Enhancement Shaman DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within Pre-Patch
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 Pre-Patch.
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 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, visit our PvP page below.
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.
Enhancement Shaman Rotation
The buttons below can be used to select between curated Elementalist and Storm loadouts. You can also use the switches below to add or remove individual talents you may also be using:
Talent Selections | ||
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Season 4 Set |
Enhancement Shaman Single Target Rotation
Enhancement Shaman plays with a priority list that focuses on managing your
Maelstrom Weapon stacks and keeping your abilities on cooldown as
often as possible. In between that, there are some procs to manage, but after
playing for a while, you will gain the muscle memory to predict your next few
globals fairly consistently. Learning this skill is invaluable to maximizing
your performance when playing Enhancement.
- Cast
Lava Burst with 5+
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
- Cast
Lightning Bolt if at 10
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
- Cast
Flame Shock if it is not currently active on your target.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Frost Shock to fill.
- Refresh
Flame Shock to fill.
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 focus on Maelstrom Weapon
management. Making sure that you react to quick bursts of stack generation
alongside
Stormbringer /
Hot Hand procs, all while keeping yourself
active with every Global cooldown. Important quick notes are:
Enhancement Shaman AoE Rotation
AoE has a variety of different delivery methods for Enhancement dictated
by the build you are currently playing. Predominantly, though, its goal is
to maintain Crash Lightning to convert single-target abilities into
AoE, and use
Chain Lightning to spend
Maelstrom Weapon.
- Cast
Lava Lash with
Flame Shock present on your target and less than 6 total active
Flame Shocks.
- Cast
Flame Shock on an unaffected target if you have less than 6 active.
- Cast
Chain Lightning if at 10
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
- Cast
Stormstrike.
- Cast
Chain Lightning at 5+
Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
- Cast
Flame Shock to fill
- Cast
Frost Shock to fill.
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. There are two different
archetypes, each with some choices regarding how you approach
AoE delivery, and their own strengths and weaknesses in encounters.
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 and maintain
Crash Lightning
to make your single-target strikes splash. This is capped off by a suite
of powerful cooldowns used as often as we can. Some notes are:
- Your main
Maelstrom Weapon spender is
Chain Lightning, which you should cast aggressively, as resource generation is much higher and it activates a number of effects. With
Elemental Blast, on the other hand, it remains the best spender until there are 4 or more targets.
Feral Spirit CDR is particularly strong here due to all the extra generation, so watch for them becoming available. Likewise, with the Season 4 bonus, you will be cycling
Primordial Wave much more frequently, and is your highest priority to complete these combos.
Enhancement Funnel as Elementalist
A brief note for Enhancement is that it is also one of the last remaining powerful funnel specs when playing Elementalist due to a number of effects:
- The additional resources allow for much more access to
Maelstrom Weapon spenders and
Feral Spirit activations. We then use this to prioritize single-target spenders such as
Elemental Blast on key targets.
Ashen Catalyst stacks ramp much faster for stronger and more frequent
Lava Lash casts on priority targets.
Crash Lightning converts pure single-target buttons into additional AoE, allowing us to still deal relevant multi-target damage from an anchor target.
Splintered Elements grants additional bonus Haste when you trigger additional
Lightning Bolt echoes on secondary targets.
All of these combine to significantly increase our single-target damage
so long as we have access to secondary targets in an encounter. This requires
a slight playstyle adjustment of removing some of the exclusively AoE-focused
gameplay portions such as Chain Lightning and cycling
Lashing Flames
to instead go all-in on something that needs to die quickly.
Enhancement Shaman Opening Rotation
Our opener differs slightly depending on if we are in single-target or AoE situations. This is caused by some additional effects we need to set up before we get started, so select below:
Encounter Type | |
---|---|
Single-target | AoE |
- Warning - please select an encounter style!
- Cast
Primordial Wave
Flame Shock on the way into melee to get
Flame Shockit active.
- 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. Quick notes are:
Tier Set Bonus for Enhancement Shaman
During The War Within pre-patch, the Season 4 set bonus from Dragonflight is
still available. The Vision of the Greatwolf Outcast focuses on
Primordial Wave, and grants the following bonuses:
-
Shaman Enhancement 10.2 Class Set 2pc casting
Primordial Wave summons a Lightning
Feral Spirit that increases your Nature damage dealt by 20% for 15 seconds.
-
Shaman Enhancement 10.2 Class Set 4pc causes each individual
Feral Spirit Wolf spawned to reduce the cooldown of
Primordial Wave by 7 seconds.
Both of these bonuses require you to play at least base Primordial Wave
to get any value. Some notes about how the bonuses work:
- The 2-piece activates an individual Lightning imbued
Elemental Spirits wolf and activates the 15-second trickling
Maelstrom Weapon buff. It also triggers
Alpha Wolf pulses.
- The 4-piece provides cooldown reduction for each individual wolf,
meaning that the 2-piece reduces it by 7, and a
Feral Spirit cast by 14 seconds, respectively.
The general rule is that at full value, 14-second cooldown reduction on Primordial Wave
is more valuable than the
Feral Spirit reduction granted via
Primal Maelstrom /
Witch Doctor's Ancestry.
However, in practice, the variable cooldown of Feral Spirit means you will often only be
getting partial reduction, meaning that cycling them as often as possible is usually
for the best. Bear in mind that these cycle often as fast as every 9 seconds, so
keeping momentum is more important than a perfect setup unless you are dealing with
specific mechanics.
Elementalist builds naturally benefit a little bit more because they take
Splintered Elements in all builds. Storm, on the other hand, can
fit this in comfortably while still maintaining its core at the bottom of the tree
thanks to the additional talent point in The War Within.
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
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 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 moderate shadow damage and applies
Flame Shock to your target. When used, your next
Lightning Bolt
will be empowered, echoing for 175% 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 40% 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.
This is our primary setup tool for Elementalist builds and deals excellent,
immediate burst in both single-target and AoE so your cycles should always be
planning around this cast. This is elevated even further by the Season 4 bonus,
which more than doubles the rate at which we can cast this thanks to the frequency
of
Feral Spirit casts.
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 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.
Alpha Wolf, on the other hand, causes 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 is also uncapped. 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 moment 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
Ascendance in Elementalist talent builds have a unique
loop due to how busy the regular priority is. Despite 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 with 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.
Mastering Enhancement Shaman Mechanics
As Enhancement has a lot of moving parts, some of the more specific details around our mechanics can be harder to pick apart. Below are some brief notes on some core mechanics that we make use of in most situations.
Enhancement Insights
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 weapon runes such as
Hissing Rune, 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.
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 it can also
increase the damage of affected spells by up to 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. We generally
aim to spend at around 8 stacks or above, unless certain specific conditions are
met with
Elemental Blast's charge cooldown.
The only time this rule is broken is when playing a Storm
build using Deeply Rooted Elements. This causes
Stormstrike
casts to take all priority over Maelstrom waste, instead making the goal
focused around casting that as much as possible even when capped. Thus, we use
Maelstrom Weapon to trigger
Legacy of the Frost Witch resets
instead to increase our Stormstrike rate.
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.
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, benefiting 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, but does not
trigger from missed attacks and can miss itself. These extra attacks count as
egular 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.
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, and, in AoE situations, can cause 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.
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 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
- 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
Guides from Other Classes
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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