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.
Primal Tenacity vs. Nurturing Instinct
Someone asked on our guild forums what I though about these two talents in a one or the other context, saying he hasn’t found much serious discussion of them. I did a quick search of my own on EJ and at Emmerald’s and I couldn’t find much about them either. So this is purely my opinion incoming.
Primal Tenacity is a talent near the top of the Feral tree that increases your chance to resist Stun and Fear mechanics by 5/10/15%. How useful is that? It can be very useful. As a tank, the fear and stun resist allows you to continue building threat on the target, and maintain positioning. As DPS, resisting those effects allows you to continue DPSing if those effects are resisted.
The problem with this talent is two-fold: one, it’s only a chance to resist. Meaning it could NEVER EVER happen and still be working as intended. The RNG is not your friend (or, at least, is not MY friend, freakin’ T4 helm). Two, prior to 2.4.?, whichever patch it was, when they changed fear and aggro, this would have been mandatory for tanking. It was a 15% chance to not wipe a party/raid on a bad fear because the mobs switched from feared targets to non-feared targets. Many classes had to actively avoid fear resisting talents so that if the tank got feared, everyone did. Since that is no longer the case, fear effects can be bad for positioning fights, but are not so critical any longer. It also does not do anything against horror effects and some stuns cannot be resisted (think Maiden’s Repentance ability).
Why would you want this talent? Well, there are two aspects to dealing damage or generating threat. You have to use your abilities in the most effective way (DPS) for the most time (time on target). PT can increase the second one. For tanking, it is a small aid in those positioning fights like Nightbane. PvP is an arena more likely to utilize this talent. Aside from warlock’s Death Coil, there are no other horrify abilities (maybe Drums of Panic?), most are regular fear and stun effects. Since there are many more PvP encounters that are going to subject you to those, the 15% has more chances to occur.
Nurturing Instinct, in its current form, is not a bad talent for the form switching druid. Right at the front, these talent points are wasted for tanking-focused builds, put them somewhere more useful. NI has two uses: 1-Increase your healing spells by 50/100% of your agility; 2- Increase healing done to you in Cat form by 10/20%. Obviously, the first is only useful when not in a form, meaning tanking druids won’t have many occasions to use this. The second is only for Cat form, so no Bear love on that (though, if it did affect Bear, this would be a mandatory tanking talent).
While I have less than stellar DPS gear, I have a little over 450 Agility unbuffed, which would mean a buff of 450 +healing if I switched to do that in combat. That would net me additional healing in the following amounts:
| Spell | Coefficient | Bonus Healed |
| Healing Touch | 1 | 450 |
| LifeBloom (HoT) | ~.34 | 153 (total) |
| LifeBloom (Bloom) | ~.51 | 223 |
| Rejuvenation | .8 | 360 |
| Regrowth (HoT) | ~.7 | 315 |
| Regrowth (Direct) | ~.3 | 135 |
Druids having more Agility focused gear would net more benefit than I would.
The second part, increasing healing done to you by 20% is a little more complicated. Using numbers from our recent Lurker kill, here’s the benefit you would expect to see:
| Spell | Original | Buffed |
| Regrowth (Direct) | 2124 | 2548 |
| Regrowth (per tick) | 425 | 510 |
| Chain Heal (average) | 2287 | 2744 |
| Flash of Light | 1459 | 1750 |
| Flash Heal | 2213 | 2655 |
| Renew (per tick) | 762 | 918 |
| Prayer of Mending | 1717 | 2060 |
These are not inconsiderable benefits, if you would use them. For PvP, this is a very good talent. Either because you are switching forms to cast heals or because you are receiving them.
For raids it’s more debatable.
When putting together raid groups, it is important to plan healing requirements for the damage being done in the encounter. If the encounter is going to have considerable amounts of raid damage, part of the plan should be to have healers capable of handling that portion of the damage. So, how useful is the additional 250-500 health that this talent gives you if there is raid damage? Without knowing exactly how much damage you’d be taking, it’s hard to say. For this talent to be optimal, you’d have to be in cat form taking raid damage where the amount of damage is ~400 damage over the unbuffed healing values so that it only requires one, rather than two heals. If the healer would have to throw a second heal anyway, this talent is less useful. It would fill your health bar faster, but not enough to prevent that second heal.
