Enhancement Shaman DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.1
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 — Dragonflight 10.1.
If you were looking for WotLK Classic content, please refer to our WotLK Classic Enhancement Shaman rotation.
Enhancement Shaman Rotation
Welcome to the Rotation section of our Enhancement Shaman guide. 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. Understanding what your spells and abilities do will make it much easier to understand what is discussed on this page.
If you are looking for an introductory primer to get started and find the full breakdowns overwhelming, you can always start with our Easy Mode page to get yourself started with a close-to-optimal build and a more straightforward breakdown. While the recommendations on the page below are not strictly optimal for endgame, they provide an excellent springboard to get to grips with the core gameplay Enhancement focuses on:
In addition to your rotation in general content, there is also a separate section of this guide devoted to how your playstyle may change in Mythic+ as situations are often less scripted and more hectic. Please take a look at the page below if you are looking for more tailored information for that content:
PvP
The content on this page is purely PvE-related. If you are looking for PvP Rotation Tips, please visit our PvP page below.
Enhancement Shaman Single Target Rotation
Enhancement Shaman plays with a priority list that focuses on managing your
Maelstrom Weapon stacks and keep as many of your
abilities on cooldown as often as possible while reacting to procs as they
happen. After playing for a while, you will gain intuition on
the state of your cooldowns and be able to predict
what you will be pressing in the next few globals. Learning this skill
is invaluable to maximizing your performance when playing Enhancement.
We have provided rotation switches below that allow you to populate the priority list based on talents we recommend in the Talents section. Check each box based on your current talents. We have currently set the tool to a default Elementalist build due to its popularity, but use the tool below to switch talent selections:
- Cast
Lava Burst if at 5 or more stacks of
Maelstrom Weapon
- Cast
Lightning Bolt if at 10 stacks of
Maelstrom Weapon
- Cast
Flame Shock if it is not currently active on your target.
- Cast
Lava Lash.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Frost Shock.
- Refresh
Flame Shock.
The more that you play with Enhancement, the more you will adjust to the ebb
and flow of each ability cooldown and know when you need to fill with Maelstrom Weapon
spenders. Making sure that you react to quick bursts of stack generation
alongside
Stormbringer /
Hot Hand procs while keeping yourself
active with every Global cooldown. Alongside this, it cannot be stated enough that avoiding
Maelstrom Weapon waste is more important than ever in Dragonflight,
so keeping on top of this - and planning when you need to dump - is
the first skill you should focus on learning.
Ascendance with Elementalist builds is a new addition
in Patch 10.1, which in single-target situations turns it into a huge
generator via
Static Accumulation. You still ideally want to
be casting
Windstrikes where it can slot in, but ideally aim
to keep
Thorim's Invocation primed to
Lightning Bolt.
This can be difficult during the new 4-piece bonus window,
which is explained in its section later on.
Static Accumulation alters the priority by drastically raising
Lightning Bolt spending even at 5
Maelstrom Weapon stacks
due to how much value is in the reset, regardless of the build being played.
It also removes
Lava Burst entirely from the rotation if you are
playing it, but not
Elemental Blast.
Enhancement Shaman AoE rotation
Similar to the single-target rotation section, use the checkboxes below to
populate the list underneath. The one assumed talent here is Molten Assault,
as it is taken in virtually every AoE build and sets up
Flame Shock spread
gameplay:
- Cast
Lava Lash if
Flame Shock is active on your target and you do not have the maximum number of active
Flame Shocks.
- Cast
Flame Shock if it is not active on any targets.
- Cast
Chain Lightning if at 10 stacks of
Maelstrom Weapon.
- Cast
Lava Lash.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Chain Lightning at 5 or more stacks of
Maelstrom Weapon.
- Refresh
Windfury Totem.
- Cast
Flame Shock
- Cast
Frost Shock.
While it can be overwhelming at first glance to look at all of
the different components in Enhancement's AoE toolkit, many things
are dictated by how you have built your talent tree. In Dragonflight, there
are many different paths you can take for your AoE damage delivery, and each
talent setup or encounter type has a different approach. This has
created more nuance in managing your buffs, procs, and resources, but
the main cornerstone remains — avoid wasting Maelstrom Weapon
by casting
Chain Lightning as much as possible (
Overflowing Maelstrom
is invaluable here to dump more at once) and weave in
Crash Lightning
between these casts. This is capped off by a suite of powerful cooldowns mixed in as often as possible.
An important thing to note is that Chain Lightning enters
in as your main
Maelstrom Weapon as soon as a second target is
present. The only exception to this rule is if you are playing
Elemental Blast,
which remains worth casting at 3 or below targets.
Patch 10.1 adds in the new set bonus focused on Sundering that sends it
way up the priority to activate both buffs, but the charges are usually
consumed naturally by our AoE cycle. It has also significantly improved
Fire Nova, adding it to the new Storm build, but otherwise many of the
same rules we had previously are in place here.
