Enhancement 4.0.1 Guide!

Elam’s Guide to Slaying Dragons:
Enhancement DPS in patch 4.0.

Part 1- Introduction:

So, you were there, wielding a caster mainhand and a dagger offhand, when Kel’Thuzad and his sinister lieutenant Bigglesworth were slain. You were there in Yogg-Saron’s brain room, buffin’ your melee buddies and giving the Old God a headache no Aspirin can cure. You were there when Azjol-Nerub was merely a setback, buffing your friends with water walking and causing more deaths than the subsequent raid boss. And you were there when Tirion Fordring (and 25 friends) bubbled an ice block and saved the world from an impending zombie apocalypse. But now, after an expansion of fighting Giant Brains, Zombie Overlords, Gnomish Megazords, and an ERADAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION, you’re faced with a boss that tankspot doesn’t have a video guide for: PATCH 4.0.1.

Whether or not you were actually around for the days of early Wrath of the Lich King, where Gear Score didn’t exist, Sartharion was content, men were men and women were men playing female draenei, and an Enhancement Shaman’s BiS weapons were a healer mace mainhand and a rogue dagger offhand to hax the dps meter with mad Flametongue Weapon damage, it doesn’t matter. Sometime over the course of your wow career, you probably realized that World of Warcraft changes. However, most of those changes are small-the addition of Flame Shock into our rotation in patch 3.2.something, the addition of Fire Nova into our arsenal in patch 3.0, the buff that made Fire Elemental actually worthwhile in 3.1, etc. Patch 4.0 is different. Patch 4.0 is an overhaul of the entire system, requiring you to adapt and change the way you play your enhancement shaman forevermore.

Now, this may all sound scary. But seriously, you’ve faced JARAXXUS, ERADAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION. You’ve done Tirion the small favor of downing the first 90% of the Lich King encounter. You’ve successfully conquered the Safety Dance (or if you haven’t, it was lag. Yea, it was totally lag). You can conquer relearning your own class.

Oh, and to make things easier- you have an army of super nerds behind you, simming and testing and theorycrafting and waxing philosophical and tweeting and blogging and doing all the other things nerds do to provide you, Mr./Mrs. Shaman, with the tools you need to not get kicked out of your raid group because you’re trying to dps with a two-hander with rockbiter weapon. Please remember this if you ever feel tempted to give some innocent bro with a pocket protector and suspenders a swirly.

Part 2-4.0 Talent Tree
In case you’ve been living under a rock, been somehow without internet access for the past six months, or have been doing something totally lame like writing your doctoral dissertation rather than spamming f5 on mmo-champion for patch notes, here’s a quick overview of Talent Trees in 4.0.1:

-31 Talents Deep
-You have to go 31 talents into a tree before you can branch out into other flora
-Talent Trees are designed to have talents that don’t directly influence dps, to give some “choice” to the player regarding utility talents.
-Cutting down Talent Trees to 31 points did not contribute to global deforestation. That is a myth.
-Each tree comes with certain passive abilities, as well as a Mastery. Those passive abilities and that mastery are only accessible if you choose that talent tree as your specialization. If you choose Elemental as your specialization, you will never be able to talent into Lava Lash. (Unless you pay your local <Shaman Trainer> gold, ofc.)

I can’t think of anything clever to use to subtly segway into discussing the talents themselves. So here is a brutal, right-angle, non-subtle transition. I bite my thumb at thee, English Major.

Enhancement Passives:
Lava Lash: There’s a lot to be said about Lava Lash. Due to its pathetic damage and its stunning ability to give anyone who talented into it break out in hives, Lava Lash is rumored to have been the number one reason shamans never had a date during Wrath of the Lich King. Thankfully, Blizzard took pity on us, and the Lava Lash that made us all blanch and write giant rage posts of yesterday has been replaced.
Yesterday’s Lava Lash: 100% Off-Hand Fire Damage+25% with Flametongue. 6 Second Cooldown. Dating prohibited.
4.0.1.’s Lava Lash: 200% Off-hand Fire Damage+40% w/ FT. 10 Second CD. Enhance by talents. Dating encouraged.
Lava Lash is our single highest hitting ability now, provided a five stack of searing flames on the target. You actually will WANT to use this ability.

