Elemental Shaman DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Shadowlands 9.2
On this page, you will find the best gear and best in slot items for your Elemental Shaman in World of Warcraft Shadowlands 9.2.
If you were looking for TBC Classic content, please refer to our TBC Classic Elemental Shaman gear and best in slot.
Gearing a Elemental Shaman
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.
Elemental Shaman Tier Set in Patch 9.2
Within the new Sepulcher of the First Ones raid that will be coming in Patch 9.2, every class will once again earn pieces of a gear set that is uniquely class-themed with its own two- and four-piece bonuses for every specialization. For Elemental Shamans, these set bonuses are:
Elemental Shaman 2-Piece — While your
Fire Elemental is active, your
Lava Burst deals 20% additional damage and you gain
Lava Surge every 8 seconds.
Elemental Shaman 4-Piece — Casting
Lava Burst extends the duration of your
Fire Elemental by 1.5 seconds. If your Fire Elemental is not active, Lava Burst has a 20% chance to reduce its remaining cooldown by 10 seconds instead.
Note that you can obtain pieces of the new tier set from your weekly Great Vault. Which pieces are best will depend on your build and other stats. As always, make sure to sim your character. Thanks to the Creation Catalyst, you can also convert any Season 3 item into a "tier" piece, keeping its upgrade path/socket/tertiaries.
Elemental Shaman Tier Set Thoughts
This is a fairly strong set bonus for single-target purposes. It adds even
more consistency to Elemental Shamans' DPS, doubling down on one of their strengths.
Currently, this set bonus would be fairly middle of the pack or slightly above
average compared to other DPS specs. Not great, not terrible. The 2-piece in particular
has both synergy and anti-synergy with some of Elemental's mechanics and Legendaries,
which on the one hand will allow for skilled players to gain an additional edge,
but the potentially wasted Lava Surge procs will be very frustrating. This
set bonus also completely sets in stone
Echo of the Elements as a
mandatory talent.
For AoE purposes, this is a problematic set. It does a couple things. First,
it can allow for a second casting of the Meteor, which is quite nice
if you need to do AoE damage every minute or so. If you are using
Storm Elemental,
it can allow for a second
Eye of the Storm. In either cases however, you will
need to cast a few
Lava Bursts in what is potentially a burst AoE situation,
which can be problematic; in practice I expect the AoE potential of this bonus
will only have niche applications for raiding, although it may well be extremely
strong for Mythic+
In general, there is a strong anti-synergy between these set bonuses and
Storm Elemental which will lead to either ignoring one or the other completely,
or to complex calculations to determine when it is worth using
Lava Burst
during Storm Elemental. Moreover, while using
Primal Elementalist will almost
certainly be mandatory with this set bonus, having an almost permanent Fire or Storm
Elemental means it becomes inconvenient to use
Earth Elemental and its
extremely powerful defensive abilities. I expect an overall decrease to Elemental
Shamans' survivability because of that, although this will really depend on the
encounter, and obviously staying alive is more important than doing more damage.
Finally, the 4-piece bonus encourages casting Lava Burst in AoE situations
which is yet another uncomfortable decision you have to make.
There is a small possibility that the tier set bonus allows for Ascendance
to come back into the spotlight as the additional
Lava Surges and
Lava Burst
damage make
Deeply Rooted Elements significantly more attractive.
Domination Gear and Shards of Domination in Patch 9.2
Domination Shards will NOT work outside of Korthia, The Maw, and Torghast and are therefore largely obsolete in Patch 9.2.
The Importance of "Simming Yourself"
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.
Evaluating Upgrades
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.
Stats
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.
Early Gearing in Shadowlands
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.
Adding Sockets to your Gear
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.
Valor upgrades
Patch 9.0.5 reintroduced Valor to World of Warcraft. You can learn more about this system on our dedicated Valor page.
Trinkets for Elemental Shaman
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.
Single-Target
Cleave/AoE
For the new raid trinkets, note that while Elegy of the Eternals was
looking dominant, it received a massive nerf and may not be very good anymore.
The First Sigil and
Resonant Reservoir are probably safe picks.
Legendary Powers for Elemental Shaman
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.
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.
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.
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.
Best in Slot Items for Elemental Shaman
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.
Changelog
- 07 Mar. 2022: Removed mentions of the now defunct "machine gun" build.
- 22 Feb. 2022: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.2.
- 01 Nov. 2021: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.1.5.
- 09 Jul. 2021: Removed warning about Unholy Domination Shards.
- 29 Jun. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Updated Legendary recommendation; added a link to the Valor page.
- 15 Dec. 2020: Removed somewhat obsolete line on Darkmoon Card Putrescence.
- 24 Nov. 2020: Removed a mention of Azerite Traits.
- 24 Nov. 2020: Page updated for Shadowlands release; added a section on early Shadowlands gearing and one on Legendary Powers. Added a comment on trinkets, removed a lot of BfA-specific information.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Page updated for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
More Shaman Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Stormy, Elemental main since Wrath of the Lich King and member of the Storm, Earth and Lava Elemental theorycrafting team.
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