You've been... thunderstruck!

This is my beautify Unbound, in her new ride, a turbo charged, uber prop machina. Oh baby!

Yep... 8 primal fires, 24 khorium bars, 48 fel iron bars, 32 eternium bars, a hula doll (90g) and my left spleen... and I ride in STYLE!


K, this is the great enhance shammy post... again, some history...

Unbound was my first pvp server char. And she was wonderful... many was the paladin (and back then, they was all alliance paladins) that got smashed 12" shorter by Mabd and her big ass windfury stick.

Then the great shammy redesign hit, and I kinda lost interest. As well, I had absolutely no clue how shammy dps worked under the new rules. Ignorance did not help... I did a lot wrong, and my poor Unbound suffered greatly from my neglect.

However, I finally chanced upon the elitist jerks thread on all you need to know about beating the unholy crap outta things as an enhance shammy....

The problems with enhance...

You are WAY too dependent upon crit. For PVE, this isn't a problem. I'll explain why later... however, for PVP, this can be murder. Functional pvp builds run on one of two themes as far as crit is concerned.

1. Don't need it. (we got stuns, or something even meaner...)

Locks, mace warriors, mace stun rogues, disc priests, ret pallies.

2. Got so damn much of it thanks to class mechanics, you can stack resilience all you want, it wont help...

Frost mages, MM hunters and freaking mutilate rogues.

At this point, shammies are usefull for the buffs, being almost as hard to kill (with better healing/buff options) than pallies... and an elemental shammy can dump a pretty awesome amount of regular damage out.

But enhance shammies aint doin it in pvp. Or so I thought until last weekend.

First... I was in a WSG. We won 3-0. (For some reason, Melvin always loses WSG. I don't know why... he's usually solid when it comes to BG's) The win wasn't that relevant... but the thing was, Unbound came in second in damage, and had a flag recovery. And Unbound had pretty crappy gear, since I was saving all my arena and honor point love for the upcoming resto respec.

The thing was... first in damage was another enhance shammy, from my server... and he had almost 300% my total damage, as well as several flag recoveries... where ever he went, allies died like rats. Anything in cloth that got even near him died a horrible death....

So of course, I bugged him for tips. Which, being pretty cool, he was more than happy to give. But the main thing was... like warriors, enhance shammies really really do need the best gear. So I went out, bought the season 2 main hand, and the season 3 boots and belt for unbound.

And saw immediate improvement.

So... enhance shammy tips...
Totems matter. Two in particular... earthbind and grounding. Grounding totem will eat a hunter's freeze trap... (and don't think I wasn't terrorizing every hunter I found last weekend...) Earthbind is just vital. You really wanna use earthshock where you can for the damage bonus. If you need to close range, frost shock is nice, but insta cast ghost wolf is better...

Stormstrike has to be timed. Its best to save storm strike for immediately after a melee attack that DOESNT proc windfury. This pretty much assures the storm strike as being outside the WF cooldown window. (Windfury has a 3 second cooldown. Since there are no weapons slower than 2.8, this means the melee attack after a windfury proc will not proc windfuy.... stormstrike is best used at this time.)

Stack AP. No, really. Crit works for enhance shammies like this... a crit every 10 seconds gets ya 10% more attack power. A crit every 6 seconds gets ya a much reduced mana cost shock (this is vital for grinding, less useful for pvp...) A crit every 4 normal blows will get you a 30% increased attack speed.

Looking at this... every 10 seconds, you should see 12-14 swings (counting windfury, flurry and stormstrike) so... 8% crit should see the melee bonus always up.

Over 6 seconds... maybe 7 swings. It breaks funny. anything near 24% crit will keep your shocks with a reduced cost...

Over 4 normal blows... at remember... you really should be packing windfury on both weapons at this point. (Dont even start talking about 2h weapons... I will feed you to rabid leper gnomes....) you'll have about a 70% chance of a wf. Assuming theres no storm strike in the mix... we're looking at a 1 in 6 crit rate to keep flurry up. (Cuz WF hits dont eat flurry charges, and if your weapons are the same speed, flurry means your next two swings of both will be 30% faster, for 4 hits instead of 3.. I din't believe this either... till I tested it out...) So what? 24-28% crit will keep flurry running unless you get serious bad luck...

Crit for enhance shammies seems to lose appeal after getting near 25%. After that, it's nice, you get double damage hits and all... but you don't get special effects...

Compare to our favorite class... hunters... everytime they crit... free pet attack, free pet focus, 230% damage instead of 200%... on and on...

Mabd by the way... does 1.03 x 1.03 x 2.3 = 244% damage on crits (on humans at least... resiliance THAT bitches!), thanks to talents and her meta gem. A meta gem that's pretty useless for shammies...

You see why I have her Crit near 34%? 46% with multishot?

Unbound is different... you gotta tweak crit for the special abilities... but resiliance really really messes this formula up.. however, against high resil targets, you might be working with flurry only up half the time... the +10% attack power buff will be there...

So why AP? Well... enhance shammies get an awful lot outta AP. Increased spell damage and healing, works with the unleashed rage buff. Both of these scale the way that crit based talents dont. And a normal hit for tons and tons of damage isn't mitigated by resil the way a crit is. As well, your mana regen ability, Shamanistic rage, is based entirely offa AP... not damage.

So... whats the new play style? Watching this guy... insta wolf to close, open with a nice frost shock, dump totems while getting first hits in, then beatdown time.

So whats the second thing? I was was usin the new style to grind ghosts in shadowmoon for that damned Guldan quest. And wouldn't ya know, his athletic supporter just wouldn't drop! I killed like 30 before getting the drop... wolf, jump, beatdown for the kill, wolf, move to next... If I pulled more than one, I'd drop stoneclaw, and by the time it was dead, so were the extra mobs. If I dropped below 70% health, I'd do a quick heal...

I keep mana bar full the entire time with a combination of water shield and the 15 sec mana regen talent. (Shamanistic Rage) And when I was done, I stood alone in a field of dead ass level 68 mobs.

And then I got the whisper...

"You were awesome!"

WTF? look around... and then see the belf rogue killin the same ghosts, only much slower...

And then I realized... Majeure could cleared the field with aoe... but woulda been out drinkin half the time... Mabd could killed em as fast... maybe... mabd has serious aggro problems...

The point was... Unbound had arrived. As lethal as my other alts, in both PVE and PVP. (well, nowhere near Mabd in PVP, but then who is?) And the play style is as frenetic as anything I've seen.

One last tip... water shield... you can blow through the three charges in 9 seconds.. thats 600 mana regen every 9 seconds as long as something is beating on you, and you keep it up. Lightning shield is great if you don't expect to outlive your mana... but water shield, with the reduced mana shocks, and low cost of stormstrike... (grounding totem, earthbind totem and ghost wolf are also pretty damn cheap as well...) and with every 2 min, getting a full refill of mana offa Rage... (I get 350 mana per proc... and it procs about half the time... so over 15 seconds... 16-18 swings, about 3k mana returned...) you really shouldnt have mana problems while grinding...