Season of Discovery Enhancement Shaman Tank Stat Priority

Your stat priority can change depending on what your current gear and goals are. If you are interested in dealing damage and creating maximum threat, then Strength and Agility are great stats, but from a purely defensive point of view getting more Stamina and Avoidance stats can be better, so make sure to adjust accordingly.

1. Hit Chance (9% is the cap for special attacks against raid bosses which are treated as being your level +3);
2. Strength;
3. Stamina (more health per point);
4. Agility (grants crit, dodge and armor);
5. Critical Strike (200% on normal swings);
6. Intellect (larger Mana pool to sustain tanking skills);
7. Raw Attack Power;
8. Defense (you cannot be critically struck by default with Way of Earth reducing its relative value);
9. Parry % increases (more likely to avoid damage altogether with minor DPS benefit baked in);
10. Dodge % increases (more likely to avoid damage altogether);
11. Armor (less physical damage taken per point).

Hit allows your attacks to land more often, which can often be the difference between having aggro or letting the enemies kill your group while you watch helplessly. Quickly establishing threat is, thus, of paramount importance to smooth group play.

Stamina is the only stat that will help you survive all types of attacks (including magical), and as such, should always be highly valued for survivability purposes.

As a Shaman, Agility increases your dodge, your armor and your critical chance. This makes it a rather valuable stat for tanking.

Your weapon is by far the largest contributor to your damage, and you should always aim to upgrade it first, if possible. There are three types of stats you are mainly looking for in a weapon: its DPS, its damage range and its speed. Slower weapons have bigger damage ranges, which is very important for certain skills that depend only on the damage range, such as Stormstrike.

Weapon Skill allows you to hit enemies more often and, more importantly, for a lot more damage when you land a Glancing Blow. Glancing blows are regular hits that deal reduced damage. Raid bosses are counted as being your level +3, which means 40% of your attacks will be glancing blows, which deal 35% reduced damage if you have the default maxed weapon skill.

You can get some benefit by increasing your weapon skill further with racials such as Axe Specialization, Sword Specialization, or Mace Specialization, Runes such as Axe Specialization, or with items such as Expert Goldminer's Helmet.

Having at least +5 skill is a huge damage increase against end game bosses such as the ones in raids as it massively increases your Hit chance and lowers the Glancing Blow penalty, as you can see in the table:

Critical Strike for Shaman tanks increases your damage, threat generation, and makes you attack faster through Flurry.

Intellect is surprisingly valuable for Shaman tanking, as all of your threat abilities require a lot of Mana, including Earth Shock. Fortunately you can now also rely on Shamanistic Rage to refill Mana as it became baseline in Phase 4 and no longer shares a rune slot with Way of Earth.

Defense determines your chance to get critically hit, missed or crushed (against +3 or higher level difference enemies), among other things. WoW Classic's combat is table based, and one of the following results happens when you attack or get attacked, in this precise order, when assuming you are uncrittable due to Way of Earth and uncrushable due to Defense Specialization and other defense / avoidance / block sources in your gear which push crushing blows off the table:

1. Miss > 5%
2. Parry > 5%
3. Dodge > 5%
4. Block > 10% to 20% (depending on Shield Mastery being active)
5. Hit > 75%

Thus the potential outcomes for a Shaman tank are not very bad, with block being a great source of damage reduction against multiple enemies but weak against a single powerful boss.

Resistance, while inherently niche due to different bosses dealing different magical damage types, can be very useful while progressing specific bosses. Wearing resistance gear of a type makes you take less damage or even completely avoid damage when hit by that type of magical damage.