Quick question about Shaman stats. I've seen a few posts about the importance for Enhancement Spec in order of magnitude str > stam > hit > AP > crit. Strength being more important due to endgame scaling for AP with buffs. Or something similar. However, being new to the class (only got my Shaman up to 40 last night) I want to do a bit of theorycrafting and parsing on my own. Can you guys give me a quick run down of how each stats effect a Shaman. Str to AP, Agi to Crit. etc. I have some time at work today, but I can't get in the game to get this info for myself. Any info would be welcome.

Having some interesting research into pre-60 itemization, as already stated in this thread, is awful for enhancement shaman. SM Mail is actually pretty decent. However I want to thank you guys for what to look out for once I get back to the Outlands.

This thread answers most of your questions - All Class Level 70 Stat conversions . I think it used to be sticked but isn't anymore.

1 str --> 2 AP
15.8 hit rating --> 1% hit (at 70)
22.1 crit rating --> 1% crit (at 70)
~33 AGI --> 1% crit (at 70)

1% crit is more powerful to us than 1% hit, although you need +hit to some extend to avoid wasting crits on bossfights. All the effects we care about (windfury, SR) can proc of crits just as well as hits, and crits fuel our dps through flurry and unleashed rage.

A 1% AP boost certainly doesn't improve your dps with 1%, although maybe there are fuzzy math examples when it does. AP is a bit tricky to calculate in, because of WF making up such a large part of our dps, and WF compresses your AP, and cooldowns warp it, etc.

But looking at my own set up, 1% AP would be 11 AP, or less than 1 dps (14 AP adds 1 'raw' dps). Since my 'real' dps sits neatly above 500, there's no scenario where that would even be noticable unless I would set up a test in a vacuum with entirely fixed circumstances.

edit: to go into the 'of the bandit; of the soldier' question, lets just take a greenie with those suffixes: Skettis Footwraps

Of the Bandit gives you: 20 agility, 30 stamina, 41 AP
Of the Solder gives you: 20 Crit, 30 stamina, 20 Str

20 str = 40 AP, and 1 AP really isn't a significant difference.
20 Agi gives about 0.6% crit, and 20 crit rating gives 0.9% crit.

So of the solder is the better suffix.

could someone perhaps set up pawn ( http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=3999 ) to work in our best way? ie one enhancement and one resto and one elemental etc

would be great to have.

True if you are concerned only about DPS in a raid setting, but the agility also gives dodge and armor which could help in PvP.

I feel like I'm going against the flow here, but from my own testing, 25 AGI = 1% crit for shamans; ~33 AGI is for warriors. I've seen a few other people post this as well, but the vast majority claim 33 AGI.

The RatingBuster mod agrees with me (25 AGI = 1% crit), and when I unequipped my Sun-Gilded Shoulderpads (they have 25 agi, no crit rating, and I have no enchant on them) my crit went down by exactly 1%.

Am I missing something, or am I correct (and thus many of the arguments presented before are flawed due to the 33/1% assumption)?

Pane, can you explain why you think 1% crit is more powerful than 1% hit? Is it just flurry and UR, or is something else going on? I'm familiar with the one-table combat roll system. I thought that 1% crit and 1% hit should each give roughly a 1% boost to melee DPS, barring boundary issues such as going above ~27% hit on bosses and such.

So a 1% increase in AP (say from 1000 to 1010) increases weapon DPS by about 0.7. Taking an example of 70 DPS weapons, you're going from 70+1000/14=141.4 to 70+1010/14=142.1, or a 0.5% increase to each weapon's DPS. That should be pretty proportionally distributed among DW, WF, SS. So 1% increase in AP ~ 0.5% increase in melee DPS (at least for someone with ~1000 AP base and ~70 DPS weapons). Is this right?


For itemization, if my goal was to boost my DPS by 1%, I could get 1% hit, costing 15.8 item points, or I could get 1% crit, costing 22.1 item points, or I could get 25 AGI, costing 25 item points, or I could get 20 AP or 10 STR, costing 10 item points.

Is that right? If so, it looks like AP is the most important stat to focus on, at least in this range.



Please check my theorycrafting!

Yep, pretty much true. You didn't have to go through the nasty math though, what matters is that essentially if you get 70 dps from your weapon and 70 dps from your AP (which is about right with those numbers), then about 50% of your dps comes from your ap -> hence increasing your AP by 1% = .5% increased overall dps. Well, or at least it's easier for me to think this way .

