enhancement-shaman-totem-talk

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  • Totem Talk: Epicly gearing your enhancement shaman

    by 
    Josh Myers
    Josh Myers
    01.29.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Do your likes include bladed weapons, the elements, and fights with little to no movement or target-switching? So does Josh Myers, new kid on the block and now host of Totem Talk: Enhancement! I remember my first epic very well. It was Shard of the Virtuous, which dropped off Maiden of Virtue during the first raid of my life. We went on to set a bunch of world records, wiping to Shade of Aran four times because our restoration shaman couldn't run out of Arcane Explosion and hitting the 10-minute enrage timer on Terestian Illhoof. Finally, we called the raid for the week after wiping on the Chess Event. This was the week after patch 2.3 was released, and Karazhan had been farm content for over a year. I didn't care about any of these slight defeats, however. I didn't care that the protection warrior tank called me the worst player ever. I barely noticed that our hunter went AFK on every trash pull and did the least DPS on every boss. After six months of grinding, 12 levels of gaining experience through only running Burning Crusade dungeons before the dungeon finder was released, and getting side tracked by PvPing for weeks at every single bracket, I finally had an epic item to show for it. Purple gear is cool. The later patches of Wrath of the Lich King did some damage to the prestige that purps once had, but Cataclysm has done great things to remind us that epic gear is supposed to actually be epic. A month ago, I wrote a pre-raid gearing guide, as writing a guide to epic gearing made little sense when the majority of WoW's population wasn't seeing any raids. It has now been over a month and a half since Cataclysm hit store shelves, and some players are only starting to see their first epics now. As a result, I can now happily release a guide to enhancement shaman epic gear.

  • Totem Talk: Choosing your enhancement shaman's race as of 4.0.6

    by 
    Josh Myers
    Josh Myers
    01.15.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Do your likes include bladed weapons, the elements, and fights with little to no movement or target switching? So does Josh Myers, new kid on the block and now host of Totem Talk: Enhancement! Few things in Azeroth spawn more debate than racial choices. Some sides argue that if you don't min-max your racial choices, you're the reason your guild hasn't downed heroic Lich King, while the other side maintains that if you're playing a character for three hours a day, it should at least look appealing to you. Personally, my view is that everyone should be a tauren, but I'm an outlier in the great race debates. This issue of Totem Talk will be focusing on racials as used by enhancement shaman, using the redesigned racials in patch 4.0.6. This is purely for information purposes; I don't want anyone loading in to Azeroth feeling ashamed at their racial choice. Unless they chose male draenei.

  • Totem Talk: Make the most of enhancement's utility

    by 
    Josh Myers
    Josh Myers
    01.08.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Do your likes include bladed weapons, the elements, and fights with little to no movement or target switching? So does Josh Myers, new kid on the block and now host of Totem Talk: Enhancement! Back when Ulduar was relevant content, there was a very mean boss named General Vezax. General Vezax constantly cast an ability called Searing Flames, and the only way to prevent him from casting Searing Flames was to interrupt it with abilities that locked out his fire school for long periods of time -- Counterspell, Pummel, Mind Freeze. Back in those days of yore, when brains had tentacles and Wind Shear didn't exist, we had to drop Earth Shock from our rotation entirely. Our sole interrupt was also tied to our main DPS shock, and we had to sacrifice damage to avoid screwing up the Kick rotation of classes with better interrupts. Thankfully, patch 3.2 saw the introduction of Wind Shear into the enhancement shaman's arsenal. No longer were we the DPS class that screwed up interrupt rotations. On fights for which we were the sole interrupter, we no longer had to hold off on DPSing in order to interrupt an important ability. This change would have been totally awesome for PvE ... had Wrath of the Lich King possessed any heroics in which not interrupting an ability would cause a wipe. As it was, a handful of encounters in the rest of the expansion had any relevant interrupting -- Lord Jaraxxus, Faction Champions, Twin Valk'yrs, and Lady Deathwhisper were the only four out of the last 17 raid bosses who actually had interruptible spells. Thankfully, we're not in Wrath of the Lich King anymore. Cataclysm has come, and the shattering of Azeroth has brought an entirely new style of gameplay into PvE content. It's no longer any DPS player's job to care simply about DPS; interruptible spells from the lowliest of trash mobs can wipe you if you're not careful. Healer mana matters, so avoiding damage is the norm. Luckily for us, enhancement shaman have some of the best utility in the game for making sure your group doesn't wipe.

