Elemental Shaman DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Season 4

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 for which you need gems and enchant advice, you can find everything on our dedicated page below.

At this stage in the game, there are so many variables and 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 in a way 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 consider all the variables.

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 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.

That being said, T31 incentivizes a very clear stat distribution for both Single-target and AoE: Mastery to soft cap (88% or ~7200 Mastery), then a lot of Haste, some Versatility, and as little Critical Strike as possible.

We only provide "Best in Slot" lists as a mandatory requirement stemming from certain guilds and players thinking they absolutely need to blindly chase that one item in that one slot and nothing else will do. Sometimes, it is raid leaders enforcing a very strict "BiS list" for loot council without any nuance; other times, it is players themselves enforcing it on themselves.

Static Best in Slot lists are only an indicative tool in a vacuum; we recommend using the following tools: Raidbots Top Gear and its Droptimizer options.

Once you finish the Dragonflight campaign and reach max level, you will want to upgrade your gear. There are many ways to do this. We recommend that after  some World Quests and Heroic Dungeons, you try getting into Mythic Dungeons, preferably with friends, and do every single dungeon during the weekly lockout.

This weekly loot system remains much the same. You can select ONE item out of a maximum pool of 9, depending on how many raid bosses you defeated, your Dungeon clears and how much Honor you farmed the previous week.

You can learn more about this system on our dedicated Great Vault page.

Season 4 offers a way to target specific, powerful items with the new Antique Bronze Bullion.  Here are the best items to spend your Bullions on in Dragonflight Season 4.

• Seal of Diurna's Chosen
• Seal of Filial Duty

The Valor Upgrade system is gone since Season 3 and was replaced by a new system that allows for item upgrades to be obtained from a wider variety of content.

Crests can be used to upgrade gear up to Item Level 528, with Very Rare gear from Final Raid Bosses being upgradable up to Item Level 535.

For more information on the new Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page for it below.

Unsurprisingly, you should sim your character to determine which upgrades give the most bang for your buck at any point in time. Beyond that, you generally want to maximize your weapon, then your trinkets, then whatever slot is your worst, and after that, it is generally best to upgrade the slots that give the most stats, especially the tier set pieces: Chest, Helm or Pants, with a lower priority on whatever has the best secondaries, but maximizing Intellect remains the best way to gain DPS.

I would recommend getting Elemental Lariat and Adaptive Dracothyst Armguards.

The season 4 tier set is the same bonus as the T31 set. You want to have your full T31 4-set, no matter what content you are looking to do, as soon as possible.

What tier piece you skip can matter in this tier, though it will probably depend on what you gain access to. Overall, the Helm piece is probably the one you will most likely want to skip once you have the 4 other pieces, as it has the worst stats for the relevant builds. Second worst are the shoulders.

This set somewhat forces us into using a Fire-Focused build and can be pretty "spammy", and not very complex. While this was a welcome change from the "set rotation" of the T30, this is not to everyone's taste either.

 

Note that sites likes Bloodmallet are using a mastery-capped profile that dramatically lowers the value of any trinket that gives Mastery. Sim your OWN character!

IMPORTANT NOTE Between the uncertainty regarding "group" trinket usage, the reworked trinkets, the ones doing very conditional damage (low chance, over a long duration...), the ones doing significant self-damage, and the ones that are weak on anything except either pure single-target or AoE, it is very tough to settle on an objective ordered list. I would highly recommend you look into how the different trinkets function and sim your character in different situations with them.

 

Our overall recommendations are:

For Raids:

• Ominous Chromatic Essence
• Whispering Incarnate Icon
• Belor'relos, the Suncaller
• Tome of Unstable Power
• Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge (even better if you are below the Mastery soft cap)
• Umbrelskul's Fractured Heart (likely the best trinket for pure single-target, unphased encounters)
• Desperate Invoker's Codex
• Furious Ragefeather
• Idol of Pure Decay
• Screaming Black Dragonscale

For Mythic+ or AoE heavy raid encounters (very similar list since, for once, our single and multi-target stat priorities are similar):

• Ominous Chromatic Essence
• Whispering Incarnate Icon
• Tome of Unstable Power
• Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge (even better if you are below the Mastery soft cap)
• Belor'relos, the Suncaller
• Idol of Pure Decay
• Erupting Spear Fragment
• Screaming Black Dragonscale
• Desperate Invoker's Codex

   

There are way too many trinkets to list and describe, only the best available  trinkets are mentioned here.

Since Vault of the Incarnates is back, things are quite simple. You most likely want Elemental Lariat, and then you definitely want both Seal of Filial Duty from Broodkeeper Diurna and Seal of Diurna's Chosen from Eranog, both from Vault of the Incarnates

Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno drops at the highest item level and has great stats and a damage effect to boot, which is mostly strong on untouched targets. It does come with the hefty downside of slowly killing you, however...But it is easily the strongest weapon you can get.

Other than that, I recommend weapons with the best stat combos for the best builds available to you, but you should almost always prioritize item level.

The best weapons for all content are:

From Dungeons:

1. Koroleth's Crackling Dagger
2. Searing Tusk Shard
3. Final Grade

 

From Raids:

1. Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno
2. Dreambinder, Loom of the Great Cycle
3. Eternal Kindler's Greatstaff

While professions do not generally give player power, there are possible exceptions in some circumstances. Suppose you want to min/max your player power in all possible situations. In that case, you should be an Alchemist and an Engineer. Note that the actual uses of their unique bonuses are highly conditional and, for the most part, should not dictate your profession choice.

Tl;dr: Get Adaptive Dracothyst Armguards, and Elemental Lariat You can also get Acidic Hailstone Treads if you like handicapping yourself for no good reason.

Allied Legguards of Sansok Khan perform well in most situations despite mediocre stats and forcing you to equip the T31 Helm. Do keep in mind that if your closest allies are healers or tanks, the buff will go to them, which is not necessarily ideal.

Witherrot Tome is a strong pure single-target DPS option.

Venom-Steeped Stompers are a possible stop-gap if you are struggling to reach the Mastery cap, and they have great stats, but you will want to swap them out at some point.

Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch remain a very solid option.

The Horizon Strider's Garment set with Wind Spirit's Lasso and either Scale Rein Grips or Ancestor's Dew Drippers is good for M+ and heavy multi-target fights, but like the Legguards, using the set forces you into using the T31 helm, which has mediocre stats.

Acidic Hailstone Treads's downsides are not worth the trouble anymore, especially not since they straight up do not give you much more damage than alternatives that do not have a downside.

Do not forget that Alchemical Flavor Pocket does not count for your embellishment limit, and you always want it on!