Leveling an alt Shaman...Enhance or Elemental ?

[Arees]

My Enhancement Shaman is 3 bars from 40 and I am debating what to get first, Dual-wield or Stormstrike. What does everyone here recommend?

I'm going to get DW personally. I'd rather have a 2nd weapon always hitting my target than a shield that sits there not doing much.

[vertinog]

My Enhancement Shaman is 3 bars from 40 and I am debating what to get first, Dual-wield or Stormstrike. What does everyone here recommend?

I'm going to get DW personally. I'd rather have a 2nd weapon always hitting my target than a shield that sits there not doing much.

I was thinking DW so I could have either double WF, WF/FB or WF/FT and get some extra damage over my slow 2h. Probably will go with DW as well.

[Punkss2]

I'm pretty sure Stormstrike attacks with both weapons, so getting your DW first is probably better.

[vertinog]

I'm pretty sure Stormstrike attacks with both weapons, so getting your DW first is probably better.

Yes Stormstrike does strike with both weapons. I read at a few other places that going one way or the other was better with no real consensus on which does help you level faster. Last time I took DW when I hit 40, bought two lvl 4 1.7 speed axes and leveled my 1h axe's to 180 in 2 minutes. Spent another 15 minutes questing and I am already half way to 41. Bottom line is that you level so much faster now it doesn't matter which one you take.

[vegardhv]

So been playing enhance for a while now. Got a tip to use enhsim to find what stats would benefit me most, as I've gemmed attack power and I see most good geared folks on the server are gemming haste and maybe even using the elemental totem giving haste on flame shock period damage.

I get weird results - the sim says I'm over hit cap which is true, but then it gives higher EP for hit rating than haste, and what I feel is too much value on intellect too, attack power still comes out way ahead of everything else - seeing as no other EP value passes 2 except main hand/off hand dps.

I read a post on MMO champion from the guy who allegedly made the shockandawe addon - he said include flame shock in your rotation - that I did not know. I tried including it, but see no improvement. He just said you might want to gem haste for certain gear levels - he pointed to elitistjerks, but I _cannot_ find my way around on that site (as opposed to this awesome site). I manage to find outdated information though.

Can anyone give some insight about what to gem - and how to use enhsim correctly, the homepage for enhsim has some sort of faq/documentation - but the pages are all empty. Maybe someone saved a good link to some good enhance theorycrafting thread?

thanks
Vegard

[KysenMurrin]

If you're looking on Elitist Jerks, you want to go down to the Theorycrafting Thinktank and see the Shaman: Enhancement section there. That usually seems pretty up to date (moreso than most other sections on EJ).

The value of Int for Enhance seems to vary widely based on what mana saving talents you take and what buffs are available. Haste, iirc, only becomes highly valued once you have above a certain amount of it. Hit above the spell cap is still increasing your white hits, which can be significant (not just more hits, but more procs of WF and MW). So I can see reasons why you'd get the EP values you did.

I haven't used EnhSim myself, so can't really offer advice there.


The Haste totems are generally better than the AP totems for enhance even if you're not stacking Haste - the Triumph emblem totem for 200 Haste on Lightning Bolt is a good purchase.


Flame Shock is supposed to be a dps gain, I'm not very good at keeping the DoT up personally, but I did gain 4 piece t9 recently so I probably should pay more attention to the timer. You want to be refreshing it every 18 seconds and using Earth Shock otherwise, so that the DoT runs its full duration.

[vegardhv]

If you're looking on Elitist Jerks, you want to go down to the Theorycrafting Thinktank and see the Shaman: Enhancement section there. That usually seems pretty up to date (moreso than most other sections on EJ).

Been there before, and looked now - yeah they updated it some more. I still want more though. I found a blog from some shaman in ensidia - he posted his setup of enhsim - I'll try copy that just so I don't have any obvious bugs in my config setup.

The value of Int for Enhance seems to vary widely based on what mana saving talents you take and what buffs are available. Haste, iirc, only becomes highly valued once you have above a certain amount of it. Hit above the spell cap is still increasing your white hits, which can be significant (not just more hits, but more procs of WF and MW). So I can see reasons why you'd get the EP values you did.

