Updated for the current 3.3.2 patch.

As always, if you have any comments or corrections, please let me know! I do not expect this FAQ to be 100% accurate yet, and it never will be without your help. Unless otherwise specified, assume this information pertains to PvE.

Which Imbues Should I Use for Enhancement?
- The ideal configuration is a slow mainhand with windfury (WF) and a slow offhand with flametongue (FT).
- Fast offhands with FT are not viable. Both the FT proc and spell coefficient scale down with weapon speed.
- If you don't have the elemental fury talent yet, use WF/WF slow/slow.

Which Glyphs should I use?
Glyph selection depends upon spec and gear level. These should be taken as suggestions for the lazy, not gospel. Run the enhance simulator and Rawr, check out Binkenstein's spreadsheet (from the EJ article linked below) and do your own tests.
Enhancement: Stormstrike, Feral Spirit, and Windfury Weapon. Fire Elemental is an alternative for heroics.
Elemental: Flame Shock, Totem of Wrath, and Lightning
Restoration: Earth Shield, Riptide, and either Chain Heal (for raids) or Lesser Healing Wave

How to AE
The Fire Nova (FN) ability grants shamans the ability to effectively AE. FN has a 10s base cooldown.
1) Invest 2 points in the Improved FN talent. (+20% FN damage and -4s cooldown)
2) Invest 3 points in the Call Of Flame talent. Both enhance and elemental should take this anyway for single-target damage. (+15% magma and FN damage.)
3) Glyph Fire Elemental Totem. (-5 min cooldown) Note that this is not recommended for raiding purposes. It will only improve your performance on bosses taking over 5 minutes to kill.
4) If targets are likely to be stationary, drop a Fire Elemental Totem on top of them then FN until dead.
5) If targets are likely to move, drop Magma Totem instead and continue to cast FN on cooldown. Move/refresh Magma Totem as required.
6) Chain Lightning (waiting for 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon if enhance)

Enhancement Damage Priorities
Enhancement shamans don't have a set rotation as many spells have staggered cooldowns and maelstrom weapon stacks are random. We use a priority list instead. Use the following abilities in order of priority to maximize sustained damage.

1) Lightning Bolt (With a 5 stack of maelstrom weapon. Use chain lightning only if >1 mob.)
2) Stormstrike
3) Earth Shock
4) Lava Lash
5) Fire Elemental or Magma Totem
6) Fire Nova, if mana allows and/or >1 target in range
7) Refresh Lightning Shield

How to gear for Enhancement
The proper way to determine stat weights is to run the simulator with your stats plugged in.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t31667-enhancement_shaman_enhsim_dps_simulator/

If you're still leveling up or feel lazy, a general rule of thumb is as follows. These are ordered by priority.

1) 8% total melee hit (to cap special attacks, minus 6% from imp. dual wield)
2) Expertise (until 6.5% reduction in parry/dodge, 26 expertise minus 9 from unleashed rage)
3) 17% total hit (To cap spell hit. Note that improved dual wield does not provide spell hit.)
4) Haste, Crit and Agility (no real caps here)
5) More hit (until hard DW melee cap at 27%) > Int > Str > Attack Power > Armor Penetration > Spell Power

Note that hit has "soft" caps at 2% (for special melee attacks, including 6% melee hit from talents) and 17% (for spells) and a hard cap at 22% (covers everything, assuming 6% melee hit from talents).

Windfury Weapon
- Scales with weapon DPS, attack power, haste, crit, and hit.
- Mitigated by armor and block, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 5% special attack type melee miss chance.
- Benefits from Weapon Mastery for 10% more damage.
- The best enchant for enhancement shamans on the main hand.
- The two extra attacks can proc Flurry, Unleashed Rage, and weapon on hit effects. They do not consume Flurry charges and don't glance.
- When used offhand, the two extra attacks are affected by the standard offhand 50% damage reduction. The WF proc's attack power bonus is not.

Windfury Totem
- The Windfury Totem grants melee haste. It does not grant ranged haste to hunters. It stacks with the shaman-only weapon imbue.

The Windfury Cooldown
After WF procs it cannot proc again on either hand for 3 seconds. No 1H weapon in the entire game can proc WF twice in a row. This means that WF will proc less than the 20% promised on its tooltip.
- When only one weapon has WF, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 20% chance to proc. This leads to a 11-18% overall proc rate, depending on gear, weapon speed, spec, and luck. Slower is better.
- When both weapons have WF, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 36% chance to proc. This leads to a 11-14% procrate with weapons faster than 2.0s unhasted and a 14-18% procrate with weapons slower than 2.0s unhasted. Slower is better.

