MOAR SPIRIT! NEED MOAR SPIRIT! /bonk

Ok!

We've talked about a lot of things now. We had an overview of what our class is like, our playstyle, our buffs, and even our attack priority list.

It's time to go out and get phat lewtz!

Er, actually no, not yet.  

We've got one thing to talk about before we can talk about our lootz.

Our stats.

YARGH!  STATS!? booooooooooooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiinnnnnngggg!

Yeah, yeah I know.  But we gots to know what we want before we go on getting what we want? right? right!

So first things first, let's look at our main attributes.  I'm talking about Strength, Agility, Intellect, Spirit, and Stamina.

Now let's get this out of the way.  Spirit?  fuhget about it.  Don't look for it, don't wear it, don't gem for it, don't even think about it.  Resto? Elemental?  Same deal, FORGET ABOUT SPIRIT.

Moving on.

Strength:  This used to be the end-all be-all attribute for enhancement shamans.  This is no longer true.  Strength does give you 1 Attack Power and some other things that are totally totally useless as an enhancement shaman.  I'm getting ahead of myself here, but there isn't too much mail or even leather gear with strength on it anyway and there sure ain't no cloth with strength on it.  The only strength then that you could get are from enchants, consumables, gems, or weapons/trinkets/rings/necklaces.  Just don't even bother.  Why? Well, let's look at our other attributes.

Agility:  Now, here's the real sexiness.  Agility in WotLK will now grant 1 attack power and a bit of crit as well.  There's also tons of agility on our mail gear.  It's not necessarily totally awesome to stack agility through gems and enchants, but it's passable.  

Intellect:  Some more sexiness.  Intellect, with 3/3 in Mental Dexterity, will grant 1 attack power, a bit of spell crit, and some mana to boot!  The importance of intellect comes into play when choosing between leather and mail.  The leather piece may totally be superior in many stats but the fact that there isn't any intellect on it makes it vastly weaker.  No mana = no spells or attacks.  You neeeeeeedz mana (on top of the attack power and spell crit).   I can tell you that there are many blue pieces of mail that are way way better than epic leather rogue gear.  Leave that stuffz alone.  I heard rogue leather causes cancer too.  Another reason to stay away from it.

Stamina:  Stamina isn't something we really want to gear for or worry about as an enhancement shaman.  If you're a pvper than that's a different post, but stamina will do nothing to add to your dps.  Many will argue (myself included) that you need to stay alive to dps and stamina is important in that sense, but if you're a dpser the only damage you should be taking is AOE or incidental boss damage.  If you're taking lots of damage, either you're doing something wrong or your raid is doing something wrong.  Regardless, you'll get more than enough stamina from your gear alone.   Enchanting and gemming for it is a loss of dps when you think about it because in place of those enchants and gems, you could be stacking other more useful stats.

It's important to remind y'all that since Strength, Intellect, and Agility all add to our attack power, that you really really want to get all those buffs going.  Blessing of Kings, Strength of Earth totem, Arcane Brilliance, etc.  You want everything.

I tend to prioritize the other stats in tiers.  

Tier 1:  Hit and Expertise

These two stats are your first priority.  You must be at or near the Hit and Expertise cap before you move on to other stats.  Other stats are inferior until you reach that cap.  Reach that cap.  Do it.  Ok?  

Hit

Think of hit in this way: if you can't hit the fricking thing, then you aren't damaging it.  I understand that you're hitting the thing and just missing occasionally, but people much smarter than you and I have done the math and their math tells us that those occasional misses are the single biggest loss of dps we have in fights.  So it's simple, make sure you have enough hit rating to get the job done.

To further complicate things, there are different hit caps we need to reach.  Having 9% hit will ensure we never miss with a yellow damage melee attack.  That means windfury, stormstrike, and lava lash.  But wait, what about earth shock and MW5LB's?  Well, we have a spell hit cap to reach for those.  And the spell hit cap is 17%.  

SEVENTEEN PERCENT!  That's a lot ain't it?  Yeah, go talk to casters how much they love that big number.  But remember we are hybridy.  We're a pseudo caster too, just in melee range.  

Anyway, the magic number for hit: 446

That seems like a really big number to reach, right?  It is.  Thankfully you've got some help.  If in your raid, you have a boomkin druid with Improved faerie fire or a shadow priest with Misery, that'll increase your chance to hit by 3%.  Oh, are you a sexy draenei?  That'll give you another one percent.

Which means we all have several magic numbers

17% - 446 (No buffs and you're a cute silly hordie)

16% - 420 (No buffs and you're a sexy draenei)

14% - 367 (Buffs and you're a ticklish little orc or troll or tauren)

13% - 341 (Buffs and you're a sexy statuesque draenei)

Expertise

Expertise is way way more confusing than hit.  This is what you need to know.  Expertise lowers the boss' chance to dodge or parry.  No mob can parry from the back.  Which is where you want to be.  Like Mobb Deep says: Hit it from the back.

So why worry about Expertise?  Because of the dodge.  Hit will lower your chance to miss.  Expertise will lower the boss' chance to dodge.  That's what you need to worry about.  As it stands, with no expertise at all, a raid boss has a 6.5% chance to dodge your attacks from behind.