What does all this come down to? For PvE there is slight benefit to either, and if your talent spec allows it, neither talent is bad for a DPS spec. For tanking specs, PT is nice, but NI is a waste of points. For PvPing feral druids, both have a lot of usefulness. Neither is a talent that is going to make or break a spec. Neither is going to substantially increase DPS, TPS, or mitigation. I would suggest, before taking either of these, you look at your spec and see if talents providing more benefit are being skipped. If you have some points leftover, or if you really enjoy PvP, either of these could be nice for you.
In interest of disclosure, I’ve never had NI in my spec, and I recently specced out of PT. It was rare that PT resisted a fear or stun in PvE or PvP, but that may just have been luck. I have not found its absence detrimental thus far.
A Raiding Shadow Priest’s Primer
Some of the information here is going to be my opinion, some of it collected theorycraft wisdom. Feel free to argue with the first, disagree, even vilify, if you want. However, if the Theorycrafting seems implausible to you, take your arguments (and math) to the appropriate places where they can set you straight. If I’ve missed something, you think something else should be added, you have additional questions, or you want to flame this, leave a comment.
What is a Shadow Priest all about?
A Shadow Priest is a priest who has chosen to focus their talents and gear into their Shadow tree to DPS, rather than heal. Currently, the Shadow Spec is one of the most important raid specs due to the extraordinary utility of the spell Vampiric Touch, which returns mana to the priests party while the DoT is on the target at a rate of 5% of shadow damage dealt. Often, a shadow priest’s personal DPS contribution will be respectable, though not at the top of the charts, but the combined benefits of the mana regen, the Misery debuff, and the Shadow Weaving debuff lead to incredible value.
Shadow Spec
There is always debate over what the most optimal spec is. One point here, another point there. For the Shadow Priest, there are a collection of talents in the Shadow Tree that are "must-have" talents. Aside from those talents, the points can be distributed as desired, though some specs are overall more successful.
Tier 1: Spirit Tap vs. Blackout
General wisdom is it does not matter which of these you choose. In terms of DPS, neither provides any tangible benefits. In some situations, Spirit Tap can provide benefits (boss with adds and having Improved Divine Spirit), while Blackout has no effect.
From the perspective of purely raiding, the marginal benefit of Spirit Tap is better than the no benefit of Blackout. For Soloers and Farmers, the blackout proc can be useful when targeting multiple mobs.
One other thing to consider is the impact of stun procs in a raiding environment. Being an uncontrollable phenomenon, it can adversely affect pulls. Whether that is something that concerns you is a personal choice or between you and your raid leader.
Tier 2: Shadow Affinity, Improved Shadow Word: Pain, and Shadow Focus
Shadow Affinity is one of the most important talents for a Shadow Priest. Not only do our damaging spells generate threat, Vampiric Touch generates threat for its mana return (in much the way Healing does) and Vampiric Embrace generates Healing Threat. A Shadow Priest doing a full DPS rotation will be one of the highest threat generating members in the raid and this is the only passive regeneration available. Other than this, ask for Blessing of Salvation if you get close to the tanks on threat.
Improved Shadow Word: Pain increases the number of your SW:P ticks from 6 to 8. At 6 ticks, SW:P already gains the full benefit of +Shadow Damage. This talent adds two more ticks at full damage, after talents and stats. This is a 33% buff to Shadow Word: Pain alone, and does not count the damage possible from having the extra global cooldown.
Shadow Focus increases you chance to hit with Shadow Spells by 2% per rank. Spells have a 17% chance to miss a level 73 target of which 16% can be negated. With a 10% improved chance for spells to hit, that means a Shadow Priest only requires 6% spell hit from gear freeing up more item value to be spent on +Shadow Damage. If you find yourself with more +spell hit on gear than you need, you can reduce ranks of this at 1 rank per 2% of unavoidable spell hit.
Tier 3: Mind Flay and Improved Mind Blast
Mind Flay is one talent point and is one of the mainstays of Shadow DPS. This is your Frostbolt. A frostbolt that is channeled and has a terrible damage coefficient.
