MoPping it up as Enhancement

I can honestly say I love being enhancement.  I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on the damage meters, but I’ve definitely been in more groups where I have been the top 1 or 2 in dps.  And I still have 8 or so gear pieces to upgrade to heroic before I feel like I know where I stand.

So today I will mostly be looking at some pre-raiding gear options for enhancement shamans, a shopping list if you will.  Truth be told I just want to have a list that I could reference but also I need to hash out a few ideas so I can try out some things with talents. On with the wish list!  Note that I’ll be listing mostly heroic dungeon gear and that I will try and include a couple extra options in case the RNG has a vendetta against you and just will not relinquish that last piece you need.

 

Head
[Swarmcall Helm] – Commander Ri’mok Gate of the Setting Sun
[Crest of the Clan Lords] – Clan Lord fight, Mogu’shan Palace

The first two options are solid choices with only a slight difference between the crit and mastery stats. 

Shoulders (the most recognizable piece of any set)
[Harlan’s Shoulders] – Armsmaster Harlan, Scarlet Halls (Don’t worry they actually fit in with the general set!)
[Shadowspine Shoulderguards] – Taran Zhu, Shado-Pan Monastery

Once again two solid choices for gear with Harlan’s shoulders sporting Mastery instead of Haste.  Now there is still a lot up in the air about mastery vs. haste as it stands for us enhancers, but I think that also depends a lot on what we choose for talents.  If we are using Echo of Elements and Unleashed Elements then mastery is still our highest secondary stat.  On the other hand if we are using Elemental Mastery and Empowered Elementals then haste is going to be really strong and be nice for those high burst damage fights.  I haven’t played around with it much yet, but I’m still working on getting some better gear before I mess around with re-forging and testing different specs.

Back
[Quick Strike Cloak] – Leatherworking
[Aerial Bombardment Cloak] – General Pa’valak, Siege of the Niuzao Temple
[Wind-Soaked Drape] – Wise Mari, Temple of the Jade Serpent

Quick Strike Cloak is a great starter piece if you are a leatherworker or know of one.  I have not personally checked the AH for this item but the mats include a Spirit of Harmony and 20 exotic leathers which isn’t too bad for a 450 cloak. The Aerial Bombardment Cloak is nice if you still need some more hit while the Wind-Soaked Drape has some more crit and mastery for us.

Chest
[Galedodger Chestguard] – Wing Leader Ner’onok, Siege of the Niuzao Temple
[Azure Serpent Chestguard] – Gu Cloudstrike, Shado-Pan Monastery
[Chestguard of Earthen Harmony] – Leatherworking (Honored with Golden Lotus)

The Earthen Harmony leatherworking piece is the one to be had out of this selection.  But clocking in at 3 Magnificent Hides and 8 Spirits of Harmony it might be a tad expensive.  Especially considering that leatherworkers have to grind some rep with the Golden Lotus faction to even buy the pattern.  Out of the other two I would recommend the Galedodger Chestguard due to the much needed expertise that will give you a nice head start to 2550 rating that you need for 7.5%.  But as always you can re-forge and gem into expertise as necessary, but wouldn’t you much rather have some shiny Agility gems instead?

Bracers
[Bladed Smoke Bracers] – Sha of Violence, Shado-Pan Monastery
[Groundshaker Bracers] – Xin the Weaponmaster, Mogu’shan Palace

Once again we have a nice expertise option with the Bladed Smoke Bracers, and the Groundshakers provide some hit.  Either way good options.

Gloves
[Archer’s Precision Grips] – Commander Vo’jak, Siege of the Niuzao Temple
[Hopecrusher Gauntlets] – Sha of Doubt, Temple of the Jade Serpent
[Gloves of Earthen Harmony] – Leatherworking (Honored with Golden Lotus)

The Earthen Harmony gloves are like the chest, ilvl 476 but the leatherworker need to be honored with Golden Lotus.  however they only need 2 Hides and 6 Spirits to create so they should be slightly cheaper. As for the other 2 the Archer’s precision Grips is definitely a solid choice with more of that needed expertise.  If for some reason you find yourself overflowing with expertise you can always re-forge it. 

