cause WF to drop off of your party members. Grace of Air is not a bad buff, but there's a reason that you always want WF on your party in a raid, and that is because WF is a FAR superior buff for a group that's likely to be 1 kitty feral, 1 enh shaman, 1 hunter and 2 rogues/warriors. The loss of WF for even a short time can completely mitigate the benefit of twisting altogether.

TL;DR there's not really a right or wrong here. Or rather, there is, but they're so close together that it really doesn't matter. The other enhancement shaman from my TBC guild and myself both decided that twisting wasn't worthwhile for us. And we were killing KJ, so it's not like we didn't know what we were doing. If you want to experiment with twisting, go for it. It's not difficult to do as long as you are reasonable at keeping track of your timer and your latency isn't too bad. If you don't want to twist and your GM/RL insists that you do, you might want to educate them as to the pluses and minuses. Most people don't actually know anything about it beyond hearing the term and that it can be a dps increase.

since i've been 2late on the ret seal twisting, i'll do it here

> inb4 you can't totem twist because wf disappears immediately instead of on the 9sec delay

To me this totem twisting is a bit like using rend as a fury warr in Wotlk:
Gives small benefit for the risk of messing the whole rotation up.

I'm going to leave this here for anyone who wants to try totem twisting (TT). This macro will fill in stormstrikes as well. Please note this isnt perfect TT macro but if you want to try it with minimal effort it helps a lot.

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=10 Stormstrike, Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem