[Guide] The Enhancment Shaman

[Amedis]

Original Guide from EJ


An Enhancement Shaman is an integral part of any melee group. Besides offering substantial personal DPS, an Enhancement Shaman brings group specific buffs through talents beyond those offered by a Resto Shaman. These include Unleashed Rage (an on-crit proc for 10% additional melee AP), Strength of Earth (+97 STR) Windfury (20% proc instant attack with extra AP), and Grace of Air (+88 AGI). Enhancement shamans are equally useful in a main tank group, offering increased dodge and armor, or increased threat generation.

An Enhancement Shaman is not a melee healer. While many will have a resto sub-spec and can certainly help top off a group after an AoE or step in to prevent an emergency, their gear's focus on melee stats makes them unsuitable healers in the endgame. An Enhancement Shaman should be dedicated to DPS, maximizing Unleashed Rage and totem coverage for his group.

Enhacement Shaman have four sources of damage:
Windfury, a weapon imbue that gives the shaman a 20% proc of two instant attacks with a substantial AP bonus
Stormstrike, a 10s cooldown instant attack with both weapons
Elemental Shocks, shared cooldown instant elemental damage offering stealth prevention, snaring or interruption
Fire Totems, pulsed direct or AoE fire damage
The vast majority (75-80%) of a shaman's damage comes from autoattack and Windfury. Shamans also have three on-crit procs: the aforementioned UR, Flurry (3 attacks at +30% speed) and a special clearcasting state for shocks.

Enhancement shaman are highly gear dependent, perhaps more so than any other DPS class. The 'skill' required to be effective at the class manifests in proper gear selection prior to combat; during combat the amount of 'skill' to produce respectable DPS consists mainly of staying in contact with the mob and maintaining totem coverage. This gives an Enhancement Shaman a great deal of latitude while DPSing since there are a limited number of actions that we can perform while waiting on Stormstrike and Shock cooldowns, allowing many possible global cooldowns to be used for purging mobs or removing poison/disease debuffs with no interruption of the DPS cycle.

Windfury Weapon

Mechanics of the Windfury Weapon imbue can be found in the Shaman: Windfury article. Below are specifics as they relate to weapon choices for Enhancement Shaman.

Windfury Weapon is the best weapon imbue to use – former CM Tseric has stated that the devs have no plans to scale the other weapon buffs to match Windfury. [footnote]http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102731970&pageNo=1&sid=1#0[/footnote]


Weapon Speed Interaction

Weapon Speeds play an important role in maximizing DPS from Windfury procs. The goal is to chain WF procs every 3 seconds, as soon as each cooldown ends. Both the OH and the MH need to be as slow as possible to achieve this(they do not need to be matched in speed, just as slow as you can get it). The idea is to reduce the number of swings made during the time that windfury is on cooldown. Since the cooldown is 3 seconds, weapons speeds are preferred to be close to that speed, generally this means 2.6 - 2.8 under current itemization. The idea is that a faster weapon would proc a WF, and then strike again within the cooldown window, which means that windfury would exit cooldown and your weapon would still be on some significant portion of its swing timer, unable to proc another WF.

Many shaman will correctly use a slow MH weapon but use a fast OH such as a dagger, generally because its easier to find fast OHs than slow ones. This combination however means that your OH is much more likely to be the first one to hit outside of a WF cooldown and will "steal" the potential chance to proc, placing your main hand on lockdown. In order to maximize the potential for MH procs the OH needs to be as slow as possible.

The image below [footnote]courtesy of Yo![/footnote] illustrates this principle. You can see that as the MH and OH approach 2.6 speed (arbitrarily chosen as the cut off point for the scale) that the number of WF procs lost to the OH become lower, at around a 45% predicted loss rate. A fast OH with a slow MH combination has a higher rate of loss to the OH, at nearly 55%.

Windfury Proc Rate

When you are wielding a two handed weapon, or are using a shield, your chance to proc windfury on any landed attack outside the 3-second cooldown is 20%. When you dual wield weapons, the chance on each landed attack outside the 3-second cooldown is approximatedly 36%, if and only if both weapons are imbued with Windfury. [footnote]Originally posted by Disquette on the WoW official forums. Original post is no longer archived by Blizzard.[/footnote]

Analysis of the combat log shows that if you sum all hits, the proc rate while DWing is 20%, but that includes hits you make while inside the 3 second cooldown, which cannot actually proc WF. When you remove the ineligible hits the observed proc rate from the eligible hits becomes 36%.

Can Windfury Totem avoid the cooldown problem?

While you may ~think~ it will help you avoid the WF cooldown problem, the totem isn't providing anywhere near the benefit you'll get from the weapon imbue.
WF Totem has the following issues: no elemental weapons bonus (40% multiple), only one extra attack (200% multiple), lesser AP bonus (scalar). Each MH WF Totem hit would be 100% extra damage or so compared to a normal attack, and has only one chance of proc'ing flurry, any weapon procs, and UR. Each MH WF imbue hit would be 280% extra damage or so compare to a normal attack, and has 2 chances of proc'ing those things.
In a very very simplified way of looking at it, you'd have to proc MH WF 2.8 as many times using the totem as you do using the imbue, for it to be worth it.

Flametongue and Frostband Viability?

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Stormstrike

Stormstrike is an instant attack with both weapons. Unlike many other classes that have normalized instant attacks (Mortal Strike for example), Stormstrike is not normalized. Non normalized instant attacks benefit greatly from using the slowest weapons with the highest DPS possible.

Stormstrike provides two major benefits to the Enhancement Shaman - it is capable of producing Windfury procs, and it will proc, but not consume, Flurry

Elemental Shocks

There are 2 possible rotations that an Enhancement shaman can use. Initially most shaman will assume that with the Stormstrike nature damage bonus Earth Shock spam will yield more DPS. However, Earth Shock is a binary spell and is susceptible to full resists, whereas Flame Shock has no binary component and will benefit from partial resist rates due to spell hit. Additionally, Flame Shock benefits from Curse of Elements and the Improved Scorch Debuff, while Earth Shock is only amplified by Stormstrike. (Both benefit from Misery)

In determining the ideal rotation, let us assume a sandbox environment with no crits and no resists to worry about. The mob will be fully raid debuffed with CoE and Malediction, Misery, and Improved Scorch Debuff. Assume that Earth Shock always has the benefit of Stormstrike, and that the Enhance Shaman in question has 2500 Attack Power, yielding 750 spell damage (approximate) with the Mental Quickness talent. Earth Shock has a spell damage coefficient of 0.42 and Flame Shock has a coefficient of 0.67.

Talent Builds

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Elemental or Resto sub-spec

No real difference anymore, matter of personal preference,
Placeholder text.

The Myth of Elemental Devastation

One of the more prevalent suggestions is that Enhance Shaman should optimize their DPS by speccing into Elemental for a 5 second shock cooldown, 5% increased shock damage, and of course the Elemental Devastation Talent, typically achieved by removing points from Mental Quickness and/or Improved Weapon Totems for an 18/43/0 build.

The logic of this build is fundamentally flawed. A properly geared Enhancement Shaman will have at most a 6% spell crit rate from Intellect. Under perfect conditions this will amount to a 1% crit gain from Elemental Devastation. Under not-so-perfect conditions, this talent would be negligible and worthless to an Enhancement shaman.
The probability of getting 2 crit shocks in a row at 6% spell crit, in order to sustain the extra melee crit bonus of Elemental Devastation, is 1-(1- 0.6)^2 = 0.118. That's about 12% uptime of an extra 1% crit from 3 talent points.

Hit Rating

Enhance Shaman do not require large amounts of Hit Rating on gear. Effectively, because we can get a large quantity of +Hit from talents (9%), our special attacks (windfury and stormstrike) are already hit capped. All the extra +Hit rating on your gear is going toward improving white damage only, which typically comprises between 45%-50% of your total damage. When you consider the itemization costs of hit rating compared to crit rating and AP, which directly impact 90% of a shaman's total damage, you can see why hit rating is given lower precedence. Take the talents to hit cap your specials, any hit rating on gear after that is icing on the cake.

A common misconception is that you "have to hit before you can crit." This is a fallacy and illustrates a misunderstanding of the attack table. (Note that this is in reference to white damage which uses a single roll system.)

A second misconception is that a miss is a "missed opportunity for a WF proc" and that more Hit Rating will generate more WF procs. This misconception is generated from the flawed assumption that all swings are possible WF procs. However only swings that are outside of the WF cooldown are eligible to proc WF. A good portion of your autoattack hits will never be capable of producing WF procs. A 5 minute fight with no flurry would see 115 white swings with a 2.6 speed weapon. A Shaman might look at that and think that 0.36 * 115 = 41 possible WF procs, but that is incorrect since each successful proc locks out 1-2 hits that follow, shrinking the pool of actual eligible hits. It is actually quite difficult to calculate the number of attacks that you *should* have producing WF in a given amount of time, and that is why we rely on simulators to generate the EP value of Hit Rating.

There is no magic value of +Hit that an Enhance Shaman needs We need as much of every stat as we can get, but hit rating is just less important than the others. That does not mean that the goal is to have low hit rating either though. Rogues and Warriors require large amounts of +Hit to be effective because of their energy/rage feedback system and because they do not have talents that can hit cap their specials before considering hit on gear. Enhance shaman have no such feedback system and are able to hit cap specials through talents - therefore, hit rating above and beyond your talents is great to have, but is not a necessity.

Haste Rating

Haste Rating will directly increase the contribution of white swings to your DPS - 1% Haste will generate 1% more auto attack DPS. Prior to patch 2.2 Haste Rating became the superior stat, but the 2.3 patch reduced its EP value closer to that of Hit Rating.

Modeling at one time indicated weapons hasted between 1.51 and 1.41 speed will actually experience a sharp decrease in potential Windfury DPS. The range of 1.51- 1.41 speed was believed to cause the main hand to always finish a swing just before the end of a WF cooldown, making you wait longer for the next eligible swing that can proc WF. If hasted in this period for a long duration, you could expect WF DPS contribution to decrease. However, you'll also experience many more white swings during that time, and so the loss of potential WF procs should be offset by the increased white DPS. It is no longer believed that the 1.5 to 1.4 hasted speed will actually cause any decrease in DPS - you should notice an overall increase.

There is no need to worry about the 1.51 - 1.41 hasted weapon range. The original claims about the supposed DPS loss had done no empirical or simulated testing to back up their modeling. More recent testing has indicated that whatever potential WF DPS is lost because of swing timer issues is more than made up for by the gigantic leap in autoattack DPS.

Intellect and Mp5

Intellect on gear is not a significant source of DPS contribution. Pater has a short writeup exploring this here.
Mp5 is almost universally agreed to be a hunter stat that is wasted on enhance shaman gear. Note that the more you decide to contribute in a "hybrid" manner (healing to top off yourself and others) the mana pool will become slightly more important, but not such that you should sacrifice significant DPS upgrades to hold on to 15 Int on another item. The combination of Judgment of Wisdom and Shamanistic Rage (use it early, use it often) should prevent you from running out of mana even in full rogue leather gear - unless you're having to spot heal.

Expertise Rating

Patch 2.3 converted weapon skill rating into weapon expertise rating, which converts into Expertise skill at a rate of 3.9423 expertise rating:1 Expertise, and reduces the chance for your target to dodge and parry by 0.25% per point of Expertise. 103 Expertise Rating is required to achieve 6.25% dodge reduction, which is the maximum observed value of any NPC. As an example, [Shoulderpads of the Stranger], which used to provide 10 dagger skill rating, now provides 10 expertise rating (all weapons).

The parry reduction element of Expertise will have only marginal use in raid settings: mobs cannot parry attacks made from behind. Many bosses randomly turn to cast attacks and can parry while turning, but this possibility is too random to value significantly. Unlike parry, mobs can dodge attacks from behind and Expertise is currently the only way to reduce the number of dodges. The dodge reduction element of Expertise will vary from encounter to encounter: it will be useless against bosses that are constantly casting (e.g. Shade of Aran, High Astromancer Solarian, Reliquary of Souls) because mobs cannot dodge while casting, but useful against mobs that do not cast or only cast instant spells. Expertise has been shown to affect yellow damage as well as white damage, so under the second circumstance it is actually more useful than hit rating for enhancement shamans.

We still don't know how Expertise's dodge and parry reduction affect the one-roll white attack table. For now, the community is assuming that it converts dodges and parries into hits that do not have a chance to crit. On the other hand, we are now confident that Expertise will allow yellow attacks to crit, since they are resolved through a two-roll system. Thus, we will estimate expertise rating to be similar to the weight of hit rating, with some exceptions.

First, expertise rating is only useful in chunks, because there is no concept of having 2.5 Expertise - the Skill values are all rounded down to whole integers. To get around this, you first need to sum up the expertise rating across all your items, divide by 3.9423, take the floor, and multiply by 3.95 again. This gives you a "white hit rating" equivalency. Note that this makes expertise rating EP discontinous.[footnote]http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Discontinuity.html[/footnote] One expertise rating may be worth 0 EP because it is not enough to give you an extra skill point -- e.g. you go from 14 expertise rating to 15 expertise rating -- while a jump of two expertise rating at the same point may have a surprisingly high EP -- e.g. you go from 14 expertise rating to 16 and thus 0.75% dodge reduction to 1.00% dodge reduction.

Weapons

A frequently asked question is how to wield weapons with differing speeds but similar DPS values, such as using a Rising Tide and a Syphon - is it better to put one weapon in the main/off hand over the other? Simulation results indicate that it makes little difference which hand the slower weapon is wielded in. It appears that in general, a 2.x/2.y = 2.y/2.x.

Optimizing enhancement shaman DPS requires running two slow weapons with Windfury Weapon on both weapons.

The best way to choose between multiple items in the same slot is to run Yo's simulator, once for each item, using the stats that you would have with that item equipped. Do not post asking which weapon is best: find out for yourself by running the sim. That said, here are some general guidelines, current as of Patch 2.4.

Main Hand

Current best in slot weapon is [Hand of the Deceiver].

Arena weapons from the latest season (e.g. [Vengeful Gladiator's Cleaver]) are likely to continue the trend of being several DPS better than the best available PvE weapons.

[Rising Tide], [Syphon of the Nathrezim], [Talon of the Phoenix], [Claw of Molten Fury] and [Dragonstrike] are roughly equivalent items and rank just below the S3 weapons.

[Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality] from the Sunwell badge vendor is simulated at within ~10 dps of the S3 and T6 weapons.

Orcs should prioritize axes for the +5 Expertise racial bonus. This is applied per hand non stacking, so an axe/mace combo only applies expertise to the axe, and an axe/axe combo would apply 5 Expertise to each hand (which would be the same as having 5 Expertise on an armor item).

The differences in DPS within these "tiers" are relatively minor. Which weapon is best for you, or which weapon to mainhand and which weapon to offhand, can only be found by using the simulator with your stats, and no general conclusions can be drawn.


Off Hand

OH itemization is fairly poor early on in raiding, but changes in patch 2.3 have added several new options in KZ and ZA that help fill the gaps. If you are not yet raiding, the best choices for OH in a WF/WF setup is a 2.6 speed Gladiator weapon from Arenas, a crafted [Runic Hammer] or a blue one-hand weapon available in several heroic instances. Failing that, you can use a green 2.6 speed weapon from the Auction House.

An epic dagger with high dps (such as [Malchazeen] or [Guile of Khoraazi])and imbued with Flametongue can be used to temporarily replace a green or blue OH weapon. This comes at the cost of reduced Windfury procs, reduced Stormstrike damage, and a reduction in Flurry uptime. This should be seen as a stopgap measure only, not a weapon that you should commit to using for long periods of time.

Current best choice (As of patch 2.4) for an offhand is [Mounting Vengeance] followed by any of the Season 3 Arena weapons ([Vengeful Gladiator's Cleaver]).

Next set of choices include [Rising Tide] and [Syphon of the Nathrezim].

[Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality] is within ~10 DPS of the S3 and T6 weapons and is available off the Sunwell badge vendor.

