Enhancement Shaman DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Season 4

Enhancement Shaman plays with a priority list that focuses on managing your Maelstrom Weapon stacks and keeping your abilities on cooldown as often as possible. In between that, there are some procs to manage, but after playing for a while, you will gain the muscle memory to predict your next few globals fairly consistently. Learning this skill is invaluable to maximizing your performance when playing Enhancement.

1. Warning - cannot combine both Tier 30 and Tier 31 set bonuses!
2. Warning - cannot pair Ascendance and Deeply Rooted Elements talents!
3. Warning - cannot pair Fire Nova and Hailstorm talents!
4. Cast Windstrike on cooldown during Ascendance.
5. Cast Flame Shock if it is not active on your target.
6. Cast Primordial Wave whenever available.
7. Cast Flame Shock if it is not active on your target.
8. Cast Feral Spirit.
9. Cast Primordial Wave or Flame Shock if it is not active on your target.
10. Cast Primordial Wave whenever available.
11. Cast Windfury Totem if not currently active.
12. Cast Ascendance.
13. Cast Doom Winds.
14. Cast Sundering to trigger the T30 bonus.
15. Cast Windstrike on cooldown with Ascendance active.
16. Cast Stormstrike / Windstrike on cooldown.
17. Cast Lava Lash if Hot Hand is active.
18. Cast Windfury Totem if not currently active.
19. Cast Elemental Blast with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks and are at two charges.
20. Cast Lightning Bolt with 8+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks and the Primordial Wave buff.
21. Cast Chain Lightning with the Crackling Thunder 4-piece active and 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
22. Cast Elemental Blast with 8+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks and Feral Spirit active.
23. Cast Lava Burst with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
24. Cast Lightning Bolt with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
25. Cast Lightning Bolt if at 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
26. Cast Ice Strike with Doom Winds active.
27. Cast Sundering, ideally during Doom Winds.
28. Cast Crash Lightning with Doom Winds active.
29. Cast Primordial Wave.
30. Cast Flame Shock if it is not currently active on your target.
31. Cast Ice Strike.
32. Cast Lava Lash.
33. Cast Frost Shock if you have Hailstorm stacks.
34. Cast Lava Lash.
35. Cast Stormstrike / Windstrike.
36. Cast Stormstrike.
37. Cast Stormstrike.
38. Cast Sundering.
39. Cast Lightning Bolt with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks to generate Hailstorm.
40. Cast Ice Strike.
41. Cast Fire Nova.
42. Cast Frost Shock to fill.
43. Cast Crash Lightning to fill.
44. Refresh Flame Shock to fill.
45. Refresh Windfury Totem to fill.

The more that you play with Enhancement, the more you will adjust to the ebb and flow of each ability cooldown and know when you need focus on Maelstrom Weapon management. Making sure that you react to quick bursts of stack generation alongside Stormbringer / Hot Hand procs, all while keeping yourself active with every Global cooldown. Important quick notes are:

• The Season 4 set bonus significantly reduces the cooldown of Primordial Wave and makes it a mandatory pickup. While it is the most valuable to get CDR on, due to Feral Spirit's variable cooldown due to Witch Doctor's Ancestry you should just cast when ready rather than trying to game it and lose uses.
• With Elementalist, you want to aim to overlap as many of your Elemental Blast casts with your Elemental Spirits windows for huge payoff moments. Thanks to the extra Maelstrom Weapon via Elemental Assault, you should have more than enough to comfortably do so.
• Elementalist builds should also be very aware that, with good RNG on Maelstrom Weapon generation, it is possible that you can get Feral Spirit ready again before the first set fades. These buffs stack rather than refresh, so if it ever looks like it is going to happen, be ready to cast it and fire a 4-wolf Elemental Blast in the brief overlap.
• For Storm builds, while counter-intuitive the Maelstrom Weapon waste rule goes out the window, and instead, it converts as many globals into Stormstrike as it can. It uses Maelstrom instead as a backup reset via Legacy of the Frost Witch.

AoE has a variety of different delivery methods for Enhancement dictated by the build you are currently playing. Predominantly, though, its goal is to maintain Crash Lightning to convert single-target abilities into AoE, and use Chain Lightning to spend Maelstrom Weapon.

