Enhancement Shaman: How to Maximize DPS Output in PvE/Raid Dps (WoTLK 3.2)

As I leveled my shaman, I found elemental to be a pretty suitable spec for leveling at any level, just because mobs seemed to go down rather quickly while leveling. I stayed elemental through some level 80 end-game content, however, restoration was, and still is my main spec.

Enhance has gotten some extra attention from myself and guildies lately, because I got extremely bored with elemental dps and daily questing. I first tried enhance just because it was a newer aspect of the shaman for me, and decided that melee shaman questing was extremely fun in comparison to the boring elemental casting. I then decided to grab some decent gear and head into heroics, to test the dps out. I wasn't shocked at first, the dps was very low. I had a hard time doing more than 2k dps, however my gear was quite bad, with very few epics.

Now I'm much more geared, and the dps output is equal or greater than my elemental dps. In this article, you will learn what I have discovered through testing different builds, weapons, and rotations with my enhance shaman, which will hopefully let you know a little more about the mechanics of the way an enhancement shaman works.

Gearing

When it comes to gear, both expertise and hit rating were very important to me. I made sure to get the expertise up to the "cap", which for any class is 6.5%. This will improve dps because your attacks will no longer be dodged and parried so frequently while dpsing a boss. Hit rating is very important as well, especially considering the fact that you're dual wielding. Take note that the base chance to miss while dual wielding is 25% on either weapon, so, talents included, the hit cap would actually be 25%. I'm only geared to include about 18% hit (whilst including talents and racial that account for 7%), and I miss about 8% of the time on my melee attacks on raid bosses. However, this doesn't affect my dps much anymore, and I have stopped stacking hit rating gear.
-Since all of your attacks scale with attack power, I stacked 40 attack power gems in every slot acceptable. Gear primarily for attack power, crit, and melee haste once you're up to at least 10% hit via gear, and expertise capped. Don't worry about the armor class of the gear you're looking for at first, I wear some leather on my enhance shaman even though I should be wearing all mail. Take whichever piece of gear gives you the stats you need to maximize dps output.

Rotation/Dps style

While in a raid, make sure to take note that melee attacks cannot be parried while the attacker is behind the mob. So, if you're a melee dps, you should always be behind the target for the maximum dps output. However, with expertise cap, the amount of times you'll be parried during a fight is very few.
-The rotation for an enhancement shaman is very simple, and is quite similar to that of a retribution paladin. Basically, just use stormstrike, lava lash, and earth shock whenever they are off cooldown, and use lightning bolt or chain lightning whenever maelstrom has 4-5 stacks.
-While dpsing a boss, after popping whatever cooldowns are necessary for the fight, my rotation is: Stormstrike, lava lash, earth shock, (melee until maelstrom procs or other abilities come off cooldown), lightning bolt, and repeat.
-Make sure to keep strength of earth and especially windfury totem down. 20% melee haste (with enhancing totems specced) is amazing for an enhancement shaman.

Weapons

I've decided to make this a different category entirely, just because of the complexity of the weapon requirements for maximum dps output for an enhancement shaman. Firstly, you're going to want to be dual-weilding, of course, and you're going to want to be dual weilding the slowest weapons you possibly can, with the highest top-end damage weapon in your main hand. Slower weapons are good for enhancement shamans due to windfury procs, stormstrike damage, lava lash damage, and flametongue weapon damage. The slower the weapons you have, the more damage stormstrike will deal each time you use it, and the harder a windfury proc will hit. Make SURE to have windfury on your mainhand, and flametongue on your offhand while dpsing, in almost all situations. Some enhancement shamans decide to put windfury on mainhand and windfury on offhand to maximize windfury procs. What they don't realize, is that there is a 3 second cooldown to windfury proccing on both hands, regardless of how many times it should be. If your offhand is proccing a windfury, it's not going to hit nearly as hard (offhand deals nearly half as much damage as the mainhand) and it's wasting the 3 second cooldown that your mainhand could have used. Not to mention, having your offhand enchanted with flametongue will increase the damage of lava lash 25%, and an additional 10% if you glyph for it.

Glyphs

With my Enhancement dps spec, I run glyph of spirit wolves, which increases the attack power bonus your wolves get. The wolves are an excellent increase to dps, and the increased attack power they gain makes a good cooldown even better. I also use glyph of lava lash, which increases the damage of lava lash by an additional 10% if your offhand is enchanted with flametongue. I also use glyph of stormstrike, which increases the nature damage the target with the stormstrike debuff takes by an additional 8%, making my lightning bolt and chain lightning hit 8% harder, effectively.

For any further questions/concerns about enhancement shamans, please comment on this post and I'll do my best to get back to you.