A question about "off-hand" weaponsFollow

Enhancement shaman can equip them at or above level 40 when they can access to dual wielding through talents. The "Off-hand" designation just means that you can't equip the weapon in your main hand slot. It's worth noting, however, that weapons with the off-hand designation typically have half the swing delay of main hand counterparts and half the damage range which usually isn't ideal for Enhancement shaman. This may have changed with WotLK but I know that in TBC enhancement shaman wanted a high delay/high damage weapon in each hand for Stormstrike as well as to maximize the damage from Windfury Weapon procs.

I think Rogues are really the only class that goes for the fast off=hand weapon, and it's possible that they don't even use them anymore, either. It used to be that some rogue specs would prefer the fast off-hand weapon simply for applying poisons to a target. That may have changed with 3.0/3.1.

Regardless, the short answer is that yes, Enhancement shaman can equip weapons designated as "off-hand". The question becomes whether or not they would want to ;D



I'm guessing that no, it's not possible but I could well be wrong. You'd have to stack an enormous amount of haste on your gear + Windfury totem + Flurry and even then you'd have a hard time hitting > 70% speed reduction from haste. If it is possible, I think it would be safe to say that you wouldn't be seeing those numbers until you were wearing advanced raid gear.

You could well be right about that. I had a 70 tauren shaman that I leveled enhancement pre-WotLK and just started a new shaman (Alliance this time) so I'm just now getting used to the changes. I could see a fast off-hand with Flametongue Weapon...maybe. The main concern used to be that Windfury Weapon can only proc so often and if all of your procs were coming from your offhand weapon, you were losing out on a fair bit of damage. I'm guessing that the Flametongue procs from a fast offhand offset the reduced damage from Stormstrike, but I've got another 16 levels to go before I have to start thinking about that ;D

Edit to add: I did a little poking around and found out why shammies are using Flametongue on the offhand and it's because it gives a 25% bonus to the base Lava Lash damage. What I've yet to find is why you'd want a fast offhand weapon for an ability that does 100% offhand weapon damage + 25% if the offhand is imbued with Flametongue Weapon. I would imagine it has to do with scaling of damage, but that's enough research for tonight ;D


Edited, Jul 20th 2009 10:09pm by AureliusSir

All of the expert analysis I have seen on level 80 enhance imbues and weapons are still saying slow/slow with windfury on main hand and flametongue on off hand. I think there are some still experimenting and getting some results with a caster main hand with flametongue but the majority say to stick with slow/slow.

Now - at low levels, you don't have a lot of the skills that push us into the slow/slow mold so you do have a bit more flexibility to experiment to see what works best with the tools you have to work with. Most enhance Shammys use a nice slow 2-hander until they get dual-wielding and a nice pair of weapons to use it with. Even beyond that, 2-handers really aren't going to hold you back too much while leveling since most people really only care about maximizing their dps at level cap.