There are other ways to work things out that come down to the same answer, that roughly speaking AP is the best stat to go for pure item-value wise, followed by hit (until you hit the cap) followed by crit (assuming you have enough crit to have UR and be almost perma-flurried).

This is however, not counting buffs: If you have might, BoK, battleshout on you, you gain alot of AP, increasing your base and thus increasing the relative worth of hit/crit compared to AP. If you throw in flasks and elixirs (which I'd rather not), it exagerates the difference even more.

At some point in the game as our weapons become hgiher and higher dps and we have alot more ap hit/crit should become more valuable then AP, per itemvalue, but not yet.

Seems like the breaking point should be somewhere between 1500 unless you've capped hit, and at 2200 AP if you have capped hit (raid buffs and UR included, assuming still 70 dps weapons), right? At that point, hit and/or crit become more efficient to get.

On the other hand, assuming that the weapons get better while your AP stays the same, your weapon would have to be 140 dps (until hit cap) or 210 dps (post hit cap) in order for hit/crit to become more efficient to get than AP. (This is clearly a long way off )

So it seems like AP is the most efficient investment for a long time. Seems likely switch to crit (assuming hit is capped) at about the 1700 AP with 90 dps weapon point, is that about right? What AP are raiders hitting with full buffs including UR, BS, Pack?


Side note. The hit cap is 24.6%, right? Also, I guess I see how hit is only about 90% as effective as crit (even ignoring flurry and UR) because SS doesn't need it once you're above 5% hit.

Sort of... on the other hand, ignoring dodge (and parry/block since you attack from behind.. right), when you are below the hit cap +1 hit actually increases your overall damage by more then 1%... the math was nicely done in the other thread by brissa but you can simply think of a limiting case where if you had a 50% chance to hit, increasing it to 51 is actually a 2% increase in your total dps (this becomes smaller as you get closer to 100%). On the other hand with crit, if you had a 50% crit chance already, 1% extra crit would actually increase your damage by 0.5% (1% crit gives a higher overall % increase when you have no crit other crit).

In practice the values are close since your miss rate wiht talents is about 15% and your crit rate is about 10%.

Although yes the SS brings it down a bit although not enough considering the itemvalue difference.

To be fair, though, the exact numbers on crit performance vs. hit performance are difficult to apply if your crit is not sufficient to sustain Flurry and Unleashed Rage. Obviously this is not exactly true, and I'm sure that detailed modeling could be done to incorporate the effects of those talents, but I think a viable rule of thumb is to value crit and hit equally until you get to 90%+ uptime on Flurry and Unleashed Rage. After that point, +hit can take precidence.

Well, since you can only proc WF on a white hit, it seems that hit applies in equal proportions to DW and WF. 1% more DW hits should result in 1% more WF procs. This is where I approximated the benefit of +hit at 90% of crit, assuming the same 40/40/10/10 distribution. DW/WF/SS/ES.

OK, so if you're seeing 2.5k AP you're definitely in the range where crit grants more benefit than AP (item point efficiency). That's good to know as I start looking for my raiding gear.

Unless I'm missing something wouldn't you need 5% more +hit to see 1% more WF procs?

I don't think so. 1000 hits should (assuming no cooldown) create 200 WF procs.

1010 hits (1% boost) should create 202 WF procs (also a 1% boost).

This is pretty much the crux of it, Pater. Once you go past your cap for yellow dmg, +hit gets severely diminished, whereas crit steams on.

Then the big thing becomes your miss rate versus your crit rate on raid bosses, the fabled crit cap http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Weapon_Skill#Crit_Cap. The important bit; at some point the cumulative effect of glancings (can't crit), misses, dodges etc means that your critrate will 'use' all your effective 'non-misses' if you will. Any increased crit chance from there is wasted. At this point +hit becomes prime, as it will allow your crits to land.

For dual wielding against a 3 lvls higher mob (raid bosses), the crit cap is 18.6%, meaning that if your crit rate is higher (and it will be, because you will be raid buffed) you're gonna need +hit.

We're fortunate that we can get 9% hit from talents, so 'our' crit cap is 27.6%, but this is still lower than your raid buffed crit (probably). I personally have another 6%~ish from gear, and am eagerly awaiting my 2nd Desolation item so I can bump that up another 2+%. After that I'll be stacking AP and stamina.

edit: yet another way of looking at it:

compare a scenario where you never miss but never crit, to one where you miss 24% of the time but also crit 24% of the time. In terms of auto attack, they should be equal, with the double dmg from crit compensating for the misses. Now in the second scenario, you lose about 1/4th of your WF procs, but you'll ALSO have flurry up a very large part of the time, meaning you get more attacks off which almost closes the loss of wf procs, AND your windfuries can crit, which fuels even more flurries (not to mention more dmg).

