There’s no doubt about it. With so many spells to manage, enhancement is the most complex of the two shaman dps specs. Arguably, it’s even one of the most complex specs to play in the game at the moment. This guide is about my take on playing as enhance, and is meant as an aide to help any raiding enhance shammy (be it main or alt) get the most out of their toon without getting bogged down in the maths involved, and as a reference for those who are already doing so. I’ll try to arrange it so that the main points are clear at the top of each section, with my banter below. That should make it easier to quickly look something up.

As it is based around my own preferences and experiences, it could be that you disagree with some things. If so – great :) I’m always open to considering things from another angle, so please feel free to comment.

Spec

Firstly I’ll link my current raiding spec: 19/52/0

This is the spec that will give you the most damage output. I’ve seen many shamans with talents in Shamanistic Focus, Improved Stormstrike and possibly Elemental Focus from the elemental tree. I had the former two myself until about a month ago. With those talents you never have mana issues, which is great but I recently swapped them out for Improved Fire Nova and a point in Reverberation.

The reason for this is quite simple – you will do more damage! (More shocks is always good, and Fire Nova will be a part of your rotation) And the best part? You won’t really have mana issues. This isn’t obvious at first though. When I first switched into this spec I was often panicking as my mana was getting dangerously low where before it never went less than 50%. But the truth is it is very rare that you have 0 mana because Shamantic Rage usually gets back off cd before that happens, and after popping that you’ll be back to full in no time.

From my experience, mana issues in this spec only comes from trash packs and running heroics. It’s never been a problem on a raid boss, and that is where it truly counts and the damage boost you get matters all the more.

Glyphs

The glyphs I go for are: Glyph of Feral Spirit – Our wolves are a really nice source of damage output, an extra 30% of our AP fed to them is awesome.
Glyph of Windfury Weapon – Windfury is one of our highest sources of damage. Therefore it’s nice to have it proc more often.
Glyph of Stormstrike – Your stormstrike debuff should almost always be up, so this effectively increases all your nature damage spells.

There are other alternatives but these seem to me to stand out as the top 3. Glyph of Lightning Shield could maybe go in there, as that will be proccing often (especially while you have T9 set bonus), or Glyph of Lightning Bolt as another big source of damage, but I personally wouldn’t want to give up one of those listed for them.

Weapon Imbues

Main hand – Windfury.
Off-hand – Flametongue.

No exceptions.

Stat Priorities

Hit rating (if not capped)
Expertise rating (if not capped)
Haste/AP (kinda down to preference – more on that below)
Crit rating
Agility
Armour Penetration (ArP)
Intellect

So what stats do you want to go for?
First thing is always to get both hit capped and expertise capped. Note that for enhancement shammies, the hit cap is the SPELL hit cap. More hit rating beyond that is still nice as it will still increase your white damage hit %, but you don’t have to go out of your way to get it. Just make sure you’re at the spell hit cap. And what are these caps?

Hit Cap
For Horde:
With shadow priest or moonkin in the raid – 14% : 368 hit rating.
Without shadow priest or moonkin – 17% : 446 hit rating.

For Alliance with Draenei aura:
With shadow priest or moonkin in the raid – 13% : 342 hit rating.
Without shadow priest or moonkin – 16% : 420 hit rating.

Expertise Cap
26 expertise – 140 expertise rating (this assumes you have the Unleashed Rage talent… which you should :P )

After you have those capped off, you’ll want to start stacking haste and AP. These are our two primary dps stats and so you’ll want to ideally look for gear with as much of both as possible. Crit, Agility and Intellect are generally passive stats. I mean passive as in you can kinda ignore them. Your gear will be loaded with enough without you having to actively worry about it.

Then there’s armour penetration… this is a stat that isn’t so useful to us due to the amount of magic damage that makes up our damage output. However it isn’t completely useless as it does have an effect on our white damage. The general rule of thumb for ArP is that you shouldn’t necessarily avoid gear with it on, but if you can replace it with another stat, do so.

Weapon Speed

This is important. Enhancement shamans should always be using slow 1h weapons (2.5 speed or slower). You may get some attractive looking weapon drop with a big raw dps value on it, but with a speed of 1.5 or so… do not be fooled! It is not worth it.

To explain just how bad a choice it is, I once read an article of someone who was testing this subject. He found that the blue quality slow 1h weapon you can get from Amphitheatre of Anguish in Zul’drak put out as much, if not more, dps for him than an ICC quality fast weapon. That’s how huge the difference is, so do yourself a favour… stick to slow weapons ;)

Gems

Meta – Relentless Earthsiege Diamond (21 agi +3% crit damage)
Blue socket – Nightmare Tear (This alone will activate the meta and should go in a blue socket to allow for a socket bonus. Put haste/AP in other blue sockets)
Red – Bright Cardinal Ruby (40 AP) or Stark Ametrine (20 AP, 10 haste)
Yellow Socket – Quick King’s Amber (20 haste) or Stark Ametrine (20 AP, 10 haste)

Whether to choose AP or Haste gems is up to you really. They are generally fairly equal, with haste just about coming on top, especially with the T10 4 piece bonus. But if you want to stack AP, it’s also viable.