1. Warning - cannot combine both Tier 30 and Tier 31 set bonuses!
2. Warning - cannot pair Ascendance and Deeply Rooted Elements talents!
3. Warning - cannot pair Fire Nova and Hailstorm talents!
4. Cast Primordial Wave whenever available.
5. Cast Feral Spirit.
6. Cast Lava Lash with Flame Shock present on your target and less than 6 total active Flame Shocks.
7. Cast Flame Shock on an unaffected target if you have less than 6 active.
8. Cast Primordial Wave, ideally on a target not affected by Flame Shock.
9. Cast Sundering to activate the T30 set bonus.
10. Cast Lightning Bolt with 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks, the Primordial Wave buff and as many Flame Shocks active as possible.
11. Cast Ascendance.
12. Cast Elemental Blast with 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks, at 2 charges and against 1-3 targets.
13. Cast Windstrike during Ascendance.
14. Cast Windstrike during Ascendance.
15. Cast Chain Lightning if at 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
16. Cast Windfury Totem if not currently active.
17. Cast Doom Winds.
18. Cast Sundering to activate the T30 2-piece.
19. Cast Crash Lightning if the buff is not active, or during Doom Winds.
20. Cast Sundering, try to align with Doom Winds when possible.
21. Cast Fire Nova with 6 active Flame Shocks.
22. Cast Lava Lash, cycling between targets to apply Lashing Flames.
23. Cast Ice Strike.
24. Cast Frost Shock with Hailstorm stacks.
25. Cast Lava Lash.
26. Cast Sundering.
27. Cast Fire Nova with 3 active Flame Shocks.
28. Stormstrike / Windstrike.
29. Cast Lava Lash.
30. Cast Stormstrike / Windstrike.
31. Cast Stormstrike.
32. Cast Crash Lightning.
33. Cast Stormstrike / Windstrike.
34. Cast Stormstrike.
35. Cast Stormstrike.
36. Cast Ice Strike.
37. Cast Crash Lightning.
38. Cast Elemental Blast with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks against 1-3 targets.
39. Cast Chain Lightning at 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
40. Refresh Windfury Totem.
41. Cast Flame Shock to fill
42. Cast Frost Shock to fill.

While it can be overwhelming at first glance to look at all of the different components in Enhancement's AoE toolkit, many things are dictated by how you have built your talent tree. In Dragonflight, there are two different archetypes, each with some choices regarding how you approach AoE delivery, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in encounters. This has created more nuance in managing your buffs, procs, and resources, but the main cornerstone remains — avoid wasting Maelstrom Weapon by casting Chain Lightning and maintain Crash Lightning to make your single-target strikes splash. This is capped off by a suite of powerful cooldowns used as often as we can. Some notes are:

• Elementalist has two options for its filler - either focusing on Lashing Flames by cycling Lava Lash in a "tab-target" style, or switching it out for Legacy of the Frost Witch and prioritizing Hailstorm combos. Both are reasonably each with their own advantages, so pick by preference.
• Storm is quite complicated in Season 4 because it requires some of the more complex tools to enable the set bonus. Unfortunately, there is no real way around this, as the investment required into Lava Lash and Molten Assault clogs up the middle of the tree.
• Your main Maelstrom Weapon is Chain Lightning, which you should spend aggressively, as resource generation is much higher and it activates a number of effects. With Elemental Blast, on the other hand, it remains the best spender until there are 4 or more targets.
• Feral Spirit CDR is particularly strong here due to all the extra generation, so watch for them becoming available. Likewise, with the Season 4 bonus, you will be cycling Primordial Wave much more frequently, and is your highest priority to complete these combos.

A brief note for Enhancement is that it is also one of the last remaining powerful funnel specs when playing Elementalist due to a number of effects:

• The additional resources allow for much more access to Maelstrom Weapon spenders and Feral Spirit activations. We then use this to prioritize single-target spenders such as Elemental Blast on key targets.
• Ashen Catalyst stacks ramp much faster for stronger and more frequent Lava Lash casts on priority targets.
• Crash Lightning converts pure single-target buttons into additional AoE, allowing us to still deal relevant multi-target damage from an anchor target.
• Splintered Elements grants additional bonus Haste when you trigger additional Lightning Bolt echoes on secondary targets.

All of these combine to significantly increase our single-target damage so long as we have access to secondary targets in an encounter. This requires a slight playstyle adjustment of removing some of the exclusively AoE-focused gameplay portions such as Chain Lightning and cycling Lashing Flames to instead go all-in on something that needs to die quickly.

