Enhancement Shaman Talents Guide

Enhancement has access to two distinct talent builds, either using the Stormbringer or Totemic hero talents. Currently, in pre-patch Totemic has the edge in all situations.

Stormbringer focuses on generating as much Maelstrom Weapon as possible to spend on improved Lightning Bolts and Chain Lightning. Your spenders and Stormstrike will occasionally upgrade your next Lightning Bolt into a Tempest, which is a massive nuke.

Totemic, on the other hand, focuses on improving Lava Lash, Sundering and triggering your weapon imbues as often as possible. You get access to Surging Totem to pair with your Doom Winds, improving your 1 minute burst windows with guaranteed and extended Hot Hand procs.

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The changes to the class talents in Midnight have largely been disappointing, even when discounting the pruned utility and defensive aspects; The bottom left corner with Spiritwalker’s Grace and Nature’s Swiftness is still mostly useless since you are melee; Multiple talents were turned into two-pointers to waste your talent points with Winds of Al’Akir, Brimming with Life, Static Charge, and Nature’s Fury; More unexciting passive talents were introduced in Spiritual Awakening and Instinctive Imbuements, and Tremor Totem and Poison Cleansing Totem were made mutually exclusive. The only positive change is that you gained access to the former Restoration talent Therazane’s Resilience.

There are a few mandatory throughput talents, these include:

• Chain Lightning
• Fire and Ice
• Spiritual Awakening
• Enhanced Embues
• Nature’s Fury
• Instinctive Imbuements

Next, key utility, defensives, and movement are taken and these are also pretty non-negotiable:

• Earth Shield
• Thunderous Paws/Spirit Wolf depending on if you need a snare break or damage reduction
• Spirit Walk/Gust of Wind depending on if you need to deal with knockbacks or not
• Astral Shift
• Nature’s Guardian
• Winds of Al’Akir
• Planes Traveler
• Brimming with Life
• Wind Shear
• Capacitor Totem
• Static Charge
• Wind Rush Totem
• Earth Elemental
• Primordial Bond
• Elemental Warding
• Therazane’s Resilience

This leaves only 6 (3 at level 80!) points to distribute among our formerly impressive collection of niche utility, of which you will now have to pick and choose. Unfortunately, you will find yourself changing talents a lot depending on the dungeon or raid boss if multiple of these are valuable in a given season:

• Earthgrab Totem
• Windveil no longer stacks to two, but also no longer cares about spell school
• Refreshing Waters
• Cleanse Spirit
• Purge
• Ascending Air/Jet Stream
• Hex
• Totemic Projection
• Totemic Focus
• Tremor Totem/Poison Cleansing Totem
• Totemic Surge

Other talents are not worth the talent points, but may be used for pathing.

The new spec tree is uncharacteristically light on points compared to previous iterations, especially towards the top of the tree, so there are only a few choices to be made.

You will always select your core spells and most talents that are increasing your resource economy:

• Maelstrom Weapon
• Windfury Weapon
• Flametongue Weapon
• Forceful Winds
• Crash Lightning
• Molten Assault
• Unruly Winds
• Raging Maelstrom
• Ashen Catalyst
• Stormblast
• Overflowing Maelstrom
• Elemental Tempo
• Voltaic Blaze
• Stormflurry
• Ride the Lightning
• Doom Winds
• Lightning Strikes
• Elemental Assault
• Static Accumulation
• Thunder Capacitor
• Thorim’s Invocation

Additionally, there are a few scaling and passive damage bonuses that you should not pass up as well:

• Overcharge
• Storm’s Wrath
• Elemental Weapons

From here on, the remaining talents will depend on your selected hero talents. The most valuable points for Stormbringer are:

• Chaining Storms
• Converging Storms
• Fire Nova
• Feral Spirit
• Ascendance

Totemic, on the other hand, is locked into Hot Hand and also takes Sundering, as it lines up well with the frequent burst windows:

• Hot Hand
• Fire Nova
• Sundering
• Surging Elements

The remaining talents are generally not bad but outshone by other options:

• Flurry does only provide single target value and is not strong enough to be taken over other resource generating options.
• Lashing Flames shines particularly in AoE but does not help resource generation at all. (It is really good with geared level 80s though, since you have enough stats to not need every little bit of extra resource generation.)
• Primordial Storm is a strong AoE button particularly for Totemic, but you need to drop another point below the last gate or Apex talent for it, which are all fantastic.

Never take Stormbind. Not only is it a utility talent on a tree that is otherwise fully throughput talents, taking it will cause you to split up a group of mobs and make it harder to AoE, as you are only randomly slowing some of them.

Stormbringer

Stormbringer is all about Tempest, which deals massive damage and replaces your Lightning Bolt occasionally via spending Maelstrom Weapon, Awakening Storms, or Descending Skies.

You are also provided with a bunch of supporting talents, which further bolster your Maelstrom Weapon generation such as Unlimited Power, Supercharge and Stormwell, so you can proc Tempest more frequently.

Additionally, the damage of your spenders is improved via Voltaic Surge, Stormcaller, Conductive Energy, and Natural Gift.

Arc Discharge has been changed to only affect Chain Lightning and it is not worth casting it to make use of the buff in single target.

Totemic

Totemic is focused around Surging Totem burst windows. It deals damage while it is active through Tremors and Surging Bolts from Totemic Rebound, and improves several of your abilities via Amplification Core, Earthsurge, Primal Catalyst, and Whirling Elements (Check the cooldown section on how to make the most of these buffs).

Additionally, you get general improvements via Imbuement Mastery, Supportive Imbuements, and Lively Totems, and stronger Hot Hand procs via Splitstream, and Totemic Momentum.