The Attack Table

On more than one occasion, I've read that Enhancement Shaman should value critical hit chance over standard "to hit" bonuses. This advice always seemed counter-intuitive to me... "If you don't hit, you can't crit, right?"

Wrong-o.

It appears that WoW uses a single-roll system to determine hits/crits/misses, rather than a two-roll system (first to see if you hit, second to see if you crit). And for those born in the 90's: this "roll" refers to pen & paper RPGs where you physically rolled oddly-shaped dice. Anyone remember THAC0 and the insta-crit natural 20 roll? I digress...

MaxDPS.com has a nice Enhancement worksheet for examining this single-roll attack table. Notice that all possible scenarios are accounted for as a percentage: hits/crits, misses/parries/dodges, etc. If you fiddle around with Crit %, you'll see that having more crit improves the quality of your landed hits by taking percentage points away from regular hits.

Since so many Enhancement abilities (Flurry, Shamanistic Focus, Unleashed Rage) are triggered by crits - not to mention raw DPS - it's important to be crit'ing as much as possible. Sure, having more +hit is nice, but having more crit impacts your overall DPS significantly more.

Note that you can also remove Dodge/Parry misses from the attack table by positioning, so always try to attack from behind!