Shaman FAQ for Cataclysm - 4.1.0 WoW

All information primarily pertains to PvE unless otherwise noted.

Which Weapon Imbues Should I Use?
- Enhancement: Slow mainhand with Windfury and a slow offhand with Flametongue. Fast offhands are not viable as Stormstrike and Lava Lash are instant non-normalized attacks.
- Elemental uses Flametongue and Restoration uses Earthliving.
- Rockbiter is highly situational and encounter-specific. Frostbrand is PvP-only.

Which Glyphs Should I Use?
Enhancement
Prime - Glyph of Lava Lash, Glyph of Stormstrike, and Glyph of Feral Spirit.
Major - Glyph of Healing Stream Totem and Glyph of Ghost Wolf are very useful. If AEing, use Glyph of Chain Lightning and Glyph of Fire Nova.

Elemental
Prime - Glyph of Lightning Bolt, Glyph of Lava Burst, and Glyph of Flame Shock.
Major - Glyph of Lightning Shield and Glyph of Thunder. The remaining one is at your discretion. Glyph of Chain Lightning is nice for quick AE and Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is always great to have.

Restoration
Prime - Glyph of Earth Shield, Glyph of Riptide, and Glyph of Water Shield. If you don't have mana issues, replace Glyph of Water Shield with Glyph of Earthliving Weapon.
Major - Glyph of Chain Heal for raiding, free if not. Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is a fine choice.

Gearing Enhancement
The proper way to determine stat weights is to run the simulator with your stats plugged in.

http://enhsim.codeplex.com/

1) First get 17% spell hit (1742 hit rating, 1639 for Draenei) and 26 expertise (540 expertise rating, as we get 8 expertise from Unleashed Rage).
2) Agility > Mastery > Crit > Haste > Hit (until hard DW melee cap at 21%) > Intellect
3) Gem Agility.

Note that hit has soft caps at 2% (for special melee attacks, including 6% melee hit from talents) and 17% (for spells) and a hard melee cap at 21% (covers everything, assuming 6% melee hit from Dual Wield).

Reforging Enhancement
1) Reforge to 17% spell hit and 26 expertise.
2) Reforge all your Hit (over 17% spell hit), Crit, and Haste to Mastery. In that order.
3) Reforge any remaining excess Hit and Haste to Crit.

Gearing Elemental
1) Spell hit to 17% (1742 hit rating, 1639 for Draenei). Remember that 1 point of Spirit = 1 spell hit rating. Spirit is better than hit rating as it also provides mana regeneration.
2) Intellect > Spellpower > Haste > Mastery >> Crit
3) Gem Intellect.

Reforging Elemental
1) Reforge to Spirit until you reach 17% spell hit.
2) Reforge all Hit/Spirit (over 17% spell hit), Crit and Mastery to Haste. In that order.
3) Reforge any remaining excess Hit/Spirit and Crit to Mastery.

Gearing Resto
If you often run out of mana, prioritize Spirit over everything but Intellect.

1) Int > Haste (below soft cap) > Mastery > Spirit > Crit > Haste (past cap)
2) Gem Intellect.

Reforging Resto
1) Reforge everything into haste until the soft cap.
2) If the item already has haste or you're at the soft cap, reforge to mastery.
3) If the item already has mastery, reforge to spirit.

The Resto Haste Soft Cap
Restoration has a soft cap at 916 Haste Rating for non-goblins and 788 for goblins. This is the point where all HoT spells get one additional tick. Past this point, haste value drops. The second tick comes at roughly 4000 haste rating, which is not currently possible.

How to AE
Elemental
Earthquake > Flame Shock > Fire Nova > Chain Lightning. You will have one empty GCD in this priority which could technically be filled with magma totem or thunderstorm if you're already in range and very low latency. Flame shock should be "multidotted" to multiple targets.

Enhance
MW5 Chain Lightning > Flame Shock > Fire Nova > Magma Totem. "Multidot" Flame Shock and continue your single-target priority between AE cooldowns. Remember that Unleash Flame works with Fire Nova.

