Enhancement Shaman issues on the WOTLK section

hey I’m enhancement shaman but the best in bags and upgrade finder keeps suggesting spell power gear, i dont need spellpower gear i need agility type gear. I think the site thinks im elemental. HELP!

I would have to see a snapshot to respond to this. Enhance does do a lot of spell damage - almost (or just as) much as it does physical damage.

like best in slot from heroics is war mace of unrequited love which has spellpower stats but FERAL attack power which doesn’t help an enhancement shaman. I think the problem lies in the calculations of feral attack power as that only applies to druids. Meaning all things with feral attack power on the list for enhancement is wrong.

We do not add feral attack power into the calculations.

Enhance does so much spell damage… to get the optimizer to lay off of spell power weapons, I would need to remove some spell damage from the calculations. Flame Shock, Fire Nova, Lightning Bolts with maelstrom, Earth Shock, Magma Totem, Lightning Shield procs, Flametongue. All you have for ap scaling is autos, wf procs, storm strike and an occasional lava lash. There is more scaling with spell power in there than attack power, from what I see.

I’m getting same results - primarily recommending SP gear, which contradicts every other website’s recommendations. I wonder if it’s not accounting for the Mental Quickness talent.

The most unusual part is the weapon recommendations, even in the BiS section.

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We are accounting for the mental quickness talent.

As enhance, you do so much more damage that scales with spell power - I don’t see how spell power could be a bad stat. Mental Quickness only gives 30% of your AP as spell power, which is a bad conversion. The only meaningful physical damage comes from auto attacks, which scale more off weapon damage than AP.

The fire elemental and feral spirits are the only other big damage that scales directly from AP. I can tweak the calculations some based on logs now (mainly for fire elemental, which was hard to find info on). Making that account for more damage will reduce the value of spell power. Even if I over-estimate fire elemental damage by a bit… the optimizer still won’t shy away from all spell power gear. I just don’t see how it could, given the ability breakdown I’m seeing on enhance shamans.

Some of the top damage parses I see on WCL are using spell power weapons, so I don’t think we can be that far off.

Now that I look at the Enhancement rankings on Warcraft Logs, I’m finding that the AMR BiS section is recommending similar gear to that of the players on the rankings.

Looks like there is an exception with weapons though. AMR is recommending Torch of Holy Fire MH & Sinister Revenge OH (1.6 speed weapons) whereas the vast majority of Shamans on the rankings are using Wraith Strike MH & either The Stray or Pride OH (2.6 or 2.5 speed weapons). My first thought was that it is recommending faster weapons for more Windfury Weapon procs, but I understand Windfury Weapon has a 3 second ICD. Similar thoughts regarding getting more Maelstrom Weapon procs, but that is normalized to about 10 procs-per-minute with 5/5 points in the talent, regardless of weapon speed.

I think the high parsers are going for 2 slow weapons for a few reasons:

  • Improving Stormstrike damage, although this damage is negligible
  • Improving Windfury Weapon damage, which is fairly significant. Only the MH gets imbued with Windfury, so this doesn’t give incentive to have a slow OH weapon, which leads to the final point
  • Abusing the Flurry mechanic. If both the MH & OH hit the target within 0.5s of eachother, only 1 Flurry stack will be consumed, increasing Flurry’s uptime. It’s significantly easier to syncronize the weapons if they’re both the same speed.

I do have code in there that handles flurry uptime and the potential boost you get from having two weapons close in attack speed.

I made some tweaks to it last night - when we post them later on today or whenever we can do the next update, it should prefer a little bit more the weapons people expect.