How to Gear.

I was passing through Undercity awhile back and I got a whisper from a young shaman. He asked me why I was wearing all leather. It delighted me as it gave me the chance to pontificate for awhile on the failings of Blizzard to properly itemize gear for enhancement shamans.

The simple answer is that in most cases leather is going to be better for our dps than mail would be. Most leather has some combination of AP, crit, hit, and agility. Most mail has less of those stats due to the addition of Int and mp5. With the changes to water shield and mana spring totem, the mana pool size and regen rate are very unimportant. Unless the shaman is totem twisting the should never go oom as Shamanistic Rage will refill your pool every 2 minutes. Most of the dps mail items in the gave are itemized more for hunters than for shamans. Rogue leather on the other hand suits our needs nicely.

Now you may be asking, how should I decided which piece to use over another. Well that is where our theorycrafting tools come in. Enhancement shamans should determine a relative stat weight, or EP scale. Most people use Attack Power as a baseline and weight every other stat in relation to AP. The posters over at Elitist jerks have come up with some good scales based on different gear levels. The ideal method to compare one piece of gear to another is to use Yo's simulator You can derive your own personal EP levels based on your current gear using this sim and input them into a site like Loot Rank.. From there its a simple matter to see which items have the highest ep value. Loot Rank does not take item procs into account however, so the trinket and totem values are not accurate. It also cannot measure the relative value of slower weapons, so Keep that in mind for choosing your weapons.