How To Improve As Enhancement Shaman — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Welcome to our How to Improve page! Here we go through some of the most common pitfalls new Enhancement players make, and provide some actionable tips on how to avoid falling into the same trap yourself.

The single most common mistake Enhancement players make is not adjusting their rotation to minimize empty Global Cooldowns. This problem is twofold:

• Not Pressing Buttons Fast Enough - sometimes it really is as simple as real time between actions. The spec is GCD-locked when played correctly due to Elemental Tempo, but mis-management of resources will create downtime.
• Ability Clashing - when you mismanage your ability cooldowns and Maelstrom Weapon stacks, the in-game feedback that it was a mistake is often quite vague. The biggest indicator is you simply run out of things to press, because you sequenced things in a way that caused clashes in the following cycle.

Ideally, you should plan your globals based on your ability state, making sure to keep everything on cooldown as much as you can. This is not a skill you learn overnight, and comes with practice and muscle memory. Remember, downtime is the enemy of any good Enhancement player.

This is a uniquely damaging issue for Enhancement because, unlike many specs, its entire resource economy is built around cycling those cooldowns effectively - it's technically your second resource. Remember as well, Enhancement has some ranged abilities such as Voltaic Blaze and Maelstrom Weapon spenders it can use when forced out of range. If you can predict when this happens, align your abilities so that your ranged tools fill this space.

Your Global Cooldown optimization is also intertwined with your Maelstrom Weapon management. This serves as the central mix-up in the rotation due to being more free-form, and can often be used to correct cooldown cycling. Picture it as a one GCD delay, giving other abilities the time they may need to bridge you to a cleaner ability state. Midnight doubles down on this with Elemental Tempo, giving you a way to recover from bad ability uses with the CDR effect as well. Since you can store up to 10 stacks without waste, this means you often hover around 7-8 stacks until you need to spend them to avoid burning any.

Overflowing Maelstrom doubles down on this principle, giving more room to use Maelstrom-positive GCDs without worrying about overcapping. Dumping your entire stack count in one go means you'll rarely struggle to spend it fast enough, and since it's a locked in talent, it's a staple of current gameplay.

Hero Talents significantly alter this relationship as well. Due to them each having unique interactions with our resource, there are a couple of things to bear in mind:

• Stormbringer - shifts your mindset due to Tempest, pushing you to spend more frequently. Due to the combination of Supercharge and Thunder Capacitor, you'll often spend more often and still struggle to avoid waste.
• Totemic - utilizes it in more specific ways due to the new Totemic Momentum. It's now a method to extend Hot Hand for long periods of time, having a higher priority when this effect is active.

This also shifts in AoE as well - since Maelstrom Weapon generation with extra targets to proc Crash Lightning (even though the damage splits), spenders become much easier to access. This means that, while strikes retain a lot of value through Ride the Lightning, you have a much easier time accessing them through Elemental Tempo's CDR effect.

While Enhancement is not the highest APM spec, it does come with a higher than average number of different active buttons, even after Midnight's reduction. These often have specific interactions that need to be handled, so knowing the order of priority when it comes to procs is key.

Depending on Hero Talent, you need to be aware of the following:

• Stormbringer - needs to be keenly aware of Thunder Capacitor resets, and also your Tempest state. Stormstrike should also ideally always be kept below 2 charges.
• Totemic - should always be on the lookout for Hot Hand triggers. While active, it completely overtakes your priority. Lava Lash should be cast as often as possible, weaving in Maelstrom Weapon spenders in between to extend it.

Due to there being extra variables in moment-to-moment content, it's best to defer to our full Rotation section. This goes into detail on the different things that influence your decisions, and the conditions that cause priority shifts.

No matter the build you play - though some are worse than others - there is always an RNG factor that can heavily impact Enhancement's throughput. In some cases, it can be damaging enough that there's simply nothing you could have done to fix it, and the best practice is to shrug it off and go again. Totemic can suffer from bad streaks of empty GCDs and low Hot Hand uptime (especially in AoE if it's timed poorly), while Stormbringer can have weak Ascendance windows with fewer Thunder Capacitor refunds. If you check your logs and see drastic differences in these, it's better to not overthink it and chalk it up to one of those pulls.

With how varied modern World of Warcraft has become, it can be a daunting task to accurately assess whether an item or setup is worth it or not. The first place to start is Raidbots, which allows you to sim your own character to know a baseline. This will give you a number to strive for as you learn and improve, while also giving you extensive help when identifying upgrades, knowing what to farm for and much more.

By now, simming has become very easy to get started thanks to modern tools. There's no need to understand code or complex SimulationCraft APLs, nor does it require its own installation. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and this will give you the output to add to the Raidbots website.