Improved Mind Blast is used to reduce the cooldown on Mind Blast. The spell has an 8 second cooldown, and this can reduce it to 5.5 at max ranks. How many points you need in this is dependent upon a number of factors. 4/5 gives a six second cooldown which conveniently brackets Mind Blast around two un-hasted Mind Flays and is a very common choice. 1/5 reduces it to 7.5 which counts for two flays and an instant (or 1.5 second cast). 5.5 is useful if you have enough hast to bring Mind Flay to a 2.75 second spell, or do a Mind Flay interrupt rotation.
Tier 4: Shadow Weaving and Shadow Reach
Shadow Reach increases the range on Mind Flay to 24 yards. Sometimes those 4 yards make all the difference.
Shadow Weaving has a chance of applying a debuff to the target increasing all shadow damage by 2% per debuff, stacking to 5. This debuff is added to or refreshed by any Shadow Priest in the raid. The math works out that 4/5 is about the least you should go with to get that stacked as quickly as possible. 3/5 is workable if you will always have another Shadow Priest. 5/5 is the fastest you will put it up and the talent point is not a waste, though it may not be the most talent point.
Tier 5: Focused Mind and Vampiric Embrace
Focused mind is part of the mana efficient series of talents, reducing the mana cost of two of your most used spells by 15%. Since much of the purpose of a Shadow Priest is mana, being able to cast more efficiently for longer periods enhances your ability to provide Vampiric Touching to your party members.
Vampiric Embrace… even if you never, ever used it, you would take it because it is the prerequisite for Shadowform. But you should use it. Improved Vampiric Embrace is more debatable because it significantly increases threat generation when it is used. If you have tanks that can handle it, Imp. VE is quite nice to have.
Tier 6: Darkness
+10% Damage? Are you crazy? How can you justify not taking it? Most classes get 5% buffs.
Tier 7: Shadowform
This is why you became a Shadow Priest, because you wanted to be swirly purply bringer of death. +15% damage done, -15% damage taken. Pure win. Sure, you can’t cast holy spells (pfft! like you wanted to heal anyway), but you were brought in to DPS and this helps you do that. This is one of the two defining talents of the Shadow Spec.
Tier 8: Misery
This provides a 5% spell damage buff to your raid. Yes.
Tier 9: Vampiric Touch
This was the talent that took a sub-par DPSer that should be a healbot and turned them into one of the most desirable raid-specs in the game. I explained it above – your casters will love you. This is the other defining Talent of the Shadow Priest, and it is no coincidence it is the 41 point talent.
Outside of those, the talent points can be spent in a number of ways. The current "best" PvE spec is 14/0/47 (something more or less like this). This picks up Meditation (for mana regen) and Inner Focus (for free casting) our of the Discipline tree, and spreads a few more points in Shadow to fill it out.
Shadow Stats
Because it is mostly completely correct, I’m going to quote a section from the Elitist Jerks forum thread: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively:
3. What are the important stats for a Shadow Priest?
Spell hit: Point for point, 1 spell hit rating returns a larger increase in DPS than anything else. However, this is because spell hit can become capped, and IS capped very quickly for shadow priests. Against a boss type mob, you will have your spells resisted 17% of the time. 16% of this can be negated via spell hit. Of that 16%, ten can be negated through talents alone, meaning 76 spell hit rating is needed. For every 25 points of spell hit rating above this cap that can not be avoided, you can drop a point in shadow focus to spend elsewhere. However, never itemise for spell hit unless you need 4-6 spell hit rating to drop another point in shadow focus and have an item that gives a +damage bonus with a yellow socket.
Damage: Damage is your bread and butter stat. It, once hit capped, is the one and only stat worth getting in the sense that every other stat is translated to damage to see it’s value. For purposes of other comparisons, one spell damage will be considered the baseline. It does not matter whether the damage is shadow damage only or generic damage, both offer the same value and hence take whichever is higher (if all else is equal).
Spell Crit: Spell crit affects every single shadow priest spell that can crit. Yes, both of them. Only MB and SW:D are affected by spell crit, and they only crit for 150% damage, meaning that spell crit is a fairly weak stat for shadow priests. The current accepted conversion is roughly 6 spell crit rating = 1 damage. Yes, it’s that weak. And it does nothing if you are not using MB or SW:D.
