How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
Shaman have 19 slots of gear to fill and some of those slots are more important than others. Raiding with the wrong tabard or shirt can be disastrous for your DPS and morale! Well, maybe the morale part.
Pointy Things!
The two slots at the bottom are just about the most important for an enhancement shaman. Proper weapons selection is vital to maximize DPS. If you don’t care about the math or the reasoning behind it, get the slowest one-handed weapons you can. Right around the 2.6 speed is pretty good. The badge fists at 2.5 are fine (though not optimal, the DPS they provide is a significant improvement over many other choices). If spending that many badges is not easily done, go slow, then go slower, then go so slow people think you have stopped and that’s the speed you want. Unless you have a racial bonus, it doesn’t really matter what type of weapon you choose. Maces, axes, fist weapons- they are all viable choices.
The total benefit of a weapon (as modeled by Yo’s) is the best basis. Sometimes, a faster weapon can up your stats by a sufficient amount to outweigh the loss of DPS from the speed, but that is something you would have to check on.
Taking the breakdown of enhancement dps, and ignoring the stat allocation, some aspects of DPS are affected by weapon speed; others are not. The white damage (40%) is going to reflect the dps value alone. The 40% that is made of stormstrike and windfury, however, favor weapons with high damage values. Stormstrike instantly attacks with both weapons. Since it is an instant attack, weapon speed is immaterial, only the damage range it deals. Slower weapons tend to have the highest damage ranges. Windfury instantly adds two attacks with the current weapon every time it goes off. If it did not have the limitation of the three second cooldown, WF would be normalized. However, since the limitation in frequency is tied to a time-delay, it also favors slower weapons.
Putting this in the context of the season two one-hand and off-hand maces, you have the following effects (some of this will have the off-hand weapon as the main hand which, obviously, cannot be done- thought-experiment):
The one-hand version, pummeler, has a speed of 2.6 and a damage range of 177-330 and an average DPS of 97.5. An average main hand hit will be around 250. An average off-hand hit will be around 125 (50% penalty).
The off-hand version, bonecracker, has a speed of 1.5 and a damage range of 102-191 and an average DPS of 97.7 (higher!). An average main hand hit will be around 150. An average off-hand hit will be around 75.
Using the stormstrike ability with two bonecrackers would be 225 for a ten-second cooldown, or 22.5 DPS.
Using the stormstrike ability with a main-handed pummeler and a bonecracker would be 325, or 32.5 DPS. Already ten higher.
Using two pummelers nets a hit for 375! or 37.5 DPS. Using the two slower weapons nets a 5 DPS increase just from stormstrike while only losing out on a small amount of white DPS. But stormstrike is only 10% of total DPS, how does windfury treat weapons:
A windfury proc on the bonegrinders would add 300 damage (plus the AP bonus which would be a relatively static bonus) from a main hand hit roughly every four seconds for 75 DPS, or 150 for an off-hand hit at 47 DPS.
A windfury proc on the pummelers would add 500 damage on a main-hand hit or 250 on an off-hand hit for 125 DPS or 62.5 DPS if windfury procced an average of once every four seconds. The slower weapon hits for almost as much off-hand as the faster weapon did on the main-hand. If you had a 50-50 split on main and off-hand windfury procs, the slower weapons net almost 40 DPS more than the faster ones! It would take a lot of stats as well as inherent weapon damage to make up 45 DPS. All things being equal, slower is better. All things being unequal, they have to be really unequal for faster weapons to be worthwhile.
Chains? Leather?
It’s the job of the tank to concentrate the damage, as much as the encounter allows, onto herself, or himself, or itself (pick the most appropriate). It’s the job of an enhancement shaman to keep unleashed rage on the party, a windfury totem down, and make things dead. Since it’s someone else’s job to take the hits, armor value is, well, nice to have, but not important. We’re going to immediately not consider cloth armor (it just doesn’t have the stats) and plate armor can’t be worn. Mail and leather it is.
Between the two, the major difference is in armor value (not a concern) and in stat allocation. Looking at the stats you need, you find many of those sprinkled on both leather and mail items. Since there is no “magic stat,” the only way to really weigh items is to use Yo’s and determine the EP weights that are accurate for you. You can take those weights and mentally keep them in mind or use an in-game mod like Pawn to keep track of that for you. However, those weights, especially for enhancement shaman, are highly variable. Small changes in stats can upset small differences in EP weights, so frequent checking using Yo’s simulator is important to keep the data accurate.