  • Totem Talk: Gearing an enhancement shaman in Cataclysm heroics

    by 
    Josh Myers
    Josh Myers
    12.25.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Do your likes include bladed weapons, the elements, and fights with little to no movement/target switching? So does Josh Myers, new kid on the block and now host of Totem Talk: Enhancement! When I was a young enhancement shaman, barely out of my teens, I had an obsession with gear. "Elam," my friends would say, "why are you in Wailing Caverns for the eighth time? You should be leveling. That gear will be replaced by Thousand Needles, anyway." Their disdain for my overwhelming need to complete my Armor of the Fang set was great, but my desire for the shiny blues was greater. I leveled my first 70 primarily through 5-mans and hit Karazhan raid-ready. As for my friends, the joke was on them -- given my obsession with gear, it was all replaced in Razorfen Downs, not Thousand Needles. As a direct side result of my love for all things blue and purple, I've spent the better part of my flight time scouring loot tables on AtlasLoot Enhanced for the past week and a half, looking for the absolute best pieces of gear to come out of heroics for enhancement shaman. Like Fox Van Allen with shadow priests and Christian Belt with mages, I've made a list of which gear is optimal for enhancement in the pre-raid Cataclysm scene. Last week, I talked about reputations. This week, I'll be covering which heroics to queue for and which justice point rewards to prioritize.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman guide to Cataclysm reputation gear

    by 
    Josh Myers
    Josh Myers
    12.14.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Do your likes include bladed weapons, the elements, and fights with little to no movement/target switching? So does Josh Myers, new kid on the block and now host of Totem Talk: Enhancement! From Timbermaw Hold to the Dragonmaw Clan, who you know has always been an important part of the World of Warcraft. When Deathwing smashed the World Pillar, toppled the Stonewrought Dam, and went Death Star on Stormwind's Park District, he made a whole lot of enemies. From angry earth elementals to druidic defenders of those with "wet little noses," the Cataclysm of Azeroth has brought about an assortment of new factions for grinding friendship with. This is WoW Insider's guide to plotting your enhancement shaman's reputation progression in the most practical manner possible.

  • Totem Talk: Post-patch enhancement shaman still waiting for buffs

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    11.01.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 06 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. We're now two full weeks into patch 4.0.1 with our new and improved enhancement spec. Improved? Actually, no. Our DPS is only marginally improved over the previous incarnation, while our fellow melee brethren were buffed to the teeth. My rough analysis shows the difference between us and top melee DPS, usually warrior and death knight, has widened significantly since the patch. I'm going to preface all of this analysis by saying that I am not the top enhancement shaman, by far. I play well, I study my class, I optimize my spec, gems, forging, gear and rotations. I don't die to stupid stuff -- well, at least not often! In other words, I try to push my damage without sacrificing myself. Be forewarned that some of these numbers I'm embarrassed to post in such a public manner, and while I'm hardly the benchmark for DPS, I can at least provide a baseline of what your average progression raider's numbers look like. On average across eight of 12 hard-mode fights in ICC (excluding the gimmick fights Gunship, VDW and BQL, and excluding H-LK because we're just now working on him), the top melee DPS was doing 50 percent more damage than me pre-patch and 64 percent more post-patch. I could narrow that gap down to about 15 percent on a standstill fight such as Deathbringer Saurfang, but on high-movement fights such as Sindy, the top melee would do as much as 80 percent more damage than me overall. As much as it pains me to say this, as a raid leader I have to ask the question: Am I dead weight in raids right now? Will level 85 with Unleash Elements bring better output?

  • Totem Talk: A feast of enhancement macros

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    10.25.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement; his main spec is enhance, and his off spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 05 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. This week, I was hoping to provide a thorough analysis of the new and questionably improved (though most definitely changed) enhancement shaman DPS in patch 4.0.1. Unfortunately, I ended up missing raid on Tuesday and so missed our 11/12 ICC hard mode power clear and have very limited data to analyze. I know you're right there with me when I say it is quite disconcerting to have gaps in our normal frenzied button mashing activities. The long, lonely periods of two or three global cooldowns where we have nothing to do but hope for that fifth Maelstrom Weapon proc, while idly staring at our keys with the strange feeling that we're doing something wrong. Fret not, young shammy. It is the way of the enhancement right now; we will have periods of non-mashing where we can take a deep breath and enjoy the forthcoming five-stack of searing enabled Lava Lash crit. In last week's article I alluded to a macro that combines Magma Totem and Fire Nova into one button, and there were some comments about it. I'm a big macro user; in fact, I have all my macro slots filled up on Stoney and my druid, Finn. I think it's about time I divulged the treasure trove of macros I've accumulated over the years.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement post-patch theory

