PvE Elemental Shaman Talents, Builds, & Glyphs

In Mists of Pandaria the talent trees have been condensed down to a choice between 3 talents every 15 levels. Each choice you make is going to be highly impactful, and Elemental Shaman has a decent amount of flexibility in what you can take while remaining competitive.

PvE Elemental Shaman DPS

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Stat Priority & Reforging

Best Professions

Pre-Raid Gear

Rotation & Cooldowns

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Best in Slot (BiS)

Addons & Macros

Talents

There are two main paths to go down to start out with that I’ll go over below. Keep in mind that with Tome of the Clear Mind you can hotswap talents out of combat, so you can personalize and optimize things on a fight-by-fight basis fairly easily.

Don’t take these two as the only options. There’s a lot of viability in choices here that will change based on your playstyle, gear level, and the specific fight you’re on. It is recommended to take Echo of the Elements with Elemental Blast, though, as these have synergy with it being possible to proc from an Elemental Blast cast.

Level 15 Talents (Tier 1)

• Nature’s Guardian
  This is a solid emergency proc. It has the added benefit of casting automatically when your health drops below 30%, so you don’t need to micro-manage it or have another button on your bars. The downside is if something were to one shot you, or you were to take fatal damage at 31% health, you’re going to quickly be looking at a grey screen. You also can sometimes trigger this during moments where you’ll likely be fine, and then not have it for moments where you need a defensive to keep you up.
• Stone Bulwark Totem
  I wouldn’t recommend this as a defensive option. While it can work, it’s generally outperformed by the other two options in either efficacy or ease of use.
• Astral Shift
  A flat 40% damage reduction is a solid defensive option. The downside is the buff only lasts 6 seconds and it’s on a 1.5 minute cooldown, meaning you need to be careful with how you use the button. Generally having an idea of the fight beforehand and knowing when to press it in advance will give this defensive the best outcome.

Level 30 Talents (Tier 2)

• Frozen Power
  With this only being a soft CC, single target, and attached to a shock spell that isn’t used often, I wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, really.
• Earthgrab Totem
  A much more effective replacement for your Earthbind Totem that provides AoE CC and great kiting power. Very powerful, although situational.
• Windwalk Totem
  This iteration of the totem is a lot more niche than you might assume as it does not provide any form of movement speed increase. Instead, this provides immunity to any movement-impairing effects in a 40 yard range for 6 seconds. The good news is you don’t need to predict these debuffs in advance as an immunity will cleanse any current movement-impairing effects within the radius immediately.

Level 45 Talents (Tier 3)

• Call of the Elements
  This is a lot better than it sounds even if it offers no benefit to DPS. 80% of our utility package is in totem form, with most of them being within the 3 minute cooldown threshold. Don’t sleep on this ability!
• Totemic Persistence
  In PvE your totems are rarely going to be destroyed, and even then the benefit isn’t anything to write home about. Extremely underwhelming.
• Totemic Projection
  This is the recommended choice for Elemental Shamans. With us being ranged this’ll allow us to reposition totems when moving, and to take melee totems like Capacitor Totem and make it able for us to position them on mobs without going into melee range. Highly useful.

Level 60 Talents (Tier 4)

• Elemental Mastery
  Haste is an important stat in general for us, and early gear is not going to be anywhere close to a soft cap giving us maximum value from this talent. This will also line up well with large increases to damage output such as from the Orc racial Blood Fury. It might be best to start with this talent until you get a bit of gear on you and meet the 15% Hit cap for spells.
• Ancestral Swiftness
  While not completely useless, it’s definitely one of the weaker choices in this tier of talents. 5% passive spell haste is nothing to sneeze at, and you’ll get the bonus of having a free instant-cast lightning or lava spell every minute or so. That said, the other two options are going to beat this out in most scenarios for now.
• Echo of the Elements
  This is pretty exciting as it essentially works similar to how our Mastery functions on Elemental Shaman, and can even proc from extra spells originating from your Mastery. In terms of DPS it’ll be competitive, and in terms of fun it’ll be a blast seeing the barrage of elemental spells pouring out of your character. That said, not being spell Hit capped (15%), every missed spell is a wasted opportunity and compounds the DPS loss.

