Shaman Basics Redux

Hihi.  I’ve been having some people ask me how to DPS as enhance lately, so I wrote up this post. It reviews the basic stats and goes into more detail on the actual rotation.

Hit Rating

Hit rating is the most important stat for shaman up to 14% spell hit (17% if you don’t have a moonkin/shadow priest.) More hit rating is still good, but don’t gem for it after 17% spell hit.

Crit Rating

Enhancement shaman are very dependent on crits. Crits activate Flurry, Unleashed Rage, and Elemental Devastation. You’ll want 20-25% melee crit to keep these abilities up almost all the time. Don’t gem for it unless you’re under 25% crit buffed.

Expertise

Windfury, stormstrike, and lava lash can all be dodged. It’s especially bad when stormtrike is dodged since you lose out on two attacks, an opportunity to proc windfury, two opportunities to proc maelstrom, and two opportunities to crit. This is above and beyond the DPS loss from being dodged in the first place. You’ll see dramatic DPS increases when you start getting expertise. Mobs generally have about a 6.5% chance to dodge. I’ve found that 25 expertise for 6.25% is a good sweet spot. You’ll pretty much always have to gem for expertise to get enough.

Armor Penetration Rating

It’s not a bad stat for shaman to get, but it doesn’t do anything for our spell damage or do anything to proc our other abilities. Never gem for it. Worry about upgrades that have it since you’ll probably be trading hit rating or expertise in its place.

Haste

Haste can be a good stat for shaman if you have top-tier gear. The tier 10 set bonus and diminishing returns on crit let it creep above most other stats. If you’re just gearing up or have less than full tier 9 gear then don’t worry about it. If you have great gear then it’s about as good as attack power. It’s good for gemming yellow slots.

Attack Power

Consistently a good stat for shaman. The best to gem for once you have hit and expertise taken care of.

Summary

What should you gem for? Hit till 6%, expertise till 6.25%, spell hit till 14%, then attack power for the rest. If you have top-tier gear, gem haste if you have any spare yellow slots.

DPS Rotation

Shaman are now designed with a priority system of DPSing. You have lots of abilities on short cooldowns and you want to use them as much as possible. The goal is to use the most damaging ones over the less damaging ones since you’ll usually have more than one available. I’ll start with the basic queue for leveling/early grouping:

Lightning Bolt (with 5 stacks of maelstrom weapon so it’s instant)

Lightning shield if it’s down

Stormstrike

Earth Shock

Lava Lash

The spells higher on the list should be used first. The most important thing is to use lightning bolt when you can. The rest can be switched around a little without losing much DPS. Once you get used to doing this you can add a fire totem to the mix:

Lightning Bolt (with 5 stacks of maelstrom weapon so it’s instant)
Lightning shield if it’s down

Shamanistic rage if you have the tier 10 set bonus

Magma Totem if it’s not down

Stormstrike

Earth Shock

Lava Lash

Fire Nova

Even though magma totem is an AOE totem it does a fair amount of single-target damage. It lasts for 20 seconds with just one global cooldown so it ends up being better than most of your other spells. You’ll notice at the end there’s fire nova. If you’re keeping up well with your rotation you’ll probably only use it once every 30 seconds or so when you get a GCD with nothing to drop. It’s still extra damage even on single targets. The rotation can get hectic if you’re not used to it. You can use searing totem instead since it lasts 1 minute so you don’t have to worry about it as much.

Ghostpuppies

Spirit Wolves are just awesome. Make sure you use bloodlust after you summon them if you can. For fights under 6 minutes it’s better to summon them twice than summon them once with bloodlust. If everyone is sated and bloodlust is off cooldown then you can lust just your wolves if you like.

Glyphs and Flame Shock

The two clear glyph winners are improved stormstrike and improved windfury weapon. Imp Spirit Wolves is pretty good for the third one. After the next patch (3.3.3?) things will be more interesting. Flame shock DOT will crit and will tick more quickly with haste. Flame shock benefits a lot more from spell power and does more damage than earth shock even with stormstrike. After the patch the best glyph for the third slot will probably be flame shock.

This means you’ll be using flame shock when the DOT isn’t on the target and earth shock otherwise. A castsequence macro is pretty good here so you don’t have to watch yet another cooldown. It’ll automatically toggle between earth shock and flame shock when needed.

/castsequence reset=9 flame shock, earth shock, earth shock

You can do it manually, but I certainly don’t have that much attention to give. You can tweak the reset time a bit depending on your haste. You can’t always shock right at cooldown, so you want it to reset back to flame shock

Mods

There aren’t any must-have mods for shaman, but a few of them can help.

-Dominos bar mod and Autobar are very good for giving you more bars to work with saving space. Shaman have a lot of utility spells and there just isn’t enough room for all of them in the default UI.

-Shockandawe is the main enhance mod out there. I use it to keep track of lightning shield and some other spells. It has a priority guide that’ll tell you what spells to use next, but I don’t use it.

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