Our opener differs slightly depending on if we are in single-target or AoE situations. This is caused by some additional effects we need to set up before we get started, so select below:

1. Warning - cannot combine both Tier 30 and Tier 31 set bonuses!
2. Warning - cannot pair Ascendance and Deeply Rooted Elements talents!
3. Warning - cannot pair Fire Nova and Hailstorm talents!
4. Warning - please select an encounter style!
5. Pre-cast Windfury Totem before combat begins.
6. Cast Primordial Wave Flame Shock on the way into melee to get Flame Shockit active.
7. Cast Feral Spirit.
8. Cast Flame Shock on an unaffected target if you do not have 6.
9. Cast Lava Lash to spread Flame Shock.
10. Cast Primordial Wave, ideally on a target unaffected by Flame Shock.
11. Cast Lava Lash to apply Lashing Flames.
12. Cast Lightning Bolt with 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks and the Primordial Wave buff active.
13. Cast Crash Lightning to get the buff active.
14. Cast Ascendance.
15. Cast Doom Winds and follow up with Stormstrike Crash Lightning Sundering to activate the T30 2-piece.
16. Cast Stormstrike until you fail to get a Stormbringer proc.
17. Cast Crash Lightning as much as possible during Doom Winds.
18. Cast Chain Lightning with 5+ Maelstrom Weapon to reduce the cooldown of Crash Lightning.
19. Cast Sundering to activate the T30 2-piece.
20. Cast Elemental Blast with your opening 10 Maelstrom Weapon.
21. Cast Lightning Bolt with 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks and the Primordial Wave buff active.
22. Cast Ascendance.
23. Cast Ice Strike to generate Maelstrom Weapon.
24. Cast Frost Shock to consume Hailstorm stacks.
25. Cast Lightning Bolt to trigger Legacy of the Frost Witch.
26. Cast Ice Strike to fish for Stormbringer.
27. Cast Lightning Bolt once you reach 8-10 Maelstrom Weapon to consume Primordial Wave.
28. Cast Lava Burst as soon as you reach 5+ Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
29. Continue with the normal priority list.

Where you go from here depends entirely on your resource state with Maelstrom Weapon, if Stormbringer or other procs have activated, and what other talents you have selected. You will often go down the priority list, get your cooldowns cycling, and building up a pool of resources. Quick notes are:

• The Season 4 set bonus shifts the priority to Primordial Wave first over Feral Spirit, as the guaranteed 14-second cooldown reduction is generally more valuable here. On some encounters it can be worthwhile to flip this for a higher chance at double Feral Spirit overlap, or for more favorable timers. The rule is not set in stone.
• Storm really just wants to get into a state where it has Doom Winds active and can trigger Windfury Weapon as frequently as possible, regardless of Maelstrom Weapon.
• Elementalist wants to get itself set up with Maelstrom Weapon and high power spenders before entering into cycling its various buffs. If at any time Hot Hand triggers, its window drastically shifts to accommodate this (unfortunately cannot be shown dynamically in the above tool due to how unpredictable it is).

Doom Winds deals minor physical damage to your target and empowers you for 8 seconds, tripling your chance to activate Windfury Weapon and increasing the damage of your Windfury Weapon attacks by 10%. While the buff is active; you should aim to fit as many main-hand abilities within the window as possible without sacrificing Maelstrom Weapon spenders. Our main-hand attacks include:

• Stormstrike
• Ice Strike
• Crash Lightning
• Sundering

These abilities will take precedence over most actions during Doom Winds windows to fuel additional Windfury Weapon procs. Try to keep an eye on the cooldown so you can prepare to spend resources or get other cooldowns active beforehand, even if they are not regularly at the top of your priority. Also, make sure not to use it just before downtime or you will waste the effect, as making use of these windows is crucial. If paired with Ascendance, make sure to use it after shifting form to overlap the buffs as much as possible.

Primordial Wave deals moderate shadow damage and applies Flame Shock to your target. When used, your next Lightning Bolt will be empowered, echoing for 150% of its normal damage against all enemies currently affected by your Flame Shock. With Primal Maelstrom, casting Primordial Wave will also generate 5/10 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon, allowing you to easily combo your Primordial Wave-empowered Lightning Bolt with Overflowing Maelstrom. Finally, with Splintered Elements, each Lightning Bolt echoed by Primordial Wave will grant a stacking haste buff for 12 seconds - up to 40% haste with 6 active Flame Shocks, giving you a window that can be used to unleash powerful burst AoE or funnel damage. Due to its relatively short cooldown, you should plan around these windows, ideally dumping your Maelstrom Weapon and using this to refill immediately. This is our primary setup tool for Elementalist builds and deals excellent, immediate burst in both single-target and AoE so your cycles should always be planning around this cast. This is elevated even further by the Season 4 bonus, which doubles the rate at which we can cast this thanks to the frequency of Feral Spirit casts.

