PvE Elemental Shaman Rotation, Cooldowns, & Abilities

The Elemental Shaman is a class that specializes in dealing high-burst damage while also having the applicability of a spammer given enough haste.

In the last patch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, however, the Elemental Shaman finds itself in a pretty tough spot, dealing significantly lower amounts of damage than the other casters in the game, unless it acquires a fair amount of gear.

After the acquisition of said gear, the Elemental Shaman starts to pick up the pace and with the right knowledge and the right rotation it can even find itself in the higher parts of the DPS charts.

The Elemental Shaman is a hybrid class that provides both utility for its allies and damage to its enemies, having the potential to buff those around him and fry up any enemy that comes in its path.

In this section of the guide we will delve a bit further into the Elemental Shamans abilities and explain how they work.

The main spells of the Elemental Shaman are Lava Burst,  Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt and Flame Shock. The specialization works as a “spam” caster, with its main filler spell being Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt gains benefit from our glyphs, having an increase of damage by 4%. Alongside the low cast time of the ability, it gains a pretty good spot as a “filler” spell in the list of the spell caster’s fillers. 

Although you will often find yourself spamming Lightning Bolt, the true damage of your kit comes from the proper use, on cooldown, of Lava Burst and Chain Lightning.

Lava Burst is an ability empowered by Flame Shock. By casting it while Flame Shock is active on the target, Lava Burst will be a guaranteed critical hit. Thus it is very important to always open up on the target with Flame Shock and keep it up on the target, not only for the Lava Burst critical hit but also for the periodic damage.

While you might be a bit confused by Chain Lightning, the ability itself actually has a higher damage on single targets than Lightning Bolt so make sure to keep it on the target at all times.

Furthermore we will now dwell into the crucial part of the Shaman Class, the trademark of the class itself, totems. The totems offer similar utility to Paladins.

While you can place each of them individually you can make three presets  which will be very useful for any situation that presents itself, this offering the Shaman extreme versatility and lots of ways to counteract the potential threats. 

You can provide effects similar to the auras such as Fire Resistance Totem, Frost Resistance Totem, Nature Resistance Totem, empowering effects such as Windfury totem, Strength of Earth Totem, Flametongue Totem or absorption effects such as Tremor Totem or Grounding totem.

Most of your utility comes from the proper use of totems, some exceptions being Heroism/Bloodlust, Hex and Wind Shear. Wind Shear is a very spammable interrupt effect so use it as often as possible. Bloodlust speaks for itself, use it in the beginning for burst and Hex is just a form of Polymorph that unlike the mage it will not regenerate the HP of the target and it will be harder to break.

With this being said, the “trademark” totem for the Elemental Shaman is the Totem of Wrath. It provides increased spell power and increased critical strike chance by 3%.

The common misconception of this ability is that it does not stack with the Moonkin Form aura, but in fact it does stack,  the specific Elemental Shaman effect that does not stack with the moonkin form aura is Elemental Oath.

One ability which is also not often used is Fire Nova. It used to be called Fire Nova Totem, but since patch 3.3, it changed to the current version. The misconception about this ability is that it requires either Searing Totem or Magma Totem in order to work, but it actually works just the same if used in conjunction with Totem of Wrath.

Elemental Mastery is one of your utmost important abilities, and this is not due to the fact that it offers you an instant cast of your main abilities but due to the fact that it offers you a buff of 15% spell haste for 15 seconds. The sweet part about this ability is the fact that its cooldown is reduced by 2 seconds each time you cast a Lightning Bolt or a Chain Lightning. With proper haste and the buff of 15% spell haste you receive, you can accomplish multiple Elemental Masteries in a very fast window.

The last bit of information you should remember is the proper weapon imbue effect which you should use, and even if it sounds like a no brainer, you can still meet to this day people who use the wrong one. We are obviously talking about Flametongue Weapon. Why this weapon effect specifically? Because of the Elemental Weapons talent.