Mists of Pandaria Classic Enhancement Shaman Talent Builds

With Mists of Pandaria the talent system was heavily reworked to focus on a small amount of highly impactful choices and Enhancement Shaman has multiple talent options for different encounters and gameplay profiles, ranging from high survivability to high DPS.

In Mists of Pandaria you will be able to unlock a new row of talent selections every 15 levels, starting at level 15. Each row has a specific theme in order to keep the choices balanced with each other, and thus the choice will mostly rest on what type of defensives you want, or mobility, or utility, for the situation.

This tier of talents is dedicated to additional defensive options and cooldowns.

• Nature's Guardian provides a passive defensive layer by increasing your health by 25% and reducing your threat whenever you drop under 30% health. While this is not a particularly powerful talent, it is also fully passive making it easy to make full use out of.
• Stone Bulwark Totem summons a totem which shields you for 30 seconds. With its short cooldown of 60 seconds it is easy to get good value out of this talent but its shields are not particularly powerful.
• Astral Shift has the longest cooldown of all options at 90 seconds but is also by far the most powerful as it reduces all damage taken by 40% for 6 seconds when used. That means you can activate it before hard hitting abilities or if you cannot dodge a dangerous ability to guarantee your survival.

This tier of talents has crowd control and anti-crowd control options. Their usefulness depends on the encounter you are facing, so be prepared to adjust these talents on a fight by fight basis.

• Frozen Power causes Frost Shock to root its target for 5 seconds. While this can occasionally be useful, its diminishing returns and high time cost when needing to root multiple times make it not that useful in practice.
• Earthgrab Totem replaces Earthbind Totem and roots its targets before slowing them. This totem can be very useful whenever dangerous enemies need to be crowd controlled for an extended period.
• Windwalk Totem grants allies within 40 yards immunity to movement impairing effects 6 seconds on a 1-minute cooldown. While this totem does nothing if the encounter you are doing lacks movement impairing effects, it is invaluable against slows and roots!

This tier of talents increases the quality of life for using most of your utility totems.

• Call of the Elements allows you to reset the cooldown of all totems with a base cooldown under 3 minutes which mostly excludes Healing Tide Totem, Stormlash Totem, and the Fire / Earth Elemental totems. This can be very useful to get multiple utility totem usages in emergencies or more Healing Stream Totem healing.
• Totemic Persistence allows you to have multiple totems of a type active at the same time, but does not affect Fire totems. This is mostly used to allow you to use your utility totems freely, as Tremor Totem and Earthgrab Totem would not be able to be active at the same time otherwise, for example.
• Totemic Projection allows you to change the location of your totems to a nearby point every 10 seconds. This can be extremely useful to avoid having to recast Searing Totem when repositioning, or when using Earthgrab Totem and Capacitor Totem on enemies far away, for example.

This tier of talents grants you extra throughput ranging from long cooldowns to passive bonuses.

• Elemental Mastery grants a 30% Haste boost for 20 seconds on a 90 second cooldown, which makes it very useful for fights requiring heavy burst damage.
• Ancestral Swiftness increases your melee Haste by 10% and spell Haste by 5% passively and also allows you to make your next spell instant cast every 90 seconds. This is a strong semi-passive option, with the active effect being small but still enough for some self-healing or fitting in an extra cast occasionally.
• Echo of the Elements gives you a 30% chance to duplicate spell effects other than Elemental Blast which has only 6% chance. This is very powerful if you want to focus on area damage, as most of your area damage comes from Fire Nova and Chain Lightning, which fully benefit from Echo.

This row is healing focused with multiple options to increase the power of your healing kit.

• Rushing Streams allows your Healing Stream Totem to heal two targets at once for 15% additional healing. This is a good passive option, but its total healing bonus is rather underwhelming when compared to the potential of the other two options.
• Ancestral Guidance copies 20% of your damage to three injured allies nearby for 10 seconds, resulting in a 60% total conversion to healing on a 2-minute cooldown. While it is often overkill, if you need to help your healers against burst damage this is a great button to press.
• Conductivity extends the duration of your Healing Rain by 3 seconds every time you use most spells and abilities, up to a maximum of 30 seconds. This makes it potentially the best talent of the row, but also the most situational, as having to recast Rain often will ruin its benefit.

The final tier of talents provides significant throughput increases mostly focused on dealing additional damage or buffing yourself.

• Unleashed Fury causes Unleash Elements to add additional effects. For Enhancement the important ones are Windfury Weapon enabling Static Shock procs from auto-attacks for 8 seconds and Flametongue Weapon increasing the damage taken from Lightning Bolt by 30% for 10 seconds. This is a very strong talent for Enhancement since you get two bonuses due to dual-wielding and is recommended in most situations.
• Primal Elementalist transforms your Fire Elemental Totem and Earth Elemental Totem into more powerful versions with access to Empower and Reinforce. This is generally the best option for increasing burst damage and also has some defensive value through Reinforce.
• Elemental Blast should be used with Maelstrom Weapon and deals high damage plus a large stat boost for 8 seconds on a 12-second cooldown. This can also be a strong talent that works similarly to Unleashed Fury but due to its lower cooldown and Maelstrom Weapon requirement, it is also more intrusive in your rotation.

There are only two categories of Glyphs in Mists of Pandaria: Major and Minor Glyphs. Major Glyphs tend to improve or change how major abilities work and thus have direct impact on your performance, while Minor Glyphs are mostly cosmetic or small quality of life improvements for niche spells.

While not all recommended glyphs affect your throughput, we still recommend using the glyphs listed below for their high quality of life improvements.

• Glyph of Chain Lightning — is situational since it lowers your area damage in situations with less than 4 targets, but is highly recommended whenever you will be facing 4+ targets.
• Glyph of Fire Nova — is also a situational damage increase since it is not needed if targets are perfectly stacked but it has great value if the added 5 yards on Fire Nova allow you to hit even a single extra target.
• Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem — is the final situational DPS increasing glyph and is very useful for short fights, where the full duration of Fire Elemental Totem would be wasted.
• Glyph of Spirit Walk — reduces the cooldown of Spirit Walk by 25%, allowing you to become much more mobile than you would otherwise be.
• Glyph of Flame Shock — causes your Flame Shock to heal you for 30% of the damage dealt, which can have decent value for Enhancement due to the Flame Shock spreading properties of Lava Lash.
• Glyph of Lightning Shield — reduces your damage taken by 10% whenever Lightning Shield is triggered. Despite not including Static Shock procs, this has very high value whenever you are taking damage regularly.

Enhancement Shamans only have quality of life Minor Glyphs, but there are a few useful ones listed below.

• Glyph of Astral Fixation — causes Astral Recall to take you to your capital's Earthshrine rather than your Hearthstone location, allowing you to have a different Hearthstone location for extra mobility around the world.
• Glyph of Spirit Wolf — allows you to use Ghost Wolf while in ghost form, which is likely to make any corpse runs much faster.
• Glyph of Astral Recall — reduces the cooldown of Astral Recall by 5 minutes, allowing you to teleport with it more often.
• Glyph of Lava Lash — is a very niche glyph which causes Lava Lash to not spread Flame Shock when used. As spreading and using area damage is one of the biggest strengths of Enhancement, this should only be used on very specific encounters where the extra Flame Shocks would break important crowd control.