Introduction
Hi everyone, I am Weber, and I have been maining my Shaman since Siege of Orgrimmar back in Mists of Pandaria. I am a moderator for the Earthshrine Discord, and I have been raiding with Deposit Coin on Stormscale for the past four years, finishing around World 200-300 on a casual two-day schedule.
Enhancement Shaman is a melee specialization that excels at sustained single target. However, we can tailor our damage profile to almost any given encounter thanks to our very flexible talent tree with strong options for funnel and cleave damage profiles. The only thing we have trouble providing is large-scale AoE, as most of our AoE options are capped at 6 targets. Most of our resource generation is tied to melee hits, so we suffer significantly from downtime.
We do provide Windfury Totem, which is a sizeable increase to the damage of other melee in your party. A strong healing cooldown in Ancestral Guidance and many other niche utilities, which tends to be relevant on one or two bosses each expansion such as Tremor Totem or Poison Cleansing Totem. We excel at AoE crowd control, being able to lock down trash packs for a very long time through Capacitor Totem, Guardian’s Cudgel, Thundershock, and Sundering.
What has changed
Patch 10.1 Enhancement Shaman Changes
Patch 10.1 brings some minor changes to Enhancement. First of all, Static Accumulation and Thorim’s Invocation were buffed, making the Ascendance path more appealing even to builds focusing on Lava Lash.
Additionally Windfury Weapon was buffed and Elemental Weapons now requires you to use both your weapon imbues to get the full effect, which means that substituting Windfury Weapon with a Howling Rune is no longer a viable option.
Deeply Rooted Elements was adjusted to have more consistent behaviour. This means that while it is no longer possible to high-roll to the moon, you also won’t have pulls where it does not proc at all anymore, making it a much more consistent and attractive option for progression.
Fire Nova now deals Flamestrike damage, making it more appealing for Physical builds that can boost its damage via Feral Spirit and Legacy of the Frost Witch now.
Flame Shock now deals Volcanic damage, which means that it now also benefits from lightning wolves when playing Elemental Spirits.
These changes combined with the new T30 tier set bonus have shuffled our talent builds around a bit.
First Impressions
With the release of Dragonflight, Enhancement has received many positive changes and is in a great spot right now. Windfury Totem was finally fixed to apply to offhand hits, and it can’t miss for dual wield specializations anymore, which drastically improves its value for those.
The value of Maelstrom Weapon has been immensely increased, finally making our spenders heavy hitters compared to how they were mostly used to reduce downtime by filling empty GCDs for most of Shadowlands.
In the talent tree, we have access to various old legendaries and some very strong new effects that let us focus heavily on different damage profiles. We have access to burst on 45s cooldown through Primordial Wave, 90s cooldown via Doom Winds, and 3m cooldown via Ascendance should any encounter require this. Alternatively, we can focus on sustained/random damage through Feral Spirit and Deeply Rooted Elements.