Outside of the game client, MaxDPS.com has an enhancement shaman listing of gear. you enter your stats and it uses its own formulas to generate a list of gear (be sure to check “Include Leather” in the lower right). Lootzor, Thottbot, and WoWHead all have similar listing which can take the ep weights and generate lists. Yo’s simulator, on the import/export tab, generates links for both the Lootzor and Thottbot sites.
One thing to notice is how highly leather gets ranked on those lists. Over half of the best items, and many of the best in slot items, are leather.
The relic slot should be filled with the Stonebreaker’s Totem as soon as you can get it. The non-armor slots should be filled with what best meets your stat allocation needs.
The coming days
When I started this series, Wrath of the Lich King was over the horizon. We all knew it was there, but now it is standing in a clear silhouette. Many classes and many abilities are changing significantly. Shaman will be gaining AP (as currently stands) from agility, strength, and potentially intellect. Spellpower, the unification of spell and melee hit, crit, and haste will have a great impact on the hybrid classes. This series was written from the perspective of what is currently true for shaman. Going into Wrath, much of it, I am sure, will be invalidated. But for the next few weeks or months keep your rage unleashed!
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
Totems! Totems! Totems!
Totems are the defining characteristic of the shaman class. Over the levels, quite a few of them are collected and (certainly in my case) some are used only once to see what they do. Some, such as Poison or Disease cleansing totems, or the spell resistance totems, have situational uses. Some fall into the more general category, and those are the ones that need the most explanations.
Generally, all totems only affect your party, not the entire raid. Additionally, they have a range of (untalented) 20 yards, beyond which they provide no benefit. Any totem that provides a passive buff can be refreshed any time prior to its two-minutes. The totems, notably the fire or water totems, that have active effects (mana spring, searing, etc.) should expire before they are replaced so the full benefit is received. With only having to juggle the six-second shock cooldown and the ten-second Stormstrike cooldown, keeping totem uptime high should be an easy task.
All totem effects are based on untalented effects.
Earth Totems
Strength of Earth: This is your “default” earth totem. It increases the Strength of all nearby party members by 86. For most, that means 172 AP which translates to roughly 12 DPS added to white damage for all melee classes and more benefit depending on how specials scale with AP.
Tremor Totem: This totem pulses every four seconds to break fear, sleep, and charm effects. When you are fighting mobs that do any of the above, this is the totem to drop.
Fire Totems
Fire Nova Totem: Fire Nova Totem go Boom! One of the weaknesses of the Enhancement Shaman is AoE DPS. we are single-target creatures. Between this and magma totem, we can contribute at least a small amount of AoE DPS. Some things to note: creatures can and will target and destroy the Fire Nova totem before it goes off if they are not being tanked. With the 15 second cooldown on this totem, it is a good idea to use this totem first, then a magma totem, then this again, if the pull isn’t over.
Magma Totem: As with Fire Nova totem, the Magma Totem is about it for Enhancement Shaman’s ability to do AoE damage. The range is small, but be careful when using these as the damage can break CC and generates threat.
Searing Totem: Somewhat of your “default” fire totem. In situations where there is no CC and all targets being tanked, use this totem, it does increase your dps, but it is uncontrolled.
Air Totems
Grace of Air Totem: Adds 77 agility to nearby party members. Rogues, Feral Druids, and Hunters will love you for this. AP and Crit for them. It’s the air totem that should be your default because it benefits everyone, but it probably will not be. Most of the time, you’ll be dropping Windfury if you’re in a melee DPS group. Some exceptions to this, if you are in a group of rogues/feral druids/hunters or with a feral druid tank or with a warrior tank who is generating sufficient TPS and rage the avoidance boost from 77 agility is worthwhile.
Windfury Totem: The air totem your dps warriors, paladins, and swords rogues want. The benefit this totem gives your party outweighs just about any benefit Grace of Air will give you. If your raid is close to the threat cap, giving your warrior tank this will probably be the best thing you can do for raid dps (and to save your own skin: ankhs get expensive).
Wrath of Air Totem: Worth a short mention, if you get stuck in a caster group for some incredibly silly reason, or are with a paladin tank and are nearing the threat cap, this may be the way to go. Buffing the casters outweighs GoA for yourself, though I’m not sure whether a paladin tank would want this or WF totem. If you are getting threat capped, ask.