Flametongue Weapon
- The best mainhand enchant for elemental shamans and the best offhand enchant for enhancement shamans.
- Scales with spell power, melee attack power (with Mental Quickness), crit, hit, and melee haste.
- Mitigated by spell resist, fire resist, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a normal spell miss chance of 17% against level+3 bosses.
- Crits at 100% damage with the elemental talent Elemental Fury
- With Mental Quickness FT scales with attack power, but it scales less than WF. FT should not be used mainhand by enhance shamans.
- Spell coefficient applied per proc is determined by weapon speed, from 5% for 1.3s weapons to 10% for 2.6s weapons to 15% for 4.0s weapons.
- Used offhand, the FT proc is not affected by the 50% damage reduction.
- FT rank 10 adds 68.5 base dps. Each proc will do 68.5*(weaponspeed) base damage.
- Does not proc Elemental Focus on crits.
- The glyph of Flametongue Weapon stacks when dualwielding, giving 4% spell crit.
- The FT totem gives spell power instead of the FT weapon imbue. This stacks with FT weapon.

Earthliving Weapon
- Earthliving (EL) is the weapon imbue for restoration shamans.
- The EL effect has a chance to proc on each "jump" of a chain heal.
- The Heal over Time (HoT) effect ticks every second and refreshes itself when it procs frequently. It does not stack.
- When dualwielded, the healing spell power effect and procrate are both doubled, but the HoT still does not stack.

Frostbrand Weapon
- Scales with spell power, attack power (with Mental Quickness), crit, hit, melee haste.
- Mitigated by spell resist, frost resist, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a normal spell miss chance of 17% against level+3 bosses.
- Crits at 100% damage with the elemental talent Elemental Fury.
- Benefits from 10% of your spell power per proc.
- Procs at 9 procs per minute, which at level 80 is 79.5dps.
- With Mental Quickness, FB scales with attack power, but it scales considerably worse then FT. FB should not be used for its damage. It is situationally useful in PvP only.
- Does not proc Elemental Focus on crits.
- Does not slow bosses. Frostbrand is a PvP-only ability.

Maelstrom Weapon
- Maelstrom Weapon (MW) is a fantastic talent. A 5-stack Lightning Bolt should always be your first priority for both sustained and burst DPS.
- MW ranks give 2/4/6/8/10 base procs per minute (PPM).
- Note that this is before dualwielding, windfury, instant attacks, and haste like flurry or WF totem. MW procs a lot more than 10 per minute. Due to instant attacks, slow weapons are better than fast.
- Unlike many PPM enchants, MW scales with haste. More haste will give more MW procs.
- Impacted spells cast with MW stacks do not reset the swing timer. They suspend it.
- Do not drop ranks of Maelstrom Weapon. Get all 5.

Unleashed Rage
- Does not generate threat.
- Unleashed rage is 3 talent points and also grants 3/6/9 expertise. It is a worthwhile talent even if your raid has a hunter or DK to provide the AP buff.

The Elemental Focus Talent
- Elemental focus procs on every offensive spell crit, giving a buff reducing the cost of the next two spells by 40%.
- This buff also works on heals. It does not stack to greater than two. Instead it refreshes itself.
- Chain lightning does give three chances to proc elemental focus.
- Elemental mastery now gives one free spell and you gain the elemental focus buff.

Dual Wield Specialization
- Dual wield specialization does not give spell hit.

Stormstrike
- [BUG] Not affected by the thundering strikes talent.
- [BUG] If the first attack of your stormstrike is dodged, parried, or misses, the second will never go off. This bug has been reported many times but never acknowledged.
- Can proc windfury, flurry, weapon procs, unleashed rage, and shamanistic rage.

*************************************************
CONTINUED IN POST 4, SCROLL DOWN...
*************************************************

Nevermind.

Excellent Post, thanks!!

(continued)

Searing Totem
- Searing totem is less single-target DPS than magma. It should not be used.

Chain Heal
- Fully talented chain heal is one of the best healing spells in the game, if used effectively to heal multiple targets. It is only useful situationally, but when you can use it, it's incredible.
- Fully talented chain heal is the main reason why resto shamans are useful in raids. Shaman single target healing is inefficient compared to priests or paladins, but we're great at keeping the rogues up.

Lava Lash
- LL is a standard non-normalized offhand attack that happens to do fire damage. It is affected by the 50% offhand damage penalty just like a normal offhand attack. It crits at 100% without elemental fury.
- It does not benefit from spell power, etc, and will proc everything a normal offhand attack will proc like flametongue, windfury, mongoose, flurry, etc.
- LL completely bypasses armor and is resisted like a fire spell, but uses melee hit. It also benefits from buffs to spell damage, like curse of the elements.

Which Totems aren't raid-wide?
- Cleansing, mana tide, healing stream, grounding, and tremor totems remain group-only.

Bloodlust/Heroism
- These spells drop the global cooldown to 1s. They do not stack with other haste effects castable on other players like [Drums of Battle]. They do stack with Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Touch.