Enhancement Simplified Priority
Enhancement uses a priority list since many spells have staggered cooldowns and Maelstrom Weapon stacks are random. Use the following abilities in order of priority to maximize sustained damage. Note that this priority is simplified to the point where humans can reliably execute it. You should also use your cooldowns (trinkets, wolves, fire elemental, etc) as often as possible.

1) Lightning Bolt - With a 5 stack of Maelstrom Weapon. Use Chain Lightning only if >1 target.
2) Lava Lash - Don't worry about searing stacks on your target, use this on cooldown.
3) Unleash Elements
4) Refresh Searing Totem, if necessary.
5) Flame Shock - Only use if the FS DoT is down.
6) Stormstrike
7) Earth Shock

Unleash Elements
This ability has different effects based upon your equipped weapon imbues. Dualwielding shamans get both. Note that Unleash Flame does not buff Lava Lash damage.

- Unleash Wind (Windfury): http://wowhead.com/spell=73681
- Unleash Flame (Flametongue): http://wowhead.com/spell=73683
- Unleash Life (Earthliving): http://wowhead.com/spell=73685
- Unleash Frost (Frostbrand): http://wowhead.com/spell=73682
- Unleash Earth (Rockbiter): http://wowhead.com/spell=73684

Windfury Weapon
- Scales with weapon DPS, attack power, haste, crit, and hit.
- Mitigated by armor and block, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a 5% special attack type melee miss chance.
- The best imbue for enhancement shamans on the main hand.
- The three extra attacks can proc Flurry and weapon on hit effects. They do not consume Flurry charges and don't glance.
- When used offhand, the three extra attacks are affected by the standard offhand 50% damage reduction. The WF proc's attack power bonus is not.

Windfury Totem
- The Windfury Totem now grants 10% melee and ranged attack speed. It stacks with the shaman-only weapon imbue.

The Windfury Cooldown
After WF procs it cannot proc again on either hand for 3 seconds. No 1H weapon in the entire game can proc WF twice in a row. This means that WF will proc less than the 20% promised on its tooltip.

- When only one weapon has WF, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 20% chance to proc. This leads to a 11-18% overall proc rate, depending on gear, weapon speed, spec, and luck. Slower is better.
- When both weapons have WF, each hit outside of the cooldown has a 36% chance to proc. This leads to a 11-14% procrate with weapons faster than 2.0s unhasted and a 14-18% procrate with weapons slower than 2.0s unhasted. Slower is better.

Flametongue Weapon and Totem
- The best mainhand imbue for elemental shamans and the best offhand for enhancement shamans.
- FT should never be used mainhand by enhance shamans.
- The glyph of Flametongue Weapon stacks when dualwielding, giving 4% spell crit.
- The FT totem gives a 6% total spell power buff. This stacks with the static buff on FT weapon but does not stack with 10% spell power buffs provided by elemental shamans and demonology warlocks.

Earthliving Weapon
- Earthliving (EL) is the weapon imbue for restoration shamans.
- The EL effect has a chance to proc on each "jump" of a chain heal.
- The Heal over Time (HoT) effect ticks every second and refreshes itself when it procs frequently. It does not stack.
- When dualwielded, the healing spell power effect and procrate are both doubled, but the HoT still does not stack.

Frostbrand Weapon
- Scales with spell power, attack power (with Mental Quickness), crit, hit, melee haste.
- Mitigated by spell resist, frost resist, avoided by dodge, parry, and miss.
- Has a normal spell miss chance of 17% against level+3 bosses.
- Crits at 100% damage with the elemental talent Elemental Fury.
- Benefits from 10% of your spell power per proc.
- Procs at 9 procs per minute.
- With Mental Quickness, FB scales with attack power, but it scales considerably worse then FT. FB should not be used for its damage. It is situationally useful in PvP only.
- Does not proc Elemental Focus on crits.
- Does not slow bosses. Frostbrand is a PvP-only ability.

