Enhancement Shaman DPS Easy Mode — The War Within Pre-Patch

Enhancement has a variety of different talent builds for single-target due to it having two separate archetypes. Currently, the most popular and optimal option is Elementalist, revolving around keeping Lava Lash on cooldown and spending Maelstrom Weapon on Elemental Blast. If you are interested in alternative builds for Storm or details on how choices are made, check our talent page:

Be sure to make use of the 'Copy Export String' button to import the best build directly into your game!

In AoE, the Elementalist loadout for Enhancement already contains a lot of core tools that also bring AoE through regular gameplay. The build is largely the same, though it takes Crash Lightning to add additional AoE damage triggered from its melee strikes. It can either focus on a priority target to funnel damage to, or tab-target Lashing Flames to empower Flame Shock. If you are interested in alternative builds for Storm or details on how choices are made, check our talent page:

Be sure to make use of the 'Copy Export String' button to import the best build directly into your game!

Enhancement has a wide variety of talent builds with varying degrees of difficulty, but currently the most popular are Elementalist loadouts. The core revolves around making sure you keep rotational abilities on cooldown, in particular Lava Lash and reacting to Hot Hand procs. You should make use of Maelstrom Weapon to cast powerful spells, empowered to be instant, prioritizing Elemental Blast on cooldown. Any excess Maelstrom Weapon stacks should be spent on Lightning Bolt.

Maelstrom Weapon stacks are generated both from a flat chance from any special melee attack, or guaranteed through Elemental Assault and Swirling Maelstrom. Managing this and making sure to avoid any waste is key, as it provides huge damage. Alongside this, Feral Spirit amplifies the damage of different elements epending on the wolf that spawns, and is cycled very quickly via the Witch Doctor's Ancestry cooldown reduction.

Aside from this core, there are also some additional buttons and talents that are regularly taken in the sample build that you need to keep in mind:

• Primordial Wave has a 30-second cooldown and deals extremely high damage, and also hits any other targets affected by Flame Shock. It also triggers the Splintered Elements effect when consumed.
• Hot Hand triggers from auto-attacks, drastically reducing the cooldown of Lava Lash for 8 seconds. While this is active, every other GCD should be Lava Lash until it ends.
• Ice Strike and Hailstorm both empower Frost Shock into a powerful finisher. These are consumed ideally together, but should not be prioritized over the above two points.
• Stormstrike is more of a filler tool with this build that is used to generate Maelstrom Weapon when other, more important abilities are not available.

In AoE, Enhancement plays similarly but it adds in Crash Lightning, which causes your melee strikes to also trigger an AoE splash effect that can generate Maelstrom Weapon. That means in these situations we have significantly higher resource generation to make use of. We also replace our Maelstrom Weapon spender of choice with Chain Lightning at 3 or more targets.

Some key things to bear in mind with our AoE build are as follows:

• We have a number of effects that trigger from Flame Shock on multiple enemies. Use Lava Lash to spread it from a priority target using Molten Assault.
• Hailstorm plays more of a part here in your cycle, for high bursts of damage when it is set up with Ice Strike.
• Crash Lightning should be maintained at all times.
• Feral Spirit cooldown reduction is much higher, meaning you will be cycling wolves much more often. Due to the set bonus, this also means that Primordial Wave has a drastically reduced cooldown too, alongside a much higher uptime on Splintered Elements.
• Lashing Flames means there is value to tabbing between targets to apply it to multiple enemies to apply Flame Shock. This can be quite involved in larger pulls though, so if it is too hectic you should focus on other things.
• Sundering deals heavy AoE damage on a 40-second cooldown. This can also be used as an interrupt tool as well.

Astral Shift provides a 40% damage reduction for 12 seconds on a 1.5-minute cooldown (using Planes Traveler). This is Enhancement's strongest defensive tool, and while it has a longer cooldown than most defensives provides a lot of safety while active.

Earth Elemental grants 15% maximum health and 5% damage reduction for 1-minute, on a 5-minute cooldown. This is a "backup" cooldown when you cannot use Astral Shift, and can cover very long periods of time. It does, however, have a habit of getting itself killed due to its taunting, so be wary of using it if it will bother your tank.

Stone Bulwark Totem provides a 15% max health absorb shield, and an additional 1.5% one every 5 seconds for 30 seconds, on a 2-minute cooldown. This is a decent survival tool against burst damage with some additional help against rot effects, but its long cooldown makes it inflexible. Totemic Recall can be used to reset this cooldown, as we do not really have any other important totems to use the reset on.

Spirit Wolf provides up to a 20% damage reduction after remaining in Ghost Wolf for an extended period. This is a last resort defensive tool if you have nothing else available, as we cannot deal any damage in this state.

Maelstrom Weapon can be used to make Healing Surge instant, providing strong burst healing to ourselves, but this comes at a very high cost of damage by spending our offensive resources to do so.

Earth Shield grants a modest amount of healing over the course of an encounter with each charge consumed, and increases the healing we do to ourselves while active. This has a high GCD requirement to maintain, but does provide some extra sustain if used pro-actively.