Yeah. But the sim also states how much out of mana time there was in the simulation. First I had like 50 % out of mana time, I realized I hadn't used shamanistic rage in the priority queue. Even so - since no other rating came even close to the value of 2, attack power seemed the way to go. But I'll try some more fixing the numbers, adding some haste to my gear.

The Haste totems are generally better than the AP totems for enhance even if you're not stacking Haste - the Triumph emblem totem for 200 Haste on Lightning Bolt is a good purchase.

Hm yeah - I was thinking about the frost relic, which gives some more haste.

Flame Shock is supposed to be a dps gain, I'm not very good at keeping the DoT up personally, but I did gain 4 piece t9 recently so I probably should pay more attention to the timer. You want to be refreshing it every 18 seconds and using Earth Shock otherwise, so that the DoT runs its full duration.

I just yesterday tried actively using shockandawe - and I found that if I put flame shock into my rotation it came up only when the dot had falled off the target, if not the lower prioritized earth shock came up, which is a good thing.

[Epimer]

EnhSim is a bit intimidating, but it becomes much easier to use if you use ShockAndAwe to export your stats and import them into EnhSim that way (make sure you click off your weapon imbues before doing so). It also kind of goes without saying that the raid buffs you select/omit can make a huge difference to its output, so make sure they reflect whatever situation it is you're trying to sim.

[Dendrah]

I went for the elemental way. I'm lvl 50 now and the only thing I get bored of is the long flightpaths.

The early lvl's were a bit LB spammy but now I do 2 bolts and a shock and stuff dies. While questing I never go oom. Only if I forget to refresh my watershield I might drop a bit in mana (60% aint bad either).
WhenI know I have some pulls I can make form 1 location then I drop SP and mana totem. The mana totem makes sure you stay mana neutral for your totems.

In dungeons I tend to run oom. CL on CD, Nova's and moving 4 totems kind of leans heavy on your mana. But if you top the dmg meters like I do there is hardly anyone to complain when you ask for mana break. The groups that did continue without me soon realised what recount could have told them

I have considered speccing Enha once I got to 4( or so but I had to much fun 2-3 shotting mobs as ele that I didn't.

Ooh and never use Flameshock while questing. Earth or frost shock to kill, otherwise just LB spam or CL to kill the pet on the first cast (fried imps ftw)

[vertinog]

So I switched my off-spec from Restoration to Elemental and decided to give it a shot with the gear I picked up in Hellfire. When choosing rewards I would always go with an upgrade to my Enhancement set over an Elemental choice if possible. The result is the Elemental gear my char currently has on in my sig link.

Elemental has hands down the best DPS and lowest downtime even with the gear I have. As Enhancement I was doing roughly 320dps in dungeons, as Elemental I was doing 600dps. The only time I switched back to Enhancement was to solo a quest where you have to kill a guy with 22k hp and then a 63 elite right after. The puppies helped keep me alive during the fight where as Elemental I didn't have much of a chance against 3 melee pounding on me.

I foresee myself staying Elemental now and only switching to Enhancement when I will be fighting nature immune mobs or there is an elite I can't solo.

[uke]

My shammy is currently level 71, and I've been playing him mostly nostop since level 24 once I grinded some emblems and loaded him up with BOA gear. I went 24-40 elemental, which was pretty much lightning bolt spam, queing as dps or healers for randoms. At 40 I grinded enough emblems for two BOA 1h maces and the BOA melee shoulders, and switch to enhance from 40-45. However, I just got bored of enhance, switched back to elemental, and haven't looked back.

Elemental is basically a gun turret, blasting everything around it. Most melee mobs either die or are near death by the time they get to me. It was fairly slow until outlands, but then outlands gear basically turns it into a killing machine. Oh, and thunderstorm is pretty much the greatest 51pt ability in the game .

Personal preference of course, but elemental is just too much dang fun for me.