AeroWow

We’ve got two DPS enchants for our boots.

Greater Assault
Icewalker

One gives AP. One gives Hit and Crit. If you’re Fury, or if you can make use of the Hit as Arms, pick up Icewalker. Otherwise, the straight AP is the way to go. As always, go with Rawr/spreadsheet.

Okay, cool.

However, I would never recommend either of these enchants as your standard boot enhancement.

Wait… What?

It’s all about the Runspeed. There’s two options here:

Tuskarr’s Vitality (TV)
Cat’s Swiftness (CS)

The choice is yours; even though the latter is a Burning Crusade enchant, it provides the same 8% boost as the Wrath one. The difference is 15 Stam versus 6 Agility, and is a total toss-up. Given the copious amounts of Stam on our gear already (I’m currently sitting on a 25 thousand health pool completely unbuffed, and that’s as Arms, without the second weapon), I personally lean towards Cat’s Swiftness. More DPS is always a good thing, too.
But… The “pure DPS” enchants look much more attractive!

I don’t care.

As melee, we have one goal that supersedes all else (aside from living): Stay on target. If you’re not in melee range, you can’t use melee abilities. Therefore, if you’re not in melee range, you’re essentially not doing anything – gaining rage, spending rage, or maintaining buffs / debuffs.

Anything that can help us increase our time-on-target will always be a fantastic opportunity in any situation where we are moving. Between moving out of the green stuff, moving to new targets, or moving around the battlefield for any other reason, there’s a lot of non-stationary action going on in Wrath raiding.

There is some math floating out in cyberspace for Mages that leads to the conclusion that if one spends at least 4 seconds out of every minute moving, then runspeed overtakes the other available enchants. Since we’re moving more than any mage would, this 4 second rule is met in the vast majority of raid encounters.
I’m not quite convinced

Think of it this way. Runspeed scales with the rest of your stats in a way that the the other boot enchants cannot hope to achieve. The more damage you deal while on-target, the better runspeed is, as it reduces the time you’re not dealing that damage.

Say you deal 5k DPS. If you must move for 4 seconds in a minute (an extremely conservative estimate of a typical raid encounter), you can convert 8% of that time into damage dealt at 5K DPS. In this case, you’re saving .08 * 4 = .32 , roughly one-third of a second. .32 * 5000 = 1600. So, Tuskarr’s essentially nets you 1600 damage over the course of that minute, which translates into an effective 27 DPS. The actual damage output gain is higher than this, though, as the earlier you get to your target, the more long-cooldown rotational abilities (read: Whirlwind) you can fit in before the target dies or you need to move once again.

This is also completely ignoring the survival benefits of the enchant, which are not trivial. Runspeed is the epitome of raw utility.
Alright, I’m sold, and not looking back!

Well, I wouldn’t dismiss the stat boot enchants out of hand. They absolutely have a place in our arsenal, in any fight that exhibits little to no movement. Any sort of stand-and-deliver (Patchwerk, Vezax, Ignis) inherently lacks a movement component, so the “pure DPS” enchants will provide more to your output than runspeed. This also includes any fight where the movement is not critical to performance – Iron Council, and arguably Anub’Arak (as the DPS time is fully stationary).

The key is to understand the encounter as a whole, and from that you can determine how to maximize your play. Maximizing your play, in reference to boot enchants, may mean carrying around some scrolls of [runspeed enchant of choice] and ["pure DPS" boot enchant of choice], to swap out necessary.

If, after all of this, you’re still not ready to ditch the “pure DPS” boot enchants, I challenge you to an experiment. Put runspeed on your boots for one entire week of raiding. Do heroics with it, tank with it, PvP with it, whatever. Then, after that one week, go back to your old enchant. I can almost promise that you will feel weighed down, tethered without runspeed.

PS. And if you’re an Engineer, count your blessings.

PPS. If anybody could provide a source for the “4 second rule”, I’d greatly appreciate it. The best I’ve found through my GoogleFu is the Mage Compendium over on Elitist Jerks. I’d really love to see the source data on this.

UPDATE! Found one source of mathematical foundations for determining the breakpoint of “pure DPS” and runspeed: Enhancement Shaman on the Theorycrafting Thinktank

Tags: 8 percent, boot, ca’t swiftness, enchant, feet, gearing, greater assault, icewalker, melee, optimize, run speed, runspeed, scaling, tuskarr

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Veneretio Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Sound logic and a very nice piece of food for thought. I must say though, it’s unsettling reading your work. You seem to have a very similar writing style to myself.
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BWarner Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 11:21 pm

I’ll admit – I’ve been reading your blog / posts on Tankspot for quite a while now, Vene. Your blog played a large part in spurring me on to start my own. The whole “talk to yourself to create the illusion of an actual conversation” I totally stole from you, too, though I don’t use it too often.

Glad to see you lurking around these parts, and thanks for the compliment!
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BWarner Says:
October 15th, 2009 at 11:28 pm

Some discussion of this post over at WowInterface.