General Shaman FAQ

[Nasanna]

I've seen a lot of guildies leveling up shamans who have some common questions about shamans. I'll try to answer them here   Please reply if you have any questions!

Q: What spec should I level as?
A: Enhancement, at least until you get to Outland. Elemental would be painful since I have not seen a single piece of mail gear with damage and healing before Outland. I'd suggest staying enhancement until you pick up a couple pieces of good elemental gear. Resto is pretty boring unless you like running instances, which are hard to find groups for at low levels and I haven't seen much gear for resto until Outland either.

General Enhancement Info:

Spending your talent points as enhancement:
Tier 1 talents are kind of useless, but I'd pick Ancestral Knowledge since you won't be using a shield often. Even if you have 5000 mana, this talent will only give you 250 extra.
Improved Ghostwolf is useful for leveling, especially before you have a mount and is nice in PVP. Anticipation is useful as well. Mental quickness will give your shocks a little more damage.
Sample Enhance build (44 in enhancement): http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZxV0zE0sAuqo

Q: What shaman enchant should I use on my weapon?
A: Before you get windfury: use rockbiter or flametongue, whichever one gives you  more DPS. This usually means using the rank you trained most recently. After that, put windfury on both your mainhand and offhand. If you spec elemental or resto, remember that the damage of flametongue increases with your spell damage. If you have Elemental Fury (200% damage done by spell crits), your flametongue attack will also crit for 200%.

Q: What weapons should I look for?
A: Use a 2 handed axe or mace until you get dual wield. You can try a one handed axe, mace, or dagger with a shield until you get to dual wield but you'll do less damage. When you get dual wield, the ideal weapon speed is 2.6 for both offhand and mainhand. Finding these kind of weapons while leveling is tough but a general tip is: the slower the weapon, the better. And here's why: Windfury has a 3 second cooldown. That is, if it procs on your main hand, it cannot proc again on either weapon for 3 seconds. The slower the weapon you have, the more windfuries you will get and the more damage you will do. You also do not want a fast offhand since it will proc more windfury attacks that do less damage.

Q: What stats should I focus on as enhancement?
A: Shamans get 2 attack power for every point of strength. The base damage of your weapons is increased by 1 for every 14 attack power you get. Agility gives you a higher chance to crit but does not increase your attack power. At level 70, you get 1% more crit chance with every 25 agility you have. So look for gear with strength and/or attack power. You might find more of this on leather gear, which is fine to wear- you'll take a little bit more damage though. Most mail gear is hunter gear with lots of agility on it, which won't help shamans very much.

Weapon hit is also important, however shamans can get 9% chance to hit through talents alone (Dual Wield Specialization in enhancement and Nature's Guidance in restoration), which is the most you will need for your main hand. Offhand weapons have an innate 19% chance to miss, those talents will bring you down to 10% chance to miss.

You will get some intellect and MP5 on your gear, but you don't need to focus on this. When you get shamanistic rage, this should take care of most of your drinking time. Pop your trinkets and watch your mana bar fill back up. Between this and watershield, you won't need much mana regen.

So overall, look for: Strength, Attack Power, melee hit and melee crit chance.

Q: What sort of attack rotation should I be using as enhancment?
A: Until you get Stormstrike, you can pull mobs with lightning bolt or a shock, then autoattack and shock them. Once you get stormstrike, I would suggest pulling with lightning bolt, then using stormstrike whenever the cooldown is up followed by earthshock whenever the cooldown is up, with windfury on both weapons, of course. Keep in mind that air elementals and earth elementals are immune to nature damage, so use frostshock or flameshock instead.

I don't usually use totems while I'm by myself unless I know I will be in the same place for a long time or I'm killing an elite or several mobs at once. However, stoneclaw totem (also known as stunclaw totem) is very useful if you get adds. You can run away or heal while they attack the totem.

[Arcdelad]

this is really great nas...thank you for doing this...

i have an unguilded level 20 shaman i play sometimes (when i only have a couple of minutes or so to play)...it seems like i do a little less damage with the one hander than with the shocks...would +spell damage or +int not be a priority?

[Nasanna]

If you can find gear at level 20 for that, go for it if you find yourself running out of mana a lot, or you can experiment with it and see if you kill stuff any faster. You can throw in a couple pieces of cloth gear, though this might take away from the point of using a 1hander and shield.  To be honest, low levels are pretty boring since all you can do is shock every 6 seconds and autoattack, so the killing is sometimes slow. So the real answer: it's up to you!

As soon as you get dual wield and stormstrike though, you'll be tearing through mobs like they were critters, so you'll probably want AP/strength then. A lot of the gear you'll be wearing (unless all you wear is rogue gear) will have some int on it and shamanistic focus will probably be active when you're shocking, so mana shouldn't be a problem then.

When you have the talent points to spare, you can pick up the talent "Mental Quickness" (increases spell damage and healing by 30% of your attack power), which helps you out a lot at 70 since not much of your gear will have spell damage on it.

[Darkstar]

Thanks for the great info as always nas!  Im slowly working on getting up there.....shamans are soooo much fun