Talk:Shaman tactics

Question on the intro part with the 2.0.1 tip.

which says: With patch 2.01, shamans can dual-wield, and heavy enhancement shamans may want to use to daggers or fist weapons with Frostbiter Weapon... Should this be Frostbrand or Rockbiter? --Dga 15:58, 1 February 2007 (EST)

Enhancement Shamen and Hit Rating
It is commonly accepted that Shamen need only about 100 hit rating (with 3/3 Dual Wield Specialization and 3/3 Nature's Guidance) at any level of raiding. This is due to two reasons:

1) "White" hits account for a small amount of of our damage output (~35%); most of our damage will be Stormstrike (~10%) and Windfury (~40-45%)

2) Our special attacks, which make up most of our damage, are hit capped due to the fact we get 12% to hit from talents alone. Special melee attacks (like Stormstrike and Winfury) have only a base miss of 9%; 12% more than covers this.

This means that point per point, after 100 hit rating, it's much more important to stack Critical Strike and Attack Power to make those attacks which make the bulk of our damage (Stormstrike and Windfury) more effective.

Also, to clarify, 100 hit rating is a very generous number to cover the miss chance due to Mob-Player level differences. In theory, a PvP-centered Enhancement shaman requires only a very small amount of additional hit rating from gear to be effective in PvP.

A short thought of Expertise: Expertise is not very valuable in PvE situations, as raid bosses should always be attacked from behind (when possible) and therefore cannot Parry. From behind they can still Dodge, so the stat is not completely useless but is insignificant compared to an equal amount of Critical Strike percentage. In PvP Expertise may be desirable, since you're more likely to be attacking your target from the front; but I expect most shamen would still prefer to Critical Strike. Blizzard is turning expertise more into a Tanking and Rogue stat.

Therefore, the data in this article stating that 130 hit rating is necessary for top-end raiding is not necessarily correct. And the opposite is true, due to our mechanics we need less Hit than Rogues or Fury Warriors due to our mechanics.

As a raiding Enhancement Shaman, I intend on rewriting the Enhancement PvE section of this article soon to replace erroneous information with more up to date information.

Carrington 03:41, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Raiding stats edit justification
In the recommended stats section the headers seem incorrect. Sta as opposed to HP and Int as opposed to mana. since I believe that 6000 int or sta is not possible to obtain whereas 6000 hitpoints or mana is. I am editing the titles based on this reasoning. Dga 22:41, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The pvp boots
Yes, they were changed in 2.4 to not work above level 60, however there are still boots for both Horde and Allies. http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22857 and http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29594 specifically. The Horde has a slight advantage in that there is a second set of boots availible at 58 that have the same item bonus of +15% speed in Ghost wolf, but with lesser stats. http://www.wowhead.com/?item=16518 10:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Changes to PvE Raid Tactics
-Added some clarification on totem choice for melee. The previous article included the line, "if you are grouped with hunters or rogues, drop Grace of Air Totem," which is misleading. If you are grouped with four sword rogues, they want Windfury.

-Added a line suggesting totem choice for a tanking warrior.

-Deleted the line about resist totems. While the advice makes sense in theory - "if you're fighting something that does a lot of elemental damage, drop the appropriate resist totem" - in practice it doesn't work that well. Elemental damage in raids is often unresistable. In addition, the article suggested the use of Nature Resistance Totem, when using a hunter for Aspect of the Wild is generally preferable due to group-wide benefit of other air totems. A better wording might be, "if any of your group members are wearing resistance gear to mitigate damage on a particular encounter, drop the appropriate resist totem," but an intelligent discussion of resistance mechanics and when and when not to use resistances would be a bit too long for this article.

-Also deleted the first line under "enhancement raiding" - "an enhancement shaman will spend 70-90% of his time dpsing and 10-30% of his time healing" or some such. The frequency with which an enhancement shaman will be asked to heal will vary from guild to guild and player to player, but enh shamans shouldn't be assuming that they're healers 30% of the time or that healing is part of their normal raid duties. (This text may date back to 2.0 TBC, when the game was much more unfriendly to melee, many mobs hit harder, and few tanks truly outgeared heroics or entry-level raids. Before 2.1 I was in healing gear for at least one pull in every heroic; that hasn't been the case since.)

EDIT: To the above poster commenting about expertise, I suggest you look over the stat weights for enhancement shamans posted on elitistjerks. Expertise is a very strong PvE stat, and increases DPS by at least 50% more per point than crit rating.

Enhancement shaman mana
With an unbuffed mana pool of only 5600, I still do very well, Shamanistic Rage is enough to get my mana back up to full, even with the 15 second nerf. The numbers stated are for more skilled shamans who can totem twist without breaking their brains? Sacarasc (talk) 14:04, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Updating
I've been poking around for information on my latest character I've been levelling, and this whole mess is ridiculously out of date and needs to be updated. I'll look into doing it myself when I learn more, seeing as I'm not even level 70 as a shaman yet. But other people doing updates would be helpful too.