Intellect: Intellect is only useful as it converts into spell crit. Assuming kings, it’s about 20 int per damage. Again, a weak stat.
Spirit: Spirit helps regenerate mana with Meditation (which is getting buffed in 2.3) and also adds damage via improved Divine Spirit. 9 spirit is equal to one damage, assuming kings, along with the regen benefits.
Mana per 5 Seconds: This helps regenerate mana. Good if it’s on a piece, but not needed.
Stamina: You only truly need a baseline hp level on Doomwalker and Naj’entus, both of whom you can wear PvP gear for. Ultimately, don’t worry about it too much.
The only thing I would mention, in addition to this is that, following 2.4, the passive regen provided by Spirit is affected by Intellect in a rather complicated fashion, and the relative values are more important for mana regen than the absolute values of those two stats. The more +Shadow you have, the more mana return from VT, and the less passive regen is important.
To make the math even easier on Spell hit, this table from Shadowpriest.com breaks it down for you:
Spell Hit Caps:
* 76 hit is the cap with 5/5 Shadow Focus
* 101 hit before you can go to 4/5 Shadow Focus
* 126 hit before you can go to 3/5 Shadow Focus
* 152 hit before you can go to 2/5 Shadow Focus
* 177 hit before you can go to 1/5 Shadow Focus
* 202 hit before you can go to 0/5 Shadow FocusAll numbers rounded up to the next whole number.
1% hit = 12.6 hit rating at level 70.
Shadow Method
While some classes can use a simple rotation of spells and abilities, Shadow Priests require a more flexible system. Most Shadow spells either have long durations, long cooldowns, or both! Instead of a rotation, Shadow Priests use a Priority System, where spells are arranged in a conceptual order of importance, and each cast is evaluated as to which spell is the most important at that cast time.
Vampiric Touch is considered to be the most important spell of a Shadow Priest, and on any boss mob you can, it should be up as close to 100% of the time as you can make it. It is important to be aware of its duration, as you want one cast to fully expire before the next one is applied for maximum dps benefit. You want to use a DoT Timer addon to keep track of its duration and allow you to maximize its uptime.
While VT is the most important spell, it may not be the first spell you cast. The other spell you want as close to 100% uptime is
Vampiric Embrace, if it is going to be used, is probably the next most important spell. This spell on its own generates no threat, but does put you on an enemies aggro table. You can cast this any time after the pull, even while waiting for the tank to build threat, so long as you do not begin dealing damage.
Shadow Word: Death can be used to increase DPS, however the resultant self-damage is hazardous at times. Generally, any time your damage is increased (during Curator’s evocation, for example) or there is raid damage, you want to avoid using SW:D.
If you are using SW:D, you are probably also using Mind Blast. Mind Blast is on a shorter cooldown, so I place at a lower priority because it will not be taken out of combat as long to begin with. Also, if using VE, the health boost from MB+VE can soak some of the health lost by the SW:D immediately prior.
Mind Flay is the bread and butter of your dps casting. when you aren’t doing anything else, eat this. Or, I suppose, have your enemy eat this.
Shadow Style
As was noted above, Shadow Priests first and foremost want to be at or near the hit cap. Point for point, spell hit is the most important stat on items. Once you are at the spell hit cap, the only important stat is +Shadow Damage, and the more +Shadow Damage you have, the more lackluster the other stats become.
Shadowpriest.com has two excellent guides to gear. So excellent, in fact, I won’t even bother to summarize them here.
Best Raiding Gear Available
Best Pre-Raid Gear Available
A lot of the craftable gear is exceptional, and those lists reflect that. If you are a tailor, the Frozen Shadoweave set, while not the best, can last you well into tier 5 and tier 6, as will the Engineering helm.
Gems and Enchants
Gems and enchants follow the same rules as gearing in general. Spell hit if you need it, +Damage beyond that. For slots where that is not available, anything that improves your ability to regen mana (mp5 or spirit), threat reduction or stamina would be your choices.
For a meta gem, the current gem of choice is the Ember Skyfire Diamond which conveniently requires red gems, since you will be stacking the "Runed" gems (Blood Garnets, Living Rubies, Crimson Spinels). You should only use a different color gem if the total spell damage you gain is equal from the gems and the socket bonus to what a red gem would provide.
