Melee combat? Barbaric. Healing? How pedestrian. Let the elements do the talking. Totem Talk: Elemental. Brought to you by Mike Sacco.

Last week I took you through Elemental 101, a crash course in playing your elemental shaman. Now that we've got the basics out of the way and you understand your talents and rotation, it seems as good a time as any to talk about gear.

We addressed the main stats you're looking for on elemental gear last week, but here's a quick rundown again for those who missed it: Hit rating, spell power, haste, and crit. These are the only four stats we'll be looking for on elemental gear, besides the obvious intellect and stamina boosts that'll be on nearly every piece of caster gear anyway.

If the above sounds like a pretty reasonable set of stats to look for, well, you're not wrong. So I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news? There's definitely elemental gear out there. The bad news? Good luck finding it. Elemental gearing has a lot of issues unique to both the shaman and this specific spec. And you're not gonna like them.


First, shaman are the only caster class that uses mail as their highest available armor class. The issue that comes out of this is that there are two caster specs in our class, each with very different needs in terms of gear. What's good for the goose (Resto) is not usually good for the gander (Ele). MP5, for example, is a stat that's plenty good for Resto (and will be on nearly every piece of Resto gear), but offers no plausible benefit to elemental.

Want to downgrade to cloth or leather instead? Well, there are issues there, too. The majority of cloth and leather caster gear you encounter will have gobs of spirit on it, which is also of near-zero benefit to Elemental. Found a piece that doesn't have spirit on it? You'll be fighting with the other non-spirit caster specs for it, and they should rightfully have first dibs on their highest armor class anyway.

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