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    10.18.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 04 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. This patch hit me hard, harder than any patch before it, and I know I wasn't the only was one to be drastically affected by it. Other than the usual spate of patch-related addon issues, I was struggling to keep the downloader connected. After turning off all anti-virus, firewall and other sorts of computer safety monitoring programs, I finally got into game on Friday night. Mostly, though, I just lacked time to log in this week. Once in game, I was faced with just as many challenges getting Stoney in order and raid-ready as I was trying to get online. This patch was more disruptive in game than any patch before. A far an enhancement goes, there's so much that still needs to be tested and refined. The greater enhancement community is working hard at the theorycrafting, but even the simulations are not fully refined for level 80 testing; the latest alpha of EnhSim is tuned to level 85 right now. The decisions I made in game are based on the best available data as well as some things I want to test out for myself. There was a lot to accomplish in-game including, respeccing, retraining, regemming, reforging, readjusting and refining.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement's path to victory in patch 4.0.1

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    10.09.2010

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement -- his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance, and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 03 now out!)as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Are you ready? Charge up your Maelstrom Weapons and dust off your Searing Totems -- Patch 4.0.1 is nearly upon us! Not sure what to do on your enhancement shaman? The quick-hit guide to enhancement in the cataclysmic world is below. What's not changing Let's start with some things that are not changing. Slow/slow is the way to go (for your weapons, I mean). Your weapons shouldn't be faster than 2.00 and ideally should be between 2.50 to 2.70 speed. Be wary of any weapon with a speed below 2.00; most likely it's been touched by a rogue and still has some residual poison on it meant to cripple your Windfuries and Flametongues. We're also staying with the same imbues: Windfury on the main hand and Flametongue on the off hand. With this patch (as with every patch, it seems), there was a little bit of banter about going full spellpower, with fast/fast and a caster weapon main hand along with FT/FT, reforging spirit, and otherwise doing crazy things like looking for the next Torch of Holy Fire. Don't do it. Stay slow/slow, with WF/FT. We're meant to be melee doing primarily melee damage.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman changes for patch 4.0.1

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    09.26.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2, Episode 1 now out!) as enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. I can't wait for the new talent trees to kick in with patch 4.0.1. The game designers truly streamlined talent trees, including Enhancement. They've even gone so far as to make Primal Wisdom, our mana regen talent, into a base ability, and they've taken one point out of Unleashed Rage. This frees up two talent points right away and gave us some very viable specs to use right out of the gate of 4.0.1 for our last hurrah at level 80. I see two different possibilities for level 80 specs for enhancement: Fire Nova or Improved Shields. First, an Improved Fire Nova spec of 5/31/0. Not only did this talent get moved to the enhancement tree, but it got dropped down deep, out of reach for elemental. The unfortunate part is that come Cataclysm, Fire Nova will require a Magma, Fire Elemental or Flametongue Totem and will not work off our new and improved Searing Totem. To further confound matters, the improved nova is right beside Searing Flames, the Searing Totem special kicker. The improved novas make a big difference in fights requiring both boss and AoE damage, such as heroic Halion-25. Outside of that fight (or any future fights like it), Improved Fire Nova is a waste; better to put the points in Improved Shields. My main spec at 80 will be 5/31/0. Just moving those points isn't going to push your DPS up significantly, but with the changes to Lightning Shield, making it effectively a 10-minute, non-depletable buff (when glyphed), those two points are well spent there at 80. Dipping into the elemental tree, after our requisite 31 points in enhancement, three points in Acuity are a must-have, especially as we start to level again. The last two points going into Concussion will pack an extra punch.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement beta update

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    09.04.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance, and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 13 now live!)as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. It's been a few weeks since my last beta post. I feel like I'm back in grammar school at good ol' St. Louise de Marillac, "forgive me readers, it's been four weeks since my last beta post. Since then I've been mean to my guild, and I tried to kill my own priest." In game priest, in game! I can't wait to read the letters to the editor about that slip up. Oh well, at least I didn't use the word "casual." Moving right along to important topics that everyone cares about: beta changes for enhancement shamans! Well, I suppose "everyone" excludes people that are not interested in beta spoilers. Great, two paragraphs in and I've already offended Catholics, priests, and people not interested in beta spoilers. Look on the bright side: at least I didn't use an offensive font this week! If you are interested in the latest beta changes as they relate to enhancement shamans then please read on. Please note that beyond this point, this post will not further offend your good, wholesome middle Azerothian sensibilities.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancing your gear in only four dungeons

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    08.28.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance, and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 12 now out!)as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Holy Stormstrikes! I'm going to refrain from using the term casual in a post ever again. Wait, I just used it there. Ah well, rack that promise up with "I'll never drink again" and "I'll never die to cutters again." Lies, all of them, lies. We all have different definitions of the term and judging by the comments in the last post, others' definition of casual is more severe than mine. I'll get into casual vs. hardcore and the ridiculousness of those classifications in another post. For now, I hear you loud and clear, so let's refrain from diving into that now. I digress. As I was writing last week's article I had this sneaking suspicion that I already wrote several articles on gearing your non-end game enhancement shaman. In fact I had written articles many moons ago, and they are all on my neglected blog, Big Hit Box. Time for a revisit.

