Enhancement Shaman DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (Season 1)
On this page, you will learn how to optimize the rotation of your Enhancement Shaman in both single-target and multiple-target situations. We also have advanced sections about cooldowns, procs, etc. in order to minmax your DPS. All our content is updated for World of Warcraft — The War Within (Season 1).
If you were looking for WotLK Classic content, please refer to our WotLK Classic Enhancement Shaman rotation.
Enhancement Shaman Rotation Guide for The War Within
Welcome to the Rotation section of our Enhancement Shaman guide that goes over everything you need to know about the gameplay in Raid and Mythic+ scenarios. If you came here without first checking over the Spell List/Glossary page, we recommend that you do so if you are new to the specialization.
Enhancement Shaman Rotations
Each of the sections below explain the rotation for Enhancement at different target counts. Click the boxes to switch to the desired damage type. We currently recommend Stormbringer Storm in single-target raid situations and Elementalist in cleave and Mythic+.
Enhancement Shaman Rotation
Hero Talents | |
---|---|
Stormbringer | Totemic |
Talent Selections | ||
---|---|---|
Ascendance | Crash Lightning | Deeply Rooted Elements |
Doom Winds | Elemental Blast | Elemental Spirits |
Fire Nova | Hailstorm | Hot Hand |
Ice Strike | Lava Lash | Lashing Flames |
Primordial Wave | Static Accumulation | Sundering |
Thorim's Invocation | Arc Discharge | Earthsurge |
Enhancement Shaman Single Target Rotation
Enhancement Shaman plays with a priority list that focuses on managing your Maelstrom Weapon stacks and keeping your main abilities on cooldown while reacting to procs. Enhancement tends to take a bit of time building up muscle memory so you know what to focus on, and what to ignore.
- Cast Feral Spirit.
Enhancement has a strong ebb and flow that you will slowly get a feel for when playing, as the general "feel" of Maelstrom Weapon and ability cooldowns is a pattern you learn. Reacting to quick bursts of stack generation and procs is very important, as is making sure you are always active each Global Cooldown. Quick notes (populated based on tool choices) are:
Enhancement Shaman AoE Rotation
Enhancement AoE gets very busy due to the number of different tools we have. While there are additions, the core focus is maintaining Crash Lightning for additional Maelstrom Weapon, and spending that on Chain Lightning.
- Cast Feral Spirit.
- Cast Frost Shock and Flame Shock to fill.
While our AoE priority when populated with other abilities can be quite overwhelming at first glance, many things are dictated by quite simple rules. Generally, maintaining Crash Lightning when possible and making sure to spend Maelstrom Weapon without wasting any is the central focus, while weaving in your chosen rotational abilities / cooldowns, while casting Feral Spirit as frequently as possible. Key notes based on your rotation tool selections are:
Enhancement Shaman Opening Rotation
Our opener changes quite a lot depending on build and target count. Use the tool below to adjust the display based on the fight style, and it will populate depending on your choices in the rotation tool.
Encounter Type | |
---|---|
Single-target | AoE |
- Cast Feral Spirit
- Continue with normal ability priority.
Enhancement has quite a few things to set up before it can get started when entering combat, but once its major cooldowns are rolling you can usually transition smoothly into our priority list. Key notes to bear in mind are:
- Feral Spirit is always cast very early to make sure it overlaps all of our other opening burst effects.
Enhancement Shaman Hero Talent Changes —
Note that this section is populated based on your selection in the rotation tool.
Simplified Enhancement Shaman Rotation for Beginners
With Enhancement's rotation being very overwhelming at a glance, you may benefit from visiting our Quick Guide page to get yourself started. This outlines all the key points you need to hit on in a more digestible way.
Understanding Enhancement Shaman Mechanics
In the below sections are a number of explanations on exactly how some of the core components of how Enhancement works. It dives into the underlying mechanics of major cooldowns and rotational abilities to get a better understanding of exactly why you are pressing each button.
Enhancement Shaman Major Cooldowns
Throughout the talent tree, there are a variety of different cooldown options that provide burst windows in different ways, many with different interactions. Below, we go over the ways they impact the rotation and how you should use them.
Major Cooldowns
Feral Spirit
Feral Spirit summons two wolves to fight with you for 15 seconds on a 90-second cooldown. When this is cast, you instantly generate one stack of Maelstrom Weapon and gain an additional Maelstrom Weapon stack every 3 seconds for their duration. The first follow-up talent, Witch Doctor's Ancestry, reduces the cooldown by 1 second every time you generate a stack of Maelstrom Weapon, which reduces the cooldown to roughly 20-30 seconds in active combat. This means in endgame combat, this is much more of a rotational ability rather than a big cooldown moment, as uptime is extremely high.
