Raiding Enhancement Stat Importance?Follow

Go for the 30%ish crit first. Part of the Enh game plan in raids is to have Unleashed rage up nearly full time, which is a pretty BIG AP buff for all Melee ppl near you, not to mention yourself. Once you get your crit down, THEN work on your AP. basically if you can keep Unleashed rage up full time, that is directly helping your AP too, and a good chunk of it!

Also, don't forget about your hit rate+ too. There is a prefered amount of Hit+ raiding shaman's go for, fortunetly since we have talents to help make up for the -Hit from DWing, we don't need to go over board with it, unlike some melee classes...but we still do need some. I don't know the amount off the top of my head atm, but I'm sure a little snooping around on wowwiki, elitestjerks, or here...and you'll find it.

At your current progression level, you should be able to easily fill in any holes to your gear. Just pick up upgrades as they come (since many of the pieces are best in slot untill sumwell) and make sure everything is properly enchanted and gemmed (generally +Str gems unless socket bonus is better). Some ones that come to mind include, but are not limited to:

Trash Neck drops
Rage/Teron Bracers
Teron/Badge cloak
Veng. Glad Helm
Azgalor legs
Veng. Glad weapons/Badge Weapons/Rising Tide/Syphon(s)/BS weapons
Teron/Sharaz boots
Akama/Gurtogg/Badge rings
DST/Shard of Contempt/Tsunami talisman/Ashtongue trinket/ect.
Belt of Deep Shadow/belt of 100 deaths

As the drops come, you will gain a little bit of everything (hit, AP/STR, Crit/Agi, Armor Pen, Expertise, Haste). Look up Yo's Simulator on google, and go to town.

As a a general rule, the only stats you really need to get are enough +hit to reach the cap and enough health to survive splash/AoE damage of your current content so that you're not dying before the healers have a chance to get to you. After you've met those two criteria, there's really nothing else to do but pump your AP and crit as high as you possibly can, and there's no cookie-cutter, set-in-stone way you're supposed to do it.

Guides can only give you a rough estimate of what you should shoot for. Most Enhancement Shaman gear is shared with Hunters and comes with MP5, agi, and AP on it anyways, so once you've made allowances for the hit and health, all that's really left is to pick up the best possible gear you can get access to and it's going to shape your stats the way it's going to shape them.

That having been said, an average of 33% crit is more than enough. If you're looking to do nothing else but maximize damage through stats at that point, I would horde AP. Crit starts to get a little redundant for melee classes after 30-35%, but you can never have too much AP.

You only need as as many stats as your guild is willing to take you with. As for individual stats, THERE IS NO MAGIC NUMBER! The only number that's important as an enhancement shaman is the damage output (DPS) that you provide, both personally and from enhancing your melee group. Whether you get there with 1400ap and 45% crit or 1500 ap and 35% crit (completly arbitrary numbers BTW), it doesn't matter. If you want to benchmark yourself, I can typically put out about 1500-1600 dps fully raid buffed (for reference, our melee group typically runs enh/fury/ret pally/2x rogue, and we are currently 8/9 and 5/5) on a fight like Teron when I can stand still and chain chug haste pots. It might not be bad to run a little crit light and AP heavy if you happen to have a feral druid in your group since you can make up the lost crit with LoTP.

The whole point is that you should just aim for whatever pieces will be the greatest DPS increase for you, which should be pretty universal at your progression.

Edited, May 21st 2008 1:33pm by TheJadeMonkey