  • Totem Talk: Gearing your casual or alt enhancement shaman

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    08.24.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 12 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Casual raider? Or not fortunate enough to play a shaman as your main, but instead stuck on another, lesser class? This article is for you. If you need to go out and gear up your shaman from guild alt runs, PUG raids and mucking about in daily dungeons for your two frost emblems, then read on for your gear choices. From the applications we received over the past few months at Big Crits, it seems that guilds and PUGs alike had a hard time getting past Deathbringer Saurfang -- that is, until the bigger ICC buff hit. Now the breaking point is 6/12 ICC, with kills on Festergut and Rotface being commonplace but little experience beyond that available. Taking into consideration how far casual guilds or alt runs can realistically get into ICC, I've listed the loot in order of progression, from easy to hard.

  • Totem Talk: Enhanced moves with Halion

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    08.14.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 10 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. The last patch of an expansion feels like the last gift of Christmas; you want it to be the most epic and the most incredible gift of them all, the one gift by which you'll remember this time forever. But instead, you're at your in-laws' doing the family gag gift exchange with a price limit of 20 bucks and a penchant for As Seen on TV products. In some ways, Ruby Sanctum is like that; it's not huge, it's not epic, it's not expensive, but it does have some potential. Maybe Ruby Sanctum is the Slap Chop of this expansion. None of this has anything to do with the article today. Except that I'm talking about Halion. Halion, the Twilight Destroyer. Three phases, good loot and a huge scale-up in difficulty on heroic mode. It's a good fight that requires paying attention throughout the entire 8-minute enrage timer, in which one death can mean a wipe, especially on heroic. There's no 30 percent buff incoming, so you either learn it and beat it, or you don't and fail. For our part, as enhancement shaman, there are a few tricks we have up our sleeves.

  • Totem Talk: Enhancement Cataclysm update

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    08.07.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury, and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance, and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 9 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. With such a lame title, you'd never guess we have so much to talk about this week! Mastery bonus is all elemental damage, not just nature! Smarter Searing Totems! Four Ghostcrawler replies (11 paragraphs!) about Shamans, with four paragraphs solely about Enhancement! Longer Hex! New crit-increasing talents! Increased totem ranges! Well, okay, maybe that last one isn't as exciting as the first few. But there's so much news out there for us enhancers, I don't even know where to begin. The logical place to start is with the biggest news: Enhancement Mastery bonus "increases all elemental damage done by 20%. Damage increased further by mastery rating." This is a change from the first Cataclysm build that included mastery; previously our bonus was only increasing our nature damage. The nature-only mastery was great for our core spell, Lightning Bolt (LB), but with Maelstrom Weapon (MW) now including Lava Burst (LvB) we would not benefit from our Mastery bonus with LvB. This was a problem for two reasons: first LvB does more damage than LB, and second, LvB could be used to keep Elemental Devastation up. Lava Burst will automatically crit when Flame Shock (FS) is on a target, making it a smart choice to used to keep Elemental Devastation active. That choice changed. Mastery now affects all elemental damage, which includes Lava Burst. Hence, Lava Burst plus Flame Shock plus mastery equals happy enhancer. This is a great buff for us. Because LvB has an 8 second cooldown and LB has none, we'll still keep LB handy for when LvB is on cooldown.

  • Totem Talk: Enhance me

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    07.31.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury, and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 8 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Two weeks ago a fellow enhancement shaman contacted me on Twitter asking how to improve his damage output. He was kind enough to let me use his email as the topic for the weekly enhancement shaman column here on WoW.com. Because he was brave (crazy?) enough to face the public scrutiny that comes from being in the spotlight here, show him the high level of respect our fellow enhancement brother deserves. Here's his email: I just switched to enhance for raiding a couple of weeks ago and I still feel like my DPS is lower than what it could be. I'm using Shock and Awe and still depending more or less on the priority frame, which I hope to ween off of soon. I'm still not 100% sure if I have the priorities set up correctly at this point. They are set at: SR MT LS MW5 LB SS ES if SS FS LL FN I also use Wolves every time they are up and also Fire Elemental when off CD. With just my buffs at the heroic dummy I seem to be maxing out around 6-6.5k. Again, seems a little low to me. If you would like to look at my armory, the name is Alyssian on Durotan. We use WoL, too, and my guild is Chi Cerca Trova. PS - Any tips for helping me get off of the SAA priority window? I'm mainly concerned with keeping the shock rotation going, I think I can handle the rest.