About the GoA and WF divide
Ideally, you can get around this problem by having a resto shaman in the raid as well. Windfury totem is a huge benefit to the heavy but slower hitting melee classes. It is no benefit to shaman, druids, or hunters. Rogues end up kind of split on it. If you have a resto shaman, it may be the best use to have them in the tank/melee group to drop SoE and WF, leaving you in the hunter/druid group to drop SoE and GoA.
The Elemental Totems
The Earth Elemental Totem and the Fire Elemental Totem are not totems you want to count on, but they are handy and useful to have available. The Earth Elemental summons a pocket tank that does okay against groups of mobs (it does much better if it gets healed, too), and the Fire Elemental… well, instead of dropping any other fire totem, you would drop this one. Really good against groups of low HP mobs. When you drop either elemental totem, there is a two-minute cooldown on the other, so you cannot have both active at the same time.
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
If my shaman had been on an arena team, I would have called it “Frost Shock and Awe.” True story.
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
The Awe of Shocks
The underlying mechanics of the Enhancement Shaman are incredibly esoteric, but the act of DPSing is a fairly straightforward process. The bulk of Enhancement Shaman DPS comes from normal attacks and Windfury procs. The easiest way to maximize dps from those abilities is to stay in contact with the target as much as possible. People may say that Hunters can just autoshoot and afk and still do good dps, but Shaman can autoattack and still do great dps. There is no mana cost and no cooldowns to manage and as long as you don’t cast any spells with a cast time your swing timer will continue uninterrupted.
Maximizing DPS is not much more complicated and only requires juggling the cooldowns on shocks and Stormstrike. Stormstrike is easy to get out of the way: hit it every cooldown unless it’s cooldown comes up while you are casting Flame Shock. If it does, Flame Shock first, otherwise, StormStrike first. If you don’t care about the math this is what you need to know:
Enhancement/Resto Shaman will find the most benefit from cycling Flame Shock, then Earth Shock.
Enhancement/Elemental Shaman will find the most benefit from cycling Flame Shock, then two Earth Shocks.
If Stormstrike conflicts with a shock, Flame Shock takes precedence.
If the target will die within the next eight seconds, Earth Shock, otherwise continue the rotation as normal.
In the realm of shocks, I want to point out a few of the terms I’ll be using. DPS (damage per second, something we all use frequently), DPM (damage per mana, the bang for your buck), and DPCD. DPCD is probably a new one to a lot of people and stands for Damage Per (Shock) CoolDown. Since shocks cannot be chain cast, the delay between casts is part of figuring their rotation. The best shock rotation to use is dependent upon a variety of factors. I’m restricting this to comparing Flame Shock and Earth Shock. On the whole, Frost Shock is slightly worse the Earth Shock. If the snare effect is needed, or the interrupt of Earth Shock is needed, those are the probably more important than a maximized DPS rotation. If a target is immune to nature damage, Frost Shock can be substituted for Earth Shock at only a small decrease.
| Flame Shock | Earth Shock | Earth Shock with Stormstrike | |
| Mana | 500 | 535 | 535 |
| 5 seconds | |||
| Damage | 482 | 675 | 810 |
| DPM | .964 | 1.26 | 1.51 |
| DPCD | 96.4 | 135 | 162 |
| 6 seconds | |||
| Damage | 587 | 675 | 810 |
| DPM | 1.17 | 1.26 | 1.51 |
| DPCD | 98 | 112 | 135 |
| 10 seconds | |||
| Damage | 692 | 675 | 810 |
| DPM | 1.38 | 1.26 | 1.51 |
| DPCD | 138.5 | 135 | 162 |
| 12 seconds | |||
| Damage | 797 | 675 | 810 |
| DPM | 1.594 | 1.26 | 1.51 |
| DPCD | 132.8 | 112 | 135 |
| 15 seconds | |||
| Damage | 797 | 675 | 810 |
| DPM | 1.594 | 1.26 | 1.51 |
| DPCD | 159.4 | 135 | 162 |
That chart probably requires a certain amount of explanation. The sections for cooldown note what interval your shock rotation would refresh. With the Reverberation talent in the Elemental Combat tree, the shock CoolDown can be reduced to five seconds, allowing a theoretical five second shock rotation. Under each rotation time, it shows what ONE shock would do. 