Dual Wield: Let’s you use Two One-Handed weapons and increases white/yellow melee hit chance by 6%. I don’t think I need to elaborate further.

Primal Wisdom: Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to restore 5% of your base mana. Shamanistic Rage is gone as an emergency mana pool regen mechanic, but it’s mana restore on melee attack function has been rolled into a passive benefit of being Enhancement.

Mental Quickness: Increases your Spellpower by 50% of your Attack Power (up from 30% on live.), and reduces the cost of your instant cast spells (i.e., shocks, stormstrike, lava lash) by 75%. This change was to compensate for the removal of Elemental Fury as an ability we could talent into. So, where in WoTLK we got 30% of our AP as SP and did 200% rather than 150% on spell criticals, we do 150% damage on spellcrits but our base spell power is 20% higher than it would have been. This change really benefits sustained dps and lessens the damage of poor RNG on our rotation. Also, our heals hit harder. Amazing ability all around.

Mastery: Enhance Elements- Each point of mastery increases our elemental damage by 2.5%. Every point of mastery increases the power of nearly every ability we use but white hits, stormstrike, and windfury by 2.5%. More about this during “gearing” later.

Part 3-Enhancement Talents:

Your enhancement talent tree should look something like this:

http://wowtal.com/#k=DccPAHG-U.a67.shaman

With the exception of Imp. Fire Nova, every point in that tree is required for maximum enhancement dps. If you feel so inclined, you can take the points from improved fire nova throw them in imp. shields, for nominally higher lightning shield damage, totemic reach to…reach your windfury to the melee who standing outside of melee range?, increase your stamina, or remove snares on your party with earthbind. Frozen Power would just be an all around terrible idea, as bosses are immune to the frostbrand debuff.

Elemental Weapons 2/2: Increases the damage of Windfury and Flametongue. Not only is it a good talent in its own right, but when you consider that your other option is Imp. Shields, it’s like comparing a fountain of chocolate to a fountain of seltzer water.

Focused Strikes 3/3: Makes Stormstrike hit harder. Same imp. shield logic as above applies.

Flurry 3/3: Increases your attack speed by 30% after you crit. Haste is good. This talent is good.

Elemental Devastation 3/3: When you crit with spells, you get a 9% melee crit buff. Considering that before any raid buffs/debuffs, an Enhancement shaman in t10 will have more than 50% spell crit when you factor in the Stormstrike debuff, this spell is phenomenal.

Ancestral Swiftness 2/2: Gives you 15% speed all the time. Sort of like CC and legitimate AoE, shaman are a little late to the party of “getting tools everyone else had an expansion ago.” That said, 15% speed is a MUST in raids, and this talent is awesome. Like, if it was any cooler, it’d be me. OH, did I mention that it also makes Ghost Wolf instant? You know, that spell that buffs our speed by 30% and is now usable indoors? Yea, that happened. Get this talent.

Stormstrike 1/1: Hits hard, has two chances to proc Static Shock at 45% chance each, can proc windfury, procs flametongue, can proc flurry, and leaves a chargeless, 15-second long debuff on the target that increases your chance to crit them with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Earth Shock, or Lightning Shield by 25%(33% glyphed). If Lava Lash is your sucker punch, Stormstrike is your uppercut from Mortal Kombat that caused people to land on spikes and some dude to shout FATALITY.

Static Shock 3/3: Gives your Stormstrike and Lava Lash abilities a 45% chance to proc damage equal to a lightning shield orb. This is an excellent change that helps us with movement fights by relying less on auto-attacking to proc shield orbs and more on hitting hard-hitting abilities to proc them. Also, orbs are no longer consumed when you hit with them, meaning less GCDs spent refreshing lightning shield. Nice all around.
Searing Flames 3/3: Your Searing Totem fireballs leave a dot that burns like an uncomfortable rash. This ability is fairly strong in its own right, but it’s real strength lies in its interplay with improved lava lash, discussed later. (Oh, searing totem is your fire totem of choice now.)

