enhancement and ShieldsFollow

Given that as Enhancement your job is providing large amounts of DPS, yeah, you need to dual-wield to do it right.

I think the only time I've heard of enhance shamans switching to shields was as a temporary thing to try and live a little longer when being focused in pvp, and switching back to DW to kick some ***.

Mani, just to be clear, you can do whatever you like. If your solo playstyle allows for a shield then by all means wield one. If you are in an instance with a group, however, I strongly suggest you Dual Wield, or use a 2 hander, as you should not be tanking. Your damage will be much higher, and as such you will do a better job for the group.

When you are alone... Well do whatever makes you feel good about your time spent at the keyboard.

I do not recommend using SP weaponsn. They do not offer alot of pure melee dps and you will lose alot of useful stats.

Melee dps orientated weapons offer pure melee stats like Strength, and Agility. And since most of your DPS consist of melee white hits, which use those stats for their multipliers etc, you will benefit alot more from using the correct melee weapon.

,Zig

Shields in general tend to be rather underwhelming for enhancement. From a defensive standpoint, enhancement shaman (and shaman in general) don't get the itemization or talents that enable them to get much benefit from shields. If you look at classes like paladin and warrior, they get all kinds of talents that increase their chances to block, stats like STR increase their block value, and they get gear for prot specs that further enhance the benefit of a shield.

Shields are typically worn by elemental and resto shaman because they can't dual wield and their aren't too many 2h axes/maces with caster stats. Blizzard has caster shields in the game specifically for holy pallies and ele/resto shaman.

As far as solo enhancement goes, the choice to use a 2h/dual wield vs. 1h + shield revolves around the same reasoning as the choice to use Stoneskin Totem or Strength of Earth Totem...the defensive option might let you withstand a bit more of a beating; the offensive option makes you less likely to need that extra time ;D For enhancement shaman in groups, you'll never find a shield with the kind of stats that would boost the damage output of a single 1h weapon relative to the kind of damage you can do with a 2h weapon or, ideally, dual wield.

This used to work. In Wrath beta the Maelstrom charges effected Lava Burst. So as long as you had Flame Shock up, you could pop the LvB and get big crits along with your melee damage. I'm not sure if you used the Spell Power weapons or melee ones, or just got both kinds of gear, but you got a bunch of crit/haste, since it effects both melee and spells.

More haste is more Maelstrom procs (see http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t20765-shaman_enhancement/#Maelstrom_Weapon ) so you could blast your enemies with spells and put out nice DPS along with the quick melee attacks.

It got nerfed though.