Enhancement Shaman DPS Guide — Shadowlands 9.0.2

Enhancement in Shadowlands relies on juggling different ability cooldowns and the Maelstrom Weapon effect to form a cyclical rotation. This means you will often be using all of your abilities on cooldown, with some of them excelling in different scenarios. We can adapt well to different target counts and maintain the sustained single-target and funneling components from previous expansions as well. We still struggle with survivability and our self-healing has been reduced, but our utility toolkit for dungeons remains intact. We also have access to Windfury Totem as an extra boost to other melee players in our party, granting us unique damage-increasing utility.

Strengths

• Sustained single-target and cleave-focused damage profile.
• Flexible, can mesh with a number of different encounter styles and target counts.
• Able to funnel AoE and cleave into single-target, gaining a large amount of priority target damage.
• Versatile group utility toolkit for dungeons.
• Good mobility via Spirit Walk and Ghost Wolf.
• Windfury Totem boosts other melee in your group.

Weaknesses

• Can have high variance, due to Stormbringer and Maelstrom Weapon proc rates.
• Reliant on uptime, so can be punished in very high movement encounters.
• Very fragile, with a low number of defensive tools, which is rough for melee.
• Punishing playstyle that requires you to be on the ball at all times to manage cooldowns.

Due to the extent of the changes to Enhancement in Shadowlands, you can look at our maintained list of Shadowlands expansion changes at the link below:

If you are interested in playing Enhancement, but do not yet have 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 addons and UI elements you are not used to, and makes the transition to end-game play quite jarring. Due to that, we recommend grabbing some of the basic addons on our dedicated page when you are learning the spec, to make the transition smoother when learning to play Enhancement.

Enhancement in Shadowlands is focused around managing a number of individual spell cooldowns that, while they do not cost anything, have different timers that need to be used in varying orders to prevent downtime. This is paired with two proc effects - Maelstrom Weapon and Stormbringer, that provide a mix-up to your regular rotation cycles.

The core concept is to make sure that you keep Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Crash Lightning, and Frost Shock/ Flame Shock on cooldown and make use of every Global Cooldown you can. You should also be weaving in casts of Lightning Bolt/ Chain Lightning whenever your Maelstrom Weapon stacks allow (making sure not to waste any by going over 10), as they are made instant whenever you have 5 available.

If you have never played Enhancement before or are new to the Shadowlands 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 some items to look out for alongside some Best in Slot picks for the first season of Shadowlands.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.

The end-game playstyle of Enhancement will look very different from the one you use to level, due to the longer encounters you experience. Due to that, we provide Mythic+, Torghast, Raiding, and PvP focused guides that are aimed at each content type.

Sometimes it can be difficult to pin-point exactly what it is that is causing you to do poorly, but do not worry, many of these questions come up for players. Because of this, we have set up pages that cover common questions and target frequent mistakes below.