Improved Fire Nova: Fire Nova has been changed to only function with Magma/Fire Elemental/Flametongue totems down. Since Searing is preferred for single target fights, you won’t be using Magma, and Fire Nova won’t be a part of your single target rotation. However, since this is patch 4.0 and you’re probably still raiding Icecrown Citadel, talenting into this is probably worthwhile for fights like Lich King.

Shamanistic Rage: 75% defensive cooldown, 25% “oh @#$% I’m oom” ability. You’ll be using this mostly to avoid spikes of damage now, but if you happen to mismanage your mana and run oom, this gives you 15 seconds per minute of free abilities to replen with primal wisdom. Also, this is required for t10 raiding due to 2pct10.

Unleashed Rage: Nerfed by 1 expertise, which is fine! (10% AP is nice too.)

Maelstrom Weapon 3/3: Required. Every melee hit gives you a chance to reduce the cast time AND mana cost of your lightning bolt, chain lightning, hex, or heals by 20%, up to 5 stacks. Instant cast, mana free spells. Yum!

Improved Lava Lash 2/2: Increases the base damage of your Lava Lash by 30%, and consumes stacks of Searing Flames to increase Lava Lash’s damage by 20% per stack…or 100% in all. This talent makes Lava Lash hit like a truck. And since Searing Flames stacks to 5 in around 7 seconds, you get the boosted Lava Lash every time it’s off Cooldown. Love this talent.

Feral Spirit 1/1: Wolves. Primary dps cooldown. These guys are now on a 2minute cd, but 30second duration. Interesting part about wolves- you don’t need to worry about casting them before bloodlust anymore. They can’t receive buffs anymore. Instead, they’re supposed to scale dynamically with your stats, which means that if you cast them during bloodlust they’ll gain a haste buff from your haste buff. It ‘s not clear if this is implemented yet, but that’s the plan. Watch for AP procs and drop these guys while you’re buffed. (4Pct10 is a huge candidate for this.)

Elemental Talents:
Concussion 2/3: Increases the damage of your Lightning Bolt and Shock Spells by 4%. Very straightforward.

Acuity 3/3: You’d go further in this if this wasn’t your last talent point. Increases your chance to crit with every ability you have by 3%. Very basic, very nice.

Part 4-Priority Queue:

Now, you have all your talents picked, but you’re not sure what to do with them. That’s understandable- after an expansion of Lava Lash hitting like it’s Betty White’s right hook, it’s admittedly difficult to condition yourself to want to press the button. Luckily for you, it’s not our highest priority ability.
(For those of you who don’t know, a priority queue is used to make decisions when two abilities are both available for use. The one higher on the queue is the ability you use.) Our PR queue, sim-tested, Rouncer approved (check http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27026377056&sid=1&pageNo=1 and http://totemspot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=229) is:

1. Searing Totem (if not active)
2. Maelstrom Weapon 5-Stack Lightning Bolt
3. Feral Spirits
4. Stormstrike
5. Lava Lash
6. Flame Shock
7. Earth Shock
8. Shamanistic Rage (w/ 2pct10 bonus.)

Now, in a total twist from Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard introduced an entirely new element to the Enhancement Shaman priority- breathing room. Where we were previously Global Cooldown capped, we now have spaces in our rotation. Most of the time, redropping Searing Totem will fall in one of these spaces-since it’s once a minute, it’s something you’ll notice is running out during your free time and you’ll recast. Feral Spirits is once every two minutes, so that’s not going to be a regular thing to care about in terms of priority. Shamanistic Rage will fit into the same gaps as Searing Totem- don’t go out of your way to cast it unless everything else is on CD. Also, Flame Shock also now scales with haste by increasing the number of dot ticks within its 18 second debuff, which means you’ll be casting a 1:2 shock rotation, with one flame shock followed by two earth shocks in most cases.  All in all, the new Enhancement priority system is a lot cleaner, with less abilities to manage but with each of the abilities we have hitting harder.

