Before you can start kitting out your character you’ll need to know what your stat priority is so you can select the appropriate gear, gems, enchants, and consumables. Enhancement Shamans should look to reach the crucial Hit and Expertise breakpoints listed below focusing on Agility, Mastery, Critical Strike or Haste.
Stat Priority
- Agility
- Hit (17% spell hit )
- Expertise (26 Expertise Rating or 6.5% Expertise)
- Mastery
- Critical Strike
- Haste
Agility is your bread-and-butter stat, giving you 2 Attack Power for every 1 point of Agility at level 85. Also, for every 262 Agility, you’ll gain 1% melee critical strike chance. This means that Agility increases your physical and magical attacks because of Mental Quickness. When your Hit and Expertise caps are reached, you’ll just want to focus on Agility when it’s available.
Hit is vastly important because of how much hybrid melee and spell damage you’ll be doing. For your Melee special attacks like Stormstrike and Lava Lash, you’ll need 8% hit chance, but you’ll need 17% to reach hit cap with your spells. You could really go overboard and aim to eliminate all misses on your auto-attacks, but that would require 27% hit rating, which is generally not feasible even with the Dual Wield passive.
Expertise is another stat you need to reach a breakpoint in, and that’s 26 Expertise, which is equal to 781 Expertise Rating. If you’re an Orc with Axe Specialization or a Dwarf with Mace Specialization, you’ll only need 23 Expertise, equal to 691 Expertise Rating, when using the corresponding weapon type. The talent Unleashed Rage gives 8 Expertise, so allocating this can significantly reduce the amount of this stat you need to find on or Reforge onto gear.
Mastery is another stat dump like Agility once you’ve reached your other breakpoints. Enhanced Elements increases all spell damage in your arsenal, which makes it a very stackable stat. You won’t be hitting any cap by dumping points into Mastery, and it directly influences the damage dealt by all your spells. 1 Mastery is equal to 179.28 Mastery Rating which is 2.5% extra spell damage. Be as masterful as you can.
Critical Strike is a less desirable stat to stack on your gear not because it’s not valuable — it does work synergistically with Flurry and Elemental Devastation — it’s just simply outshined by Agility and Mastery. Stacking Critical Strike isn’t as effective a strategy as outright increasing your damage floor by increasing your Attack Power, and you can get some increased critical strike chance from Agility anyway. Still, it’s better than Haste.
Haste is the last stat that has some use for Enhancement Shaman, but its use is as the best alternative stat when none of the abovementioned stats are available. There’s Flurry available to give you 30% increased attack speed, which will be activated throughout a majority of the duration of your fights. This in turn increases the rate at which you can proc Maelstrom Weapon, reducing your spell casts to instant speeds. Haste also doesn’t affect the speed of your melee ability attacks, which remain constant.
Reforging
Reforging is a new feature in Cataclysm that allows you to trade out part of one secondary stat for another on any piece of gear. You won’t be able to get Agility this way, or get rid of another primary stat like Intellect or Spirit, but you can fine-tune your secondary stats to your heart’s content.
You’ll want to use the Reforging system to make sure you reach your Hit and Expertise caps as close to their breakpoints as possible. After that you can Reforge any useless or less useful stats to Mastery.
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