PvE Enhancement Shaman Talents, Builds, & Glyphs

The talent tree and general makeup of builds are a lot more streamlined and simplified in Mists of Pandaria, although the choices you do make with your build will have high impact. As your gear progresses the optimal build path will likely change with it, so make sure to keep up to date.

Talents

Below I’m going to go over a good all-around build for most content to start with. Keep in mind that with Tome of the Clear Mind you can hotswap talents out of combat, so you can personalize and optimize things on a fight-by-fight basis fairly easily.

While this is a solid generalist build to start with, one of the cool features of this talent rework is that there’s quite a lot of flex in what’s actually viable. Below I’ll go over each tier of talent choices to give you a better idea of how they function and when you might want to take them.

Level 15 Talents (Tier 1)

• Nature’s Guardian
  This is a solid emergency cooldown. It has the added benefit of casting automatically when your health drops below 30%, so you don’t need to micro-manage it or have another button on your bars. The downside is if something were to one shot you, or you were to take fatal damage at 31% health you’re going to quickly be looking at a grey screen. You also can sometimes trigger this during moments where you’ll likely be fine, and then not have it for moments where you need a defensive to keep you up.
• Stone Bulwark Totem
  I wouldn’t recommend this as a defensive option. While it can work, it’s generally outperformed by the other two options in either efficacy or ease of use.
• Astral Shift
  A flat 40% damage reduction is a solid defensive option. The downside is the buff only lasts 6 seconds and it’s on a 1.5 minute cooldown, meaning you need to be careful with how you use the button. Generally having an idea of the fight beforehand and knowing when to press it in advance will give this defensive the best outcome.

Level 30 Talents (Tier 2)

• Frozen Power
  With this only being a soft CC, single target, and attached to a shock spell that isn’t used often I wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, really.
• Earthgrab Totem
  A much more effective replacement for your Earthbind Totem that provides AoE CC and great kiting power. Very powerful, although situational.
• Windwalk Totem
  This iteration of the totem is a lot more niche than you might assume as it does not provide any form of movement speed increase. Instead, this provides immunity to any movement-impairing effects in a 40 yard range for 6 seconds. The good news is you don’t need to predict these debuffs in advance as an immunity will cleanse any current movement-impairing effects within the radius immediately.

Level 45 Talents (Tier 3)

• Call of the Elements
  This is a lot better than it sounds even if it offers no benefit to DPS. 80% of our utility package is in totem form, with most of them being within the 3 minute cooldown threshold. Don’t sleep on this ability!
• Totemic Persistence
  In PvE your totems are rarely going to be destroyed, and even then the benefit isn’t anything to write home about. Extremely underwhelming.
• Totemic Projection
  While this is a viable option, it’s far more niche than Call of the Elements. This is mainly going to be an attractive option when in fights with lots of movement, target swapping, or other opportunities where not having to recast your active totems one by one will be useful.

Level 60 Talents (Tier 4)

• Elemental Mastery
  The strongest option by far pre-BiS as a lust/hero effect on a 1.5 minute cooldown is insanely strong. Haste is an important stat in general for us, and early gear is not going to be anywhere close to a soft cap giving us maximum value from this talent.
• Ancestral Swiftness
  The active part of this talent is not very useful when compared to the other options as our spells are going to be all instant-cast anyways, and there’s not much room in our priorities to fit another spell in at a profit. That said the passive Haste increase makes this at least somewhat viable, although still not recommended.
• Echo of the Elements
  This is going to get more viable over time as your gear improves. Will it pass Elemental Mastery? Potentially, given your stat setup and how your cooldowns line up with the length of a particular fight.

Level 75 Talents (Tier 5)

• Rushing Streams
  While not an enormous impact, it will provide some consistent healing over the course of a long fight as long as you remember to keep your Healing Stream Totem down as much as you can. It’s not flashy, it will take some presence of mind not to forget to press the button when it’s available, and it does take up a GCD – which are at a premium for Enhancement.
• Ancestral Guidance
  Potentially my favorite defensive cooldown of the whole expansion. If you overlap this with some damage cooldowns it can be nearly on-par with a raid-wide healing CD. It’s simple – the more damage you do, the more you heal those around you. You’re already trying to maximize your damage, and this takes a large chunk of your damage and replicates it as healing. The downside is that you need to have uninterrupted time to DPS in the encounter to make the most of it.
• Conductivity
  This is going to be extremely awkward to work into your rotation and is a much more clunky and less effective version of Ancestral Guidance. I don’t see any scenario where this would be more useful than the other two.