A note on Fire Elemental:
Fire Elemental has been a reasonably good dps increase for Enhancement Shaman in the past, offering as much as a 1000+dps increase on short duration fights. Due to Enhancement’s reliance on Searing Flames for both dot damage and Lava Lash damage, Fire Elemental’s dps increase is not a dps increase over Searing Totem. HOWEVER, Fire Elemental does allow use of Fire Nova for the two minutes it is up. Drágon of Lethon has done some simming that shows using Fire Elemental and fitting nova into the GCD gaps offers a dps increase slightly shy of 100dps. However, due to nova casting from the totem and not the Fire Elemental, this means this will only be useful in fights where the boss is always in Fire Elemental range. For straight up fights, FE/Nova to your heart’s content. For movement fights, Searing is king.

Weapon Speed is still slow/slow, meaning 2.6 speed in both hands or slower. Imbues are still Windfury Mainhand/Flametongue Offhand.

Part 5: Gearing
Now, I know that haste is your best friend, and has been since Ulduar, and you don’t want to give up the special thing you two have. I get that. However, haste has ditched you. The change that went into effect in late Naxxramas days that gave us 30% more haste from haste rating is gone in 4.0, drastically reducing the haste you get from haste rating. When I copied Elam from live to the beta, he gained a good 50 haste rating…but his melee haste percent went from 33.10 to 27.9%. And that was not the only change- with the loss of Attack Power as a green stat on mail gear, and losing ap from intellect, my Attack Power dropped nearly a thousand points, from 5311 to 4432.

None of this is actually bad, though. In fact, it’s kind of nice that Blizzard nerfed our haste, as it’s a good way of encouraging us to break out of our comfort zone and seek greener pastures. Right now, our low damage specials and high reliance on white attacks makes us weak in movement fights, and haste exacerbates those very issues. Agility, our new gemming overlord, gives us attack power and melee crit, and makes our now high-damage specials higher damage. This isn’t to say haste is the worst stat in the world, but it’s been definitely reduced.

Also, we’ve entered the new world of “Mastery.” As mentioned earlier, Enhancement’s “mastery” bonus is 2.5% increased Elemental Damage for each point of mastery (not mastery rating), the shaman has. This increased damage affects Flametongue procs, Lava Lash, all our shocks, both our lightning spells, our searing totem dot and lightning shield. Much like Agility, it servers to make our abilities hit harder. Mastery has pretty definitely taken charge over Haste and Crit as our most sought after stat. This is especially nice in t10 gear, as it allows shaman who are nearing the crit cap a way of dropping their critical hit for something more useful than hit. To give an example of the benefit of mastery, after transferring Elam to the Beta, I simmed a 550 dps increase after reforging the excess crit on my gear to mastery, dropping my melee and spell crit by about 8.5% and increasing my mastery by 8.52, or 21.3% Elemental Damage. (I also achieved another 500+ dps increase by dropping all my haste gems and grabbing agility gems.)

To put our new stat priorities into an easy to visualize-possibly dangerous if you’re hungry-situation, I came up with this example:

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Q u o t e:
Imagine you’re eating a really good Surf and Turf dinner. You first need to procure your utensils-in this case expertise and hit- otherwise you won’t have the tools to eat the dinner. They’re not as fun as anything else, but they’re the most important.After that, you move on to the steak, Agility. This is the thing that overshadows everything else on the plate with it’s awesomeness. After that comes your…Lobster, I guess? That’s your mastery. If the steak didn’t exist, it would be the highlight, but the existence of agility pushes Mastery into the second spot.

After that you have your potatoes and drink, your crit and haste. You don’t order the meal because the meal comes with crit and haste, but you also don’t cry that they’re included. They’re still good, they’re just not excellent.

And then you have like, your peas. This is spirit. No one likes peas or spirit and we bite our thumb at it.

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TL:DR: Hit and Expertise to caps are most important. Caps are 111 for Expertise (88 pigfaces) and 446 for Spell Hit. Agility is best to stack. Mastery is slightly-less-best. Crit and Haste don’t suck, but aren’t something to go out of your way for.

Special note: 111/88 caps for expertise are based on a current bug on live that has diminished boss dodge percentage. Caps SHOULD be higher, (139/116), but they are not. Yet.

Basic runthrough of 4.0.1reforging:

Reforging is the practice of paying an NPC in a capital city to remove 40% of a rating on your gear in order to boost another rating by the same amount. This can only be done with Green Stats (Crit/Hit/Expertise/Mastery/Haste Ratings/Dodge/Parry) and Spirit-Agility, Stamina, Strength, and Intellect can not be decreased or increased in this way. Oh, and Resilience Rating. That can’t be reforged either.