Waist
[Impaler’s Girdle] – Striker Ga’dok, Gate of the Setting Sun
[Bindburner Belt] – Flameweaver Koegler, Scarlet Halls

 

Legs
[Hopping Mad Leggings] – Hoptallus, Stormstout Brewery
[Legguards of the Crimson Magus] – Thalnos, Scarlet Monastery

 

Feet
[Treads of Fixation] – Raigonn, Gate of the Setting Sun
[Bone Golem Boots] – Rattlegore, Scholomance

 

Rings
[Anji’s Keepsake] – 1250 Valor (Honored with Golden Lotus)
[Signet of Dancing Jade] – Liu Flameheart, Temple of the Jade Serpent
[Pulled Grenade Pin] – Saboteur Kip’tilak, Gate of the Setting Sun
[Seal of Hateful Meditation] – Taran Zhu, Shado-Pan Monastery
[Seal of Ghoulish Glee] – Headless Horseman (Seasonal)
[Mark of the Dancing Crane] – 1250 Justice Points (Shado-Pan)

I’ve listed a couple of valor/justice point rings here because its always nice to have options for rings.  Plus currently neither requires any rep requirement to buy them from the faction vendors.

Trinkets (Trinkets yes. Pretty Trinkets! Ak!)
[Searing Words] – Darkmaster Gandling, Scholomance
[Windswept Pages] – Lorewalker Stonestep, Temple of the Jade Serpent
[Flashing Steel Talisman] – High Inquisitor Whitemane, Scarlet Monastery (NOT FOR DEATH KNIGHTS!)
[Coren’s Cold Chromium Coaster] – Coren Direbrew (Seasonal)

Trinkets with Hit, AGI, Crit and haste will be the norm.  If you can manage to get a good deal on the Tiger Deck for Darkmoon Faire you could even pick up a really nice [Relic of Xuen]. Oh to dream…

Weapons
[Gao’s Keg Tapper] – Yan-Zhu the Uncasked, Stormstout Brewery
[Crescent of Ichor] – Sha of Violence, Shado-Pan Monastery
[Claws of Gekkan] – Gekkan, Mogu’shan Palace
[Ner’onok’s Razor of Katar] – Wing Leader Ner’onok, Siege of the Niuzao Temple
[Inelava, Spirit of Inebriation] – Yan-Zhu the Uncasked, Stormstout Brewery
[Ka'eng, Breath of the Shadow] – Taran Zhu, Shado-Pan Monastery

The last two weapons in this list are rare drops in heroics off the last boss.  They are epic quality 476 weapons, so they will be hard sought after.  Personally I would not mind a couple Ka’Eng fist weapons for that delicious expertise.  All of these have varying bits of secondary stats but I have to admit I’m partial to the model of the Keg Tapper.  Nothing like toting around a barrel of ale on a stick.

Weapons are always what I look forward to the most.  Especially when it comes to fist weapons.  I’ve always liked the recent efforts put into the look of various fist weapons, unlike the basic never-ending same model they used for virtually every fist weapon in vanilla.  I think it was the [The Bladefist] that first got me really interested in fist weapons.  Never got it back in BC but was able to obtain it no long after most main hand fist weapons turned into one-hand (very handy for transmog)  There are too many good ones to list here so go over to wowhead.com and check them all out.  The best part is the current end game weapons for us enhancement shaman are Fist Weapons!  Now I won’t want to race change to an Orc to get that extra expertise for axes like the last 2 expansions. Truth be told, I’ve always liked how shaman gear looks on Taurens better than Orcs.  It’s the same reason I didn’t roll a Tauren monk.  If you want to see something horrid check out what a male Tauren looks like in the Monk raid set.

*As a side note, running scenarios will sometimes reward you a nice piece of 463 gear form your Cache of Treasures.  They all have random suffixes which determine the secondary stats, but there are quite a few that would be good to round out your set if you get lucky with the cache.