Relics

While it is possible to swap relics during combat to try and take advantage of multiple relic buffs, this is not recommended. Swapping a relic incurs a global cooldown and resets your swing timer.

The two best choices are [Totem of the Astral Winds] and [Stonebreaker's Totem]

A: Astral Winds EP = Percent_of_WF_Swings * Astral_Winds * Elemental_Weapons
B: Stonebreaker EP = Uptime * (B1 + B2 + B3)
B1: Stonebreaker EP to WF = Percent_of_WF_Swings * Stonebreaker * Elemental_Weapons
B2: Stonebreaker EP to SS = Percent_of_SS_Swings * Stonebreaker
B3: Stonebreaker EP to white damage = Percent_of_white_Swings * Stonebreaker * (1 - MissRate)

Physical Damage breakdown:
Assuming two 2.6 speed weapons, flurried to 2.0 speed, means you get around 10 white swings per SS cooldown. 40% of those swings will be WF, meaning 10 white swings, 2 SS swings, 4.8 WF swings. 10+2+4.8 = 16.8
Percent_of_WF_Swings = 4.8/16.8 = 0.286
Percent_of_SS_Swings = 2/16.8 = 0.119
Percent_of_white_Swings = 10/16.8 = 0.595
(This breakdown is conservatively in favor of the Astral Winds Totem. Many WWS parses from raids show the balance slightly shifted away from WF towards white swings)

A: 32
B1: 44
B2: 13
B3: 65 * (1 - Missrate)

A = Stonebreaker_Uptime * (B1 + B2 + B3).
32 = Uptime * (44 + 13 + [ 65 * (1 - Missrate) ]
Let Missrate = 19%
Then Uptime = 29%

As miss rate decreases, so does the required uptime to break even. An enhancement shaman with +9% hit from talents and no hit rating on gear would see a 19% miss rate against boss mobs, resulting in a required uptime of 29%.
Changing some values for more hit gear, we find that even if your miss rate is better than 2% the required uptime is 26.4%. This gives us a fairly good window of possible required uptimes for the Stonebreaker buff over a wide variety of gear, with a good conservative estimate being 30%.

Now what does it take to achieve a 30% uptime? Here’s a simplified formula for determining this.

(Seconds per Shock) = (Stonebreaker proc chance) * (1-Spell miss rate) * (Stonebreaker duration) * (1/Stonebreaker Uptime)

(Seconds per Shock) = (0.50)*(1-0.14)*(1/0.30) = 14.3

This means that on average, a shock every 14.3 seconds is the minimum needed to maintain 30% uptime on the totem buff and thus make it come out ahead of the Astral Winds totem.

Conclusion: The Stonebreaker totem should be superior to the Totem of Astral Winds on average if the shaman can shock at least once every 14 seconds. Note that Stonebreaker has a 10 second hidden cooldown.

Gems and Meta Gems

In general, [Bold Living Ruby] should fill every socket unless there is a socket bonus that does not require using a Blue gem color, and where the socket bonus is worth more EP than what the loss of the dps stats on the blue gem would be.

If you are matching gems for socket bonuses, use the following:
Red socket: [Bold Living Ruby].
Yellow socket:[Inscribed Noble Topaz].
Blue socket: [Sovereign Nightseye].

The [Rigid Dawnstone] is always the wrong answer for enhance shaman.
The [Bold Living Ruby] will always be better then [Bright Living Ruby] in a raid environment due to Blessing of Kings.

Naturally the epic BT/Hyjal versions of these gems follow the same logic and you should be able to extrapolate which gems to use.

[Relentless Earthstorm Diamond], Best choice for a meta gem. This gem will scale with your crit rating. The 3% crit damage can be roughly approximated to raise your DPS by 0.03 * Crit Rate. At 30% crit rate this amounts to nearly a 1% gain in damage dealt.

[Thundering Skyfire Diamond] gives 240 haste rating for 6 seconds. This is your second choice for meta gems as it appears to have a 1 minute cooldown. Shaman with lower crit rates (20% or lower, geared in heroic/blue gear, just starting 25mans and KZ) will benefit slightly more from this gem over the RED.

