Shaman Leveling Guide

Introduction

Shaman leveling speeds lie at the comfortable cross-roads between ‘total ass,’ and ’70 in a single day.’ At one end of the spectrum, the ‘ass’ end to be particular, we get holy priests, protection warriors, and the paladin – at the other end the candidates for ‘gods of leveling’ are rogues and hunters, who have it entirely too easy in general.

As a shaman you preserve a balance, you aren’t so easy to level as to make it a one and done process, yet you don’t lag so far as to make it to the level cap only to discover it’s been increased once again.

However, without proper talent selection and gearing, you can easily find yourself a lot closer to those as the venerable ‘ass’ end as opposed to the speed demons, not a pleasant prospect at all. Therefore, read on and follow these guidelines to avoid that unruly fate.

2.0 – Talents

9/52/0 Enhancement Build

As the base talent build for leveling, I like to focus on enhancement long into the 40’s before possibly picking up a few key restoration talents to round out the build’s strengths.

What this build emphasizes is quite obviously melee, it’s a straight up enhancement pick going for the primary damage-dealing talents and picking up the side-grades when extra points are abundant. Let’s cover the big picks of the enhancement tree, what to get and when.

One of your first real damage increasers is thundering strikes, however given that it’s simply a passive increase, +critical%, it won’t be nearly as flashy/noticeable as opposed to what it lead to, flurry.

Flurry is a diamond, and a very large one at that. Much like the effect for fury warriors, flurry makes a shaman feel alive as it beefs up your attack speed every critical. Overall this not only looks fancy when you go on a criticals streak, but also adds a massive increase of damage over-time, a real winner.

Shamanistic focus is one of the talents I see a lot of shamans skip, frankly this flabbergasts me. Why throw away a free shock or two, or more depending on luck, in almost every battle? Honestly I’ve come to love this combined with a high-critical rating, it gives yet another large boost of damage over time.

Moving back yet another level on the talent tree, we have improved ghost wolf, why would you get this? It really speeds things up pre-30, and even after that it comes in handy quite frequently. Whenever you need to escape combat this practically guarantees you won’t have a lengthy corpse run ahead of you, and I find the cast time of untalented ghost wolf just annoying honestly.

However, skipping this is what I chose to do in the current incarnation of the enhancement build, taking instead more damaging talents as we can now pick up mounts just a short while (at level 30) after we get ghost wolf, reducing it's usage.

Everything else is fairly obvious as to why you’d want to take it, and of the more notable ones, dual-wielding really proves itself to be quite an increase to overall damage dealing. Despite the increased miss-rate, you can’t beat out the straight DPS growth provided by this, even though this removes any armor bonus of a shield.

So, the talents I’ve gone over above are the truly necessary ones that shine for a leveling shaman, otherwise I leave it to you to pick and choose what you feel is right for your shaman at any given level.

10 - 12 Enhancing Totems
13 - 14 Ancestral Knowledge (2/5)
15 - 19 Thundering Strikes
20 - Shamanistic Focus
21 - 23 Elemental Weapons
24 - Ancestral Knowledge (3/5)
25 - 29 Flurry
30 - Spirit Weapons
31 - 32 Improved Windfury Totem
33 - 34 Mental Dexterity (2/3)
35 - 37 Weapon Mastery
38 - 39 Unleashed Rage (2/5)
40 - Dual-wield
41 - Stormstrike
42 - 44 Dual-wield specialization
45 - Lava Lash
46 - 47 Improved Stormstrike
48 - 49 Mental Quickness (2/3)
50 - Shamanistic Rage
51+ Branch out and make your own choices or finish the build

3.0 – Gear & Progression

Well, the primary statistics for an enhancement shaman are quite simple, they all revolve around our melee damage quite obviously. In general finding the proper gear for this is also fairly easy and becomes even more so at around 50-60+

Attack power, this equals a straight up increase in damage overall, is quite helpful. This is increased at a rate of 2 attack power for each point of strength, therefore stacking armor that either directly increases attack power or simply adds quite a bit of strength would help.

Another primary and important stat is +hit rating, however by the time this truly becomes necessary you should have the maximum of 9% hit rating, all from talents in both the enhancement and restoration trees.

Crit rating is obviously important, combined with the thundering strikes talent this allows you to have an almost constantly active flurry effect going. Flurry counts for quite a lot of damage and therefore is quite handy to have going 24/7.

Basically, attack power, strength, critical rating, anything else is secondary except possibly stamina if you’re really gimped health-wise.