Enhancement Shaman Guide - Talents, Rotations, Races & More

Enhancement Shaman can utilize every stat in the game quite well, but during leveling, you should generally be on the lookout for Intelligence and Spirit, since those will keep you up and going because Mana is the biggest downtime factor. Being able to pick up some spell damage gear will be a nice bonus, especially if you are leveling in a group utilizing your Fire Nova heavily.

1. Hit Chance to minimum 8%
2. Expertise to 6.5%
3. Strength/Intellect
4. Spell Piercing
5. Haste
6. Critical Strike Chance
7. Spell Damage
8. Agility
9. Spirit
10. Stamina

Enhancement Shaman scales with every stat in the game, so every consumable will increase your power. You will be using a wide variety of them, but if you aren't looking to spend a lot of money on them, try focusing on the ones that give you more Spirit, Intelligence, or Spell damage. Utility potions like Swiftness Potion can also be quite useful if you have them available. The items listed below will be in no particular order, and the lower-level versions of them will not all be listed.

Elixir of Sages
Elixir of the Owl
Greater Arcane Elixir
Elixir of the Grizzly
Greater Mageblood Elixir
Major Mana Potion
Swiftness Potion
Any self-made food for the 5% EXP buff

If you want a profession that will offer you constant gear upgrade paths during leveling, you should consider Leatherworking. You will be able to craft yourself strong equipment pieces; even though they will most likely not beat what you can get from dungeons, they will act as great in-between steps or fillers for whatever you have not dropped yet. To achieve this, you either need to spend a considerable amount on leather from the auction house or level Skinning yourself until you get all the items you want.
Another crafting profession that should not be ignored is Enchanting, since it will allow you to make Polished Driftwood Icon. This is one of the few extra tools you can utilize to manage your mana sustain better if necessary.

Alliance

Dwarf

Your only option will be Dwarf. They provide you with higher crit damage/healing through Earth Fury and a small defensive cooldown with Stoneform, which does have its niche uses. Besides those two, you also get Big Game Hunter which increases your damage to Beasts by 5% and Find Treasure. While Big Game Hunter still has its uses against Beasts, Find Treasure is mostly just flavor, offering you very little.

Horde

You will have a lot of choices here. The two best being Orc or Windshaper Skyborne. Both offer you good damage-oriented racials. Orc still has Blood Fury increasing their attack and spell power shortly, and the newly added Savage, adding 1% crit. Additionally, they have two solid defensive racials, with Shatter Curse and Hardiness. Windshaper Skyborne received the Wind Blessed passive, adding a flat 3% haste permanently. They also have gotten a racial to increase damage against their preferred enemy with Elemental Insight. Their last 2 racial abilities are mostly utility-focused. Skysight allows them to increase their movement and mounted movement speed by 10%, and Walk on Air allows them to glide through the air for 10 seconds.

Start learning how to preserve your mana. A lot of times, an extra Earth Shockor Fire Nova is not necessary to kill the enemy since your next auto attack would have killed it anyway.
Try to keep pulling enemies close to your already placed totems; this will optimize mana usage and smooth out your leveling experience even more.
You can quickly go around and use Purge to pull multiple mobs towards your group for easier AoE farming, but be careful since this will only aggro, not tag them.
Make sure you keep Lightning Shield up, since it's your most mana-efficient spell comparatively to how much damage it deals. But don't just smash the button the moment it falls off; make sure to mind your 5-second mana rule and don't just randomly interrupt your mana regeneration when it's not needed.
It doesn't matter as much which weapon imbue you are using, as long as it is the last learned/leveled one. All of them have similar power while leveling. Just make sure not to use Rockbiter Weapon in dungeons if you don't want to be the tank of the group.

While leveling, you will not always have the money to learn every ability from your class trainer, so it makes sense to only cherry-pick the ones that you will actually end up using while leveling. Here is a list of abilities you should definitely learn and keep at the highest possible rank during leveling (in no particular order)

1. Earth Shock
2. Flame Shock
3. Windfury Weapon
4. Flametongue Weapon
5. Rockbiter Weapon
6. Lightning Shield
7. Fire Nova
8. Strength of Earth Totem
9. Poison Cleansing Totem
10. Disease Cleansing Totem
11. Windfury Totem
12. Searing Totem
13. Magma Totem
14. Ancestral Spirit (at least level 1)

Abilities like Call of the Ancestors, Call of the Elements, or Call of the Spirits can be ignored while leveling. Lightning Bolt will mostly just be used to pull from far away, so leveling it is not strictly necessary, but if it suits your playstyle you can definitely afford to level it, and the same goes for Chain Lightning

• Level 4 - You will receive a quest to obtain your Earth Totem. After finishing the quest your will be able to use Earth Totems like Strength of Earth Totem.
• Level 10 - You will receive a quest to obtain your Fire Totem. After finishing the quest your will be able to use Fire Totems like Searing Totem.
• Level 20 - You will receive a quest to obtain your Water Totem. After finishing the quest your will be able to use Water Totems like Healing Stream Totem.
• Level 30 - You will receive a quest to obtain your Air Totem. After finishing the quest your will be able to use Air Totems like Grounding Totem. Additionally, you will receive the The Tempest's Weapons/The Tempest's Weapons quest, which involves killing a lot of high-level enemies and an elite. In return, you will receive Rage of the Storm.