I totally understand that SS doesn't benefit from hit above 5%. But it seems to me that WF gets the same benefit from hit that DW does, since you have to hit to proc WF (post above yours).

Thanks for the information on the boss crit cap. I can see how that makes hit better than crit in those circumstances (basically, against bosses, because of the 40% glancing).

But if crit=hit to us, then hit>crit, since hit rating is significantly cheaper (less points = 1%), and thus we can get more of it on gear of equal ilevel. If i have to pick between an item with ap/hit/sta and ap/crit/sta, I'll pick the one with hit every time for this reason - you're going to get about 33% more value from the hit rating since it coverts better.

That said, as I gear up in epics my hit rating keeps going down as my stamina ap and crit go up; it's really hard to find on T4 gear, unfortunately.

This is true, but while 1% to hit does reduce your number of misses by 1%, it doesn't add 1% to your WF DPS because of the WF cooldown. Less misses means more hits per second, which means more hits that occur within the WF cooldown. This, combined with the flurry/UR/Stormstrike buisness, means that given 1% to hit or 1% to crit, crit is better every time. This is fairly minor, though, and given the large cost disparity between hit and crit, I still tend to think that hit is superior.

But the thing is in a raid I can get around 7% to crit with an agi pot and a feral druid in my group. I don't see anything giving +hit buffs.

I'm not convinced about this math suggesting that ap outweighs +hit, assuming equal amounts of itemlevel. I'd love to see more math on this, although I grant that doing math right now is just an exercise in frustration, with the coming changes to windfury.

I like the idea of setting up a good weight scale for pawn.

The math on this gets really complex, because to provide an accurate model you need to take into account stormstrike and how weapon speed alters your windfury proc rate. This is a really rough example of how the math works on it. Before I started, I honestly expected a bigger difference between the two. Perhaps I did some math wrong somewhere in there, I'm not in the most alert of mindsets right at the moment.

In my own case, I have ~20% +hit from gear/talents and ~22% crit and ~2000 AP in a raid environment with no consumables (no feral/TSA either, usually). Using 2.7/1.6 speed 81/71 DPS weapons, this works out to an average no-armor hit of 664/188, and an average windfury hit of 796/227. Over a 1000s test period, assuming attacking from behind and full flurry, I would connect 95 times with stormstrike, 434 times with the mainhand, and 732 times with the offhand. That's 529 total mainhand strikes and 827 offhand strikes. My offhand procs windfury at roughly a 17% rate, while the mainhand is more like 18%, because of the speed difference. Thus, 282*0.95=266 offhand windfuries and 190*0.95=181 mainhand windfuries. All told, that's 710 from the mainhand and 1093 from the offhand. The added damage another 31.6 AP (the same budget cost as 1% to hit) adds can then be calculated based on the damage it adds to each individual strike, counting crits as well. For the mainhand, you would add (31.6/14*2.7)*710*1.22=5279 more damage and to the offhand (31.6/28*1.6)*1093*1.22=2408. All together, over 1000s 31.6 AP adds 7687 damage, or 7.687 DPS.

In comparison, 1% more hit means 1% more white hits, and an amount of windfury procs roughly equal to 18% of the extra white mainhand hits, and 17% of the offhand hits. This works out to 4.82 mainhand hits, 1.65 extra mainhand WF strikes, 8.12 offhand hits, and 2.62 extra offhand WF strikes. Working out the damage that all does, you get (4.82*664+8.12*188)+(1.65*796+2.62*227)*1.22= 7056 damage, or 7.056 DPS.

The difference between the two results is probably less than the error from the various approximations I used in the calculation, so this result does not prove that AP is superior. What it does perhaps show, however, is that at this particular gear level and buffs the two stats are reasonably close.

Edit: On third reading, I found two mistakes. I placed the crit calculations in the wrong spots, which has the result of providing a calculation as if I had a slightly lower crit rate. I also forgot to calculate in unleashed rage's contribution to AP, so the DPS result from the first calculation should be 10% higher. That still leaves it at ~8.5 DPS, which isn't really all that much greater than 7.065 DPS.

Whipped this up today at work. Comparison of Desolation to Tier 4

http://s9f.spreadsheets.google.com/a...scol=0&ecol=19

Pretty disheartening that Blizzard throws so much spell damage instead of hit/crit