My new word for idiots…Death Knights

I’m not much for ranting usually, but I just needed to get some thoughts out there before it boiled up into and uncontrollable rage which might lead me to doing something stupid.  That’s part of the reason I use Shamanistic Rage all the time; if I let it all build up there is no telling what my shaman might do.

I’ve decided that from this point forward, at least until I feel the issue has been resolved (which might be a long long time), anytime I think someone is an idiot I shall call them a death knight.  Now I know most of you are thinking but isn’t that what huntards are?  But I beg to differ knowing that most hunters just get a bad rap.  Plus with them needing expertise now Blizzard has effectively brought them closer to being ranged enhancement shamans which in my book isn’t all that bad.  I think the main reason they get such a bad rap is they spend so much time with their pets that they kind of forget how to interact with humanoids from time to time.  When out in the wild is totally ok to feign death and let your pet die a horrible death if it means that you get to live.  In a group setting this isn’t always as acceptable.

Death Knights on the other hand are just plain idiots.  In fact you don’t even need to come up with some sort of creative name to imply that they are somehow less intelligent than a warriors gear, you just need to call them by their name.

You may be wondering where all this is coming from, or maybe you are reading this and saying “That’s what I’ve been thinking since day one!”  This stems from a situation in which I was in a LFD group where a trinket drops from the last boss, a trinket that is probably one of my top 3 pre-raiding trinkets, and the death knight won the roll on it.  Now an intelligent Enhancement shaman would wonder why would a Death Knight and an Enhancement shaman be rolling on the same trinket?  What stats could possibly overlap other than maybe hit and expertise between the two classes?  Here is the trinket that I’m talking about [Flashing Steel Talisman].

Notice anything peculiar about that trinket?  Last time I checked Agility is basically the worst stat for Death Knights in relation to all the other stats.  Especially since Agility is considered a core stat and couldn’t be re-forged. It’s like strength for shammies, we shouldn’t touch it even if it is a possible slight upgrade over our green questing trinket.

Now maybe I’m being a little harsh on the death knight community; maybe the death knight didn’t know better.  They were wearing  [Mithril Wristwatch] which although spell power is helpful because they do cast spells, there are much better options for them out there that have something we like to call strength.  If they truly didn’t know better then I’ll let it slide, but considering if they took 2 seconds to look at every other piece of gear that they got when leveling up to 90, they would notice a strange lack of agility and a strange abundance of strength on everything.  Agility at most could be used to give them some more crit.  Why use up useful stats on something that ranks as your lowest?

I’m not going to name any names here as I have already looked up their guild leader and sent a simple note indicating that they may want to check in on a certain death knights gearing choices.  Best part is it’s a death knight on the same server as me.  So conceivably I could run into them out and about.  But at least it makes them easy to add to my ignore list. (Strangely enough on my old server there was a death knight that needed on some tanking plate against my warrior tank and won the roll).  But for the time being, idiots = death knights in my mind.

Let me start off by saying it has been a little bit of a whirlwind for my shaman.  From downing Madness of Deathwing in 10-man normal a couple days before the 10% buff too effect, to getting both my shiny new axes off back to back weeks with deathwing kills things have been pretty good for me in recent weeks.

I want to point out that the week we managed to down deathwing the first time we definitely spent a number of hours wiping and progressing.  There were stupid wipes like people not being jumped from platform to platform and with even one dps down we wouldn't beat the cataclysm timer on the 4th platform, or accidental death(s) of our tanks.  Then the last few attempts we had for the night we got oh so close to 5-6% left.  Finally, after swapping one person due to needing sleep, a pet swap of our hunter, and a bit of a break we downed him 2 attempts later.  This is what makes raiding feel fun.  Having to work a little at getting a boss down is what makes it feel like an accomplishment.

Anyways, on to the good stuff (not that downing deathwing isn't good).

