Best DPS Build For Maximum DPS With Best In Slot T8 Level Gear For Elemental Shaman In WotLK

Since we’ve had so little overall information about the Shaman class, we thought it would make a perfect beginning for our DPS profiling series.  Even if you don’t have a Shaman, you’ll probably end up being surprised at a couple of the points you’ll find here, and it will make you foam at the mouth to get the post for your class and favorite build.

The elemental Shaman has been a little low on the DPS charts for a while, and is showing no signs of making a serious run at rogues and mages anytime soon.  However, that doesn’t mean you won’t want one in the raid.  An ele shammy will buff the locks and mages another 500 dps or so from totems, so they get part of their DPS from the buffs they give to other classes.  The more casters you have, the more you need an Elemental Shaman in the raid.

It turns out that the real key to best DPS in T8 gear for the Elemental Shaman is to skip the T8 legs and one spell completely.  It will make a huge difference in your DPS overall, although this will certainly apply to single target pulls such as Boss fights and not trash quite so much.  So let’s take a look at the build and show you how to begin using these guides.

First, take a look at the build profile from Wowhead:

http://profiler.wowhead.com/?profile=13000116

When the page loads, you’ll see the doll slots all filled up with best in slot gear, so you can know what you’re looking for from all those dungeon runs.  We will post the T9 current version next, but for those of you without a bagillion Emblems of Triumph and no Trophies the T8 version of BiS is a great place to start.  At the bottom you will also see all the enchants and gems you will want to use (or epic versions of course where available).

In the tab at the top you will see the talent tab where you can check out the full build along with glyphs choices, although the glyphs are also listed here:

Glyphs:

  • flame shock
  • lava
  • lightning bolt

The next thing you need to do is know what to use and when.  Don’t think of things in terms of rotions any more, but rather in terms of priorities.  In the following list, use things in the order of the list from top to bottom, refreshing as things higher up in the priority list become available.

Priorities:

  • flask type = frost wyrm
  • food type = fish feast
  • flametongue weapon
  • water shield
  • mana spring totem
  • wrath of air totem
  • speed potion
  • flame shock
  • lava burst (only if flame shock is active on the target)
  • searing totem
  • lightning bolt
  • thunderstorm

Now, of course you’re going to drop all of your totems at once, but you will need to refresh searing totem every minute.  The other thing you will notice is that you will not be using chain lightening at all in this spec.  Rather, you will just cycle through and hot flame shock every time the cool-down is up and fill in the spaces with LB, and oddly enough, Thunderstorm.  Thunderstorm will require you to be almost in melee range, and as you can see in the charts below it actually barely registers when it comes to damage.  In other words, TS will only come into play in a few fights but can fill up a cool-down in the rotation from time to time.  You can see the damage graphs from the Simulationcraft Wiki for all of this below.

shaman raid dps world of warcraft wotlk

shaman raid dps world of warcraft wotlk

And, finally, you can always make gear choices a whole lot easier with Pawn.  You can download pawn from either WowMatrix or Curse and keep it updated easily enough.  Pawn will give every piece of potential gear a score while you work toward best in slot so that you can keep the same build and priority list while you collect gear that matches the best in slot stats closely enough.  This will keep you from having to tweak and test your rotation and gear choices and get used to what you are doing.

Pawn Scale:

( Pawn: v1: “Shaman T8 57-14-00″: HitRating=3.02, SpellDamage=1.59, HasteRating=1.39, CritRating=1.13, Intellect=0.38, RedSocket=36.85, YellowSocket=48.32, BlueSocket=24.16 )

So there you have the Max DPS build for the Elemental shaman in T8 equivalent best in slot gear.  Next time we’ll bring the Shaman up to T9 level and then move on to the other classes one at a time.  As always, you can leave your requests for which class we do next in this thread and we’ll post the most requested in order to help you Dominate.