New to Shaman and in need of adviceFollow

You seem to be doing alright. A few pieces of Spell Power gear, but not that bad. They have crit at least. It was a good idea to dual spec. Ideally Resto and Ele are the best, because they can share some gear. But you can do Enh and Resto no problem, just gather the gear for them. And Ele does just fine DPS if played right.

For normal you don't need super stats. Just stack Intellect without losing much Spell Power, then it's a bit of a toss up. If you don't run out of mana, go for crit, otherwise MP5.

You can mix gear, cloth, leather and mail. Unless it's a big upgrade though, don't take any cloth or leather with Spirit on it. Spirit is wasted on Shaman's.

For Elemental you need to get around 14%ish hit rating. Hit will be the most important stat to get for both Enh and Ele at first. Other then that, make sure your gear is all Spell Power based. Enh with some Spell Power is fine, but Resto or Ele with Attack Power is a no no.

Also your specs are fine.

From Elitist Jerks:



Note that those figures apply to raid bosses (I know it says so in the quote, but it's an important thing to take note of). I run with the goal in mind to have 420 hit rating unbuffed (I'm Alliance, ergo passive 1% bonus to hit; I think I'm sitting at 422 hit rating atm). From what I've read (which it's possible that I misunderstood), the 3% hit they're talking about from raid buffs comes from a shadow priest's Misery. There may be other raid buffs that can increase your chance to hit, but I'm not that versed on the full scope of raid buffs atm (working on it though :D)

Also note that my view on it is slightly different than I would expect an elemental shaman to have because I'm enhancement. Stacking hit a bit beyond what I actually end up needing to be at the spell hit cap still offers some benefit (albeit a trivial one) in that I'm still not hit capped for my offhand weapon so hit beyond 420 isn't totally wasted.

There are a couple of options when it comes to hit rating. The "best" setup would be one where you know exactly what your group composition will be at all times and you could make your decisions based on that. The second best scenario would be to assume that you will not have a shadow priest (or any other class that can buff your hit chance) and gear/itemize so that you're within 40 hit rating of the cap. That way, you can carry around hit rating food (Worg Tartare is +40 hit) and use it when you have no outside buffs to allow you to hit the cap and if you find yourself with a shadow priest in the group, you can use food more suited to damage (ie. Fish Feast, or personal food for spell power, crit, whatever).

I find it difficult to itemize hit properly to account for every possible situation, and I hate having to use +hit food so the easiest thing for me was just to go for the hit cap assuming no other buffs.

Wonderful guys and thank you so much for your kind assistance. Atleast I have a rough gauge on what to look out for.

But imho its so hard to get the right mixture of gears till I can get Tier gears whereas as a priest (My Main), it was kind of a breeze.

I want to play shaman as retro as I like healing and want to experince healing the shammy way. Also the urge to respec to ele is there is I want to dps too. Infact thats one of the main reasons I dual specced at lvl 60.

But with the recent changes made, it seems i have been reading other experince shammy players saying there is a drop in dps. Nevertheless I'll like to try and see how it goes.

For the time being I'll stick to enh and restro cos enh is really cool spec for leveling. Very fast and indeed with the help of feral spirits, I am even able to solo elite quest which requires 2 or 3 players. Didn't dared to try that big guy walking in nagrand.

So I do expect the same to be in WOTLK as well.

Once again thank you so much for your assistance.

Happy gaming and good drops :)

Cheers