Elemental Shaman

Overview

Talents and builds

Level 60 build

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Raid build

The raid build moves 13 points from Improved Healing Wave (5), Natural Grace (3) and Totemic Focus (5) to Elemental Mastery (1), Thundering Strikes (2), Ancestral Knowledge (5) and Tidal Focus (5).

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Key talents

• Elemental Fury5/5Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Searing and Magma Totems and your Fire, Frost, and Nature spells by 100%
• Lightning Overload3/3Gives your Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning spells a 10% chance to cast a second, similar spell on the same target at no additional cost that causes half damage and no threat
• Lava Burst1/1You hurl molten lava at the target, dealing 114 to 145 Fire damage. If your Flame Shock is on the target, Lava Burst deals 20% increased damage
• Elemental Warding3/3Reduces damage taken from Fire, Frost, and Nature effects by 10%
• Elemental Focus1/1Gives you a 10% chance to enter a Clearcasting state after casting any Fire, Frost, or Nature damage spell. The Clearcasting state reduces the mana cost of your next damage spell by 100%
• Elemental Alacrity3/3Reduces the cast time of your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst spells by 0.50 sec

In rough priority order: Concussion raises the damage of Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Earth Shock, a broad multiplier across the entire single-target and AoE kit. Call of Flame, reworked in Forever, now boosts Lava Burst and Fire Nova alongside Flame Shock within a single talent instead of touching only the Fire Totems it used to buff, effectively unifying the tree’s fire-damage kit under one pick. Elemental Fury raises critical strike damage on the totems and elements the spec relies on, moved earlier in the tree with a lower first-rank value than 1.12’s single large-rank version. Lightning Overload gives Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning a chance to cast a second, weaker bolt for free, a straight damage-per-cast increase. Elemental Alacrity cuts the cast time of Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst further on top of the baseline speed-up Forever already gave those spells — maxed, it brings deep Elemental’s effective cast speed roughly back to where 1.12 Elemental topped out, since the starting point is already faster. Lava Burst, the tree’s new capstone nuke, hits harder against a target already carrying Flame Shock. Elemental Mastery is reworked too: instead of 1.12’s free critical next spell it takes 0.5 seconds off Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst for 15 seconds, which with Elemental Alacrity puts Lightning Bolt on the global cooldown, and removes Chain Lightning’s cooldown for the same window. The raid build takes it with the 31st Elemental point, and moves Totemic Focus’s five points into Thundering Strikes and Ancestral Knowledge; together that gained about 4% in our level-60 raid search run. Natural Grace only lowers threat, so the raid build moves its three points into Ancestral Knowledge for the Intellect, about 1% more in a later search.

Rotation and priority

The loop this site’s simulator plays: against a single target, drop Searing Totem for the higher fire damage; against two or more targets, drop Magma Totem instead so everyone standing in it takes damage. Against two or more targets, Chain Lightning is used since it hits every target for close to single-target Lightning Bolt damage. Lightning Bolt fills the rest of the single-target rotation, on every free global. Keep Flame Shock on the target: Call of Flame stretches it to 21 seconds, so it costs about one global in fourteen, and its damage plus Lava Burst’s 20% bonus beats the Lightning Bolt it replaces. Elemental Mastery goes on cooldown with your trinkets; for its 15 seconds every Lightning Bolt is a 1.5 second cast. Lava Burst is the first line when you have the talent, cast on every cooldown while your Flame Shock is on the target, so every cast carries the bonus. An earlier search left Flame Shock out to save mana, but that run’s character was running dry; with raid buffs and consumables, Flame Shock upkeep with Lava Burst waiting for it gained about 9% in our level-60 raid run. Chain Lightning on cooldown against a single target is also worse than plain Lightning Bolt casts, because it costs more than twice the mana for less damage per cast. Earth Shock is not in the loop: it shares the shock cooldown with Flame Shock, which earns that cooldown. Mana Spring Totem goes down first: it lasts five minutes, returns 10 mana every 2 seconds at its top rank, so the 100 mana it costs comes back many times over; adding it was worth roughly 4% in our level-60 run, and starting it one global before the cooldowns was worth about 1.5% more. Fire Nova is a real spell in Forever (learned from level 12, instant, on a 10-second cooldown, and it needs a Fire totem standing), but it is not in the loop: it deals about a third of Lightning Bolt’s damage per point of mana, and at no mana threshold we tried did adding it beat plain Lightning Bolt casts. We re-checked these numbers against the client’s own spell data, and every one of them got smaller; the order of the loop did not change.

Stat priority

1. 1Spell power
2. 2Hit
3. 3Nature power
4. 4Intellect
5. 5Critical strike
6. 6Spell haste
7. 7Spell penetration

Best in slot

Enchants and consumables

Races

• Orc (Recommended)
• Dwarf (Recommended)
• Tauren
• Troll
• Windshaper Skyborne

Orc is the Horde pick: Blood Fury. Dwarf is the Alliance pick: Stoneform.

Professions

Community convention for caster Shaman favors Enchanting alongside Tailoring or a gathering profession for spell-power gear and enchant materials, though Shaman’s totem and weapon-imbue kit doesn’t lean as hard on any one profession as a pure caster class does.

Leveling

Outlined: points added in this level range.

Enhancement is generally the stronger leveling spec for Shaman, since its melee durability and weapon-imbue burst clear trash faster than Elemental’s cast-time-dependent damage.