How Haste Works
Haste is not a straight speed reduction. 25% haste from Flurry does not make your 2.0s weapon attack at 1.5s; it actually attacks at 1.6s. The same formulas work for melee and spell haste. They are:

Haste multiplier = 1 / ((100 + haste%) / 100)
Hasted weapon speed = unhasted weapon speed * haste multiplier
Flurry haste multiplier = 1 / 1.25 = 0.8

So for flurry, simply multiply your unhasted speed by 0.8.

Earth Shield
- [BUG] Earth Shield is only affected by the Purification talent when cast upon yourself. So you lose out on 10% effectiveness. This was not fixed in 3.0.
- [BUG] Mana cost not reduced by tidal focus.
- Gets 56% of your +healing per charge. This is determined when you cast the spell, so you can blow your trinkets for a better earth shield proactively.
- Earth shield counts as the target healing, so if it heals 100 damage they get 50 threat. This is affected by defensive stance/bear form and defiance/feral instinct, so a warrior/druid tank generates 0.725 threat against all mobs per point of damage healed. It is unknown if this healing threat is affected by Paladins' righteous fury spell. It's unlikely, since the healing effect is listed as nature, not holy. Also paladins get 50% threat from healing passively, so the difference would be minimized.

Spell Power Coefficients
Lesser Healing Wave - 80.5% (untested)
Healing Wave - 161% (untested)
Chain Heal - 262% (134% + 80% + 48% on each "jump" respectively) (untested)
Chain Lightning - 112% (64% + 32% + 16% on each "jump" respectively)
Lava Burst - 57.14%
Lightning Bolt - 79.4%
Lightning Shield - 100% (33% per proc)
Earth Shield - 336% (56% per proc) (untested)
Earth Shock - 41%
Frost Shock - 41%
Flame Shock - 81.42% (21.42% on shock, 60% over the DoT)
Healing Stream Totem - 11% (per 2 second tick) (untested)
Searing Totem - 8% (per shot)
Frostbrand Weapon - 10% per proc
Flametongue Weapon - Scales with weapon speed from 5% to 15%.
Fire Nova - 21.4% (untested)
Magma Totem - 100% (10% per 2s "pulse", 10 pulses)

Skills, Stats, and Ratings at 80
Note that avoidance stats now have diminishing returns, so benefit will drop as you stack dodge rating, for example.

1 Expertise = 8.2 Expertise Rating = 0.25% less dodges/parries from your target
1 Defense Skill = 4.9 Defense Skill Rating
1 Attack Power = 1 Strength = 1 Agility
1% Melee Hit = 32.79 Hit rating
1% Spell Hit = 26.23 Hit rating
1% Crit = 45.9 Critical strike rating = 83.3 Agility = 167 Intellect (both spell and melee)
1% Haste = 23 haste rating (both spell and melee)(untested)
1% Armor Ignored = 13.99 Armor Penetration rating
1% Dodge = 45.2 Dodge rating = 60 agility
1% Parry = 49.2 Parry rating
1% Chance to block = 16.4 Block chance rating
1% Resilience = 82.0 Resilience rating = 1% less chance to be crit, 2% less critical strike damage
Mana Regen (out of the 5 second rule): Int now directly impacts spirit. This has become complex and out of scope for this FAQ. For more details go to the wowwiki link below or just install an addon like Ratingbuster to do it for you.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Spirit

Links to other major useful infodumps

http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t20765-shaman_enhancement/
http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t20914-shaman_elemental/
http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t24796-shaman_restoration/

Very nice Slant. :)

I am happy you left out much of the suspect information. You missed a point when you talked about flame tounge. You should remove the "Also useful if you have under roughly 400 attack power. " That is suspect and highly variable depending on things.

Finally do you know if the new Elemental Focus (Clearcasting) Talent works with crits from flametounge or frost brand?

Thanks for the post. I just started playing WoW as of TBC and have a shaman as one of my toons. Probably having the most fun so far with this guy duoing with my wife's druid.

(continued)

This used to be a page trying to convince raid leaders to take shamans on their raids. Well I think it worked, as shamans were very much wanted in TBC. Obviously it's no longer necessary in WOTLK with buff sharing, so I'll just keep this post reserved if I need more space.

STICKY!

Really excellent post. Nice job.

Quick question - when analyzing weapon buffs, you mention "pre-TBC greens." Does that mean "anyone who is not L60+, as well as anyone L60+ still in green gear"? I.e., while leveling enhancement, until we start getting good gear in the mid-to-high 60s, we should use Rockbiter MH and FT OH? Thanks a lot!

How to gear for enhancement?
Four stats are important for enhancement shamans. They are:

in english you want:
+HIT
+STR/ATTACK POWER
+ATTACK HASTE/SPEED
+AGI/CRIT
+STA ( a lot of it to increase your survavility specially if you pvp)

---

Q u o t e:
STICKY!