Weapon Imbues and Mana

During leveling, you will rely a lot on your weapon no matter what build you choose to level as, especially early on. This is not a huge issue since your Rockbiter Weapon Imbue is carrying you a lot during this stage and also later on with Imbues like Flametongue Weapon and Windfury Weapon.

You should always keep your Lightning Shield up once you unlock it, since it's very Mana efficient and deals a considerable amount of damage if you are getting hit. Try to be resourceful with your Mana and don't spam your spells; most of them will be overkill, and you would rather spend it to quickly heal yourself back to full or save yourself whenever you have pulled too much at once.

Choosing a Leveling Approach

As mentioned before, Enhancement Shamans have a few different playstyles available for leveling. Whichever performs the best will depend on the player and their goals. If you primarily level in a group, then focusing on support and AoE will take priority, while leveling on your own will require more personal defenses and single-target damage. Sometimes it's also best to level with a 1h weapon and a shield for consistency and safety.

Traditional Enhancement Leveling

The traditional Enhancement leveling playstyle will consist of using a 2h weapon and primarily focusing on single-target damage early on, while leaving the possibility open to opt into more AoE damage later on if necessary. Your talent points will be spent in the Enhancement tree till you unlock Improved Stormstrike, which will allow you to more actively manage your mana sustain. This will happen in the mid-30s; after that, you are able to unlock more AoE-focused talents in the Elemental tree like Call of Flame or Trial by Fire. But you also have the possibility to go into the Restoration Tree for more Hit chance, mana regeneration through Mindfulness and Water Shield and sustain yourself through pulls that way.

This leveling playstyle will fit the majority of the player base, since it offers many pivots while leveling to adjust to your, or your group's, needs without any prior heavy investment like a pure AoE build would need.

AoE Enhancement Leveling

Focusing more on AoE-centric gameplay will make you focus less on the Enhancement Tree, even though you are still technically using most of the Enhancement Shaman's toolkit. You will be more of an actual battle mage, most likely using the highest spellpower weapon you can get your hands on, be it 1h or 2h and you will be using mostly Flametongue Weapon as your imbue. Your gameplay will be focused on big pulls, ideally in a group with multiple players taking the aggro off of you, and you will be using your fire totems for big Fire Nova damage, getting buffed by your Elemental Talents. You will also be using more mana talents to be able to continue this playstyle with low downtime. But don't think you will just be an Elemental Shaman' at this point; you will still be right in there using your weapon to hit any priority targets.

This will be your leveling build for the more traditional Enhancement leveling playstyle. I heavily recommend going into the Enhancement Tree first to get Improved Ghost Wolf as soon as you hit level 20. This will make open-world travel a lot faster and cut down on downtime during leveling. Especially being able to use Ghost Wolf indoors is a big bonus, making this a must-have talent. After that, you should get Shamanistic Focus to reduce the mana costs of your shocks and Lightning Shield spells. This will already alleviate a lot of the mana issues you will have early on. Anticipation and Flurry are mostly travel talents that are taken since no other better talent is available. Once you have unlocked Stormstrike, your solo leveling strength will increase by a fair bit, especially with the combination of Improved Stormstrike helping a lot with your mana situation and speeding up your leveling journey a fair amount. Spirit Weapons is an easy pickup for two reasons: First of all, it gives you a free 5% parry, and second of all, it will give you more chances for your Stormstrike cooldown to reset. And Mental Quickness is a low-investment talent that provides a lot more usable stats for you. Going further into the Enhancement Tree does not give you any more leveling power, so this is as far as you would go during leveling.
Your other points will either be spent on the Elemental Tree or the Restoration Tree. You will end up having points in both of them when you finish leveling, but it's your choice if you want to get more AoE power from the Elemental Tree or more hit rating and mana sustain from the Restoration Tree first. Both choices have their own right to be pursued first, and it will depend on your unique leveling situation what's best for you. The Restoration Tree is universally useful, and it will smooth out your solo and group leveling experience. Meanwhile, the Elemental Tree will provide you with a lot of talents that will increase your performance in AoE situations, which will mostly occur when you are playing in a group. The most important talents from the Elemental Tree are Call of Flame, Trial by Fire, and Elemental Focus. But talents like Earthbound should not be ignored, giving you more tools to handle tough situations and escapes.

You should still start out in the Enhancement Tree early on your leveling journey since you will most likely not be playing in a group until you hit your first dungeons. Additionally, the utility of Improved Ghost Wolf is not to be scuffed at, being able to travel faster and being able to use Ghost Wolf indoors. You should not invest too much into the Enhancement Tree after that, since you will need the available talent points elsewhere, so stop after Improved Ghost Wolf. Aim for Call of Flame, Elemental Focus, and Trial by Fire next. After that, you will have most of your AoE talents covered, and you can get more mana from the Restoration Tree to sustain your damage. In the higher levels, you will be able to unlock talents like Elemental Fury or Earthbound giving you even more AoE damage and control. This build will give you the maximum power to assist your group with both damage and utility, but it can fall off a bit if you are leveling on your own, so adjust it accordingly to your own playstyle and situation.