While active, the physical damage of your abilities (not including auto attacks) is increased by 15% per active wolf, stacking multiplicatively - meaning the default effect before other stacking buffs is 32.25% increased physical damage. This physical buff can be paired with our other physical cooldowns, such as Doom Winds and Sundering, to devastating effect.
Feral Spirit Capstones
Feral Spirit also has a choice of two capstones to empower it further, both with very different effects:
- Elemental Spirits replaces the physical damage buff with a pool of 3 different elemental wolves that buff either fire, frost, or nature damage by 20% chosen at random. This puts a significantly higher focus on the magic damage you deal with your tree, and is often paired with similar builds and effects to make sure our wolves are amplifying a damage type that aligns with our build.
- Alpha Wolf causes Chain Lightning and Crash Lightning casts to make each individual Feral Spirit pulse for uncapped, armor-ignoring physical damage to all nearby enemies every 2 seconds for 8 seconds. This affects any wolf spawned through any means and turns the ability into a stronger AoE tool.
Ascendance
Ascendance has two methods of activation — either with the active ability on a 3-minute cooldown for 15 seconds, or through procs triggered by Stormstrike using Deeply Rooted Elements for 6 seconds. While this is active, Stormstrike's cooldown is significantly reduced and both it and your auto-attacks are replaced with 30-yard range, armor-ignoring alternatives in Windstrike and Windlash. While active we generally aim to cast Windstrike as often as possible, but the base cooldown is quite weak. Instead, a lot of value is from the follow-up talents.
Ascendance Follow-up Talents
Whenever playing these nodes, it is highly recommended to complete the entire talent row with both follow-up talents.
- Static Accumulation — each point causes you to generate one Maelstrom Weapon per second while Ascendance is active, and spending Maelstrom Weapon on Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning has a 10% chance per point to fully refund the amount spent. This is an enormous source of resource generation and often alters our priorities.
- Thorim's Invocation — increases the damage of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning by 20%, and causes Windstrike to also spend up to 5 Maelstrom Weapon to discharge either Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning, depending on your most recent cast. With this taken it means no matter your build you will want to cast Windstrike on cooldown, as it both generates and spends Maelstrom Weapon at the same time.
Primordial Wave
Casting Primordial Wave does heavy Elemental damage, and applies Flame Shock to your target when it lands. After casting this, your next Lightning Bolt cast is empowered, echoing 175% of its normal damage to your target and any other enemy affected by Flame Shock. This has a 30-second cooldown, so serves as a good additional cooldown to set up on a target, and is incredibly powerful for dealing burst AoE damage provided you set Flame Shock up properly. This can be taken as a single talent point and a lot of builds do so, but it does have some useful follow-ups talents.
Primordial Wave Follow-up Talents
Both follow-up talents have been reduced in value going into The War Within relative to the rest of our toolkit, so are generally less appealing.
- Primal Maelstrom — each point causes Primordial Wave to generate 5 Maelstrom Weapon. This is extremely nice quality of life and serves as a resource reset, but its raw power is not very high.
- Splintered Elements — consuming the Primordial Wave effect grants you 10% Haste, plus an additional 4% for each extra Lightning Bolt echo you trigger. This is good for getting started in a pull and especially nice for AoE, but due to the reduction to 10% in The War Within is falls quite short of being desirable for most builds.
Doom Winds
Doom Winds deals minor physical damage to your target and empowers you for 8 seconds, tripling your chance to activate Windfury Weapon and increasing the damage of your Windfury Weapon attacks by 10%. While the buff is active; you should aim to fit as many main-hand abilities within the window as possible without sacrificing Maelstrom Weapon spenders. Our main-hand attacks include:
- Stormstrike
- Ice Strike
- Crash Lightning
- Sundering
These abilities will take precedence over most actions during Doom Winds windows to fuel additional Windfury Weapon procs. Try to keep an eye on the cooldown so you can prepare to spend resources or get other effects active beforehand, even if they are not regularly at the top of your priority.
A lot of players ask how this is considered an AoE cooldown, and it is due to both Crash Lightning and Sundering counting as direct main-hand strikes to targets hit. This means when they are cast, potentially every target hit is struck by an individual Windfury Weapon attack, dealing both high damage and generating a huge amount of Maelstrom Weapon.