Rotations at ten seconds and longer would use multiple shocks. Also, the numbers above are the base amounts for the spell and assume no benefit from the Mental Quickness talent or any spell damage on gear (which there should not be any).
Since the shocks have a shared cooldown, the total damage for the shock gets divided by the total cooldown (we’re assuming this is a sandbox encounter where the full shock duration and cooldown end when the target dies). The last column shows the damage Earth Shock would do if it always had the StormStrike bonus damage.
For an Enhancement shaman looking to maximize shock DPS, five points in Reverberation, keeping Storm Strike on the target, and casting only Earth Shock results in the best dps, overall. Without any additions to spell damage, if no one else would be using your StormStrike charges, keep that up and Earth Shock.
If someone else is eating SS charges, the math changes and favors at least a two shock rotation. Allowing Flame Shock to go its full duration and cycling Earth shock in results in more damage at better DPM and better DPCD. A twelve second rotation alternating between them has 1472 damage over 12 seconds (122.6 DPS, 1.42 DPM) does more than two Earth Shocks at 1350 damage (112.5 DPS, 1.26 DPM). For a 15 second rotation taking advantage of the reduced cooldown, Flame Shock followed by two Earth Shocks is the optimal DPS rotation (2147 damage, 143.13 DPS, 1.36 DPM).
Once the Mental Quickness talent (adding 30% of you AP as damage/healing) is taken into consideration, the numbers start scaling differently. According to WowWiki’s spell damage coefficients*, Earth Shock and Frost Shack scale at 42.86% (meaning you multiply your benus spell damage by .4286 and add that to damage done) keeping their relation with FrS slightly worse. Flame shock has a trickier bit of math. Because it has both a Direct Damage and a Damage Over time component, the portion receive different coefficients. In this case, the DD portion has a 15% coefficient, and the DoT has a 52% coefficient over four ticks (or 13% per tick). For total Damage done, FlS gets 67% of spell damage added.
At 1000 AP, a number fairly easily reached, that nets 300 bonus spell damage. Earth Shock would gain an additional 128 damage, 153 with StormStrike. Flame Shock gains 201 damage over its full duration. That brings Earth Shock with StormStrike to ~960 damage, and Flame Shock to ~980 Damage, making Flame Shock the better shock. However, you still have to let it tick its full duration so the cycling is still the most effective solution for DPS.
Enhancement/Resto Shaman will find the most benefit from cycling Flame Shock, then Earth Shock.
Enhancement/Elemental Shaman will find the most benefit from cycling Flame Shock, then two Earth Shocks.
If Stormstrike conflicts with a shock, Flame Shock takes precedence.
If the target will die within the next eight seconds, Earth Shock, otherwise continue the rotation as normal.
*Some of the coefficients on that page may be wrong, and it may list an incorrect number for Earth Shock. If it is incorrect, the correct number would be lower by 10%. This would make the break even point where Flame Shock becomes superior at all times to Earth Shock occur at a lower amount of AP, but doesn’t change the ultimate conclusion.
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
It would be nice if this could be simply described. Get hit to x; get expertise to y; get crit to z. Unfortunately, Enhancement Shaman DPS is based on some complicated interactions of all of those elements. Judging from my own and others reports, regular melee attacks will be about 40% of your dps, Windfury will be 30%, Stormstrike, Earth Shock, and Flame Shock being the remainder.
Some stats benefit all of those (assuming the Mental Quickness talent), such as AP. Some benefit some but not others (hit and expertise). Some are a waste (spell stats).
The problem with being able to simply say that one crit rating gives you as much dps as 1.4 AP (made up numbers, by the way) is Windfury. As written, it is a normalized ability: by adding swings and AP it doesn’t favor any weapon speed at all. However, it has an internal 3 second cooldown that makes if function like an unnormalized ability, leaving it in a complicated place.
Without going into specific theorycrafting we can make some generalizations. Many Enhancement Shaman abilities are based on critical strikes. Flurry and Unleashed Rage both occur at a critical strike, as does the Focused effect. Roughly 80% of your dps is capable of a melee critical strike, so 1% increase in critical strike chance is .8% increase in DPS just from critical strike damage. The additional benefits of Flurry and Unleashed Rage improve that in ratios that differ depending on what your stats are at that time. AP benefits everything: it is always worthwhile.
