How To Improve As Elemental Shaman — The War Within (Season 1)

One of the biggest difficulties casters have is respecting the golden rule of Always Be Casting. It sounds simple enough, but in practice, it can be tricky to pull off, and in some circumstances, you even have to break this rule. There is no magical advice that can help players both respect the rule or show clearly when it is right to break it. It simply comes with experience and, most importantly, knowing the encounters. Analyzing your own logs can be quite helpful, ideally recording your own gameplay and reflecting on all the time you are spending doing anything that is not casting spells. Did you really need to move there this early, did you have to interrupt this cast, did you need to ghost wolf to get there in time?

Ideally, whenever you need to move, you should take advantage of your instant spells. Unfortunately, this requires foresight, good timing, and sometimes luck in order to avoid losing DPS while trying to gain some. You will generally want to use your Lava Surges as soon as they show up if using a Fire build, for example. However, you have fairly generous windows where you can choose when to refresh your Flame Shock and use your Earth Shock, and you should always try to use those windows to adjust your positioning. I can not emphasize enough how important this is. Additionally, you can move as you summon one of your elementals or cast Liquid Magma Totem, for example.

Frost Shock can be a handy backup spell to use for movement. You should not hesitate to use it whenever you have to move and do not have anything better to cast. You should not always default to casting Frost Shock in every circumstance involving movement, but it is definitely an occasionally useful failsafe spell, minimizing your DPS loss during movement.

Depending on your talent choices, Elemental can have relatively few or quite a lot of abilities. Especially if you are using a talent setup you are not used to, it can be very easy to forget to use your entire arsenal of spells. Of the base abilities, it is common for people to forget to use Fire Elemental, Storm Elemental and Earth Elemental after the initial cast. A lot of people die with Astral Shift or Stone Bulwark Totem off cooldown. If there is any possibility of you dying from what is going to hit you next, you should always use whatever defensives you have available.

As for talents, it can get more complicated. Liquid Magma Totem, Primordial Wave and Stormkeeper are in a category of spells with a fairly long cooldown that can be easily forgotten, although you should usually wait for the proper time to use them.

Finally, a lot of people have trouble with one of the big fundamentals of playing Elemental Shaman properly: (almost) always maintaining Flame Shock on your main target. Your uptime should be very high in nearly all circumstances.

Unless you are trying to bank Maelstrom for a priority target or burst phase, there should not be any reason to overcap Maelstrom in The War Within. You have room enough to hold onto your Earth Shock or Elemental Blast in order to optimize your movement with it, but it should never be at the cost of wasting more than a couple of Maelstrom outside of niche situations like Ascendance being about to run out. Elemental Blast is more problematic if you cannot use Nature's Swiftness/ Ancestral Swiftness with it as it has a higher Maelstrom cost and a cast time. In AoE situations, you should usually drop your Earthquake as soon as it is available (unless the enemies are about to die), so it should not lead to any overcapping issues.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize an Elemental Shaman without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

Simming is now very easy with no need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below, you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.