For socket bonuses, anything other than at least 12 AP or a decent amount of haste is not worth getting. Just stack your preferred gem.

Enchants

Weapons: Berserking on both
Helm: Arcanum of Torment (Knight of the Ebon Blade quartermaster – Shadow Vault, Icecrown)
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Axe (Sons of Hodir quartermaster – Storm Peaks)
Chest: Powerful Stats
Cloak: Greater Speed
Bracers: Expertise if not expertise capped, otherwise Greater Assault
Gloves: Precision if not hit capped, Expertise if not expertise capped, otherwise Crusher
Legs: Icescale Leg Armor
Boots: See below

For your boots, I highly recommend one with a run speed increase. As melee, you have to be next to something to hit it (obviously) so in a fight with lots of movement or target switching it increases your dps uptime if you can get to your targets quicker. There are fights where movement isn’t so much an issue, but overall you’ll be better off with it. If you really want to go to the extremes of maximising your dps at all times, you could keep an extra pair of boots around with Icewalker or Greater Assault on them for fights with less movement.

Now there are two speed increase enchants available. The first is the WotLK enchant, Tuskarr’s Vitality, which also gives stamina and will be the choice of many. The other option is an old enchant from TBC, Cat’s Swiftness, which gives a little boost to agility instead. This will give you a little more dps but the mats can be a pain to get.

Totem (the Relic kind)

This is just to note that the current BiS totem for enhance is actually the elemental one, Bizuri’s Totem of Shattered Ice. Flame Shock should always be up as it has a place firmly set in our rotation and the haste bonus is awesomesauce.

Consumables

Flask – Flask of Endless Rage
Food – Fish Feast or Dalaran Clam Chowder
Potion – Potion of Speed

Rotation

First thing to note: please do not take the term ‘rotation’ too literally. The term has always been used to describe how you use your spells, but nowadays the actual meaning has turned from a literal rotation to a priority queue for many classes, including enhancement shaman. What it means in short, is that you have a list of spells, and on each global cooldown you use the highest priority spell that is available, whilst throwing in some common sense (i.e. you don’t waste wolves, shamanistic rage, etc. when you know a stun is coming. E.g. Putricide phase transition).

This is more complicated for enhancement shamans because of the number of spells we have to manage in our rotation. Below is the priority list that I use. You won’t go wrong if you use it, but also feel free to tweak it and experiment with your own playstyle. Note that this is for single target boss fights. In aoe situations it becomes more of a Fire Nova and Chain Lightning spam.

1 – Feral Spirit
2 – Shamanistic Rage
3 – Stormstrike, if the debuff isn’t up (shorthand: SS_0)
4 – Lightning Bolt, if you have 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon (shorthand: MW_5)
5 – Flame Shock, if debuff isn’t up
6 – Earth Shock
7 – Stormstrike
8 – Fire Elemental
9 – Magma Totem, if a few seconds left on it (and Fire Ele isn’t up ofc :P )
10 – Lightning Shield, if 2 or fewer stacks remain
11 – Lava Lash
12 – Fire Nova

Yeah… that’s a lot to take care of ;) A few things to note: as I said earlier, common sense is also required. The fire elemental is in the list, but perhaps it shouldn’t be actually. You want to choose the right time to pop him up rather than just when the rotation says so, and you want to do it when you have your procs up. Unlike your wolves, the fire ele gains a % of your stats as they are the second you plant the totem. The wolves work like other pets in that if your AP goes up while they are active, theirs will too.

You also want to be smart about using your wolves. They are your top priority spell, but there are times where you may want to save them a bit. For example, the wolves benefit from Blood Lust (the fire ele does not, so this isn’t important for him) but only when they are active when it is cast. If you cast Feral Spirit just after Blood Lust is cast, they will not gain the effect.

The good news is that all this isn’t too bad once you get used to it, and there are addons available to help you with it. The main one that enhancement shamans use is Shock and Awe, however I have chosen not to use this. Why? Because it only shows you the icon of the spell you should use right at that moment. It flashes up the spell to use as it becomes available and so it all becomes based on your reactions with no way to think ahead a bit.

So instead I use Powerauras, which is awesome. If you don’t know the addon, you should get to know it very well :P Put simply, it allows you to build your own visual cues to almost anything related to your spells, buffs and debuffs (sadly, totems not included so a totem timer addon is recommended as well – I use TotemTimers). Using Powerauras, I have set up a line of little spell icons above my action bars in priority order, that only appear if they are available. Therefore, I can essentially use the spell corresponding to the leftmost icon on every global cooldown, but also having a view of what else is available as well! Some sample screenshots of this are below, so you can see the kind of thing I am talking about. If you want to do something similar, and aren’t sure how to do it with Powerauras, I’d be happy to help out there as well.

Full priority list setup:


Priority list when idling (no procs, Lightning Shield up):


Priority list when in combat (most stuff on cd, with 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon):


So there you have it, it’s pretty long but it should provide a single resource for the essentials of raiding as enhance. I hope it proves useful to someone at least :) If I have missed anything or something seems incorrect, please let me know. (Email link on the right)
Thanks for reading :)