It's the amount of haste rating it takes for a level 70 character to have a 1% haste increase on melee attacks.

30% haste means you get 30% more attacks in any unit of time, not that your swing time goes down by 30%.

I would love to get points in healing focus as an elemental shaman, but there is so much less wiggle room in an elemental spec then there is in enhancement. If I take more than 1 point in focus, it means losing totem range, spell hit or spell crit. All of which to me are pretty big no nos. If I could get full focus with only sacrificing 1 or maybe 2 points, than it might be plausible. but not when it means sacrificing 4 points.

When applying AEP values to items, is there a way to weigh the value of Stam as well, or is it more of a personal preferance? Since you can easily compare strength to AP, for stam it seems to me its like comparing apples to oranges since increasing stam does not impact DPS directly, but a "dead shaman does no DPS". Some items that score high on AEP are low, or have nil stam which is less appealing to melee IMO. If there is no way to weigh it directly, is there a minimum HP suggestion for BT/Hyjal?

Deck -- you are missing something, namely that you don't need to match colors in gem slots UNLESS you really want the socket bonus or need a certain setup for meta gems.

In most cases, you'll get more benefit out of slotting Bold Livings everywhere, which have an AEP of 17.6

Value of various exceptions can be calculated pretty easy...f'rexample, check out my leggings...i'm missing about 3.2 AEP by using two +8 crit rating gems, but the +8 AP offsets that. And I'm losing a handful of AEP from the bracers and gloves, a tradeoff made to gain a teeny bit of stamina (which obviously i need).

Oh duh! Jesus, how stupid on my part! That should have been blatantly obvious. Thanks for the clarification Toots.

Ahh, the Stamina thing.

Strictly speaking, the AEP of stamina is 0, because it does not contribute directly to DPS. If you can guarantee you'll never get hit, you don't need any extra health -- and if you're going to get one shot anyway, it doesn't matter what your health was before it happened. Many fights definitely have a minimum value due to AoE or cleave effects, which change depending on your raid makeup. If you group with two warriors, for example, you can effectively shave 100 +STM off your gear thanks to commanding shout.

Stamina shouldn't be in the AEP numbers, but enhancers should pick up stamina gear whenever possible. That way we can stack just enough of it to form a baseline contoured to the fight and the group, and have the rest of our gear devoted to that which maximizes our DPS.

I currently maintain two sets of DPS gear: one with a health goal of 6500 (which is a nice buffer for those bosses that have 3000 damage AoE pulses), and my high DPS set with no lower limit (and thus around 5500 health). As I push into higher tiers of raiding, I expect to push up my "survival" set's baseline to match the tougher raid bosses.

I think all of this applies to int as well. I currently have no problems with mana, but I will if I keep trading hunter/shaman/druid gear for rogue leathers.

Hi Shaman friends,

first of all a big THANK YOU to all of you guys. I've learned so much about my char by goings through this whole post.

But at the moment I've still one question. A few days ago, I had a discussion with my raidleader about the setup of the melee group. We had 2 rogues, 1 offwarrior and me.

The question: Is it better to take a BM hunter (3% more damage) or a feral druid to optimize the DPS output of this group.

Are there any calculations? Especially in connection with all my melee buff?
or is it a really stupid question and the answer is very easy?

thx

Miuntar

Uh oh

Bah, for quite a while I was Restoration, so I was a bit lagging behind in theorycraft about Enhancement. I didn't think much of it, but I've always socketed my gear for a LOT of crit. I checked just now and I have 32% crit unbuffed, but only 1452 AP. I started looking into my personal performance a little and I remain unsatisfied for now, really. Would my performance improve by regemming anything of my gear? I know for a fact Crit is nice, but maybe I overdid it a little. I'm not too sure anymore :E.

The Armory

Any suggestions on whether I should keep on going for this approach or not? Should I re-evaluate my sockets and value Strength a lot higher then what I do now? It's not like I completely ignored Strength, I just have a damn lot more crit :P.
I know the OP states I should gem yellow with 4 str 4 crit, but I kindly ignored that for quite a while since in the tier 5 region of gear I was in, there was quite a lot of AP/Str on the items already. Now that I've gotten some tier 6 quality gear I seem to be dropping in attack power every day :/

To Illundi.

Well +8 crit is 16 AEP and 8 Str is 17.6 AEP (with BOK). So from a pure min max perspective +8 Str is just better. I have always viewed 30% crit as a good breakpoint, but honestly I just go with whatever is the highest AEP return.