Enhancement Shaman DPS Guide — The War Within (Season 1)

Enhancement is a melee specialization with a heavy emphasis on both Physical attacks and Elemental spells, weaving both together in a fast-paced "battle-mage" combat style and with a variety of effects that enhance your main abilities.

The gameplay is fairly unique in that it has no fixed resource, instead having 3 central pillars: juggling different ability cooldowns, your stacks of the Maelstrom Weapon effect, and some key procs. This means you will be cycling abilities on cooldown in order of priority, depending on the situation. We can adapt well to different target counts and excel whenever an additional target is present, having access to funnel, cleave, and burst AoE tools. It also has a somewhat unique quality of having two distinct build loadouts that play very differently, all contained in one specialization. Lastly, as a Shaman, it also provides the Skyfury group buff.

Strengths

• Variety of damage profiles, with short cooldown timers, Especially with the Stormbringer Hero Tree.
• Powerful Single Target potential for Raid encounters.
• Strong at 2-6 target cleave and AoE, while also having funnel tools for priority targets, making it flexible for Mythic+.
• Varied control and utility toolkit for Mythic+.
• Good mobility with a tool for most situations.
• Off-healing ability 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.
• One Hero Talent is tuned extremely poorly, limiting options.
• Reliant on uptime, making high movement encounters and intermissions very punishing.
• Playstyle has a steep learning curve when getting started.
• Requires many available keybinds to play effectively.
• Needs defensive planning and foresight to deal with repeated one shot mechanics.
• 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). 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.
• 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.

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.