Maelstrom Weapon
- Maelstrom Weapon (MW) is a spec-defining talent. A 5-stack Lightning Bolt should always be a high priority for both sustained and burst DPS.
- MW ranks give 3/6/9 base procs per minute (PPM).
- Note that this is before dualwielding, windfury, instant attacks, and haste like flurry or WF totem. MW procs a lot more than 9 per minute. Due to instant attacks, slow weapons are better than fast.
- Unlike many PPM enchants, MW scales with haste. Haste provides additional MW procs.
- Spells cast with partial MW stacks do not reset the swing timer. They suspend it.
- Do not drop ranks of Maelstrom Weapon. Get all 3.

Unleashed Rage
- Unleashed rage is a mandatory talent even if your raid has a hunter, paladin, or DK to provide the AP buff.

The Elemental Focus Talent
- Elemental focus procs on every offensive spell crit, giving a buff reducing the cost of the next two spells by 40%.
- This buff also works on heals. It does not stack to greater than two. Instead it refreshes itself.
- Each Chain Lightning hit has one chance to proc elemental focus.
- Elemental Mastery gives one free spell and you gain the elemental focus buff.

Searing Totem
- Searing totem is mandatory for single-target damage. It should always be kept up due to its interaction with Searing Flames, Lava Lash, and Improved Lava Lash.

Deep Healing (Resto Mastery)
Deep Healing is a simple function that improves linearly as your target's health drops. It works with every shaman heal.

Point for point, mastery rating is better than haste rating if your target has under 53% health. Haste rating is thus superior to mastery in most situations.

Looking at crit rating, casting Chain Heal and Healing Rain, mastery rating wins if your target has under 83% health. On single-target heals, it beats crit rating if your target has under 68% health.

Deep Healing Multiplier (DHM) = This is the value on your mastery tooltip. It starts at 20% and each point of Mastery (179.28 Mastery Rating @ 85) adds 3%.

Total Healing = DHM * (Target's Missing Health as a Percentage / 100)

Lets say you have 500 Mastery Rating and your Healing Wave heals for 4000. Your first target is at 75% health.

20 + ((500 / 45.9) * 3) * (25 / 100) = 13.17% additional healing
4000 * 1.1317 = 4527 total

Your second target is about to die at 15% health.

20 + ((500 / 45.9) * 3) * (85 / 100) = 44.78% additional healing
4000 * 1.4478 = 5791 total

Glyph of Lightning Shield
- The tooltip is confusing. It should read "Your Lightning Shield can no longer drop below 3 charges."

Primal Strike
Primal Strike shares a cooldown with Stormstrike. Once you get Stormstrike at level 31, take Primal Strike off your bars.

Lava Lash
- LL is a standard non-normalized offhand attack that happens to do fire damage. It is affected by the 50% offhand damage penalty just like a normal offhand attack. It crits at 100%.
- It does not benefit from spell power, etc, and will proc everything a normal offhand attack will proc like flametongue, windfury, mongoose, flurry, etc.
- LL completely bypasses armor and is resisted like a fire spell, but uses melee hit. It also benefits from buffs to spell damage, like curse of the elements.
- LL is very high priority due to its flat damage buff and its interaction with Searing Totem's DoT.

Dude, Where's my Cleansing Totem?!
- It's gone!
- Sentry Totem is gone too, but you probably didn't miss it much.

Which Totems aren't raid-wide?
- Healing Stream and Grounding totems remain group-only.

Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria
- These spells drop the global cooldown to 1s. They stack with Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Touch.

How Haste Works
Haste is not a straight speed reduction. 30% haste from Flurry does not make your 2.0s weapon attack at 1.4s; it actually attacks at 1.54s. The same formulas work for melee and spell haste. They are:

Haste multiplier = 1 / ((100 + haste%) / 100)
Hasted weapon speed = unhasted weapon speed * haste multiplier
Flurry haste multiplier = 1 / 1.3 = 0.769

So for flurry, simply divide your unhasted speed by 1.3.