Hit and Expertise sit in very strange positions. Going with a typical Enhancement/Resto build, you will have a 9% increased chance to hit while dual-wielding. With the way the attack table works in WoW, a normal single weapon attack has a 9% miss chance against level 73 targets (raid bosses). This means that Hit Rating, which only counters miss chance, won’t help 60% of your dps (Windfury, Stormstrike, and shocks). Ordinarily, a 1% increase in hit is nearly a 1% increase in damage, not so for Shaman. Expertise is slightly more beneficial since it counters dodge and parry, which will benefit 80-90% of your DPS. Only if attacking from the front of a mob, though, and most of the time you should be attacking from behind. It ends up more beneficial than hit rating, but not by much, and it’s tough to get much of it with current itemization.
Haste, like hit, only improves normal melee damage. It does enhance dps but due to the three second cooldown on Windfury, interactions of passive haste, weapon speed, flurry, and active hastes such as Heroism can result in poor swing times to maximize Windfury. It is thought that the dps gains from melee damage exceed dps loss due to Windfury existing outside the cooldown longer than it needs to.
Spell Stats are completely worthless, avoid them. Intellect, though, has an indefinable value. Like stamina, you need enough of it. Most accurately, 30% of your dps needs it. Normal mlee and Windfury chug along even without mana, and Shamanistic Rage is used to regain mana and scales with AP. More AP = more mana back.
In terms of what stats to look for, a general rule is to focus on Crit chance until you have35-40% buffed crit chance. Keeping Unleashed Rage and Flurry active as often as possible require crit chance in that range. More adds to DPS but provides diminishing returns on the crit-based effects. AP scales damage linearly. 14 AP provides 1 weapon DPS. Shaman only get AP from Strength (1 strength yielding 2 AP) and AP. For an enhancement Shaman Agility is only used to provide crit chance. More AP is always better. Beyond Crit and AP, Haste and Expertise are not bad, hit is not bad.
The only way to really know what stats should be pursued, is to use Yo’s simulator: Crazy Shaman’s DPS & AEP calculator. Because of the interactions of all of those effects, no simple formula can weight the stats. The simulator uses what we know of combat in WoW to run a simulated combat and look at the results.
The way to use it is enter your current stats in the list on the left side. These should be your base stats, unbuffed, from your character sheet. Check the Victim, Procs & Stuff, and Buffs & Debuffs tabs to make sure it has accurate information for the situation you will be DPSing in: if you will never have Blessing of Kings, don’t select it. If you will always have a feral druid, select Leader of the Pack, etc. Once everything is setup correctly, set your hours to something over 10000, select ‘Find EP Weights,’ and click Theorycraft!. Depending on the speed of your computer, it will process the simulated combat hours and generate the information on the right pane, detailing the EP Weights (enhancement points) of each stat. The stat with the highest EP value should generate the most DPS increase for you. This is the most accurate way to determine benefit without extensive testing in game. Unfortunately, the numbers will only remain valid for very small changes in the stats they are based on, so once there are differences, the simulator needs to be run again.
As you can see from the pic above, my best bet right now is pulling in some more expertise, then strength, then crit rating. Looks like it may be time to farm for the Shard of Contempt.
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Introduction
Being a pretty committed member of the alliance, I had very little reason to care about the mechanics of Shaman before Burning Crusade. Aside from my hatred of them in PvP where they killed my poor little shadow-priest in about two seconds, I never encountered them. With the addition of the Draenei in Burning Crusade, and allowing them to be Shaman, the Alliance had to deal with integrating a new class with a new set of abilities into its mechanics, much as, I’m sure, the Horde did with Paladins.
Release day I rolled a Shaman and was pretty set on enhancement; I already had a caster so elemental was redundant and I don’t much care for healing. However, the complete lack of any role models or mentors in the play of shaman was quickly apparent. The changes to mechanics with 2.0 were still being learned even by the experienced Shaman horde side. After learning a lot of it the hard way and perusing the official forums (and more recently Elitist Jerks) I’ve gotten a handle on how to shaman.
This guide is not a guide on how to min-max an enhancement shaman for tier six or sunwell raiding. I hope anyone at that level would know as much or more than me about the needs of raids and synergies at that point. Rather, this is for shaman new to 70 or just starting raiding 
that might not have a more experienced shaman to learn from. I’m starting with Enhancement because that is what I play, but eventually, all three specs will be covered. There will be five parts to this guide:
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Talent Specs and Important Abilities
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
You might think it would be obvious that an Enhancement Shaman would have their talent points solidly in the Enhancement tree, but I though it would be obvious enchants that only proc off melee attacks are less than thrilling for hunters… what do I know? The Enhancement tree provides a lot of talents that enhance a shaman’s ability to engage in melee combat (mmmmmm bad puns). Not all of the tree is equally important, and there are some variations in spec, but here are the key talents:
Tier 1: Both pretty terrible. Take Ancestral Knowledge because more mana is good and you won’t be using a shield.