  • Totem Talk: Dual-wielding topics

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    07.25.2010

    Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. This week I'm dual wielding topics. Neither one was enough to keep you entertained, my lovely and intelligent readers, for a full week's worth of enhancement, but combined together I think we can accomplish something. Consider a Stormstrike post with fire elemental mechanics in one hand and Cataclysm changes in the other. If you're firmly in the "don't tell me anything about Cataclysm" camp, then just read the first section and skip the rest, though all I'm talking about are the recent changes to the shaman talent trees. If you don't mind a sneak peek at enhancement 4.0 as it stands now, then enjoy!

  • Cataclysm Beta: Enhancement talent preview

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    07.15.2010

    As many of my fellow Wow.com bloggers noted, the starting talents are a welcome change, and even more so for enhancement. New shaman will hit level 10, choose the ultimate spec, and bam! We'll have dual wield, dual wield specialization, Mental Quickness and Lava Lash! This means no more playing as an elemental wannabe lobbing Lightning Bolts until the 2 button on your keyboard wears off. The way things stand now, leveling as enhancement doesn't feel like enhancement until the 30s, when we get Windfury, or 40s, when we currently get Dual Wield. That stretch of 20s and 30s really is rough right now, if you are true to the path of enhancement. Heck, even Faience from Choose My Adventure is feeling the pain of the lack of enhancement in the 20s. But no more! We will be enhancement from the beginning with dual wield plus hit, attack power conversion to spellpower and an off-hand attack! The talent tree is highly streamlined, but with only 41 talent points to spend, we won't be painting the trees with points. I don't see any tough choices in the enhancement tree, and getting down to Feral Spirit should be easy with something like 0/31/0. The last 10 points could look something like 8/33/0, but that remains to be seen.

  • Totem Talk: Enhance DPS on the move

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    07.10.2010

    Rich Maloy, master of the turn-around-Frost-Shock, nerd-rager of the Big Crits (week 7 coming next week), and blogger of the enhancement variety prides himself on keeping the pressure on the boss at all times. He encourages you to work on your turn-around jump shot this week. I love being melee. I love being up in the middle of the fray right on the boss' heel, breathing in the fumes of battle and mashing my abilities as fast as global cooldowns will allow. But the cost of being in the heart of the action are cleaves. And whirlwinds. And tail swipes, dragon breaths, shock vortexes, running around the room chasing ads, and oh yeah, dodging cleaves. Did I mention whirlwinds yet? Granted, there's not as much hate on melee in Wrath as there was in The Burning Crusade, but our DPS is still limited by time on target. We are after all, melee. Yet the great thing about enhance is when we're not in melee range, we can still lob some spells and drop some fire bombs all while running around dodging those whirlwinds. It was Sindragosa's Permeating Chill that first got me thinking about maximizing my damage output while I'm not doing melee attacks. Also, her Blistering Cold got me wondering about ways to keep damage on boss even while running in the complete opposite direction. What follows are some of my simple strategies for maximizing time on target and keeping the damage pumping even while running around.

  • Totem Talk: Ruby Sanctum loot for enhancement

    by 
    Rich Maloy
    Rich Maloy
    07.03.2010

    Rich Maloy subsists solely on enhancement air. He experiences shortness of breath when offered spellpower gear and is easily confused by spirit and MP5. You can ask him anything about enhance at the Totem Recall roundtable or watch his WoW reality series, Big Crits. In case you missed it in all the news about the Cataclysm beta, Ruby Sanctum was released into the wild on Tuesday. With a new instance out everyone is asking, "What's in it for me?" But my question is, "What's in it for enhancement?" The short answer is ArP. For a stat that's going away in a few months, we're seeing a lot of it in Ruby Sanctum gear from both the 10- and 25-man versions of the raid. Armor penetration (ArP) is not the ideal stat for enhancement. Not ideal, but definitely usable. There are some definite winners among the RS loot -- on both 10 and 25. I've created a new enhance gear spreadsheet on Google Docs including the new loot. It's read-only, so either make a copy to your Google Docs file or save a copy to your desktop as an Excel file. I've also included some sample EP values for different levels of play, including EP values derived from the latest Elitist Jerks BiS gear, setup and rotation.