Feral Spirit summons two wolves to fight with you for 15 seconds on a 90-second cooldown. When this is cast, you instantly generate one stack of Maelstrom Weapon and gain an additional Maelstrom Weapon stack every 3 seconds for their duration. While active, the physical damage of your abilities (not including auto attacks) is increased by 15% per active wolf, stacking multiplicatively - meaning the default effect before other stacking buffs is 32.25% increased physical damage. This physical buff can be paired with our other physical cooldowns, such as Doom Winds and Sundering, to devastating effect. With Witch Doctor's Ancestry, the cooldown of Feral Spirit is reduced by 1/2 seconds every time you generate a stack of Maelstrom Weapon.

The Feral Spirit capstone talents allow you to customize the effects of your cooldown even further, with Elemental Spirits replacing the Physical buff provided by the wolves with random 20% fire, frost, or nature buffs. Alpha Wolf, on the other hand, causes your wolves to be empowered by your Crash Lightning or Chain Lightning casts for 8 seconds, pulsing light, armor-ignoring, Physical damage to all enemies around them every 2 seconds , which is also uncapped. This package is a staple in virtually all Enhancement builds, and it thrives on high Maelstrom Weapon generation to fuel even more casts for higher uptime on the respective buffs. This is treated more as a rotational cooldown in endgame play than a big cooldown movement due to this frequency, so always aim to keep them on cooldown cycling to the next use.

Ascendance is a long cooldown that deals a huge AoE burst when it is either manually cast or randomly triggered via Deeply Rooted Elements, and also gives 15 seconds of sustained single-target damage by converting our Stormstrike and auto-attacks into ranged, armor-ignoring attacks. Static Accumulation enhances this burst window, causing you to generate Maelstrom Weapon stacks every second while in the form passively. Finally, Thorim's Invocation greatly amplifies the burst potential of the cooldown, causing your Windstrike to automatically consume up to 5 Maelstrom Weapon stacks to discharge a Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning at your enemy, whichever you most recently used. This is especially useful as during the window, you are often flooded with resources without having spare Global Cooldowns to use them, so this allows us to siphon stacks efficiently.

Ascendance in Elementalist talent builds have a unique loop due to how busy the regular priority is. Despite most of the benefit is gaining access to Static Accumulation's refund effect, while this is active, there can be a number of clashes to keep in mind with some rules:

• Still try and keep Elemental Blast recharging
• If you ever reach a point where Feral Spirit may come off cooldown fast enough to have 4 wolves active; make sure to have 10 Maelstrom Weapon for a last-second Elemental Blast.

Your Weapon Imbues should always be active as they confer a strong benefit. Some notes on each are:

• Windfury Weapon - only applied to the main-hand, these additional strikes are considered special attacks and, as such, can generate Maelstrom Weapon and trigger procs such as Stormbringer.
• Flametongue Weapon - only applied to the off-hand, this causes all weapon attacks to trigger an additional hit of fire damage and doubles the damage your Lava Lash deals while active.

While Weapon Imbues do block you from using weapon runes such as Hissing Rune, the extra mechanical effects these provide to the Enhancement toolkit make them more valuable and as such we always use them. This is made even more mandatory by the locked-in talent Elemental Weapons, and you should never use double Flametongue Weapon - this confers no benefit.

Lightning Shield should always be kept active in solo content thanks to the additional Maelstrom Weapon it generates, but has little value in group content. Generally, Earth Shield is played instead and maintained for the minor additional sustain it provides.

Maelstrom Weapon management is crucial if you intend to play Enhancement at a competitive level. This has a 20% chance to trigger from any melee hit and stacks up to 5 times (or up to 10 times with Raging Maelstrom). Each stack reduces the cast time of your next Lightning Bolt/ Chain Lightning cast by 20%, and it can also increase the damage of affected spells by up to 25% per stack consumed, depending on how many points you have invested into Improved Maelstrom Weapon and Raging Maelstrom. By default, only 5 stacks can be consumed at once, at which point the affected spell will be instant cast; however, Overflowing Maelstrom allows you to consume up to 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks per spell, greatly increasing the amount of damage done per cast.

While it is tempting to cast these spells as soon as you hit 5 stacks, you should train yourself to make use of the 10-stack limit granted by Raging Maelstrom. If you are not at risk of overcapping your Maelstrom Weapon stacks, then it makes more sense to focus on keeping your other abilities on cooldown as much as possible; however, do not use other abilities at the expense of wasting Maelstrom Weapon stacks. Currently in Season 4, we generally aim to spend at around 8 stacks or above, unless certain specific conditions are met with Elemental Blast's charge cooldown.