As anyone that plays WoW knows, Blizzard just dropped all the goodness that is Mists of Pandaria in a press conference.  We finally have a better idea of what is going on behind closed doors and what we will be able to expect in all of the various aspects of the next expansion.  And we also got to see what Female Panderen look like and personally I'm glad it wasn't another female worgen fiasco.  They models are pretty great and I think they were able to capture the Pandaren essence.  Plus there will be a red panda skin that will include a longer tail!

But as for the shaman community I can hope that we will soon see a finalized version of our 90 talents.  A couple news sources managed to get a glimpse at the current 90 talents, but they still aren't up on the talent calculator at this point. Over on wow.joystiq.com they managed to get a quick look at the current iteration of the 90 talents.

• One supercharges your Unleash Elements to provide a much better bonus for each imbue type.
• Another removes the cooldown on your Fire and Earth Elemental Totems and allows you to control them.
• And the last is a blast of elemental energy in a cone on a 15-second cooldown.

Each one is some sort of dps increase for us, and each one looks like it might have us switching up our 90 talent from time to time, either for flavor or for possible mechanics.  I can see the cone of elemental energy being useful for aoe and also give us a different style of spell than what we currently have. The perma-pet elementals would be excellent as elemental and fix some issues with leashing and i'm-going-to-go-attack-this-random-mob-that's-away-from-the-boss-and-everything-else problems.  I truly think that fire elemental has as much ADD as searing used to have.  The two of them should get together and learn from one another.  Lastly, the supercharge on Unleash Elements sounds like a good dps boost, but might feel a little lackluster if its just a increase effect by X% sort of talent.  It should bring the fire from the heavens and call down tornadoes or something.  But with the beta being out now, I'm sure we will begin seeing some initial responses on what these talents will be like.

When the talent trees first came out, I have to admit I had some mixed feelings.  Not because of the radical change of picking one of 3 skills every 15 levels, but because some skills to select looked really cool while others, not-so-much.  But after looking at them for a while I had ideas start brewing in my head on how to combine different skills into even more awesomeness.  One combo I came up with (and sadly doesn't look like it will persist with the new tree) was using Repulsion Totem and totem relocation in conjunction with each other.  I was thinking of dropping repulsion and then teleporting it to the middle of a bridge, top of a tower, on top of the EOTS flag and watching people fly when I wasn't even in the middle of it all.  But alas, the repulsion totem has seemingly gotten the axe and remote activated flying alliance totem will never see the light of day.

One skill that piques my interest thus far is the Echo of the Elements which has a chance to duplicate a spells effect from a direct healing or damaging spell.  This would be beneficial in both PvE and PvP but until we see how haste is going to work with us (esp. Enhancement) I think this will be the best one of the three for our melee brethren.  Currently elemental shaman have this through their mastery Elemental Overload, although the second spell is only 75% damage.  I am tempted to try out elemental for a while considering this talent with the mastery in combination leading to some possibly insane burst damage.  But if the secondary effects from the mastery and talent don't trigger the other (which is most likely the case) then it really doesn't seem like much of a benefit unless both can proc off a single spell cast.

But what intrigues me even more than the skill tree at this point is some revelations I have noted for the "built-in" skills that we get for our various specs.

Since I'm focusing mainly on Enhancement, here's the run down as it stands now:

