[top]Managing your threat
Enhance Shaman are severely threat capped - not as badly as a Ret Paladin, but worse than a DPS warrior. With no active threat reduction we rely on buffs, items, and strategy to reduce our threat. Methods to reduce your threat are listed below in order of Most to Least effective. Remember that threat reduction is multiplicative, not additive.
Spirit Weapons - Enhancement talent that reduces melee threat by 30%. This is a staple talent for our spec. Most effective since its always on and isn't reliant on a paladin.
Blessing of Salvation - 30% threat reduction. If you only have one paladin in your raid, this is the buff you need. If you don't have a paladin in your horde raid, you need to pressure your leadership to recruit one.
[Prism of Inner Calm] - worth around 10% threat reduction as long as your raid buffed crit rate is over 30% (and by the time you're killing Vashj it damn well better be). Keep an eye on this as Blizzard may buff it at some point.
Strategy - A lot of this depends on your tank and his TPS generation. If your tank can generate around 800 TPS you can give him a 10k threat lead and then unload without much worry of catching up. If you find yourself approaching the threat cap you should stop shocking first since they aren't affected by Spirit Weapons. A suggestion was made of "downranking" your weapons for a few seconds, allowing you to continue to provide Unleashed Rage to the group with lowbie weapons so that your threat isn't increasing.
Battle Ankh - the improved ankh talent can certainly come in handy when clearing raid zones. You need to be extremely careful about pulling aggro however - if you pull and die, the mob will pick the next highest threat target to attack, which may not be the tank. A much safer method is to allow yourself to die to AoE, and have buffers primed to give you DPS buffs when you ankh. At that point you'll be free to take Blessing of Might if you didn't have it before, since your tank will now have a hefty threat lead.
[top]Notes for Raid Leaders
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[top]Group compositions that work
While building groups for Enhancement Shaman its important to remember that while we are a support class, we also require support from other group members to enhance our own DPS. Battle Shout is one of the most important buffs that Enhancement Shaman require, followed by Blessing of Salvation/Might.
There are three possible group configurations that can make use of an Enhancement Shaman, listed below in order of the magnitude of buff they would bring to your raid as a whole.
Melee Group
Enhancement Shaman (Windfury Totem)
Rogue
Rogue
Rogue/Feral Druid/BM Hunter/MM Hunter/Ret Paladin
Fury or MS Warrior
The Melee Group is the top priority to receive an Enhancement Shaman, it is where we provide the most utility.
Tank Hybrid Group
Enhancement Shaman (Windfury Totem)
Prot Warrior
Prot Warrior
Prot Paladin or Resto Druid
Tree Druid
This group brings an increased threat window for the rest of the raid, allowing the DPS classes to attack earlier and at full force, and should be the second priority for an Enhancement Shaman if you're able to bring 2 to a raid. If the Warrior or Paladin is the Main Tank, Windfury should be used. If the Feral is the Main Tank for an encounter, Grace of Air should be used.
Hunter/Feral Hybrid Group
Enhancement Shaman (Grace of Air Totem)
Hunter
Hunter
Hunter
Feral Druid
This should be an extremely rare situation since very few guilds would ever have room in a roster for a third Enhancement Shaman, or it could be used for an encounter specific group setup. Regardless, a stacked hunter group benefits far less from Enhancement than any other physical DPS class since they cannot make use of Unleashed Rage. A Resto Shaman can actually benefit hunters more with the additional mana throughput. This group also places a strain on the Enhancement Shaman to maintain totems at the appropriate range for the melee and ranged in the group.
[top]Evaluating with WoW Web Stats
Determining if an Enhancement Shaman is performing to his potential is tricky for a raid leader as the damage output can be very random from one raid to the next, and there are no clear indicators of "using the wrong ability at the wrong time" as with other classes. The following list is intended to assist raid leaders on where to focus their efforts.
First and foremost, familiarize yourself with this article so that you can talk the talk with the shaman. You need to understand what Stats benefit them and what sort of weapons they need, as well as getting a good understanding of just how random our DPS can be.
Examine your Enhancement Shaman on the Armory. Ensure that his gear meets the principles outline in this article. He should not have Hit gems, his gear should be properly enchanted for maximum DPS benefit, and he should be wearing the most appropriate gear for the spec. You may need to do some research on WoWHead or Thottbot to help make gear upgrade recommendations. He should not be trying to wear hybrid gear for spell damage or healing.
Group buffs are the primary reason you're bringing this shaman and so you should check to make sure he's fulfilling that role. Using WWS you can check to see how many times a totem was dropped on a fight by viewing the Shaman's record for that event. Check the "Performed" section and see how many times a totem was dropped. Multiply that by 120 seconds and compare to the length of the fight. The estimated uptime should be pretty close. If there are several minutes of uncovered time, your shaman is not keeping totems down and your melee group is suffering. Unleashed Rage should ideally have 100% uptime which approximately requires a 30% crit rate fully buffed.
Evaluating personal DPS contribution is tricky because it depends on armor level of the boss, your strategy on the boss, and the nature of the fight itself.
His spread of damage should follow a general trend. Windfury attacks should account for 30-40%, Stormstrike for 10-12%. If its significantly less than that, the shaman may have forgotten to put Windfury on one or both weapons (or it ran out) or may not have been using Stormstrike on every 10sec cooldown.
Shocks should be anywhere from 0-15% of his damage depending on the threat situation or magic immunities. His shock damage should come from a roughly equal number of Flame and Earth shocks, indicating a good DPS rotation of Flame-Earth-Flame. A perfect rotation would have 10 shocks per minute of combat, but given interference with stormstrike and using GCDs for consumables we could consider 7-8 shocks a minute to be an acceptable range.
AutoAttack should make up the rest of his damage, normally 40-50%.
There should be a minimal level of Parried attacks, indicating that he attacked from behind the boss. His Miss Rate on WWS is mostly irrelevant unless he hasn't hit capped his specials. Except for cases where debuffs cause loss of Hit %, no special attack should ever be Missed (only dodged/parried). The number of white attacks missed should not be used as an indicator of "needs more hit rating."
In the rare situation that you had two Enhancement shaman and need to compare their performance this becomes very difficult. You cannot simply say that they have 'similar gear', you will need to compare fully raid buffed stats including all group buffs for Hit, Crit, and Attack Power. Group composition is extremely important. If one shaman only had Trueshot Aura but the other had LotP and Battle Shout, the second shaman (all else being equal) should have a significant advantage over the other. Differences of 100 AP or 5% crit can easily explain large gaps in DPS output. Also check and compare Shock rotations and Stormstrike use. More often than not though, the culprit is group buffs or using an Elixir instead of a Flask.
Hope you guys find this help.
Dragon
( I got this from Elitistjerks.com )