Enhancement Shaman Opening Rotation
The opening sequence has some minor quirks if you select specific talents, so if you are using any of these, set them in the tool below:
Talent Selections | ||
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T30 2-piece |
- Cast
Flame Shock on the way into melee to get it active.
- Cast
Stormstrike to generate
Maelstrom Weapon and get it on cooldown.
- Cast
Lava Burst as soon as you reach 5+
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
- Continue with the normal priority list.
Where you go from here depends entirely on your resource state with
Maelstrom Weapon, if
Stormbringer or other procs have
activated, and what other talents you have selected. You will often go down
the priority list, get your cooldowns cycling and building up a pool of
resources and move on with the priority from there.
Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible Set bonus for Enhancement Shaman
Season 2 introduces the Runes of the Cinderwolf set, available from Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible. This set grants the following bonuses:
-
Shaman Enhancement 10.1 Class Set 2pc casting
Sundering increases your Mastery by 24% for 15 seconds.
-
Shaman Enhancement 10.1 Class Set 4pc your
Sundering also increases all Fire and Physical damage dealt by 20%, and causes your next two
Chain Lightning casts to deal 100% increased damage and refund 50% of
Maelstrom Weapon spent.
Both of these bonuses require you to play Sundering to get
any value and drastically warp your rotation to play around a new
burst window. There are a number of quirks that you need to bear in mind
for different situations when using this:
- In single-target, the 4-piece does require you to use
the charges related to
Chain Lightning, as these are not only more valuable than alternative spenders, but the
Maelstrom Weapon refund makes it highly efficient.
Chain Lightning refunds contribute to
Witch Doctor's Ancestry, and can also proc a full refund from
Static Accumulation.
Sundering does buff itself with the 4-piece bonus, but not get affected by the 2-piece.
- The 4-piece bonus currently double-dips on multi-school
spells such as
Sundering and
Fire Nova, making it's quite potent.
This is ideally layered with our other cooldown windows such as Doom Winds
and
Splintered Elements, and creates a period of resource flood,
but there are still clashes in resource management due to
Elemental Blast.
You should aim to always spend both charges of
Crackling Thunder,
so be aware of your resource state before spending without a way to recover.
Both of the multiplier buffs do not significantly alter our regular priority and will mostly overlap with abilities that benefit from the effect naturally. You should aim to swap to this bonus as soon as you get the 4-piece, but not before if you are using T29. This is due to the extremely useful burst and AoE benefits it confers, emphasizing our strengths.
Vault of the Incarnates Set bonus for Enhancement Shaman
Season 1 introduced the Elements of Infused Earth set, available from Vault of the Incarnates, granting the following bonuses:
-
Enhancement Shaman 2pc causes
Stormstrike casts to increase the damage of your next direct Fire, Frost, or Nature spell by 10%, and generate a charge of
Maelstrom Weapon.
-
Enhancement Shaman 4pc causes your
Maelstrom Weapon consuming spells to grant 1% Haste per stack consumed for 3 seconds.
These bonuses are strong and provide good power gains for both builds. Neither effect drastically alters the rotation, but they have a significant effect on resource generation and smoothing and remain relevant going into the start of Season 2.
You should aim to hold onto this until you have completed the entire 4-piece from the new set, especially if playing a Storm build.
Enhancement Shaman Major Cooldowns
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
mainhand attacks include:
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 cooldowns active beforehand, even if they are not regularly at the
top of your priority. Also, make sure not to use it just before downtime or you
will waste the effect, as making use of these windows is crucial. If paired with
Ascendance, make sure to use it after shifting form to
overlap the buffs as much as possible.
Primordial Wave
Primordial Wave deals light shadow damage and applies
Flame Shock to your target. When used, your next
Lightning Bolt
will be empowered, echoing for 150% of its normal damage against all enemies
currently affected by your
Flame Shock. With
Primal Maelstrom,
casting
Primordial Wave will also generate 5/10 stacks of
Maelstrom Weapon, allowing you to easily combo your
Primordial Wave-empowered
Lightning Bolt with
Overflowing Maelstrom. Finally, with
Splintered Elements, each
Lightning Bolt echoed by
Primordial Wave will grant a stacking
haste buff for 12 seconds - up to 60% haste with 6 active
Flame Shocks,
giving you a window that can be used to unleash powerful burst AoE or funnel
damage. Due to its relatively short cooldown, you should plan around these
windows, ideally dumping your
Maelstrom Weapon and using this to refill immediately.
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. 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. With
Witch Doctor's Ancestry, the cooldown of
Feral Spirit is reduced by 1/2 seconds every time you generate a stack
of
Maelstrom Weapon.
The Feral Spirit capstone talents allow you to customize the effects
of your cooldown even further, with
Elemental Spirits replacing the
Physical buff provided by the wolves with random 20% fire, frost, or nature
buffs, or
Alpha Wolf causing your wolves to be empowered by your
Crash Lightning or
Chain Lightning casts for 8 seconds, pulsing
light, armor-ignoring Physical damage to all enemies around them every 2 seconds
which can result in a lot of extra uncapped AoE damage. This package is a staple
in virtually all Enhancement builds, and it thrives on high
Maelstrom Weapon
generation to fuel even more casts for higher uptime on the respective buffs.
