Weapons With Spell PowerFollow

Sometimes, as an Enhancement Shaman, I run across a dagger/etc. that has a lot of Spell power and little or no agility. There seems to be a battle in EJ on the use of this kind of weapon. Is it a role playing thing? Kind of a mage vs warrior feel about the role or is it more fundimental than that? I get real confused reading tne EJ boards since at 82 I don't raid or do heroics. Any oldtimers care to enlighten me?

Thanks

I wouldn't worry about weapons with spellpower on them namely due to the very low DPS on those weapons. As an Enhance Shammy, you already are converting 50% of your attack power to spellpower due to Mental Quickness and gaining a couple hundred spellpower doesn't make up for the lack of max damage in my opinion. For example:

Heavy Geode Mace vs Lifeforce Hammer

You gain 1300 spellpower at the expense of over 600 max damage. That really hurts your Windfury procs. I haven't played Enhance in a while but it would be interesting to see what the breakdown of auto attack/Windfury procs are to spellpower abilities.

Everything we've ever been told as Enhance Shammies was to have Slow/Slow max damage non-caster weapons.

Edited, Feb 17th 2011 2:33pm by Jornam

Because so many Enhance spells scaled so well with spell power, it was an over all gain in DPS to trade weapon DPS for weapon spell power. Recently, they buffed Windfury procs to three hits, making MH weapon damage more important, and changed Flametongue Weapon to only scale off AP (for Enhance shamans). There's also the rumor that Lava Lash, based on some old talent designs, benefits from both AP and spell power. This might even have been stealth-fixed recently.

In any case, the benefits of using a caster main-hand weapon have been nerfed, and will be nerfed if it ever pulls ahead of using two melee weapons. The safest thing to do is to always get the two slowest, hard-hitting 1H Agi weapons that you can find.