Gearing for Optimal DPS - Shaman Style

Sorry this took a couple days, I meant to do the followup right away but got rather distracted with other things, and never had the chance to return to it.

Once Pawn is installed and you log in, you can see on your character screen that there is a little button labeled "Pawn" in the bottom right. Click that and you can see a screen with various scales. First delete the default scale because that isn't good for anything. Next click "Import" and paste this into it:

( Pawn: v1: "Enhancement": ArmorPenetration=0.8, MainHandDps=5.9, CritRating=1.7, Strength=1.1, Intellect=1.7, Agility=1.7, ExpertiseRating=2.6, OffHandDps=2.5, HasteRating=1.3, SpellPower=0.9, HitRating=3.1, Ap=1 )

Depending on your stats, this should vary a little. The stats to pay attention to are Hit Rating and Expertise. Those two are weighed most heavily but they both have caps. I'll go a further into hit and expertise in the future but for now I'll just say that until they are capped, they are likely to add the most to your DPS. Hit obviously makes you more likely to hit your enemy.

For now I'll keep it simple. For melee you need 9%, or 295 hit rating. However, Enhancement Shamans have become increasingly dependent on spells for DPS from shocks and 5 charge Maelstroms. So it is recommended to max your spell cap, which is 17%, or 446. You don't need quite this much, however. This is for versus a lvl 83 boss, IE a raid. It is generally assumed that you'd get the necessary raid buffs to lower the needed hit by 3%, so you then require 367 hit. For Alliance it's even lower on account of Heroic Presence.

So to simplify all that. For Horde, you want a spell hit of 14%, or 367. For Alliance, you want a spell hit of 13%, or 341. Until you reach this, or at least very close, I would recommend keeping the 3.1 weight on hit rating.

Expertise is also important. It lowers the chance that you can be dodged or parried. You can only be parried from the front but you can still be dodged hitting from behind. The expertise cap is 6.5% or 214 expertise.

The rest is a little more simple. Agility, Intellect, and Crit are all weighed equally next. Agi adds 1 AP and crit. Int adds mana, spell crit, and 1AP via Mental Dexterity. Crits obviously add more damage as well as affecting Unleashed Rage.

Haste offers a direct percent increase to white DPS. It does not affect Stormstrike, Lava Lash, or spells, since anything you are casting should be instant.

Strength only increases AP. Since your strength is increased by Kings, it is slightly above 1.

Spellpower is less significant as we are still melee, even if we cast a lot. Armor penetration has shown to not have significant effects on DPS. However, the more you have, the greater effect it has. So perhaps if you can stack tons of it, it could be more valuable. I don't think that's at all practical however versus other stats.

So there you go. I unfortunately do not have Pawn values for resto. Well I do, but I don't know how accurate they are, since I have only pinch healed or healed during various gimmick fights and never even specced resto.

Soon I will post more on DPS for Death Knights and Hunters. However as I have less experience with both classes, they may be less accurate and will certainly have less backing than what I could give with Shamans.