[Swift Skyfire Diamond] will yield a very minor DPS increase - same for [Potent Unstable Diamond]

Enchanting your Gear


Weapon Enchants

[Enchant Weapon - Mongoose] 4.8% crit per proc (double procs stack) and 2% haste.
[Formula: Enchant Weapon - Crusader] provides 60 Strength (120 AP) at lvl 70 per proc.
[Enchant Weapon - Potency] is a constant +20 Strength (40 AP).

Clearly Mongoose is the preferred enchant, although Crusader can be a cheaper, but still effective alternative. Potency should be completely avoided.

[Formula: Enchant Weapon - Executioner] is roughly equivalent at high T5/T6 levels of gearing to a single enchant of Mongoose. However, Mongoose/Executioner or double Executioner will not outperform the dps benefit of double Mongoose unless the Enhancement Shaman is geared with nearly unobtainable values of Armor Penetration.

Executioner currently does not stack from multiple hands, each proc when DWing will simply refresh the buff. It is unknown if this is intended, since this deviates from how other weapon enchants function. Obviously the value of Executioner will increase as you gain more -Armor gear. At entry raid level a shaman will probably gain more from dual Mongoose enchants. At high T5 content and beyond, Executioner will become more valuable.

Evidence suggests that Mongoose and Executioner have nearly the same uptime and PPM, around 40-45%

Helm - Glyph of Ferocity (34 AP, 16 Hit)
Shoulders - Greater Inscription of the Blade (15 Crit, 20 AP) or Greater Inscription of Vengeance (30 AP, 10 Crit)
Cloak - Greater Agility (+12 Agi) or Subtlety (-2% Threat) if you feel threat constrained
Chest - Exceptional Stats (+6 Str/Agi)
Bracers - Brawn (+12 Strength)
Gloves - Major Strength (+15 Strength)
Rings - (Enchanter Only) Stats (+4 Str/Agi)
Legs - Nethercobra Leg Armor (50 AP, 12 Crit)

Consumables

[Flask of Relentless Assault]
[Elixir of Major Agility]
[Fel Strength Elixir]
[Haste Potion]
[Elixir of Major Strength]
[Insane Strength Potion]

How to choose totems

In a 5-man party your DPS is generally limited by the threat that your tank can produce. The most efficient way to increase small party DPS is to provide the tank with more threat. Totems should be chosen that compliment the tank, rather than the rest of the party, even it if means only 1 player is receiving benefit from the totem. Priority of totems always goes to the tank in small groups.

Warrior tanks should always receive Windfury (Paladin tanks need Wrath of Air), unless they are severely under-geared and need the extra armor/dodge just to survive. Rationale for using GoA for a Warrior or Paladin tank should never be to provide crit. Feral druids that are tanking should always be given GoA.

In a raid setting this becomes slightly more complicated as bastardized groups are thrown together. Recommendation is to follow this set of rules:

Rule 1 - If you are ever in doubt about which Air totem should be used, your raid leader has probably failed to put together a complimentary group. Reference the Group Compositions That Work section for details on putting groups together. Encourage proper group compositions for maximum benefit to the raid.

Rule 2 - If a DPS warrior is in your group, he needs Windfury for his rage feedback mechanism. Windfury provides a larger DPS gain to a DPS warrior than any other totem to any other class.

Rule 3 - If you are in group with a Warrior Main Tank, he should receive Windfury, if a Paladin MT he should receive Wrath of Air unless the fight is a non-threat-limited encounter where survivability is questionable.

Rule 4 - If there is no Warrior, but 2 or more Combat Sword Rogues are in the group, they will benefit slightly more from Windfury than from Grace of Air.

Rule 5 - If your group has no warrior, and 2 or more Feral Druids or Hunters, Grace of Air is the totem of choice.

Totem Twisting

Sometimes the best way to solve a conflict of interest in a group is to give everyone what they want. Blizzard has stated that Totem Twisting is considered a bug, and plans to remove the ability to do this in a future patch.

Windfury Totem places a 9 second buff on party member's weapons to imbue them with the extra attack mechanic. This can be manipulated to allow a second Air totem to be placed "simultaneously" with Windfury Totem.

