How To Improve As Enhancement Shaman — Dragonflight 10.0.7

The most common mistake many Enhancement players make is not adjusting their rotation to minimize empty Global Cooldowns. This is a mixture of not keeping on top of your ability cooldowns and casting things in an order that causes them to clash in the next cycle. Making sure to keep abilities cooling down in a way that does not cause this to happen is a skill that comes with practice. Still, downtime is the enemy of good Enhancement play.

Also remember that Enhancement does have tools to keep dealing a small amount of damage when you are forced out of range. Both of your Shock spells have a 40-yard range, as does your Maelstrom Weapon spenders, letting you fill space that other melee specs may not be able to. With none of these available, shift into Ghost Wolf whenever possible to quickly re-engage your target in melee.

The above is also intertwined with your Maelstrom Weapon management. This serves as the central mix-up in the rotation that allows you to fill gaps that can be caused by incorrect cooldown cycling or bad Stormbringer that creates a clash. Treat it as a one GCD delay giving other abilities time to return. This means pooling is a core part of Maelstrom management, as you can store up to 10 stacks before any waste occurs. If you are at risk of reaching 10 stacks, however, due to cooldowns or passive generation, you should shift to burning it off quickly, as waste is terrible in Dragonflight due to how much damage it contributes.

Overflowing Maelstrom doubles down on this, giving more room to use Maelstrom-positive GCDs without worrying about overcapping because you cannot spend it fast enough, as it always spends your entire pool.

While Enhancement is not the highest APM spec, it does come with a lot of different active buttons that all interact with each other. Due to this, knowing when to prioritize something because it is currently buffed and when to sit on it because more important things are currently available is key.

For Elementalist builds effects such as Hot Hand drastically alters the playstyle when active raising Lava Lash to the top to avoid waste. Similarly, Hailstorm and Ice Strike buffs raise Frost Shock much higher to avoid reapplying the buff without consuming it.

For Physical builds on the other hand the highest priority is getting Stormstrike on cooldown and keeping it there to fish for Deeply Rooted Elements procs. Anything that can trigger Stormbringer should be used when it is not ready, and shifting to maintenance in the short period while waiting (such as refreshing Flame Shock with Lava Lash or managing your Maelstrom Weapon) becomes the priority.

Both builds also have to balance their Maelstrom Weapon as carefully mentioned above due to the ebb and flow that changes between them. Physical comes in bursts and leverages it for extra resets via Legacy of the Frost Witch, while Elementalist plays around with the Elemental Blast cooldown and uses it to fill otherwise while also trying to aim for as few stacks as possible before casting Primordial Wave.

Our Rotation section goes into more depth regarding this as it comes with a fairly robust ruleset for the conditions on when to shift priorities.

No matter the build you play (though some are worse than others), there is simply a factor of high RNG that can impact Enhancement at all times. Sometimes there is nothing you could have done to fix it. Elementalist can simply have bad Elemental Spirits rolls not overlapping with Hot Hand and badly timed Maelstrom Weapon slumps, which can slightly hurt performance. Physical, on the other hand, is entirely at the whim of Deeply Rooted Elements procs that are entirely random and contribute enormously to your performance. If you check your logs and you see you only got a couple of procs in 5 minutes compared to someone who got 10+, unfortunately, that is just the luck of the draw, and the only real answer is to move on to the next pull.

In single-target situations, you should always aim to have as close to 100% uptime on your enemy as possible with Flame Shock. This is an extremely high DPS DoT effect that also has strong talent pairings with Lashing Flames, making it even more important when taken. With Molten Assault, Lava Lash will reapply Flame Shock to your target if it already has Flame Shock on it and will also apply it to nearby targets in AoE, allowing you to maintain Flame Shock uptime without having to recast it.

It is challenging to optimize your character without first accurately using Raidbots to sim your own character to identify a fixed start point. This will allow you to quickly identify the ideal gear choices you have available to equip, and due to the variables of different gear interacting with each other (and the War/Titanforging system causing unpredictability) should be the go-to tool to decide what you use.

On top of this, simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn and the Raidbots website. Below is a video on how to sim your character using the website.