To use an excellent example from Nathin’s Guide to 4.0.1 Warrior Tanking (well worth the read if you alt a prot warrior), Reforging works like this:

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Q u o t e:
To make up a ficticious example:Ring of Almost Perfect
120 Str
120 Agi
120 Sta

240 Haste
240 Mastery

You can’t do anything about the agility (yes, I know you won’t see str and agi on same items, just an example) because it’s a primary stat. Ditto with the str and Sta.

However you can convert the Haste / Mastery into something else. You can only do it once per item (although you can revert a reforge, and change your mind) so you can’t convert both the haste and the mastery into something else. So lets say you’re lacking in hit.

0.4 * 240 = 96. So you could take away let’s say 96 haste and convert that to hit, for a new version of the item that looks like:

Ring of Almost Perfect – Reforged
120 Str
120 Agi
120 Sta

144 Haste
240 Mastery
96 Hit

If you later get hit capped through other means, you can revert it back to it’s original state and then perhaps decide you want to change the haste into crit this time.

Ring of Almost Perfect – Reforged
120 Str
120 Agi
120 Sta

144 Haste
240 Mastery
96 Crit

And you end up with this. Just to clarify further, in this state, all you can do is revert it to original state. You can’t reforge again to change the crit into something else. You can’t change the mastery into something else or more crit.

If you did revert it back to the original state, and decided you wanted the haste to be more Mastery.. Well, that’s too bad. Because the mastery already exists on the item, you can’t reforge more of it.

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1.)Reforge Crit/Haste/Excess Hit (only if spell hit capped) into Expertise, until capped at 111.
2.) Reforge Crit/Haste into Hit to the 446 Spell Hit Cap. (Remember, 3% hit debuff is gone, so you need all your hit from gear now.)
3.)After these two caps are reached, reforge Crit/Haste into Mastery.

Basic Gemming:
1.)21 Agility/3% Increased Crit Damage meta. (Relentless Earthsiege Diamond.) It requires only one blue gem, and it’s agility. Profit!
2.)If you have blue sockets on your gear and need hit rating, gem hit here to gain socket bonuses. (Hit is now a blue gem.) If you are spell hit capped through gear/reforging, you should gem a Nightmare Tear in one blue socket to gain use of your meta. (Nightmare Tear gives you 10agi/10stam/10int, and since the int translates directly into spellpower, it provides more of a bonus than hit AFTER spell hit cap.)
3.)Red Sockets/Blue Sockets with bad socket bonuses/blue sockets when hit capped/yellow sockets with bad socket bonuses get +20 agility. You should get all your expertise through reforging. To define “Bad Socket Bonus,” I mean “anything that isn’t amazing.” If your socket bonus isn’t something incredible like +8 or +10 agility, and you don’t have access to the Alpha EnhSim to test gemming, stay safe and go +20agility.
4.)Good yellow socket bonuses (+8 or higher) get +10 agility/10Crit. +10 Agility/10 Haste also works, but crit is showing slightly higher in sims right now.

To clarify: I don’t believe a +10 agility bonus even exists in the game right now. Highest bonuses seem to be multiples of 8 on live- either 8 of x stat or +16 attack power. I’m just saying that in theory, a +10 bonus would be enough to warrant gemming 10agi/10crit.

Mail Specialization:

Enhancement Shaman now get 5% more agility provided they are wearing all mail. This means that there is almost definitely no good reason to use anything but mail gear anymore.

Relic Usage

For ill or for naught, Enhancement Shaman have spent the better part of the past year complaining about using an Elemental Shaman totem instead of one designed for Enhancement. Personally, I could care less-as long as it’s a dps increase, I’d put flametongue on a spellpower weapon and think it was awesome.

That said, Enhancement Shaman are now gone from that era of Elemental Totem usage. With 4.0 changes, totems no longer have their “unique” buff feature that procs off spell uses, but instead are another part of gear with stats on them. This is easier for Blizzard to balance by far- effectively becoming our version of the warrior/rogue’s ranged weapon slot.

