wow enhancment shredsFollow

Yes, we are awesome. :)

Sly's post is worth rating up, just because we're awesome.

Tips, though! Carry ankhs, reagents for Water Walking/Breathing, offsets for emergency-healing instance runs and make good use of totems!

Weapon itemization for end-game enhancement shaman also sucks right now, too, but that's a minor concern. Enhancement solo is a blast. Right now, Stormstrike is usually the only ability I need while doing dailies to kill my current target. The only time I seem to use anything else is if I'm on to the next mob before SS is off CD.

Enhancement shaman in raids are a niche class/spec. I'm not happy with what my shaman brings to raids these days, largely due to the fact that I raid with another enhancement shaman and even if I didn't, there's nothing I bring to the table aside from a trivial boost to Agi/Str over Horn of Winter that can't be duplicated by another class/spec.

I did, however, finally get a slow OH weapon for my shaman tonight (in addition to my iLvl245 T9 shoulders rounding out my 4pc T9 set). This will be the first time since I hit 80 (not joke) that I've had a slow OH. I'm looking forward to tomorrow night's raid to see how it influences my dps. EnhSim tells me it should produce a 200-300dps boost (minimum). Hell, I might finally catch up to the other enh. shaman in the guild, in which case I can mock his socially inept *** for letting someone in worse gear than him match (or even exceed) his numbers for the night. Oh, the glee.

And with that, your shaman works exactly as advertised. What's wrong with that?



Ok, let's ignore the tanking part. Other than that -I- got exactly what I was promised.

Well yeah, those class descriptions haven't been updated in a long time, if ever. By now we all know that druids are the only true hybrid since pallies can't do ranged dps, and there just isn't much tanking coming from a shaman.

But I think that shamans and other hybrids finally stand in the right place. Damage output is finally respectable and not totally gimped because of being able to do a little healing too. Even more so, reaching decent results with an enhancement shaman is ridiculously easy compared to some other classes, especially cat druids.

For the most part you actually get to do damage now if that's what you want to do. That's a long way from the early days, where druids were expected to heal if they wanted to raid, enhancement shammies were taken for Windfury, and shadow priest for mana.

I don't see myself reduced to being the Bloodlust/Heroism b*tch. In fact, I think it's most beneficial that other classes provide same or similar buffs now. I don't need to worry about dragging my WF totem with me if there is a DK with Improved Icy Talons, and Horn of Winter ensures that people are buffed without me having to re-set Strenght of Earth all the time. I'm actually getting to make a choice about which totem to set where and when, and that's something rather nice.

If you're raiding under PuG conditions, e.g. "Shaman heal!" you're just probably not in the right place.

Can't count the times that good use of utility abilities and/or (maelstrom or normal) heals saved the day in heroics. Must be true in harder content too.

There is more to it than just raw dps. Don't neglect that "there is more" part!

(now normally, heroics arent that interesting, but in PUGs, anything can happen...)

I'm not worried about topping charts because I know the people I play with can tell who contributes. The idea that I can bring bloodlust, wind shear, purge, and all sorts of awesome totems like cleansing and tremor... well, it makes me down right giddy.

Then on top of that you get all sorts of quality of life abilities! Water breathing, water walking, reincarnation, ghost wolf, etc.

I'm currently at 70 and when I get to the level cap and hit a wall, knowing its heroic grinding time, I'll remember my friends are as excited about my shaman as I am. And because of their generosity I have two of the brewfest mugaces in the bank ready to go.

Right now I'm using the MH fist weapon from Mimiron and the axe from Anub in ToC10. Prior to getting the axe last week, I was using the 1.8 speed dagger from some earlier boss in ToC10 (which boss specifically eludes me). That one switch (1.8-2.8 weapon speed, exact same weapon dps) made an enormous impact on my dps. I went from trailing the guild's other enhancement shaman by at least 500dps on most fights to keeping very close pace with him. He has a habit of padding meters (ie. using chain lightning on Ignis even though our strategy does not in any way involve killing the adds) and I've caught on to his sneakiness. He beat me by 70k overall damage on our last Ignis fight with 65k of that coming from chain lightning. My weapons are on par with his now but the rest of his gear is superior to mine. He stopped being a mouthy dork for some reason. I'm still trying to figure out why...

More to the point, I hit 80 and had a Titansteel Bonecrusher and a Titansteel Shanker in the bank. What sucked is that the Bonecrusher is designated MH only, and so was the Calamity's Grasp I upgraded to from the Bonecrusher, and the fist weapon I currently have is also MH only. Instead of being able to rotate my MH weapon to OH as I upgraded, my OH weapon was stuck with whatever I could get. For the longest time, that was the Titansteel Shanker. I think I upgraded from that to the dagger out of ToC10. I'm set for Icecrown Citadel now (I could still upgrade from ToGC10/ToC25/ToGC25, but if I don't see any upgrades from those at least I'm reasonably optimized now).

Rather than giving rogues the ability to use axes so they could justify putting more 1h weapons in loot tables, I think Blizzard would have been much better off simply removing the MH stipulation on so many of the 1h weapons in the game pre-T9. That would have been a much more substantial benefit to enhancement shaman, and it was largely enhancement shaman itemization they were trying to address with the rogue change.

I had wondered about that, but frankly I was too lazy to test for the threshold to see if I would have been better of continuing to farm heroic ToC5 for the mace or sticking with my dagger. I did do a test, however, that involved using EnhSim with all of my current values at the time and then changing the weapon speed on my OH weapon from 1.8 to 2.6 and it showed a gain of 200-300 dps.

I wish I could get an accurate count of how many times I ran heroic ToC5 specifically trying to get the mace, but my shaman's statistic page shows only one kill of The Black Knight in heroic ToC5...ever lol That is definitely a bug. I used to consider heroic ToC5 as a daily...I just did it every day hoping.

It's interesting to see that I actually would have been better off using the iLvl200 mace bought with champion seals than the iLvl232 dagger from ToC10. Interesting, and a bit disgusting. What an awful shame that Blizzard could botch things so badly.