You'll most likely want a macro to do this if you so choose, and a mod to track the time remaining on the windfury buff. A common one looks like this:


/castsequence reset=8 [combat] Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem

Totem Twisting has both its advocates and its detractors, it is not an agreed upon mechanic or strategy.
Pros:
Party gains 88 Agility or extra threat reduction
Overall DPS of the party is increased
Cons:
The shaman increases time spent in global cooldown, impairing his ability to decurse or purge mobs.
The mana cost of refreshing 2 totems every 9 seconds while Stormstriking is roughly 14,000 mana every 2 minutes. This will limit the ability to use shocks, and requires very careful timing of Shamanistic Rage, may require JoW from a paladin, and definitely requires 5 points in Totemic Focus.
Until you are very practiced with the technique you will find your attention devoted to watching the timers which means you will be less attentive to changes in the game environment
Latency or simply being late to refresh the Windfury totem will cause the Windfury buff to run off your party's weapons, which means they are losing opportunities for a Windfury proc.

Managing your threat

Enhance Shaman are severely threat capped - not as badly as a Ret Paladin, but worse than a DPS warrior. With no active threat reduction we rely on buffs, items, and strategy to reduce our threat. Methods to reduce your threat are listed below in order of Most to Least effective. Remember that threat reduction is multiplicative, not additive.

Spirit Weapons - Enhancement talent that reduces melee threat by 30%. This is a staple talent for our spec. Most effective since its always on and isn't reliant on a paladin.
Blessing of Salvation - 30% threat reduction. If you only have one paladin in your raid, this is the buff you need. If you don't have a paladin in your horde raid, you need to pressure your leadership to recruit one.
[Prism of Inner Calm] - worth around 10% threat reduction as long as your raid buffed crit rate is over 30% (and by the time you're killing Vashj it damn well better be). Keep an eye on this as Blizzard may buff it at some point.
Strategy - A lot of this depends on your tank and his TPS generation. If your tank can generate around 800 TPS you can give him a 10k threat lead and then unload without much worry of catching up. If you find yourself approaching the threat cap you should stop shocking first since they aren't affected by Spirit Weapons. A suggestion was made of "downranking" your weapons for a few seconds, allowing you to continue to provide Unleashed Rage to the group with lowbie weapons so that your threat isn't increasing.
Battle Ankh - the improved ankh talent can certainly come in handy when clearing raid zones. You need to be extremely careful about pulling aggro however - if you pull and die, the mob will pick the next highest threat target to attack, which may not be the tank. A much safer method is to allow yourself to die to AoE, and have buffers primed to give you DPS buffs when you ankh. At that point you'll be free to take Blessing of Might if you didn't have it before, since your tank will now have a hefty threat lead.

[jerry809]

awesome ty
+rep

[Valkyries]

What kind of core stats on gear would a shaman look for?
Stam + Str or Stam + Agi?

[gash46]

Strength and Agility or equivalent (so ap/crit), Stam will probably come in hefty amounts on anything especially if you end up looting rogue gear instead of hunter gear.
Don't stack too much ap in gems etc if you can get the proc-on-crit ap bonus trinkets (like the one from cot2 i think) :>
A big part of your job is boosting melee dps and that comes through crits, so prioritize that to aim for at least 25-30% unbuffed..

Despite the copy and paste it's still valid info

[Strichnine]

A heads up:

It's no longer expertise (the orc racial), it's +1 crit chance, with axes.

Great guide btw!

[Trinigon]

this was just copy pasted from another site, hope you gave props to it.

[Amedis]

this was just copy pasted from another site, hope you gave props to it.

...The first line..

Original Guide from EJ

[Aradroth]

Lawl who needs an enhancement shaman guide? we're one of the easiest classes to play.

Flame shock > Stormstrike > Earth shock is srs bsns.

I'd rep you but you took it from another site.

[Kyiz]

Lawl who needs an enhancement shaman guide? we're one of the easiest classes to play.

Flame shock > Stormstrike > Earth shock is srs bsns.

I'd rep you but you took it from another site.

yea...because 1500 brackets is srs bsns.

[DarkRage86]

Great guide for all starting out enh shammies
urewin: