Shaman Leveling Guide

Leveling your shaman is very fun. Even though it can be tough at the lower levels you get many tools as you level to make up for this tenfold. You will be getting ancestral recall which is another hearthstone allowing for less travel time. If you happen to die you will get reincarnation which allows you to revive without running back to your corpse. Another nifty ability is the ghost wolf form which increases your movement speed by 30%.

This isn’t all as at the higher tiers you will get a couple other skills which make you incredibly strong in solo play. These are heroism/bloodlust (name depends on the faction) which give you a 40% melee and casting speed buff for 45 seconds. Another great boon are the elementals, being fire and earth, that you can summon to temporarily fight your enemies.

For some superb guides to improving your skill with your Shaman I suggest you have a look at my Best WoW Guide Page. In that section I cover my favorite World of Warcraft guides to help you bolster your character.

Anyway let’s get into the talent trees. Stay away from restoration as it is very weak in the leveling game. For dungeon crawlers you may wish to go restoration as it helps your healing, but you could easily queue up for instances as DPS and enjoy leveling fast solo while dealing damage in groups. So now we have to choose between enhancement and elemental. Personally I’m not a big fan of elemental, at least not until outland/northrend. Unfortunately Blizzard didn’t make items for non clother-wearers very plentiful if you’re a caster making it hard to have good enough gear to not make your leveling a drag as elemental.

And this brings us to my specialization of choice for shaman leveling: Enhancement.

As an enhancement shaman you will find yourself smashing through mobs with your powerful weapon enchants in combination with your ability to weave in spells. I personally prefer this build:

Click here for the shaman talent build

First things first, at lower levels your melee damage is lackluster compared to your spells’ damage. A good benchmark is going elemental first to make up for this and play as a caster early on. Fortunately these levels will fly by after which you can respect to enhancement to get Shamanistic Focus, which allows you to use your shock spells more freely without burning mana.

As you can see in the talent build, level 20 and up is where the juicy talents in enhancement become available. As you start picking up flurry you will quickly see your melee damage skyrocket. At level 30, once you get windfury weapon, you will really start appreciating flurry. After that you will find a couple of great talents that either reduce incoming damage significantly or further improve your damage.

And then you hit level 40 and you wonder whether you’re playing a new class. You will pick up dual wield at level 40, and finally your first proper melee attack in storm strike a level later. You will get a better feel for what to expect from your shaman for the rest of the game.

Further into the tree you will find more useful talents. Such as improved stormstrike to keep your mana up and lava lash to give you yet another attack. On top of this you get Shamanistic Rage which reduces damage taken while allowing melee attacks to restore mana to the point where you will never have mana problems again.

Then we get onto the final 2 talents of the tree, of which Maelstrom Weapon truly makes the enhancement shaman what it is: A melee caster hybrid. It reduces cast time for every charge on you to the point where spells become instant cast. This will increase your killing speed tremendously on top of making it a lot more fun to play your shaman. Lastly you will get your feral spirits. These not only deal significant damage they also have useful abilities and heal you for the damage they deal. This talent allows you to solo most group quests.Remember the Heroism/Bloodlust and Elemental totems mentioned before? Now combine these with the feral spirits.

After you get all this you can move back to the elemental tree and pick up some nifty goodies there, such as increased spell damage or the always lovely Elemental Devastation which increases your melee crit by a whopping 9% whenever one of your spells crits.

All in all the enhancement shaman is one of the best levelers once he hits around level 50 and really starts getting their key abilities. You will not only be able to deal high burst damage, allowing you to quickly kill mobs you also have a mechanic in Maelstrom Weapon which keeps your damage rotation variable making it a lot more fun to play with.

If you’re totally entranced by this guide in regards to leveling your shaman, as I was when I leveled my shaman, you may want to have a look at my Dugi’s Guide Review. This review will give you an idea of what to expect from this leveling guide.