Enhancement Shaman Playstyle and Rotation Guide

• Stormbringer
• Totemic

Playstyle

Enhancement has somewhat random resource generation and relies on random procs that tend to feed back into each other. As such, the spec at its core is about efficiently making use of your random procs, keeping your cooldowns rolling, and not wasting any resource while doing so, to keep up your momentum. There are many small details that will help you achieve this, that tend to get lost when just performing a simplified priority list from top to bottom, so I will cover them here, even if they are not necessarily used in the current builds.

Cooldown Usage

To make use of Witch Doctor’s Ancestry Feral Spirit you should use Feral Spirit on cooldown. Your other cooldowns benefit from the damage bonus of either Feral Spirit or Elemental Spirits and should be used while they are active.

When playing Flowing Spirits, you will spawn wolves passively by using your abilities. If talented into Elemental Spirits, the type of wolf depends on the ability that spawns them. Fire wolves will be spawned by Flame Shock, Lava Lash, Elemental Blast, Sundering, Primordial Wave, Fire Nova, and Voltaic Blaze. Lightning wolves will be spawned by Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Tempest,Crash Lightning and Voltaic Blaze. Ice wolves will be spawned by Frost Shock and Ice Strike. If you play this talent, it is important to limit your build to spawning the wolves that are beneficial to you. For example you will want to cut Elemental Blast from your build, if you are playing Stormbringer.

Primordial Wave, Doom Winds, and Sundering, should be used on cooldown as to not lose casts. They do, however, provide significantly more value in AoE than in single target, so often times it will be worth to hold them for add spawns in favor of maximizing casts.

Ascendance should be lined up with Feral Spirit and Doom Winds. Using Feral Spirits just before gives you the maximum amount of time to achieve an overlap of two Feral Spirits casts, in which you want to fit in your Elemental Blasts.

Resource Management

Due to Raging Maelstrom and Overflowing Maelstrom you are afforded some leeway in when you spend your Maelstrom Weapon. Raging Maelstrom allows you to hold on to your casts for longer, so you don’t have to spend it immediately upon reaching 5, and Overflowing Maelstrom reduces the amount of global cooldowns you have to use on spending it. This makes it so you get to use other abilities like Lava Lash or Stormstrike first to get them on cooldown, which means they will be up earlier again down the line.

However, currently while playing Stormbringer the biggest sources of Maelstrom Weapon are refunds from Static Accumulation and Supercharge. Because of this, spending at lower amounts of Maelstrom Weapon is generally preferred at the moment.

Elemental Blast and Tempest are exceptions to this rule, as they are constrained by cooldown and proc generation respectively, and should be used with more urgency.

In cleave situations maintain your Crash Lightning buff, as the splash effect on using your other abilities also generates Maelstrom Weapon, improving your resource economy whenever there are multiple targets. You can also refresh the buff just before your second target dies to carry the extra resource generation into single target for a bit.

Lashing Flames

If you do not have Sundering ready to apply it in AoE, this talent demands you to actively switch targets with Lava Lash in AoE to maintain the debuff on up to 6 targets and this should not be neglected, as this not only buffs the damage over time component of Flame Shock, but also the initial damage of the 1+5 Flame Shocks you spread via Molten Assault. I encourage you to use a mouseover macro to make it easier.

Lightning Rod

In 11.1 managing Lightning Rod was made a lot easier, as now Chain Lightning will apply it to secondary targets if it is already active on your main target. As such, this no longer requires active management.

Elemental Blast

Elemental Blast gets buffed by all the Elemental Spirits and they stack multiplicatively with each other. As such, you want to maximize the number of Elemental Spirits that are active for each Elemental Blast without losing casts. This is easily achieved, by holding your second charge until Feral Spirit is active. This will allow you to effortlessly fit in two casts per Feral Spirit.

Doom Winds

During Doom Winds you want to focus on using your main hand attacks Stormstrike, Ice Strike, Clash Lightning, and Sundering, as only those trigger Windfury Weapon. This becomes especially important in AoE, as Crash Lightning and Sundering will hit every enemy in front of you with a main hand swing, which is our main source of uncapped AoE. By reducing Crash Lightnings cooldown via Chain Lightning you can fit two or three into Doom Winds.

Thorim’s Invocation

When using Thorim’s Invocation you need to take note of whether it is currently primed with Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning and occasionally fix it by spending your Maelstrom Weapon. Due to the random nature of Deeply Rooted Elements sometimes it cannot be helped, but especially when using regular Ascendance you should make sure you have the correct spell primed before you press it.

Alpha Wolf

When using Alpha Wolf, you will need to activate it by using Crash Lightning or Chain Lightning and then actively maintain it again after 8 seconds. Activating the effect is worth even in single target, as the wolves use Spirit Bomb on top of their normal single target damage output.