How To Improve As Enhancement Shaman — The War Within (11.2.7)

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 at this stage in Season 3, so you should always have something available with good resource management.
• Ability Clashing - when you mismanage your ability cooldowns and Maelstrom Weapon resource, 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 abilities on cooldown as much as you can. This is not a skill you learn overnight, and comes with practice and muscle memory, but 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 a number of ranged spells such as Frost Shock 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. 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 in The War Within, 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 completely due to Tempest, pushing you more toward aggressive spending. Due to the combination of Supercharge and Static Accumulation, you'll be spending aggressively and still struggling to get rid of it all.
• Totemic - cares much less, instead only really spending it on Elemental Blast and maximizing Legacy of the Frost Witch uptime. It needs to make sure to spend once at the start of each Surging Totem to use up Whirling Air, but otherwise it's more of a filler cast.

This also shifts in AoE as well - since Maelstrom Weapon is far more plentiful due to Crash Lightning, spenders become a lot easier to access. Since Chain Lightning also provides cooldown reduction for Crash Lightning, that feedback loop makes it less about careful management and more about keeping up with the fast pace.

While Enhancement is not the highest APM spec, it does come with a lot of different active buttons. These often have a number of different interactions that have knock-on effects on each other, 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 Static Accumulation 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. Every other GCD while up should be Lava Lash, weaving in your regular priority in between.

Due to there being a lot of 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 a large RNG factor that can heavily impact Enhancement's throughput. In some cases, it can be so damaging 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), while Stormbringer can have weak Ascendance windows with low Static Accumulation 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.

Because Enhancement is a spec with a lot of moving parts, it really does benefit from having some additional tracking. While some of the Blizzard offerings are competent, there are some functions that cannot be replicated without WeakAuras (such as Tempest tracking), so we heavily recommend picking some up.

This is especially important for Enhancement due to the fact that our main resource, Maelstrom Weapon, has no resource bar or UI element - just a visual proc indicator with limited detail. I'd recommend taking a look at some options on Wago and trying them out, but always tweak the layout to yourself. Nothing compares to adjusting how information is presented to help you combat your weaknesses. There's nothing wrong with using all the tools at your disposal to improve after all!

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.