In this article, we list your Elemental Shaman (WoW 4.3) core abilities and how they should be used together (rotation). We also explain when to use your various cooldowns. Then, we go deeper and present all the subtleties that playing an Elemental Shaman will face you with. The other articles of our Elemental Shaman guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the left.

1. Basic Single Target Rotation↑top

In the case of a single target, the rotation of an Elemental Shaman is a priority checklist:

1. Keep Flame Shock up on the target. Refresh when there are 3 seconds or less left.
2. Keep Searing Totem up.
3. Cast Lava Burst on cooldown
   • watch out for its cooldown being reset by procs of Lava Surge.
4. Cast Earth Shock when you have between 7 and 9 charges of Lightning Shield.
5. Cast Lightning Bolt as a filler.

2. Basic Multiple Target Rotation↑top

If the enemies are spread out, simply maintain your Flame Shock on as many of them as possible while performing your single-target rotation on one of them.

If the enemies are in the same area, proceed as follows.

• For 2 enemies:
  • keep Flame Shock on both of them;
  • maintain you single-target rotation on one of them, replacing Lightning Bolt with Chain Lightning.
• For 3 enemies:
  • replace Searing Totem with Magma Totem;
  • keep Flame Shock up on all three of them (though you can keep it on only one, to keep the rotation simple);
  • cast Earth Shock at 9 stacks of Lightning Shield;
  • spam Chain Lightning.
• For 4 or 5 enemies, spam Chain Lightning.
• For 6 or more enemies:
  • use Thunderstorm on cooldown;
  • use Earthquake on cooldown;
  • spam Chain Lightning.

3. Cooldown Usage↑top

As an Elemental Shaman, you have a total of 5 DPS cooldowns.

• Elemental Mastery temporarily increases your damage and gives you an instant cast of Lightning Bolt, Lava Burst, or Chain Lightning. It is your main cooldown and should be used whenever it is available (preferably before casting Lightning Bolt since it has the longest cast time). Thanks to the Feedback talent, each cast of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning reduces the remaining cooldown of Elemental Mastery by 3 seconds. See our Macros article for a macro to combine Elemental Mastery and Lightning Bolt.
• Fire Elemental Totem and Earth Elemental Totem are important DPS cooldowns (especially the former), they should be used whenever your Elementals will be able to attack the boss for 2 minutes without being interrupted. It is important to time these spells so that you cast them with the highest amount of Intellect, as the damage your Elementals do is proportional to the Intellect you have when you summon them.
• Spiritwalker's Grace should be used when you need to move, so that you can keep casting. If you are using Glyph of Unleashed Lightning, you will find yourself using this ability a lot less often.
• Thunderstorm is both
  • an AoE DPS cooldown, which you should always use when you have 6 or more enemies to attack and;
  • a mana management tool, which you should use on cooldown if you are having mana issues (most likely from spamming Chain Lightning).

4. Self Buffs and Totems↑top

There are two self-buffs that you should always have up:

• Flametongue Weapon on your weapon;
• Lightning Shield.

As a Shaman, you can provide your raid with various buffs from your totems. As other classes can provide buffs equivalent to those of your totems, you should discuss with your fellow raid members and your raid leader before deciding on which totems you will use. By default, use the following:

• Stoneskin Totem;
• Searing Totem;
• Mana Spring Totem;
• Wrath of Air Totem.

Note that thanks to Totemic Wrath, any of your Fire totems will provide you and the raid with a 10% spell power buff.

5. Optional Read: Mastering Your Elemental Shaman↑top

The advice provided above will enable you to play your Elemental Shaman very efficiently. The only real optimisations are regarding the use of Unleash Elements in conjunction with Lava Burst and Flame Shock, and regarding the management of your charges of Lightning Shield. We detail them below. Other than that, you might be interested in the various mechanics your class have. Also, some of the Tier set bonuses slightly change the way you play your class.

5.1. Using Unleash Elements

Normally, using Unleash Elements for Flame Shock or Lava Burst does not increase your damage enough that it will make up for the global cooldown you used to cast Unleash Elements.

However, there is a trick to make both Flame Shock and Lava Burst benefit from the Unleash Flame buff that Unleash Elements gives you. Simply cast Lava Burst immediately followed by Flame Shock, while Unleash Flame is active. Both spells will land on the target at the same time and both spells will benefit from Unleash Flame.

The only time when you should use this trick is when you want to refresh Flame Shock and Lava Burst happens to be off cooldown. In every other situation, it is not worth delaying your cast of Lava Burst or refreshing Flame Shock early just for using the trick.

5.2. Fulmination and Charges of Lightning Shield

When you deal damage with Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning, you have a 60% chance to generate an additional charge of Lightning Shield, thanks to Rolling Thunder. Damage done by Elemental Overload (your mastery) also has the same chance to proc Rolling Thunder. When you take damage, you lose a charge of Lightning Shield, but because of Glyph of Lightning Shield, your charges of Lightning Shield will never drop below 3. Therefore, you will always have between 3 and 9 charges of Lightning Shield.

