Finding Shaman Pre-Naxx Gear

I started doing some research on what gear is best for enhancement shaman. I found that there are plenty of pre-made lists out there for up-and-coming raiding shaman, but what I want to show is how to find the gear. To show you what to look for and how to look for it. One of my favorite quotes is:

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.

That’s what this post is going to do. Teach an enhancement shaman (or any other shaman) how to fish for good gear.

Wowhead.com is currently beta testing a “weight scale” for item searches. With the right search criteria you can quickly come up with a nice list of gear for your character. Depending on your needs you can target a certain item slot or a particular instance.

How To Look

Searching for gear in non-heroic instances is a bit tricky. The trick with this query is that you have to exclude normal (10-man) Naxxramas. The way I did this was to list our the WotLK instances by hand. Wowhead limits the number of search criteria to 9 so I needed to exclude the lower level WotLK instances.

Normal Level 80 Enhancement Shaman Gear

Normal Level 80 Enhancement Shaman Weapons

The query is a bit easier when you want to look for pre-naxx gear from heroics. The trick is looking for anything that drops from a heroic dungeon that is item level 200 or less. Naxxramas heroic gear starts at item level 213.

Heroic Level 80 Enhancement Shaman Gear

Heroic Level 80 Enhancement Shaman Weapons

What To Look For

The main stats you want to pay attention to are Hit Rating and Expertise Rating. The details can be found in this Elitist Jerks thread, but basically you need 368 Hit Rating (or 342 if you’re a Draenei) and 140 Expertise Rating. You can get these totals from gear, food, gems, and enchants.

Once you’re able to hit those values (I love puns), you can focus on the other stats: Attack Power, Haste, Crit, Agility, and Armor Penetration.

For weapons, you should prefer to dual wield slow weapons. Enchant your main hand weapon with Windfury and your off-hand weapon with Flametongue.

Gear Lists

If you still like seeing a list of gear to shoot for, check out the Pre-Raid Enhance Gear post on Big Hit Box. That post even gives a good introduction to something called EP value.