Earth Shield
- [BUG] Earth Shield is only affected by the Purification specialization when cast upon yourself. So you lose out on 10% effectiveness.
- [BUG] Mana cost not reduced by tidal focus.
- The spellpower coefficient is determined when you cast the spell, so you can blow your trinkets and cooldowns for a better earth shield proactively.

Spell Power Coefficients - Healing
Chain Heal - 99.1% (35.2 + 27.1% + 20.8% + 16.0% on each "jump")
Cleansing Waters - 28.2% (at 2 talent points)
Earth Shield - 109.4% (12.2% per charge)
Earthliving Weapon - 5.8% (per HoT tick)
Greater Healing Wave - 96.7%
Healing Rain - 8.3% (per tick)
Healing Stream Totem - 8.3% (per 2 second tick)
Healing Surge - 60.4%
Healing Wave - 30.2%
Riptide - 23.4% (direct) + 7.5% (per HoT tick)
Unleash Life (Earthliving) - 20.1%

Spell Power Coefficients - Damage
Chain Lightning - 150.4% total (57.1%, 40%, 20%, 19.6%, and 13.7% per jump respectively)
Earth Shock - 38.6%
Fire Nova - 14.3%
Flame Shock - 21.4% (DD) and 10.0% (per DoT tick)
Flametongue Weapon - Scales with weapon speed from 5% to 15%.
Frost Shock - 38.6%
Frostbrand Weapon - 10% per proc
Lava Burst - 62.8%
Lightning Bolt - 71.4%
Lightning Shield - 27.7% (per ball)
Magma Totem - 6.7% (per 2s pulse)
Searing Totem - 16.7% (per 1.65s shot)
Unleash Flame (Flametongue) - 42.9%
Unleash Frost (Frostbrand) - 38.6%

Stat Caps
Raiding Melee Hit (Specials) = 8% - 6% from Dual Wield = 2% = 240 Hit Rating (120 Draenei)
Raiding Melee Hit (Autoattack) = 27% - 6% from Dual Wield = 21% = 2522 Hit Rating (2402 Draenei)
Raiding Spell Hit = 17% = 1742 Hit Rating (1639 Draenei)
Raiding Expertise = 6.5% = 26 Expertise - 8 from Unleashed Rage = 18 Expertise = 540 Expertise Rating
Heroic Melee Hit (Specials) = 6% - 6% from Dual Wield = 0% = 0 Hit Rating
Heroic Melee Hit (Autoattack) = 25% - 6% from Dual Wield = 19% = 2282 Hit Rating (2162 Draenei)
Heroic Spell Hit = 6% = 615 Hit Rating (512 Draenei)
Heroic Expertise = 6% = 24 Expertise - 8 from Unleashed Rage = 16 Expertise = 481 Expertise Rating
Resto Haste Soft Cap = 916 Haste Rating (788 Goblin)

Skills, Stats, and Ratings at 85
Note that avoidance stats and resilience have diminishing returns, so the benefit per rating point drops as you stack them.

1 Strength = 1 Attack Power
1 Agility = 2 Attack Power
1 Expertise = 30.03 Expertise Rating = 0.25% less dodges/parries from your target
1 Mastery = 179.28 Mastery rating
1% Melee Hit = 120.11 Hit rating
1% Spell Hit = 102.45 Hit rating
1% Crit = 179.3 Critical strike rating = 324.9 Agility (melee) = 648.9 Intellect (spell)
1% Haste = 128.06 haste rating
1% Dodge = 176.7 Dodge rating = 304.0 agility
1% Parry = 176.7 Parry rating
1% Chance to block = 88.4 Block chance rating
1% Resilience = 276.12 Resilience rating = 1% less damage from players

Hope it answers questions pertaining to Shaman's FAQs.

Taken from SLANT