1	Lightning Bolt
1	Ancestral Focus (Passive)
1	Armor Skills (Passive)
1	Weapon Skills (Passive)
3	Primal Strike
6	Earth Shock
7	Healing Surge
8	Lightning Shield
10	Flametongue Weapon
10	Lava Lash
10	Dual Wield (Passive)
10	Mental Quickness (Passive)
10	Primal Wisdom (Passive)
12	Flame Shock
12	Purge
14	Ancestral Spirit
15	Ghost Wolf
16	Searing Totem
16	Wind Shear
18	Cleanse Spirit
20	Water Shield
20	Flurry (Passive)
22	Frost Shock
24	Water Walking
26	Earthbind Totem
26	Stormstrike
28	Chain Lightning
30	Healing Stream Totem
30	Totemic Recall
30	Windfury Weapon
32	Reincarnation (Passive)
34	Astral Recall
34	Searing Flames (Passive)
36	Far Sight
36	Magma Totem
38	Grounding Totem
40	Burning Wrath (Passive)
40	Static Shock (Passive)
44	Fire Nova
46	Frostbrand Weapon
50	Mail Specialization (Passive)
50	Maelstrom Weapon (Passive)
54	Tremor Totem
58	Earth Elemental Totem
60	Healing Rain
60	Feral Spirit
65	Shamanistic Rage
66	Fire Elemental Totem
70	Heroism
70	Bloodlust
72	Bind Elemental
75	Hex
80	Grace of Air (Passive)
80	Mastery: Enhanced Elements(Passive)
81	Unleash Elements
85	Spiritwalker's Grace
87	Ascendance

Most of it seems straightforward with our spec, like we still have things like Lava Lash, Dual Wielding, mental Quickness, and Primal Wisdom which are what we get for picking Enhancement as a spec. All the skills with stars by them are specific to our spec or have a specific version for our spec, e.g. Cleanse Spirit which will cleanse all curses on a target.  Resto gets the magic & curse version.

One thing stood out to me when I looked over this a few times...the only heals we have access to are Healing Surge, Healing Rain, and Healing Stream Totem.  I don't know about you, but this worries me for the sake of PvP considering I currently use MW5 stacks to instant cast Greater Healing Waves which heal for twice as much as a single healing surge.  I feel like I'm going to sit out for a bit even with the changes to resilience.  Shamans have been notoriously known for their lower health pools and if I can't heal it back, I need a way to mitigate damage, or better yet just dps bigger.  It's from my Burning Crusade playbook of crowd control, "Who needs CC when you can have massive DPS?".  Death is a cc that can't be broken, well until Blizzard starts making fallen shaman show up in WoW.

Other things to note are Grace of Air and Burning Wrath passive auras that we get.  Grace of Air will give us 5 mastery and Burning Wrath will give us an awesome useless 10% spellpower buff.  Granted the burning wrath aura will be awesome for Ele and Resto, but we all know real shamans are all Enhancement spec.  The mastery buff will be very nice since we live and breath mastery on shamans since it's introduction.  Another thing to note on buffs is that there will be 8 buffs available and we should be able to quickly determine which ones we are missing.  I used to really enjoy talking totems with my fellow shaman to make sure we covered all the buffs as well as seeing a forest of totems about, so while I'm am saddened to see the buff totems go, I will forge on into a land of mists.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is that spell you see we get at 87.

Ascendance

The Shaman surrenders his physical form to the power of the elements, transforming into a being of ra elemental energy for 15 sec.

Elemental:
While in the form of a Flame Ascendant, Lava Burst has no cooldown and Chain Lightning is empowered to become Lava beam.

Enhancement:
While in the form of an Air Ascendant, auto-attacks and stormstrike deal pure nature damage and have a 30-yard range

Restoration:
While in the form of a Water Ascendant, all healing done is duplicated and distributed evenly among nearby allies.

I cannot begin to express how much awesomeness I was feeling when I read this.  Enhancement shaman should be racing to get to 87 to get their hands on this spell.  For those of you not realizing the amount of awesome this will bring here's a couple things to note.

1. You can melee something from 30 yards away.
2. Auto-attacks are pure nature, i.e. melee damage and stormstrikes are unmitigated by armor.
3. We transform

Transforming itself should be pretty cool, and I'm thinking it will use the current ascendant form that is in game and used by Ascendant council in Bastion of Twilight as well as the first boss in the Hour of Twighlight heroic.  Plus this will be handy when we need some burst damage which is a current issue that really hasn't been addressed at this point.  This spell alone has made me excited for this expansion and I can't wait till it gets here.  

Hopefully I will continue giving updates as they come about, and once I get my beta invite, I'll try and get some good screenshots up here as well.  They may no longer want us for our totems, but they will always want us for our Bloodlust.