Once your gear is accounted for and you’re all prepped and ready to go, it all comes down to how well you push your buttons! Enhancement Shaman is about consistency: methodically accumulating stacks of Searing Flames on targets and Maelstrom Weapon stacks on yourself, and discharging them in conjunction with your damage-increasing cooldowns. It’s about using your Maelstrom Weapon at 3 stacks instead of 5 to maximize the time between your auto-attacks (you can cast them between autos if you can time it.) Success as an Enhancement Shaman comes from keeping track of your stacks while using your cooldowns to maximize the damage dealt by the discharge of those stacks.
Spell Priority
The new standard for Shaman weapon enchantments is using Windfury Weapon on your main-hand weapon and Flametongue Weapon on your off-hand weapon because of how strong Lava Lash is now. You’ll also want to set up your Totem Bar ahead of time so you can cast Call of the Elements with the appropriate totems for the encounter.
- Apply Flame Shock and keep re-applying throughout fight.
- Place Searing Totem to stack Searing Flames on your target.
- Cast Stormstrike on an 8 second cooldown.
- Cast Lava Lash on a 10 second cooldown.
- Cast a 3 to 5-charge Maelstrom Weapon Lightning Bolt.
- If you’re casting at 3 or 4 charges, when it’s not instant, make sure not to interrupt an auto attack.
- Cast Unleash Elements on a 15 second cooldown.
- Reminder that you get both Unleash Wind and Unleash Flame, two large self buffs, when using Windfury Weapon and Flametongue Weapon. Try to use this before re-applying Flame Shock for the added damage you’ll get from Unleash Flame.
- Cast Earth Shock if everything else is on cooldown.
Cooldowns
Bloodlust/Heroism – Coordinate with your raid to see if this is necessary, as someone else may be casting this. It has a 5 minute cooldown but applies the Sated/Exhaustion debuff, preventing you from being affected by Bloodlust/Heroism or Time Warp again for 10 minutes.
Feral Spirit – This is a huge damage buff every 2 minutes and lasting 30 seconds. Each spirit wolf has 50% of your Attack Power and can be snapshotted to other buffs that increase your Attack Power.
Shamanistic Rage – Reduces all damage taken by 30% and effectively reduces the cost of your skills, totems and offensive spells to 0 mana. Obviously, you’d want to save this for high-damage-dealing phases of a fight, but in the absence of such, you can use it strategically to conserve mana.
Earthbind Totem – Every 15 seconds you can cast Earthbind Totem, which slows all enemies in a 10 yard radius around the totem. The great part about this is you basically need only one Earthbind Totem down to slow any number of enemies that walk through its field. It’s incredibly useful for AOE slows on big pulls.
Wind Shear – Every 15 seconds you can cast Wind Shear to interrupt your target’s current spellcasting and lock them out of that spell’s school of magic for 2 seconds. Since you won’t be going Reverberation in the talent tree, this has been grossly nerfed. 6 seconds to 15 seconds for a cooldown means we’re no longer top dogs of melee interrupts; however, it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t use it when we can.
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