This is treated more as a rotational cooldown in endgame play than a big
cooldown movement due to this frequency, so always aim to keep them on
cooldown cycling to the next use.
Ascendance
Ascendance is a long cooldown that deals a huge AoE burst
when it is either manually cast or randomly triggered via
Deeply Rooted Elements, and also gives 15 seconds of sustained
single-target damage by converting our
Stormstrike and auto-attacks
into ranged, armor-ignoring attacks.
Static Accumulation enhances this
burst window, causing you to generate
Maelstrom Weapon stacks
every second while in the form passively. Finally,
Thorim's Invocation greatly amplifies
the burst potential of the cooldown, causing your
Windstrike to
automatically consume up to 5
Maelstrom Weapon stacks to
discharge a
Lightning Bolt or
Chain Lightning at your enemy,
whichever you most recently used. This is especially useful as during the
window; you are often flooded with resources without having spare Global
Cooldowns to use them, so this allows us to siphon stacks efficiently.
Elementalist Ascendance
New to Patch 10.1 is the addition of Ascendance to Elementalist
talent builds. While most of the benefit is gaining access to
Static Accumulation's
refund effect, while this is active, there can be a number of clashes to
keep in mind. This is exacerbated by the T30 set as well, so there are
some rules:
- Still try and keep
Elemental Blast recharging
- If you ever reach a point where
Feral Spirit may come off cooldown fast enough to have 4 wolves active; make sure to have 10
Maelstrom Weapon for a last-second
Elemental Blast.
- When using the 4-piece bonus, following the two
Chain Lightning casts, you should ideally try to weave in a regular cast of
Lightning Bolt between
Windstrike casts if you have the Maelstrom spare. This is to reset
Thorim's Invocation to single-target.
Dragonflight Enhancement Shaman Insights
Weapon Imbues and Buffs
You should always make sure you have both Windfury Weapon and
Flametongue Weapon imbued on your weapons. These contribute greatly
to your damage and ability proc rates, and missing them will hurt you greatly.
You should also keep
Lightning Shield active if you are facing
enemies that will strike you in melee, as the extra
Maelstrom Weapon
charges can be converted into more damage or healing.
You always require both imbues active to activate Elemental Weapons
(which should always be taken). Do not try and double buff
Flametongue Weapon - it does nothing for our damage.
Maelstrom Weapon Details
Maelstrom Weapon management is important if you intend to play
Enhancement at a competitive level. This has a 16% 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 it can also
increase the damage of affected spells by 0-25% per stack consumed, depending on
how many points you have invested into
Improved Maelstrom Weapon and
Raging Maelstrom. By default, only 5 stacks can be consumed at once, at
which point the affected spell will be instant cast; however,
Overflowing Maelstrom allows you to consume up to 10
Maelstrom Weapon stacks per spell, greatly increasing the amount of
damage done per cast.
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; however, do not use other
abilities at the expense of wasting
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
Static Accumulation
Due to the newly added Static Accumulation refund, 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.
Windfury Totem
Windfury Totem currently provides a solid boost to anyone in your
party, meaning up to 4 other melee players can gain an advantage from this
effect in a raid. This has a 20% chance to proc per auto-attack with a
0.5-second internal cooldown per player, but will only trigger from main-hand
swings. 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
Patch 10.0.5 removed the link with a stationary totem for this talent and
doubled the effect, allowing us to bring Mana to healers, especially
in raid situations. This is even more potent if you are playing a Physical
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.
Crash Lightning Explained
Crash Lightning looks simple on the surface but has many moving
parts and is an essential aspect of Enhancement gameplay. While the buff is
active, the Nature damage proc triggered by your
Stormstrike,
Lava Lash and
Ice Strike casts can activate in single target, so finding opportunities to activate the buff will improve your
priority-target damage. Second, any hits from the initial strike have a
chance to trigger
Stormbringer due to them being counted as a
weapon strike, so try to hit as many targets as possible with the initial cast.
Any instance of
Crash Lightning (cast or buff) can also generate a stack of
Maelstrom Weapon, leading to a huge flood of resources in AoE
situations. Finally, these hits all have a chance to trigger
Windfury Weapon on targets struck by the cast, emphasizing the
importance of hitting multiple enemies. This is even more important when
using
Forceful Winds, which can gain multiple stacks per
Crash Lightning cast.
Crash Lightning is also augmented by your
Chain Lightning
casts, increasing the cast damage by 20% per target hit (up to a maximum of 100%
buff with
Crashing Storms), making
Crash Lightning a good
follow-up. It can also be talented to trigger the
Gathering Storms
effect, boosting the damage of your next
Stormstrike cast by 25% per
target hit, up to a maximum bonus of 150%, allowing you to funnel more damage
into a priority target.
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 the
rotation.
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.
Changelog
- 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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