Elemental
- Leveling
This build focuses on high damage output and buffing the Shamans main spells and abilities. With all these talents, the Shaman has a total of 13% additional crit chance on all lightning abilities not including gear. With all the crit talents comes some mana regeneration and some more utility with your Flame Shock.
- Group/Raiding (PVE)
This build focuses on high damage output and more group utility. Shaman are becomming more of a group/raid tool for their Elemental only buffs they give to casters. This spec also grabs Elemental Warding to reduce damage being done to you by raid mobs. On raid bosses, 17% (446 Hit Rating) total hit percentage is needed to never miss with a spell. With Elemental Precision, that drops it to 14% (368 Hit Rating) needed from gear.
This spec is designed to maximize a Flame Shock, Lava Burst, and Lightning Bolt rotation while still remaining mana efficient and being mindful of survivability. It has the stock Lightning Bolt enhancements we all know and love, plus Call of Flame, Lava Flows, and Storm, Earth and Fire to enhance Flame Shock and Lava Burst. In addition Elemental Weapons was included for more spell power overall, and Shamanistic Focus and Totemic Focus for added mana efficiency. These talents with Glyph of Lava, Glyph of Flame Shock, and Glyph of Flametongue Weapon make for a effective DPS build, while remaining survivable through the increased range of the spec and the minimal 4% off some incoming damage from Elemental Warding.
This spec is a level 80 version of the old level 70 Lightning Bolt spam rig. The 10 points spent between Tidal Focus, Improved Healing Wave, and Improved Reincarnation can be shifted around to meet ones own personal play style. Also 2 points from Lightning Overload or Elemental Oath can be shifted around, possibly to Thundering Strikes to increase static crit rate(though I would only suggest removing the points in Elemental Oath if you have another Elemental Shaman in group that has it.) The spec also allows you to act as a spot healer in a pinch moment though you will burn through mana fairly quick.
- PvP
Grabbing all the damage reducing talents in this tree will make you a lot more durable in both big and small battlegrounds. PvP situations can differ depending on what other classes you could face. Some situational talents are defered like Lightning Overload and Lava Flows because to get the most out of them, you need to be constantly casting. This usually is not possible, especially when there is a melee class preventing most of your spell casts. Your best bet is to Frost Shock and Earthbind Totem to kite away from them in order to pull out a few extra spells. Ranged and casters are more likely to be played closer as you can interrupt them better and also prevent them from kiting you.
Enhancement
- Leveling
This build is an amazing way to hit level 80 in no time. It focuses on high damage output along with utilities that boost mana and health regeneration when needed. Using Shamanistic Rage coupled with Feral Spirit everytime they are off cooldown potentially means little to no downtime along with bigger amounts pulls of mobs. This build also steals some spell enhancing talents from the Elemental tree to make not only your melee instant strikes hit hard, but also increase damage output with your spells. With the thanks of Maelstrom Weapon, tossing a Stormstrike on the enemy and using Chain Lightning when there are five stacks of Maelstrom Weapon applied will cause your Chain Lightning to become your favorite "Shock" spell.
- Group/Raiding (PVE)
This build also takes advantage of the Elemental Warding talent that reduces certain spells damage by 10%. It also takes advantage of Static Shock as you should not be getting hit by mobs. So, to get damage with your orbs, the 6% chance to toss some extra DPS is nice plus there are more charges, reducing the times you need to reapply it. You also take advantage of an increased amount of Stormstrike charges if you can get all 4 off the mob before it expires. Unleashed Rage is also an amazing talent to buff melee DPS in bigger raids.
- PvP
This is a standard PvP build that covers most of the PvP highlights in this tree. Improved Ghost Wolf will enable quick getaways in order to heal up or when threatened with danger. Again, Static Shock will reduce the number of times you need to reapply your Lightning Shield. Earthen Power is an amazing utility that will enable any quick getaway with Ghost Wolf combined. Finally, Feral Spirit will not only heal you as your wolves do damage, but thwy can really annoy any caster trying to mess with you.
- Group/Raiding (PVE)
Restoration
Many people find leveling a Restoration shaman tedious and slow because they sacrifice a lot of DPS for an increase in healing. A costly solution to this is to use an Elemental build for solo questing, and a Restoration build when grouping up for 5-man instances. Another solution might be to choose one of the elemental/restoration hybrids to draw synergies from the spell power you already possess as a restoration shaman (this applies only to players going from 70 to 80). For a starting shaman leveling with an exclusive resto build from level 10 and up is no easy feat. If you decide to do so you should consider the following build. The build will aim for good healing capabilities in 5-man instances but also get some talents that will help your leveling. One solution is to use a hybrid build like this suggestion for leveling/instancing or lvl 80 questing and instancing. There are a fair bit of freedom in the resto tree, this is a good build for mp5 so it could probably be used as on off healer/dps for raids.
The Patriach/Matriarch (level 80)
Depending on if you put your points in Healing Focus (Shaman talent) or Healing Grace you might have to respec. Take into consideration how often do you gain aggro in groups before you decide how many points you want to spend on Healing Grace. If you don't know the group or tank you are healing some agro reduction might be in order. How often are you getting pounded while healing while out in the wild, you shouldn't pick Healing Focus (Shaman talent) with 5-man runs in mind, its primary a solo talent, leaning towards PvP.
Raiding (PVE)
Standard Raid Healing
This Build offers a 14% increase in crit with all spells, this allows ancestral healing, improved water shield, and ancestral awakening to proc fairly often. Keeping earth shield on the tank and water shield on you are always important, but with this build there is no benefit from improved shields so they have to be up at all times. I have had mana issues with this build before, but now i have over 150 more mp5. Shamanistic focus is added for either when you manage to pull aggro or your getting put on interrupting it will save a large chunk of mana. This does not include tidal focus, there are many other useful places for those 5 points.
Chain Healing / Improved Shields / Crit
This Build gives you all the good talents for Shields and Chain healing. Adds also alot of crit, enough not to need the Tidal Force talent. Also I skipped Healing grace as most tanks generate huge amounts of aggro. Healing Way and Improved Healing Wave are useless talents because if you're allocated to healing main Tank something is wrong with your raid setup. The best way to heal with this build is to keep Chain Healing when necessary, and keep the Riptide for instant heals before a Chain Heal on a target getting too much damage. You can use Lesser Heal to heal fast also and with the Ancestral Awakening and the amounts of crit you should heal one extra target too. Best practice is to heal the Earth Shield target and have the glyph [1] for the extra 20% increased Lesser Healing Wave on target affected by Earth Shield.
Healing Wave / Crit
This is mostly oriented towards heroics. The Healing Way talent plus short Healing Wave allows the caster to use Healing Wave on the tank and with the Glyph of Healing Wave heal himself while healing tank (or other member of party). You will do Riptide (to shoten Healing Wave time) then Healing Wave on the tank or member in hard times. Also the Tidal Forces makes it even better because with crits you can heal yourself with big heals and trigger Ancestral Awakening. This will make all heals from shaman viable: Healing Wave for big trouble on single target, Riptide for shortening that heal and added as an instant inbetween, Lesser to heal an offparty up while still doing Healing Wave, and Chain Healing if more members in same spot and more aoe not so much single target damage.
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