The only time this rule is broken is when playing a Storm build using Deeply Rooted Elements. This causes Stormstrike casts to take all priority over Maelstrom waste, instead making the goal focused around casting that as much as possible even when capped. Thus, we use Maelstrom Weapon to trigger Legacy of the Frost Witch resets instead to increase our Stormstrike rate.

Due to the passive refund proc on Static Accumulation, when playing this talent it removes Lava Burst (if you are not playing Elemental Blast) from your rotation. It also raises the priority on Lightning Bolt even at 5 stacks, as the chance to refund here is significantly more valuable than any other generation source.

Enhancement also brings a small package of extra effects that help the party or specific members of your raid group:

Windfury Totem currently provides a solid boost to anyone in your party, meaning up to 4 other melee players can gain an advantage from this effect in a raid. This has a 20% chance to proc per auto-attack with a 0.5-second internal cooldown per player, but does not trigger from missed attacks and can miss itself. These extra attacks count as regular auto-attacks, meaning they proc all on-hit effects, but they do not affect Hunter auto-shots, pets, or guardians.

This allows us to convert Stormstrike casts into Mana for healers, especially in raid situations. This is even more potent if you are playing a Storm build as this will often be pressing significantly more Stormstrikes. Since points are not very tight on our class tree, this is a great option for many situations should you have room for it.

Crash Lightning looks simple on the surface but has many moving parts and is an essential aspect of Enhancement gameplay. There are some core components to bear in mind with how it works:

• The Crash Lightning buff is triggered for 12 seconds whenever it strikes two targets, and should be maintained in any multi-target situation.
• While active, Stormstrike, Lava Lash and Ice Strike will trigger a separate damage splash event called Crash Lightning.
• All Crash Lightning damage, both active and splash component, can trigger Maelstrom Weapon individually, while only the active cast hits can Stormbringer.
• The initial cast of Crash Lightning can trigger individual Windfury Weapon events on targets hit.

The above means that any time we can get more than one target together, we want to get this active for a free additional boost to our primary strikes. This also leads to additional resources, and, in AoE situations, can cause a flood of extra Maelstrom Weapon which confers a number of benefits to both builds allowing for extra cooldown access, AoE and funnel. Storm generally uses this as a primary damage delivery tool due to its gameplay structure (and the additional synergy with Forceful Winds, Windfury Weapon and Doom Winds). Elementalist on the other hand uses it as a supporting resource generation tool to fuel other things and raise the value of Lava Lash casts.

Chain Lightning also has two interactions to both increase access to, and amplify the damage of Crash Lightning:

• Each target hit by Chain Lightning reduces the cooldown of Crash Lightning by 1 second (up to a maximum of 5 with Crashing Storms)
• Each target hit by Chain Lightning increases the damage of your next active cast of Crash Lightning by 20% per target hit (up to 100% with Crashing Storms).

This creates a generate-spend relationship between the two that leads to both extra access to the resources to activate it, and increased frontloaded power of the activating tool keeping them both relevant in AoE.

Finally, Gathering Storms can be taken to cause each target hit by the initial Crash Lightning to increase the damage of your next Stormstrike cast by 25% per target hit, stacking up to 6 for a maximum of 150%. This activates even on a single-target, giving a small boost to funnel on priority targets when taken.

Regardless of build, Flame Shock is a core component of your damage (though the degree of its importance depends on talent selections). It plays as both a passive, low-maintenance damage source in single-target and an AoE enabler, meaning that it will be a part of your rotation in almost every situation in most builds. There are some additional details to note when using it that are not quite as intuitive on the surface:

In single-target situations, you want to make sure that you keep Flame Shock active at as close to 100% uptime as possible. You can refresh it based on the pandemic window whenever the damage over time effect has less than 5.4 seconds. With Molten Assault, Lava Lash will reapply Flame Shock if it is active on the target of the Lava Lash cast, meaning that it effectively maintains itself with the rotation.

Molten Assault allows the Shaman with an active Flame Shock on their target to apply Flame Shock to nearby targets via Lava Lash casts. This enables a lot of other parts of our AoE kit, such as Fire Nova, Primordial Wave, and Ashen Catalyst. When you cast Lava Lash, it does not just apply the damage over time effect to other targets; rather, it casts an extra Flame Shock on them, dealing the direct damage at the same time.