Shadow Links
Shadowpriests have ShadowPriest.com as an excellent resource for all things shadowy.
The Elitist Jerks forums have thread dedicated to the theorycrafting of this spec: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively
Apanthrope has a Gear Longevity Chart that, while not ranking gear, shows you the ranges people actually use it in.
He also has some interesting thoughts on Shackle and Mind Control.
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.
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part Two: Bear Druids
Hmm. Odd that Cat Form druids get to be kitties, but there is no charming diminutive for Bear druids. I suppose I could be all Alamo about it (Bare Durids!). Anyway, for the kitties, check out part one.
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Bear Form
For tanking druids, the application of Hit and Expertise generally fall into the category of Threat stats. Warriors and Druids generate threat by attacking. Druid threat is largely generated by scaling threat modifiers on damage done, and warrior threat is largely a static amount based on abilities. Different strokes and all that. Paladins have a weird thing going on with a lot of their threat being generated by reactive abilities.
For druids, attacks need to land for threat to be generated. Hit, obviously, is useful for that because it can counter some of the 9% miss chance. Expertise counters the 6% Dodge and 12% parry chance. The block chance cannot be reduced.
It’s a lot harder to quantify threat scaling due to these effects than it is for DPS. As a general statement average optimal TPS (threat per second) will increase by 1% per increase of 1% of Hit chance. It can only be said that that is reflective of optimal performance only. In situations where there are adds or rage issues or any of that, hit may be more or less important.
In terms of threat generation, Expertise is twice as beneficial as Hit because it increases your chance to hit by 2% by reducing both dodges and parries. If you want to stack one to improve threat, Expertise is the way to go until you reach the 6% mark. From the 6% point onward, you have pushed dodges off the attack table and are only reducing parries, so it is equal to Hit as a means of increasing TPS.
The real benefit of expertise is that it is also a mitigation stat. Due to parry mechanics, when a boss parries a blow, its next attack may be sped up:
Parry & Attack Speed Reduction
When you parry an attack, it reduces the time of your next main hand attack. This applies to both players and NPCs, so when an NPC parries an attack its next attack may occur more quickly than normal. Depending on how much time is left until your next attack, one of three things will happen to your main hand swing timer:
- If the next attack would normally occur within 20% of your weapon speed after the parry, there is no effect.
- If the next attack would normally occur between 20% and 60% of your weapon speed later, it happens 20% of your weapon speed later instead.
- If the next attack would normally occur more than 60% of your weapon speed later, the time until your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed.
For example, with a 2.0 speed weapon, if your next attack would normally occur .3 seconds after the parry, it will still happen at that time. If it would normally occur anywhere between .4 and 1.2 seconds after the parry, it instead happens .4 seconds later. And if it were to normally happen 1.5 seconds after the parry, this would be reduced by .8 seconds causing it to happen .7 seconds later.
The benefit of this is high. If you reached the soft cap on Expertise and reduced parries by 6%, that would reduce the number of incoming attacks and the amount of incoming damage. How much is an amount that is hard to quantify because it is highly situational.
Should you stack Expertise?
Personal preference: I wouldn’t be stacking it on my normal tanking set. I fall onto the Effective Health side of the fence rather than Avoidance right now. When I start building a more avoidance-centric set, I probably will stack Expertise in it. Why? Because the greater avoidance would mean I’d be taking less steady damage, meaning rage generation would be less stable. Being able to hit more reliably will offset some of that, the attacks would hit and the damage from them would help generate rage. Also, a heavy avoidance kit would be sacrificing survival stats and reducing damage by reducing parry gibs would be a good thing.
General Context: If you find survivability is not an issue and can either add Expertise or replace some items to add it, you can increase your threat generation. The more threat you as the tank can generate, the wider you are opening the window for raid DPS to shoot through.