Level 90 Talents (Tier 6)

It should be noted that for this tier these are all highly impactful abilities, and all of them are viable to some degree. There is going to be a mathematically best option, and it is going to correlate with the level of gear you have on.

• Unleashed Fury
  You’ll get the benefits of both the Flametongue Weapon and Windfury Weapon enhancements when casting Unleash Elements. This will make Unleash Elements a much higher priority in our rotation, and require you to think about things like potentially delaying a Lightning Bolt cast if it’s close enough to Unleash Elements being off CD. It’s definitely the most clunky of the three to make use of, but still potentially powerful.
• Primal Elementalist
  This is going to amp up your Fire Elemental Totem and make it a powerhouse of a cooldown. Best paired with the Major Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem to allow you more casts of your buffed elemental. They will now be considered pets and gain extra abilities that you can micro-manage. Overall, though, this is the simplest cooldown to make use of and has a lower impact on your rotation complexity.
• Elemental Blast
  My starting recommendation, as seen above, is Elemental Blast as it offers a solid damage nuke combined with a bunch of free flat stats. As these stats become less valuable due to diminishing returns, this option will fall out of favor. There’s also the downside of adding complexity to an already somewhat complex rotation.

Glyphs

With the removal of Prime Glyphs you have 3 Major Glyphs to choose from that affect gameplay in a more subtle way and 3 Minor Glyphs that are mostly cosmetic or personal preference.

Major Glyphs

Good DPS Options

• Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem
  Best when used in combination with the Primal Elementalist talent.
• Glyph of Chain Lightning
  Only useful in large AoE situations where your Chain Lightning can reliably hit its maximum amount of targets.
• Glyph of Purging
  This is a very minor increase to DPS, but it at least makes the Purge button press provide some form of increase to our damage output. Generally should only take it on fights where you know you’ll have ample things to Purge.

Good Defensive Options

• Glyph of Shamanistic Rage
  If there are magic debuffs that can be cleansed during a fight this is a decent option paired with a solid defensive cooldown.
• Glyph of Feral Spirit
  The healing from your Feral Spirits is already no joke. A 40% buff to that will make you quite resilient and turns your dogs into not only a DPS cooldown, but also a defensive cooldown.
• Glyph of Flame Shock
  Seeing as your Flame Shock should have 100% uptime on at least one target, this is a small, but consistent, self-heal that’ll add up over the course of a fight. Upside is it requires absolutely no thought to make use of.
• Glyph of Ghost Wolf
  Makes your Ghost Wolf form more resilient to slows. Situationally useful.
• Glyph of Lightning Shield
  Useful when paired with Unleashed Fury talent as you can proc your Static Shock by just meleeing your target. Basically gives you a passive 10% damage resistance with a respectable uptime.
• Glyph of Healing Storm
  At 5 stacks of Maelstrom this is a 100% increase to healing. This can make for some large burst off-healing when casting instant heals.

Good Utility Options

• Glyph of Capacitor Totem
  Very straight-forward. Reduces the charge-time of Capacitor Totem by a couple of seconds. Useful when AoE stuns are going to be in-demand and you want it to be a more reactive ability.
• Glyph of Spirit Walk
  Reduces the cooldown of Spirit Walk by 25%, bringing it down to a 45 second cooldown. Extremely useful as this is our most powerful movement tool.

Minor Glyphs

Minor glyphs are mainly going to come down to personal preference, but I’ll list a few that are convenient enough to take notice of.

• Glyph of Astral Recall
• Glyph of Lava Lash
  • A note for this one: It should not be taken unless you specifically need this interaction for purposes of threat and mob management.
• Glyph of the Lakestrider