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Mental Dexterity serves a very important purpose: it helps turn gear designed for hunters into enhancement-friendly stuff, and lets the developers build Mail gear that is useful to more than one character class. Enhancement shammys will still stack Str and Agi heavily, but look at it this way: If the current stat values remain consistent through Wrath, a shaman’s most important stats by weight are

Str (2)
Agi (1.7)

Where the values in () indicate their equivalent Enhancement Point value for that item. Gear with lots of Str and Int (anything “— of the Gorilla”) will now provide the following boost:

Random Chestpiece of the Gorilla
19 STR
19 INT

That translates to 19*2 + 19 Attack Power, or 57 additional AP. It’s not earth-shattering to an Enh shaman, but it DOES give Resto shamans an easily obtainable boost to their melee DPS since their Int will be pretty high. Nowhere near the 1000+ AP of full enhancement, but it’s a start.

Spirit Link is even better than a paladin’s Blessing of Sacrifice, as it can spread damage across multiple targets, not just two. So in a fight like, say, Maiden of Virtue, you can have multiple targets active through Repentance (obviously risking a bad chain of Holy Fire, but that’s besides the point…). Definitely good in PVP. Imagine trying to take out a flag guarded by a resto shaman and any two others.

Also, what was interesting for me about the shaman talents was the way they work in connection with the new abilities given to the other classes - don’t think anyone has written about this yet. For example, priests have a new talent that puts everyone to sleep who attacks a member of their party - shaman, with tremor totem and spirit link, are uniquely positioned to deal with this. Likewise, with the death knights and all of their plague abilities, shaman with their disease cleansing totem will really shine.

Template looks fine… I still heve the same questions as you do on our final talent, we’ll see I guess.

My remarks on that:

- we will of course have to put the 3 points in shields to improve water shield…
- now, the points in Ancestral Knowledge are still a bit useless if you consider our mana regen will probably increase
- I still do not like Natures Guardian, it procs about once per raid wipe… for PVP ok, PVE I don’t think so
- I will probably wait for the final mana cost of totems before deciding against totemic focus as you do… during some long boss fights, it really adds up

I will probably go for a 8/5/58 build I think, to get Elemental Protection as I presently do with my 8/0/53 build.

Nice work though

Brohuld

Currently, we have to wait an extra long time before we “start DPS” because even a simple auto-attack can proc two Wind Fury swings. So my initial attack damage ranges from about 500 for a normal auto-attack hit, up to about 3000 if WF procs and I land two or three critical hits. I can’t control WF, so I need to wait until the tank has 3000 threat before I start DPS.

If I had Astral Shift, I could start DPS earlier. If I get “unlucky” and get a double-WF crit, I’m safe. I become immune for 3 seconds, and because I’m immune, I don’t pull the mob off the tank. The tank keeps up his threat rotation, and pretty quickly has enough threat to have solid aggro on the mob.

That’s the way it seems to me, anyway. It would be interesting to play with it to see how well it works.