Enhancement Shaman Mechanics Deep Dive
Due to Enhancement having a lot of moving parts and interactions, some of the more specific details about the quirks of our individual abilities are covered here.
Enhancement Shaman Mechanics
Maelstrom Weapon Details
Maelstrom Weapon management is crucial if you intend to play Enhancement at a competitive level. This has a 20% chance to trigger from any melee hit and stacks up to 5 times (or up to 10 times with Raging Maelstrom). Each stack reduces the cast time of your next Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning cast by 20%, and also increases the damage of affected spells by 25% when using Improved Maelstrom Weapon and Raging Maelstrom. At 5 stacks, ability casts that consume this become instant, and only 5 stacks can be consumed at once. When talenting into Overflowing Maelstrom, this is increased to 10 stacks to increase the damage multiplier.
While it is tempting to cast these spells as soon as you hit 5 stacks, you should train yourself to make use of the 10-stack limit granted by Raging Maelstrom. If you are not at risk of overcapping your Maelstrom Weapon stacks, then it makes more sense to focus on keeping your other abilities on cooldown as much as possible. Certain builds approach expenditure differently:
- Stormbringer builds always aim to spend as often as possible in an attempt to fish for Static Accumulation and Supercharge triggers.
- Totemic with Elementalist aims to spend at higher stacks to maximize the damage of Elemental Blast and open up GCDs to cast Lava Lash and Stormstrike.
- Totemic with Storm cares much less about waste, instead prioritizing Stormstrike and using Legacy of the Frost Witch to convert spending into additional resets.
Static Accumulation
Due to the passive refund proc on Static Accumulation, when playing this talent it removes Lava Burst (if you are not playing Elemental Blast) from your rotation. It also raises the priority on Lightning Bolt even at 5 stacks, as the chance to refund here is significantly more valuable than any other generation source.
Crash Lightning Explained
Crash Lightning looks simple on the surface but has many moving parts and is an essential aspect of Enhancement gameplay. There are some core components to bear in mind with how it works:
- The Crash Lightning buff is triggered for 12 seconds whenever it strikes two targets, and should be maintained in any multi-target situation.
- While active, Stormstrike, Lava Lash and Ice Strike will trigger a separate damage splash event called Crash Lightning.
- All Crash Lightning damage, both active and splash component, can trigger Maelstrom Weapon individually, while only the active cast hits can Stormbringer.
- The initial cast of Crash Lightning can trigger individual Windfury Weapon events on targets hit.
The above means that any time we can get more than one target together, we want to get this active for a free additional boost to our primary strikes. This also leads to additional resources. In AoE situations, this causes a flood of extra Maelstrom Weapon which confers a number of benefits to both builds allowing for extra cooldown access, AoE and funnel. Storm generally uses this as a primary damage delivery tool due to its gameplay structure (and the additional synergy with Forceful Winds, Windfury Weapon and Doom Winds). Elementalist on the other hand uses it as a supporting resource generation tool to fuel other things and raise the value of Lava Lash casts.
Chain Lightning also has two interactions to both increase access to, and amplify the damage of Crash Lightning:
- Each target hit by Chain Lightning reduces the cooldown of Crash Lightning by 1 second (up to a maximum of 5 with Crashing Storms)
- Each target hit by Chain Lightning increases the damage of your next active cast of Crash Lightning by 20% per target hit (up to 100% with Crashing Storms).
This creates a generate-spend relationship between the two that leads to both extra access to the resources to activate it, and increased frontloaded power of the activating tool keeping them both relevant in AoE.
Finally, Gathering Storms can be taken to cause each target hit by the initial Crash Lightning to increase the damage of your next Stormstrike cast by 25% per target hit, stacking up to 6 for a maximum of 150%. This activates even on a single-target, giving a small boost to funnel on priority targets when taken.
Enhancement Shaman Funnel
It is often mentioned that Enhancement has a unique ability to "funnel" damage into priority targets, using extra enemies as fuel to amplify its single-target damage. There are a number of effects throughout the tree that enable this.
Crash Lightning is the primary driver, due to the additional Maelstrom Weapon mentioned in the Crash Lightning section. Alongside this, Ashen Catalyst when played significantly increases in stack rate allowing for more frequent, empowered Lava Lash casts.
With Stormbringer, there is also the added benefit of Conductive Energy. This allows you to make use of tools such as Primordial Wave and Arc Discharge to hit multiple targets with Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning, and convert that into more primary target damage in the process.
