Returning Enh shammy...am I doing it right? (gearing)

[Greyarea]

Hello all.

I have just gotten back into playing WoW after a bit of a hiatus from around 5.3 or so, I've played on and off but never bothered to try and optimize gearing because I wasn't raiding at all. Now though I have got the chance to start doing normal and some heroic stuff potentially in the next few weeks so want to make sure I'm heading down the right track or if I need to do some slight adjustments to my gearing for my enhancement shaman.

Here is my characters armory ( http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...gaton/advanced ) which I have just finished working out using some simcraft and some Ask Mr Robot and testing. It seems to be decent and with my lower gear level compared to others I think I'm going well doing around 120-150k roughly (playing on hte US, from Australia sucks I want to point out...400ms is annoying, had forgotten that part of wow ). Simcraft is saying I should be doing 180k roughly. Now as I'm relearning the rotation and such again I expect it to get better, along with gear.

Now the main question I have is the gemming, enchants, reforges and trinket choices correct or should I drop some mastery to balance out a little more with haste? I know I'm about 1% over exp cap on my off hand but it means both are capped so I feel it's worth it and not being hit capped at 7.5%...meh it's so low it realistically makes very minor differences.

Finally I also have 2.8k valor saved up and need to spend some obviously. Now would it be better to spend on the weapon for more weapon DPS and thus making all hits have a little more oomph or should I go with something else? Just get the 540 ones maxed out? If someone has advice it would be great as I've spent 3 hours tonight doing number crunching and my brain is fried after a hard day at work.

Any constructive advice or criticisms would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much in advance

PS: the armory seems to love to make me look like I'm in ele gear in the character model, the gear should be enh.

[Embermoon]

There really isn't much, that would warrant critiquing you. Everything looks really good. I was doing more than 120k-150k dps at that ilvl, but I also didn't have to deal with 400ms latency, either. I didn't go to mastery-centric gemming until some time after 550 ilvl, when SimC started showing mastery to be worth more than twice agility. The trinkets you have could be swinging the stat weights, though.

Keep in mind that the sims are going to assume things that aren't realistic, in-game; such as abilities being executed perfectly, off-healing never happening, 100% contact time on the boss, etc. Sure, you can adjust settings, but ultimately, it's a sim, so take it as one source of information. Where SimC is really going to help you, is when you want to run reforge plots, to determine whether you want more mastery or haste. So far, it's been mastery for me, in 5.4.

Going forward, I'd recommend the following, for a gear-upgrading strategy:

- Get Ordos and the Celestials fights down, early in the week. If you get an upgrade, you have the rest of that same week, to get valor to upgrade them.
- Upgrade any 553 or 559 items, before lower-ilvl items.
- Upgrade weapons and trinkets over any other gear.

[Greyarea]

Cool thanks. Sadly, due to my many breaks during MoP (just not as much fun as wrath. Same thing happened in Cata for me) I am kind of behind on the cloak quest. Given a bout a month I should have it, then I'll be able to do Ordos. Also Celestials have only ever dropped pvp gear for me across all my 90's, never tier. However Nalak used to spew tier for me pretty much every week, one time I got gloves and legs for my warlock on 1 kill using a coin, happiness ensued.


Thanks for the advice