Enhancement Shaman DPS Guide — The War Within Pre-Patch

Enhancement is a melee specialization with a heavy emphasis on both Physical attacks and Elemental spells, weaving both together in a fast-paced combat style and an emphasis on effects that amplify the strength of different abilities.

The gameplay has 3 central pillars: juggling different ability cooldowns, your stacks of the Maelstrom Weapon effect, and reacting to procs. This means you will often be cycling your abilities on cooldown in order of priority, with some excelling in different scenarios. We can adapt well to different target counts and excel whenever an additional target is present to make use of our funnel, cleave, and burst AoE tools. It is also somewhat unique in that it has two very distinct build loadouts that play very differently all while being contained in one specialization. We also come with a solid utility toolkit for dungeons, and as a Shaman we also provide the Skyfury group buff.

Strengths

• Variety of damage profiles, with short cooldown timers.
• Powerful Single Target potential.
• Strong at 2-6 target cleave and AoE.
• Has access to funnel tools, converting AoE damage into a priority target.
• Powerful instant burst tools and single target.
• Varied control toolkit for Mythic+.
• Good mobility with a tool for most situations.
• Off-healing tools to assist the group.
• Skyfury provides benefits to your group, especially melee.

Weaknesses

• Some builds are hard capped at 6 targets with AoE tools, and requires tab-targeting to maximize.
• Reliant on uptime, so you are heavily punished by high movement encounters or intermissions.
• Punishing playstyle with a steep learning curve when getting started.
• Requires many available keybinds to play effectively.
• Defensively quite weak to frequent damage, which can be an issue in high end content.
• Every build has an RNG factor to deal with.

If you are interested in playing Enhancement but still need to get a Shaman at max level, we have a leveling guide with tips to help you along your journey.

After reaching max level, it can sometimes be difficult to immediately include new add-ons and UI elements you are not used to, and make the transition to end-game play is quite jarring. Due to that, we recommend grabbing some of the essential add-ons on our dedicated page when you are learning the spec to make the transition smoother when learning to play Enhancement.

Enhancement gameplay revolves around several different interlinking gameplay loops that are often all happening at once, creating a fast-paced experience that is heavy on planning mixed with reactive decision-making. The three core loops it needs to maintain are:

• Manage your Maelstrom Weapon stacks. This fuels our most powerful abilities, consuming stacks to become instant ( Elemental Blast, Lava Burst, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning). Moreso than ever, generating as much of this resource as possible and avoiding waste by going above 10 stacks is key to executing Enhancement correctly.
• Keep your rotational abilities on cooldown as much as possible. This is secondary to our Maelstrom management, but is still very important as it is often the best source of generating stacks. This requires you to look forward in the rotation, consider where gaps may appear, and adjust your plan mid-flow. This is the main decision-making portion of the spec.
• React to procs. This is the last component and what causes the rotation to fluctuate. Keeping up with powerful procs like Ascendance and Hot Hand windows to get the most out of them is core to any build that uses them.

If you have never played Enhancement before or are new to the design, we recommend looking through our Spell Summary first, as that covers all of the individual abilities alongside our Easy Mode page, which provides a quick primer to get you started.

While we always recommend simming yourself for ideal results, we do provide a dedicated Enhancement gearing page that lists the Best in Slot items to look out for in the War Within pre-patch.

Once you have started to gear, you should ideally have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more to go alongside your new items. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, and the stats page, where you can find more information on our stat priority and any necessary changes you may need to make with consumables.

The end-game playstyle of Enhancement looks very different from the one you use to level due to the longer form of combat in the encounters you experience. Because of this, we provide Mythic+, Raiding, and PvP-focused guides that are aimed at each content type.

If you are looking for an answer to a specific question, often these are common queries many players have. We keep pages that cover the most frequently asked questions and also mistakes players tend to run into.

As the pre-patch is mostly unbalanced due to the primary focus being shifted to level 80 content coming in The War Within, predicting how these few weeks will shake out is very difficult. Enhancement still has all of the same reasons to be brought to a raid as before, although it is no longer unique due to Skyfury being shared with all Shaman specs. It still has the Season 4 set bonus providing a lot of power, and as such the spec should be more than capable of doing any leftover Dragonflight activities comfortably.