Tier 2: Thundering Strikes. 5% more chance to crit. This is pure win.
That gives you ten points, but the next important talent requires 15. To fill in the gap I suggest 
Shamanistic Focus (your high crit rates should keep this buff up for most of your shocks and makes it more mana efficient), Enhancing Totems (an additional 15% to Strength of Earth and Grace of Air isn’t a huge benefit, but it is a benefit when you use the totems), and Improved Ghost Wolf (instant cast Ghost Wolf… well, it’s the best of the bunch in my opinion). Instead of Improved Ghost Wolf, you might consider Guardian Totems, while Stoneskin and Windwall are totems I hardly ever use, the reduced cooldown on Grounding Totem has some benefit.
Tier 4: Flurry. After dealing a critical strike, your next three swings occur 30% faster. Much like Shamanistic Focus, your high crit rates will keep this buff active, effectively increasing your melee attack speed by 30% for a close to 30% increase to melee dps.
Tier 5: Here we start to have so much awesomeness it’s hard to pick and choose. We want them all! And we will take them. All of the talents from here to the bottom of the tree.
Spirit Weapons: Screw the parry, this is 30% threat reduction. Without this talent, you will over-aggro and die.
Elemental Weapons: Windfury is going to account for roughly 35-40% of your dps. Without this talent, that drops to 25% or so, without being replaced. This talent is an almost 15% dps boost.
Improved Weapon Totems: Sadly, this is a talent you will not benefit from, but one of your key roles is carrier of Windfury totem and this improves that totems and thence DPS that totem provides. A nice buff to raid dps.
Tier 6: Take them both, they are nice buffs for DPS.
Tier 7: Stormstrike alone will contribute about 10% of your DPS and buff damage from Earth Shock. Dual Wielding is a huge boost to DPS on its own, and Dual Wield Specialization increases chance to hit while dual wielding by 6%.
Tier 8: Unleashed Rage. With this talent, every time you crit, you buff your party with 10% additional melee AP. Not ten percent of your AP, but their AP. This is a buff that scales to be even better the better geared melee dps is in your raid.
Tier 9: Shamanistic Rage. Most of the stats you want as an Enhancement Shaman are not going to come with large amounts of Intelligence or Mana per 5. While the damage reduction is nice, this talent is all about mana regen and you will need it. Use it early, use it often.
Taking those talents will find you with 45 points in Enhancement and look rather like this. While you could throw the remaining 16 points to flesh out the tree, there is much more benefit to taking synergistic talents from the other trees. Both the Elemental and Restoration trees have useful talents. In the Elemental Tree you would spend your 16 points on Convection and Concussion for more damaging, more mana efficient shocks; Elemental Focus because it is a one talent point proc that will sometimes improve mana efficiency, and Reverberation to speed up your shock rotation from 12 to 10 seconds. A build like this improves your magic based dps from shocks, but I feel is weaker than spending the points in Restoration.
Putting 16 points in Restoration gives you Tidal Focus for more mana efficient heals (you will be healing yourself from time to time, perhaps even healing others), Totemic Focus to reduce the mana cost of Totems by 25% (Buy 3 totems get 1 free!), and Nature’s Guidance to improve
your chance to hit with attacks and spells by 3%. Nature’s Guidance and Dual Wield Specialization together provide 9% bonus to hit while dual wielding which is all the time. While this will be more completely covered when I talk about Stats, a 9% bonus to hit means your special attacks should never miss, Windfury and Stormstrike being those special attacks. That leaves three talent points you can spend as you please and I favor Totemic Mastery for wider totem radius and Improved Reincarnation so you can come back from the dead 33% faster. This is a pretty typical build, 0/45/16.
Enhancement Shaman gain most of their abilities from their talents, not from trainers. Totems are a nice party buff and shocks are a significant portion of Enhancement Shaman DPS. Heroism / Bloodlust is a great boost to party DPS and can sometimes make the difference between a kill and a wipe.
