Elemental Shaman DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Shadowlands 9.1.5

Welcome to our Gearing Page for Elemental Shaman. This section will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.

If you have a new piece of gear that you need gems and enchants advice for, you can find everything you need on our dedicated page below.

This new system is somewhat complicated, so we recommend you head to the general guide linked below to gain a better understanding of how it all works.

Keep in mind that because most of the pieces of this system are linked to random drops in the new raid, most people will be unlikely to make the sets they want right away.

Because most of this system is a recent addition, simulations are still largely a work in progress and we should expect numbers to be in flux. That being said, it appears at the moment that the set Elemental Shamans should be going for is the Unholy set, meaning you will want 3 Unholy Shards of Domination, including a Helm from the raid. This means that you will REALLY want to get a Helm from the raid, even if it is at a relatively low item level. Because of how powerful the set bonuses are, getting 3 pieces of Domination Armor from the raid as soon as possible is very important for raid progress.

The Unholy set bonus, Chaos Bane, has a very high uptime and grants a very powerful Intellect buff. Multi-target/AoE abilities appear to make it stack faster currently.

In your other sockets, you will want a Shard of Bek and a Shard of Cor.

At this stage in the game, there are so many variables and so many layers of optimization that you can apply to your character, that there is no way for a guide or anything else to tell you exactly what gear you should wear. This is why we always recommend simulating your own character using Raidbots. The website can help you choose set bonuses, trinkets and combinations thereof in a way that is tailored completely to your specific character. Learning to use this tool is essential to maximizing your potential, as there is simply no other way to take all the variables into account.

The easiest way, and also the method we suggest, to compare multiple items is to use Raidbots' Top Gear. Here you can input an export from the Simcraft AddOn, select the items to compare, and it will find out which of the items are best.

Many people have a tendency to overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is nearly always better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item level gear with great stats. Keep this in mind when considering gear. For more stats information, please refer to our dedicated page.

Once you finish the Shadowlands campaign and reach max level, you will want to start upgrading your gear. There are many ways to do this, and our recommendation is that after some World Quests and Heroic Dungeons, you try getting into Mythic Dungeons, preferably with some friends, and do every single dungeon during the weekly lockout. Aside from that, make sure you grab a Legendary from Torghast and buy/craft yourself a Darkmoon Deck: Putrescence as soon as you can. Buying cheap crafted or BoE gear at the Auction House can also help a lot.

There is a NPC in the Maw that allows you to obtain a consumable that adds a socket to an item that did not already have one. For more information on how to obtain it, please visit our Ve'nari page.

Patch 9.0.5 reintroduced Valor to World of Warcraft. You can learn more about this system on our dedicated Valor page.

Due to the prevalence of high item level trinkets from Mythic+ dungeon grinding, there are a variety of suitable options when it comes to trinkets.

One of the hardest decisions in Shadowlands is which Legendary Powers you want to focus on. While you will eventually get all of them, this will take a long time, and you want to pick the Legendary Powers which best fit what you want to do in the game.

Overall, there are 3 Legendary Powers that stand above the rest.

1. Echoes of Great Sundering is second best in single-target and becomes extremely good in stacked AoE, making it very strong for Mythic+ in particular.
2. Windspeaker's Lava Resurgence is the best single-target damage increase, by a fairly good amount, and also gives you more mobility and reliable burst.
3. Skybreaker's Fiery Demise is decent in single-target but becomes great in multi-dotting situations. If the enemies are spread out, it is much better than Echoes of Great Sundering.

It is a fairly hard decision, and there are other Legendaries that also come quite close especially in some situations. I personally would recommend going for Windspeaker's Lava Resurgence, which is best for raiding and PvP, then Echoes of Great Sundering which is best for some raid fights, most mythic+ and some solo content.

For more in-depth information about Legendary powers, we recommend you visit our Legendary Powers and Runecarving pages.

If you have read the previous section, you should now understand that static Best in Slot lists are always misleading, and it is best to use the tools at your disposal, notably Raidbots Top Gear and its new Droptimizer options.