Level 75 Talents (Tier 5)

• Rushing Streams
  While not an enormous impact, it will provide some consistent healing over the course of a long fight as long as you remember to keep your Healing Stream Totem down as much as you can. It’s not flashy, it will take some presence of mind not to forget to press the button when it’s available, and it does take up a GCD.
• Ancestral Guidance
  Potentially my favorite defensive cooldown of the whole expansion. If you overlap this with some damage cooldowns it can be nearly on-par with a raid-wide healing CD. It’s simple – the more damage you do, the more you heal those around you. The downside to this is that Elemental damage is more proc-based and less about big, predictable damage windows. This can impact the consistency of this cooldown, although it still has the potential to be quite powerful.
• Conductivity
  This is going to be extremely awkward to work into your rotation and is a much more clunky and less effective version of Ancestral Guidance. I don’t see any scenario where this would be more useful than the other two.

Level 90 Talents (Tier 6)

It should be noted that for this tier these are all highly impactful abilities, and all of them are viable to some degree. There is going to be a mathematically best option, and it is going to correlate with the level of gear you have on and your previous talent choices.

• Unleashed Fury
  Seeing as we only use Flametongue Weapon as an enhancement we’ll only get the bonus to Lightning Bolt and Lava Lash damage for the duration of the buff. This may be useful on a fight with a lot of movement, and will be more useful later when Tier bonuses come into play to make this better. As of right now the other two options beat it out, though.
• Primal Elementalist
  This is going to amp up your Fire Elemental Totem and make it a powerhouse of a cooldown. Best paired with the Major Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem to allow you more casts of your buffed elemental. They will now be considered pets and gain extra abilities that you can micro-manage. Overall, though, this is the simplest cooldown to make use of and has a lower impact on your rotation complexity. Especially useful on fights that require lots of movement where you may not be able to squeeze off an important cast on cooldown.
• Elemental Blast
  My starting recommendation is Elemental Blast as it offers a solid damage nuke combined with a bunch of free flat stats. As these stats become less valuable due to diminishing returns, this option may fall out of favor. If you go with this talent it’s highly recommended to pair it with Echo of the Elements as it can proc that passive.

Glyphs

With the removal of Prime Glyphs you have 3 Major Glyphs to choose from that affect gameplay in a more subtle way and 3 Minor Glyphs that are mostly cosmetic or personal preference.

Major Glyphs

Good DPS Options

• Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem
  Best when used in combination with the Primal Elementalist talent.
• Glyph of Chain Lightning
  Only useful in large AoE situations where your Chain Lightning can reliably hit its maximum amount of targets.
• Glyph of Fire Nova
  Situationally useful if there’s going to be a large number of enemies and you’re having trouble getting your Magma Totem in range to hit all of them with Fire Nova.

Good Defensive Options

• Glyph of Shamanistic Rage
  If there are magic debuffs that can be cleansed during a fight this is a decent option paired with a solid defensive cooldown.
• Glyph of Flame Shock
  Seeing as your Flame Shock should have 100% uptime on at least one target, this is a small, but consistent, self-heal that’ll add up over the course of a fight. Upside is it requires absolutely no thought to make use of.
• Glyph of Ghost Wolf
  Makes your Ghost Wolf form more resilient to slows. Situationally useful.
• Glyph of Thunder
  Reduces the cooldown of your Thunderstorm, which can be important to keeping yourself alive or topped up on mana. While this is an important part of your toolkit, you’ll want to be careful when using it not to explode a bunch of mobs in random directions.

Good Utility Options

• Glyph of Capacitor Totem
  Very straight-forward. Reduces the charge-time of Capacitor Totem by a couple of seconds. Useful when AoE stuns are going to be in-demand and you want it to be a more reactive ability.
• Glyph of Frost Shock
  Increases the duration of the slow from Frost Shock. Useful if you need a little extra oomph for kiting something in a fight.
• Glyph of Spiritwalker’s Grace
  An extra 5 seconds duration isn’t anything to sneeze at. When you press your Spiritwalker’s Grace, an extra few casts getting snapped off will be a welcome addition.

Minor Glyphs

Minor glyphs are mainly going to come down to personal preference, but I’ll list a few that are convenient enough to take notice of.

• Glyph of Thunderstorm
  This is a minor glyph that actually provides some value. If you’re in large AoE situtations you can actually use Thunderstorm as a DPS gain. You can also use it to regain mana in situations where you might need to spam Chain Lightning. This removes the knockback, making it require no extra thought to use in your rotation.
• Glyph of Astral Recall
• Glyph of the Lakestrider