Now, expertise is really silly in that it only works in chunk.  There is such thing as 2.25% expertise, but no such thing as 2.29% or 2.33%.  It only works in incrememnts of .25%

To the left is a table (taken from the elitist jerks forums) that gives you those magic numbers.  The rating is how much expertise you get from your gear.  The points are what you see on your character sheet telling you how many expertise points you have.  The percentages refer to the reduced chance to dodge by the boss (also seen on your character sheet when you hover over that number).

Tier 2:  Attack Power

Attack Power

Attack power is in a tier all on its own.  That's because once you've reached the hit and expertise cap, you want to gem, enchant, take consumables, dream about, sacrifice a virgin goat for, and find coupons for attack power.  You wants it.  You wants it a lot.  

The obvious reason is because of Unleashed Rage granting us 10% of our attack power bonus when it's up.  If you have anywhere near 30% crit, which you should be pretty darn close to just through talents and basic gear, it'll be up 95-99% of the time.  

The less obvious reason why attack power is so appealing is because of Mental Quickness.  The more AP you have the more spell power you have.  The more spell power you have the more damage your earth shocks and MW5 LB's do.  Which means the more AP you have, the more babes flock over to you asking when they can get a date with you.  In which case you reply, "Get in line, babe."

The even lesser obvious reason why attack power is so appealing gets really heavy into theorycrafting, but I'll state it here.  Point for point, AP is lesser than Agi and Int.  But that being said, compare these three gems:  

Bright Scarlet Ruby: Grants 32 AP

Delicate Scarlet Ruby: Grants 16 Agility - 16 AP, .19% crit

Brilliant Autumn's Glow: Grants 16 Intellect - 16 AP, .09% crit, 240 mana, and small bit of MP5

What would you rather have, 16 AP or .19% crit?  How about 16 AP or .09% crit, 240 mana, and a tiny bit of MP5?  In that second choice, you could make a case for it, but with all the replenishment buffs going around and Shamanistic Rage, I've never had mana be a problem, even in ten-man or five-man groups.  

The thing is, the way things are itemized, especially in terms of gems and enchants, you'll usually get double the AP from the Agi and Int gems and enchants point for point.  So in terms of gems and enchants, I will always choose the straight AP gems over those other two stats.  

But if I have the choice between 10AP and 10Int or 10Agi, the choice is easy, choose either of those two attributes.  

Tier 3: Haste, Armor Penetration, Crit, Spell Power

Haste

Haste will do a lot for you.  Heavy theorycrafters will say haste is dangerous because of an internal windfury cooldown and plateauing at 1.5% speed and blah blibidy bleeping blah.  That's when theorycrafters go too far spending hours documenting and talking about things that are so moot.  The fact is, with all the procs from flurry, other buffs, boss buffs/debuffs, HEROISM!, windfury totems, and just so much more, your weapon speeds will change like five hundred bazillion times in a raid.  You can try and predict what your speeds will be to a point, but the cost/benefit of going through those calculations are sooooo not worth it.  Trust me, I tried.  

Let's simplify it, shall we?  Haste will benefit two things for you.  More MW procs, and more white damage from your melee auto attacks.  There.  That's all there is to know without bogging it down.

That being said, you don't want to gem, enchant, take consumables for it or even seek it out on gear.  If you have to choose between haste and crit, I tend to choose crit because of all my on crit procs, but there is certainly a threshold of crit where haste would actually benefit more.  I'd say if you're getting over 45% crit fully raid buffed, it's safe to say you have more than enough crit.

Crit 

Ah, crit is so fun.  It's fun to watch those big numbers fly on the screen.  Crit will also proc flurry, unleashed rage, and elemental focus.  Among those things, the most important thing by far is Unleashed Rage.  If you don't have a blood specced DK or MM hunter, then you are responsible for one of the best, if not the very best, physical dps buff in the game.  It's your responsibility to keep it flowing.  How do you do that?  With Crit

I mentioned before, with about 30% crit you should maintain about a 95-99% uptime for Unleashed Rage.

Don't gem or enchant for it or consume foods for it unless you are under that 30% crit mark.  

Armor Penetration

I don't want to talk about armor penetration.  Go read blogs, read wowwiki, read wowhead forums or elitist jerks if you REALLY want to know about it.

I'll sum it all up for you.  Armor Penetration is really really bad.  It stinks.  Don't gem/enchant/consume for it.  It is a totally helpless stat and should not be sought after.  If you have to choose between other stats and this one, always choose other stats.  

Spell Power

I have to mention Spell Power since it is a big part of our damage.  Because of the wway we do damage in WotLK you'll see lots of forum threads about caster offhands, trinkets, or other pieces of caster gear being best in slot for us or otherwise.  Some of it is true. In a very general sense though, spell power is valued much higher when you've reached very high levels of gear and you are running with a fast caster mainhand weapon with the double flametongue imbues on both weapons.  There really is only one weapon worth talking about putting in that Mainhand slot and it's the one I just linked.  Spell power trinkets may prove to be pretty powerful for you.  All I can say is the only way to really know what's better for you is to grab it, wear it, get to a test dummy and see which one is better.  It's a confusing time for enhancement shaman and here's to hoping that the spell power/caster gear on enhancement shaman problem is addressed in 3.0.1

So there we go!  Stats for the enhancement shaman!  Next, we'll take a look at gear for the freshly babyfaced level 80 shaman!