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.
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Very nice tips, well written, keep them coming!