Weapon Imbues and Buffs
Your Weapon Imbues should always be active as they confer a strong benefit. Some notes on each are:
- Windfury Weapon - only applied to the main-hand, these additional strikes are considered special attacks and, as such, can generate Maelstrom Weapon and trigger procs such as Stormbringer.
- Flametongue Weapon - only applied to the off-hand, this causes all weapon attacks to trigger an additional hit of fire damage and doubles the damage your Lava Lash deals while active.
While Weapon Imbues do block you from using temporary weapon buffs such as Ironclaw Whetstone, the extra mechanical effects these provide to the Enhancement toolkit make them more valuable and as such we always use them. This is made even more mandatory by the locked-in talent Elemental Weapons, and you should never use double Flametongue Weapon - this confers no benefit.
Lightning Shield should always be kept active in solo content thanks to the additional Maelstrom Weapon it generates, but has little value in group content. Generally, Earth Shield is played instead and maintained for the minor additional sustain it provides.
Group Buffs
Enhancement also brings a small package of extra effects that help the party or specific members of your raid group:
Skyfury
Skyfury, granted by any Shaman provides a flat increase to Mastery rating to all Party and Raid members. It also has additional benefits for melee characters, granting them a 20% chance to proc an additional auto-attack when swinging, with a 0.5-second internal cooldown per player, does not trigger from missed attacks, and can miss itself. These extra attacks count as regular auto-attacks, meaning they proc all on-hit effects, but they do not affect Hunter auto-shots, pets, or guardians.
Mana Spring
This allows us to convert Stormstrike casts into Mana for healers, especially in raid situations. This is even more potent if you are playing a Storm build as this will often be pressing significantly more Stormstrikes. Since points are not very tight on our class tree, this is a great option for many situations should you have room for it.
Flame Shock Explained
Regardless of build, Flame Shock is a core component of your damage (though the degree of its importance depends on talent selections). It plays as both a passive, low-maintenance damage source in single-target and an AoE enabler, meaning that it will be a part of your rotation in almost every situation in most builds. There are some additional details to note when using it that are not quite as intuitive on the surface:
Shocks and Pandemic
In single-target situations, you want to make sure that you keep Flame Shock active at as close to 100% uptime as possible. You can refresh it based on the pandemic window whenever the damage over time effect has less than 5.4 seconds. With Molten Assault, Lava Lash will reapply Flame Shock if it is active on the target of the Lava Lash cast, meaning that it effectively maintains itself with regular gamplay.
Flame Shock Spread
Molten Assault allows the Shaman with an active Flame Shock on their target to apply Flame Shock to nearby targets via Lava Lash casts. This enables a lot of other parts of our AoE kit, such as Fire Nova, Primordial Wave, and Ashen Catalyst. When you cast Lava Lash, it does not just apply the damage over time effect to other targets; rather, it casts an extra Flame Shock on them, dealing the direct damage at the same time.
PvP
The content on this page is purely PvE-related. If you are looking for PvP Rotation Tips, please visit our PvP page below.
Addons for Enhancement Shaman Rotation
Check out our Addons page below for some recommended Addons to get the most out of your Enhancement Shaman!
Macros for Enhancement Shaman Rotation
Check out our Macros page below for some recommended Macros to get the most out of your Enhancement Shaman!
Changelog
- 23 Sep. 2024: Updated for most recent hotfixes and Storm build switch.
- 09 Sep. 2024: Updated for Elemental Blast and Tempest hotfixes along with new Storm loadouts.
- 21 Aug. 2024: Updated for The War Within.
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Updated for Season 4.
- 21 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6, condensed insights section.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2, slight structure changes but content remains accurate.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2 and restructured the rotation tool.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Restructured cooldown section, but no content changes needed for 10.1.7.
- 14 Jul. 2023: Added build loadout buttons to switches for easier rotation display.
- 13 Jul. 2023: Cleaned up AoE rotation section with improvements for Storm.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.5 to remove 4-piece use from Storm and highlight Stormstrike over spenders.
- 04 May 2023: Tweaks to rotation tool, added warnings to false talent combinations.
- 01 May 2023: Overhauled for Patch 10.1 updates, with Storm builds, rotation tool updates, T30 bonuses and added sections.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed and improved rotation tool to align closer to current gameplay.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Added Tier Set section.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Shaman Guides
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This guide has been written by Wordup, a frequent theorycrafter involved in a number of class communities. He is also an experienced player who has been in the world top 100 since the days of Sunwell, currently raiding in Echoes. You can also follow him on Twitter.
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