Really excellent post. Nice job.

Quick question - when analyzing weapon buffs, you mention "pre-TBC greens." Does that mean "anyone who is not L60+, as well as anyone L60+ still in green gear"? I.e., while leveling enhancement, until we start getting good gear in the mid-to-high 60s, we should use Rockbiter MH and FT OH? Thanks a lot!

---

The greens in Outlands are huge leaps better than the greens in Azeroth. Because WF both scale with gear, as soon as you start getting Outlands greens (or anything), RB becomes obsolete. In most cases where you came to outlands wearing Azeroth greens, you'll have replaced all your gear by 62 or so.

---

Q u o t e:
STICKY!

Really excellent post. Nice job.

Quick question - when analyzing weapon buffs, you mention "pre-TBC greens." Does that mean "anyone who is not L60+, as well as anyone L60+ still in green gear"? I.e., while leveling enhancement, until we start getting good gear in the mid-to-high 60s, we should use Rockbiter MH and FT OH? Thanks a lot!

---

in the low 60's you will find yourself picking up a lot of +spell dmg gear even if you are enh.
if you do find yourself in this situation use a combination of WF+FT or even FT+FT.
once you enough +hit,+agi+str then you can bother with dual WF or RB.

That's not exactly the question - I'm currently 52 and have been using WF/WF-1. I'm trying to make sure I understand Slant clearly. Is he saying that everyone pre-60 should be using RB/FT?

---

Q u o t e:
That's not exactly the question - I'm currently 52 and have been using WF/WF-1. I'm trying to make sure I understand Slant clearly. Is he saying that everyone pre-60 should be using RB/FT?

---

Slant, correctly, did not give exact numbers for WF verse RB verse FT because the math and personal experence varies widly.

Some rules of thumb for this is.

If you have mostly greens under your level with little +damage RB is best. (RB does not scale with gear but starts out decent for bonus dps)
If you have mostly blues with little +damage WF is best (WF scales with gear so if you have decent gear it will be better then RB)
If you have mixed gear with a decent +damage FB is best for offhand. (Generally if you end up with a decent/a lot of +damage FB will be best for off hand, as it is not 50% like WF or RB)

Greens? Heck, you'll replace your BLUES by level 62 after you hit TBC. TBC clvl 60 greens are inflated by like 25 ilvls.

If for some reason you decide to gear up in spell damage instead of attack power when specced enhance, yes, dualwield flametongue. That certainly wouldn't be optimal, though.

At level 52 you'd probably be better off with WF/FT or RB/FT. There isn't much good enhancement gear available before outlands, and you need good attack power for the offhand to scale better than FT. If you're wearing all blue pre-TBC "shunter" gear, go WF/WF-1.

I didn't post the math because I don't have it right in front of me, but it certainly isn't impossible to model mathematically.

Yeah - I totally see the logic of FT offhand. I'm amazed I didn't think about it until your post. As far as MH WF or RB, I was just trying to follow up on this statement in your OP.

---

Q u o t e:
- Rockbiter is the best mainhand enchant if you are an enhancement shaman wearing pre-TBC green gear.

---

I gather the main issue for MH is that WF's effectiveness depends on +hit, so RB is better until getting a lot of it. Anyway, I'll play around with it. Thanks again for this, and bump for sticky!

Actually rockbiter and flametongue depend on +hit just as much as windfury. Remember that the two windfury attacks have a 5% miss rate, so they never ever miss with 6% from imp dualwielding alone.

Windfury's main advantages are that it scales with gear and gives extra hits that can crit to proc flurry, UR, and SR. That's why rockbiter is not optimal once you get TBC greens.

great post. I learned a thing or two :)

go go firetongue for resto build!

---

Q u o t e:
Actually rockbiter and flametongue depend on +hit just as much as windfury. Remember that the two windfury attacks have a 5% miss rate, so they never ever miss with 6% from imp dualwielding alone.

Windfury's main advantages are that it scales with gear and gives extra hits that can crit to proc flurry, UR, and SR. That's why rockbiter is not optimal once you get TBC greens.

---

I guess I'm wondering the mechanics of why/whether WF MH is not good for someone in 40s and 50s with a mix of green and blue gear (as your FAQ may be stating/implying).

It very well might be, that was just a generality. Talented windfury increases mainhand dps by roughly 56%; if your mainhand weapon does over 85dps (including AP), you'll get more raw damage from WF than the talented 54 rockbiter (48dps). And you get the extra flurry, UR, and SR procs.

Blue weapons around 55 are 35dps, so you need 700 attack power for windfury to beat rockbiter at that level. Call it 600AP if you include the procs from extra crits. Not unattainable at that level, if you have full shunter gear. But why bother doing dungeons over and over for blues when you can just level to 58 and instantly upgrade to TBC greens?