Note that each of the jumps of Chain Lightning has a chance to generate an additional charge of Lightning Shield. This means that in a multiple-target situation, you will generate charges of Lightning Shield much faster than in a single-target situation. Depending on the number of enemies, you may find yourself in a situation where you generate these charges faster than you can spend them (but there is nothing you can do about the wasted charges).

Using Earth Shock when you have 4 or more charges of Lightning Shield consumes the extra charges and deals Fulmination damage proportional to the number of charges consumed.

Ideally, you should always use Earth Shock when you have 9 charges of Lightning Shield. Unfortunately, things are not so easy. There is a slight delay between the moment you finish casting Lightning Bolt and the moment a new charge of Lightning Shield is being granted to you. This means that when you receive your 9th charge of Lightning Shield, you will have already started casting something, most likely another Lightning Bolt. As you can see, this runs the risk that this new cast will generate a wasted charge of Lightning Shield (since you cannot have more than 9). Therefore, to avoid wasting charges, we advise you to try and cast Earth Shock at 7 or 8 charges of Lightning Shield (remember that Lightning Bolt can generate two charges, due to Elemental Overload, your mastery).

You also need to keep an eye open for Flame Shock, which you need to refresh right before its last tick (when its remaining duration is below 3 seconds). Since you need to sometimes save the spell shock cooldown for Flame Shock, this means that you will sometimes have constraints on your timing for casting Earth Shock. Approximately 8 seconds before Flame Shock expires, you have two courses of action, depending on your number of charges of Lightning Shield.

1. If you have 7, 8, or 9 charges of Lightning Shield, cast Earth Shock and refresh Flame Shock as soon as the shock spell cooldown finishes.
2. If you have 6 or less charges of Lightning Shield, do not cast Earth Shock and refresh Flame Shock as soon as possible (ideally, right after the duration hits the 3-second mark). When the shock spell cooldown finishes, you will have enough charges of Lightning Shield to use Earth Shock.

Note that you should always prioritise casting Lava Burst over consuming your charges of Lightning Shield with Earth Shock, even if you have 9 charges. Indeed, Lava Burst does not generate extra charges of Lightning Shield, so you will never run the risk of wasting a charge of Lightning Shield when you cast Lava Burst.

5.3. Lava Burst and Flame Shock

The reason why Flame Shock should always be up on your target is because:

• each tick has a chance to proc Lava Surge, which resets the cooldown of Lava Burst;
• your Lava Burst is guaranteed to be a critical hit, if Flame Shock is on the target.

Conversely, you should only cast Lava Burst when Flame Shock is up on your target.

Flame Shock ticks every 3 seconds, which means that you have 3 seconds to make use of a proc of Lava Surge before running the risk to see it wasted by a new proc of Lava Surge. To prevent wasting procs of Lava Surge, you should always cast Lava Burst as soon as its cooldown is reset.

The reason why you want to refresh Flame Shock with 3 seconds remaining or less is because if you refresh the spell with one tick remaining, this tick will simply be added to the new duration (and will therefore not be wasted).

5.4. Mana Management

As we will see in this section, you have many talents and abilities to ensure that you will never go out of mana.

You have several passive mana management tools:

• your Mana Spring Totem, which does not stack with that of another Shaman or Blessing of Might from a Paladin;
• the Rolling Thunder talent, which causes each hit with Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning to have a chance to restore 2% of your mana (for Chain Lightning, each target struck counts as a hit);
• the Elemental Focus talent, which causes critical strikes with non-periodic spells to reduces the mana cost of your next 2 spells by 40%.

In addition to this, you have Thunderstorm, which you can use to restore 10% of your mana (12% with Glyph of Thunderstorm) every 45 seconds (35 with Glyph of Thunder). Thunderstorm will mostly be useful when you are faced with the high mana cost of spamming Chain Lightning.

5.5. Tier Bonuses

The Bonuses from your Tier 11 and Tier 13 sets are entirely passive and they do not influence your play style.

Things are different with the 2-piece bonus of your Tier 12 set. This set bonus grants your Lightning Bolt a 30% chance to reduce the remaining cooldown on your Fire Elemental Totem. This makes it a lot more interesting to choose the Totemic Focus build (presented in our Talents article). Also, replacing Glyph of Lightning Bolt by Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem becomes a viable choice.

5.6. Tier 13 4-piece Restoration Bonus

If you have 4 pieces of the Restoration Tier 13 set, you can equip them before a fight begins and cast Spiritwalker's Grace. You will benefit from the +30% haste that the Tier 13 4-piece Restoration bonus gives you while Spiritwalker's Grace is active. Do not forget to equip back your Elemental gear.