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.
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