Hi all, my Shaman is usually Resto and Ele but i started with Enhancement, im using the Icy veins ele ST build atm but i feel pretty lost so far lol. Does anyone have a build/ rotation i can check out, so far i am loving the playstyle of enh.
There is an addon that is a rotation helper called hekili. Check it out it give suggestions and will help you learn your rotation.
There isn’t really a rotation since almost none of the cooldowns lineup especially with procs, it’s more priority abilities.
The real important thing is that your spenders are a big portion of your damage, so making sure you never waste maelstrom stacks by overcapping is important. Using Ice Strike + Frost shock after using a spender will be your top damage. You want to get flame shock out early so it’s ticking, you shouldn’t really need to cast it very often as your lava lash will spread it. Storm Strike is basically your last priority, it’s what you hit when Lava Lash, Ice strike, Frost shock are on cooldown.
Sample opener for ST
WF totem preferably before the pull
Feral Spirits
Primordial Wave + Lightning Bolt(applies flame shock)
Ice Strike+ Frost shock
Lava Lash
Sunder
Storm Strike
Elemental Blast(at 8+ stacks) if ST, Chain lightning if multiple enemies, Lighting bolt if ele blast on cooldown
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I strongly suggest hekili and time spent at the training dummies to learn the rotation.
You dont need to stick with hekili long term. But its fairly accurate, esp in ST. And it gives you a good idea of what you should be doing.
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Thank you for posting I was a little confused when to use storm strike
Also do not just use icy-veins use them but also use wowhead and bloodmallet. In the end I customized my build to be what I wanted it to be by changing a few of the talents that are suggested. Like I prefer crash lighting over sundering due to crash lightings low cd and how it buffs SS, LL and IS.
New shaman here, too. I find myself with all my builders on cool down and just auto-attacking a lot. Not sure what I’m supposed to do in that situation.
At low gear levels, that’s typical. Enhancement requires a lot of Haste and Mastery before the rotation starts to have any kind of decent flow, and especially the 2pc tier bonus.
In the meantime, you can try dropping Overflowing Maelstrom until you start to feel GCD capped with casting so often. Try putting the point into Elemental Assault instead.
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Yea it will happen. What I can say is get hekili and learn your rotation with it. Also depends on your build are you physical or elementalist and then st or aoe. everything just depends on your spec.
I’m a returning player, but exclusively played elemental before. Giving enhance a shot since I’m not thrilled with the state of elemental. I think I have the rotation figured out after reading guides and watching some vids (and lots of practice on dummies). I just hit 60, so don’t have all the talents yet, so I’m sure that has an impact. I just don’t super love the downtime I get, but expect it’ll get better as I level and gear up.
Take it from a guy who has been playing a shaman religiously since the beginning of Dragonflight: if you’re relatively new and searching for your niche, lean heavily into the physical damage builds. 10.1 is introducing a new tier set that is designed around the physical builds. Start now and spend the inbetween time honing and perfecting your rotations.
When it comes to shamans and rotations, the devil is in the details. If your rotation isn’t precisely perfect, your DPS dropoff can be as high as 10% ~ which goes to show you just how difficult this class spec can be.
Enhancement shamans rely heavily not so much on a static rotation, but a dynamic series of “what-if” moments that force you to adapt at a moment’s notice to a specific scenario where each scenario has its own compartmentalized rotation.
Generally speaking, the elemental build for enhancement shamans (and the build that I personally main) is a more reliable, consistent source of damage out-put with decent AoE through primordial wave + lightning bolt, but where that is good their single target damage output is fantastic. Fantastically reliable.
In turn, the physical damage build relies more heavily on storm strike and, in my opinion, feels a lot more like the traditional enhancement shaman with a heavy reliance on windfury procs. The physical build is very much one that relies on RNG. X or Y has to happen in order for Z to occur, where Z is a massively stupid-high spike of DPS.
Generally speaking, that’s the primary difference between the two and with 10.1 right around the corner, the tier set really, really wants you to play the physical build.
Hekili can be helpful in assisting you in some muscle-memory stuff, but for the most part, you’ll find yourself going off its guide more often then not because of the expansive array of “what-if” scenarios where a proc can completely change and force you to adjust your rotation at a moment’s notice.
It’s that eclectic series of options that makes enhancement shamans one of the most difficult to reach optimal performance with and, by that measure, punishes you the most for making mistakes. But stick with it and within a few months you’ll be near the top of the DPS charts in your guild because the difficulty is worth the reward that follows.
TLDR:
Learn and familiarize yourself with the physical build, it’s going to be the money maker when the new tier set is introduced in 10.1.
Don’t heavily rely on Hekili because it’s not as reliable for shamans as it is other classes due to their eclectic set of compartmentalized rotation scenarios.
Elemental enhancement builds are more reliable, whereas physical builds feel more like a traditional enhancement shaman - it’ll be up to you to choose which one you ultimately move forward with.
But I strongly encourage you to go physical for what’s upcoming in the gear set department.
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Thanks, that’s helpful. I definitely prefer the elemental build, but will have to also get down the physical build. Kind of hoping they change the tier before it goes live. It’s not that exciting to me. A lot of specs really really hate the 10.1 tier, so hoping they listen to feedback and make a lot of changes.
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It’s always entertaining when someone pushes this, and then you check their logs and not a single parse close to 90%. I recommend you spend some time with Hekilli to better familiarize yourself with the proper rotation.
What is the current recommended builds for each content since you have to pick ST or AOE focused builds? AOE for M+ and ST for Raid?
Generally, yes, although with some context dependency. You will want to run the AoE build on Council, and add-heavy fights like Broodkeeper and Raz you will likely want to at least pick up Crash Lightning somehow.
For M+, while the AoE build will generally be your go-to, there are times you may want to run ST - particularly on Tyrannical weeks, depending on your group comp. My regular group’s other dps are a Windwalker and Beast Master, for example, so I tend to run a modified ST (swapping out Windfury Totem for Crash Lightning) regardless, and focus on funneling priority kill targets in each trash pull.
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There are 4 builds atm a physical build and elementalist build and each have a st and a aoe build. I am using a modified version of the aoe physical build. having a lot of fun with it
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Sundering is incredibly important in m+. And I mean…you can pretty easily have both. There are other things that I would suggest dropping.
I just do nto like the long cd it has where as crash lighting a lot shorter cd and also impacts ice strike, ss, LL by causing them to cleave all enemies in front of you even though it reduces damage after 6.
Yes. I get that.
I am saying that Sundering is actually extremely important to the physical build for AE damage.
And due to it being an AE interrupt basically, its extremely important for m+.
Now coupled with the fact you can easily have both. I run both sundering and crash in m+.
Sundering is literally a build defining aspect of AE for the physical build when coupled with doomwinds. If you are not using sundering in the phys AE build, you are greatly hurting yourself.