Enhancment Tips and Tricks for BWD, Part 1

At this point Big Crits is 6/6 heroic Blackwing Descent, with heroic Nefarian falling to our blades on Thursday night. Throughout our journey in BWD I've created my own mental check list on how to get the most of enhancement in each fight.

I lead the 25-man raid team so these quick tips are focused on those strategies; if a tip is heroic-mode only, I'll make a note of it, but I can't speak for the strats on 10-man raids. I imagine things are different in 10s, requiring perhaps a more precise use of abilities or specific movement or placement. But no matter what version you're running many of these tips still apply.

In this article I'll cover Magmaw, Omnitron Defense System, and Chimaeron. The next article will cover the half of BWD.

Read more...

Optimizing your Enhancement gear - the easy way

I love to tinker with my gear, run sims using EnhSim, and test for the utmost optimal combination for my shaman. Unfortunately things are increasingly complex these days with reforging and so many loot options in a progression guild with half the heroic bosses on farm.

It used to be that one piece of gear was a clear upgrade over another because it either did or didn't have your best stats. Now, we can take a piece with suboptimal stats and reforge it. Is that item with hit and haste better or worse than the item with mastery and crit? Should you gem for hit and reforge for mastery, or enchant for mastery, gem for agility and reforge for hit? So many questions.

Today I'll give you the cliff notes version version to optimizing your gear. The key is in one simple fact: you can refoge your way to hit and expertise caps—and you should.

Read more...

Getting the most out of EJ

Today's Windfury Crits article is quick and easy, but still something important to staying on top of changes for enhancement, or any class/spec for that matter.

For the past four years it seems a canned response on guild applications is “I read Elitist Jerks.” As if that evidenced an ability to play the game. I've found that statement usually means, “I opened the site and skimmed some stuff, and I think you'll be impressed that I know what EJ is, but I didn't read all 15 pages of posts about my class/spec because I was overwhelmed. Because I suck.” The truth is that for any one spec there is enough information on maximizing performance that you'd think the optimal gear/gem/reforge/spell combination would put a man on Mars. Being an avid EJ reader, today I'll disseminate my tips to getting the most out of the site everyone loves to say they read.

Read more...

Windfury Crits & Enhance Shaman 101

Back in April 2008 I started blogging about the life and times of an enhancement shaman on my personal website. The blog was called Windfury Crits, and at the time it was the only active Enhancement blog out there. In February 2009 I moved WF Crits over to Big Hit Box, a collaborative blog focused on all things melee. After getting hired at WoW Insider for the enhancement shaman position I let BHB slide into oblivion, eventually cancelling the whole thing. Then in November 2010 I left WoW Insider because I did not have enough time to dedicate to full weekly articles. And thus I went dark on blogging about enhance for nearly 6 months, my longest break since starting in writing three years ago. Admittedly, I was a bit busy with this show you may have heard of about WoW raiders...

Here we are now in April 2011, I'm bringing it back to Bacon: the return of Windfury Crits. I'll address everything enhancement-related, even if it's just in short bursts. You can subscribe to the Windfury Crits-only thread here, but of course I recommend subscribing to the full RSS feed for everything: blog posts and videos alike.

For the inaugural post I'm going to summarize what you need (and probably already know) to get started as an enhancement shaman

Read more...