For us in 4.0.1 now, this means that Totem of the Avalanche is now our Best in Slot totem, since it’s been overrun with passive Agility. Ditch that Shattered Ice and grab this totem.

Part 6: Enchanting
These enchants will give you the most bang for your buck. These all assume no profession bonuses. (A note on professions: Engineer tinkers like nitro boosts no longer give stats, but they DO allow you to enchant as well, meaning you can get +20 agility to boots AND a 5second run speed increase):

• Head: Arcanum of Torment.
• Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Axe.
• Cape: Major Agility.
• Chest: Powerful Stats.
• Bracers: Greater Assault. (Note: There is an expertise option for wrists too. Do NOT go for this, by any means. Reforge for expertise.)
• Gloves: Major Agility.
• Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle, Agility Gem.
• Pants: Icescale Leg Armor
• Boots: Superior Agility.
• Weapons: Early theorycrafting says Berserking.

Part 6: Glyphing: The days of glyphing three major glyphs and three minor glyphs are over. Come patch 4.0.1., glyphs have diversified, and we now have use of 9 glyphs at a time, not 6. Glyphs that increase damage or somehow change a rotation are now known as Prime Glyphs. Glyphs that introduced important utility are now Major glyphs. Glyphs that look pretty or do something cosmetic are minor glyphs.

Enhancement Prime Glyph Choices: Highest DPS Glyphs are bolded.
Glyph of Feral Spirit: 30% Attack Power to wolves
Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem: 5Minute CD Reduction on Fire Elemental
Glyph of Flame Shock: 50% duration increase for FS. (Duration to 27 seconds.)
Glyph of Flametongue Weapon: 2% Crit when FT Weapon is active.
Glyph of Lava Lash: 20% Damage Buff to Lava Lash
Glyph of Lightning Bolt: 4% Damage to Lightning Bolt
Glyph of Stormstrike: 8% more critical strike chance for nature spells on Stormstrike.
Glyph of Windfury: 2% more chance to proc windfury.

Enhancement Major Glyph Choices:
Glyph of Chain Lightning: CL hits two more targets, but initial damage lessened by 10%. (Good for Enhancement AoE.)
Glyph of Ghost Wolf: 5% more speed on GW, bringing you to 35% in all.
Glyph of Healing Stream Totem: Gives your healing stream totem the same effect as your elemental resistance totem. Very strong raid buff totem.
Glyph of Lightning Shield: Lightning Shield never drops below 3 charges, even when being hit or otherwise proccing. Excellent if you don’t want to blow a GCD every 10 minutes renewing LS, also ok if you’re doing fights with adds or fights with passive raid auras that proc LS.
Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem: Gives you a bubble equal to 4x the bubble your stoneclaw protects your totems with. On live, that’s about 4,400 damage. I think this is the best choice for a major glyph, as it gives you a way to proactively protect yourself from incoming damage…and any healer will tell you how amazing absorbs are in Wrath of the Lich King raiding.
Glyph of Totemic Recall: You regain 75% of the mana cost of totems when you recall, vs. 25%. Not bad, just not amazing.

The End

Also, because I put a lot of effort into this and stuff, I’m going to take a minute to plug my stuff. Please be sure to check out the rest of www.shamanonramen.com so I can pretend people think I’m funny (and good Google Analytics reports make me happy.) Also feel free to friend me on xfire.com/profile/elamqt, or to be a lemming and follow me at twitter.com/elamqt.

THANKS to:

Kokomala
Rouncer
Des
The Academy
Gistwiki
Weerarah
Gyarados. For existing.
Femael
Levva and Ziff. I’ve not interacted with them recently, but the two of them are constantly active in bettering the lives of shaman everywhere.
Womd
Trui
My college English Professors
Ahkie
Neonpeon
The dudes who made Pandora. WHY DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS SOONER.
Vespasian
Retherok
The creators of Pepsi Throwback
Eklo and Clous, I guess.
And the rest of the <Shaman Trainer>, Sentry Totem, and Totem Spot communities, who I’m neglecting to mention because this list is already awfully long.

Oh, and Blizzard entertainment. In all honesty, they make great games.