Further Information:
Wanderlei – On Avoidance
Effective Health Theory
Finding the Expertise Hard Cap
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part One: Kitty Druids
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Cat Form
For Cat form DPS I’ll assume you’d be Shredding and Ripping in a standard DPS rotation. Shred has to be done from behind the target and when attacked from behind a boss cannot parry or block (though nothing can reduce blocks anyway) so we only have to concern ourselves with Misses and Dodges. With no Hit and no Expertise you would miss 9% of the attacks, 6% would be dodged, 25% would be glancing blows (which also we cannot reduce), the remainder would be regular hits and crits.
Here is where the math starts to get fuzzy: Hit, Expertise, and Crit are all scaling effects. Depending on your stats they will all have different inherent values. As a general rule, removing one percent of misses (via Hit Rating) increases the Hit portion of the attack table by 1%, as does removing 1% of dodges (via Expertise Rating). Increasing your crit chance by 1% replaces 1% of your Hit.
Basically, Hit takes 1% that does no damage and lets it do normal damage. Expertise replaces 1% of no damage and makes it do normal damage. Crit replaces 1% of normal damage and makes it do double damage (before talents and meta gems, some of which increase the effect of critical hits and thus the value of Crit Rating). Without taking anything else into consideration, normal attacks on a normal attack table increase damage by 1% no matter which you choose.
Some special attacks, however, are resolved on different combat tables. For instance Rip cannot crit because it is a damage over time effect. Crit does not improve that ability at all, though Hit and Expertise do.
Attacks like Mangle and Shred seem to be on the two-roll system, so an attack has to hit before it can crit (normal attacks do not follow that rule). That increases the value of Hit and Expertise with the marginal increase in crit due to the special attack hitting in the first place.
Based on that, Hit and Expertise provide more benefit than Crit: they affect all attacks and on specials are increased by the marginal increase in crit chance the hit provides.
The talent Primal Fury, however, increases the benefit of Crit. Each time (if you have both points) a combo-point-generating-attack crits, you get not one combo point, but two. Given the time Energy takes to regen, it is not possible to have your four combo-point rip on a twelve-second cycle without having some of your special attacks crit. Even if you were to only Mangle, the 40 energy that costs would take four seconds to regen: the twelve seconds in between rips would only generate three combo points (assuming no misses, dodges, parries, blocks). A four CP Rip would be on a 16 second cycle using only Mangles. Using the higher DPS Shred you end up on an 18 second cycle! That is a 33% reduction in Rip damage (instead of total damage over 12 seconds it is over 18 seconds).
If we had a 33% crit rate, instead of four attacks to generate four combo points, we only need three attacks to do the same. Only using Mangle, generating four combo points would require 12 seconds, just in time to refresh Rip. Shred is improved to a 14 second cycle. At crit rates approaching 50%, mangle would generate those 4 CP in 8 seconds, far faster than Rip could be reapplied.
1% Crit, therefore, increases normal damage by 1%, special damage other than Rip by 1%, and rip damage (through faster CP generation) by up to 33%. 1% Hit or 1% expertise increases normal damage by 1%, special damage by 1% and a bit. In an effort to make this even more complicated, missed specials refund 80% of their cost and missed finishing moves do not. That weighs against the value of Hit/Expertise for specials because the energy cost of a miss is not 100% and Energy is a more scarce resource than global cooldowns (1 second in cat form).
None of that even takes relative values of AP into consideration!
Some people really like Hit and Expertise for keeping dps constant and not missing finishing moves, which is a valid argument. To the best of my knowledge, the dps benefits of any of them weighs out to very similar amounts in real world scenarios (hehe). Which you choose is going to have to be balanced against with the real items you would be equipping and the stat allocation. All of them are good to have.
My advice, is to not worry about Hit and Expertise. With the changes in 2.3 (I think it was 2.3) to Heart of the Wild made pure rogue leather much more attractive since it now operates off the derived stat of AP rather than strength. Most of the rogue gear is going to have some Hit or some Expertise on it, which is nice to have (rogues benefit so hugely from Hit that almost all of their gear should have it). I would never gem or enchant for it, however. And I would never chase pure crit. What comes on gear is nice, but I would focus on Agility. Point for point, the benefits of Agi providing both AP and Crit make it superior to every other stat for Cat DPS.
Additional resources:
ElitistJerks Feral Druid Megathread Check the first few posts for information.
Why is +hit good for DPS? A somewhat dated discussion, but the underlying math has not significantly changed.
