Great first article Stoneybaby. Good to see someone with a real clue about their class on WoW.com, as there are not many unfortunately. :(

Probably worth mentioning for those in smaller guilds that perhaps don't have a regular Moonkin or Shadow Priest for their 3% hit debuffs, the hard spell hit cap requires 443 hit rating.

You should gem/enchant to reach this if you raid a lot, but lack these classes.

Also, I personally place Nova above Lava Lash in my priority rotation as it hits for a significantly higher amount on single targets at higher gearing levels.

And if you can get your hands on at least 1 really nice Axe (for main hand), it's worth race changing to Orc if you gem for Expertise at all, allowing you to replace 2 epic Expertise gems (40 expertise rating) with AP or Haste. Off-Hand Expertise being under the soft cap is really inconsequential.

The Haste vs AP debate has been raging ever since they changed the way Fire Nova works. The best thing to do would be to sim your own character's gear/spec to find out which is better for you. But that's perhaps a bit over the top for Shamans just starting out.

From personal experience though, as someone who was fully Haste gemmed pre-3.3, and switched to full AP gems after Icecrown opened, I only realised a few days ago after simming my gear for the first time in a long while that Haste is actually still worth significantly more for me per point than AP.

I would personally recommend that if Haste & AP's values for your gear are within 10% of one another, go with what Stoneybaby suggested for yellow/red/blue sockets. Otherwise, fully gem every socket with whichever scales better for you (with the obvious exception of the Nightmare Tear for your meta activation).

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