The Basics
So you wanna be a shaman mon? For some reason I just can’t see anyone playing a shaman with any other race than a troll, but regardless of race and gender, if you go for this class you’ll be in for a world of fun while leveling up. Shamans can fill in any role in a party, save that of the tank, they can output awesome DPS as both ranged and melee, they have decent survivability in all specs with the help of their healing and panic buttons, they can grind, they can CC to some extent and they can do all this while being totally awesome. Playing a shaman is just one big bundle of awesomeness, from your ability to insta-shock other players or mobs while jumping around to the short downtime you experience with the help of your totems, shamans are one of the best classes to go for if you want a speed-burst through the levels.
Early Levels
Your talent choices will determine your play style heavily, so make sure you understand each leveling spec before you go deeper in it. Basically, both Elemental and Enhancement are great leveling specs, the first focusing on ranged damage and totem support with the latter on dual-wielding melee damage and insta-casts. Ultimately, you’ll usually go for a combination of the two, although some players tend to choose Improved Healing Wave for the reduced cast time and Totemic Focus in Resto for the reduced mana costs. While these aren’t necessarily bad choices, if you want to speed level I’d recommend against them, since those 5 or 10 points you spend in resto could easily go into a talent in either Elemental or Enhamcenet that would increase your burst damage or reduce your downtime – the faster the mob dies, the less you’ll need to use your healing wave.
Totemic Focus could be useful in combination with a “Totem Master” elemental spec, but again, this spec isn’t the fastest for solo-leveling. Totem masters usually have more downtime, since you have to set up your “totem fortress” each time you take on a group of mobs. While this allows you to take on more mobs at a time than an enhancement shaman, the downtime for setting up totems each time as well as the downtime from recuperating between packs of mobs is greater and more annoying than if you would carve your way through mobs individually as enhancement.
That’s why my personal opinion is that enhancement is a lot faster and I’d also recommend it as a leveling spec with points in Ancestral Knowledge from levels 10 to 14 (you won’t feel that extra mana yet, but it scales up and will prove very useful at later levels as well as adding a bonus in damage with Mental Dexterity). Alternatively, you can spend 2 points in Ancestral Knowledge and go for 3/3 in Enhancing Totems, since this will have a much more visible and immediate impact. The point is to reach Shamanistic Focus as soon as possible, you’ll have to take full points in Ancestral Knowledge and Enhancing Totems anyway, since the talent options bottleneck later on and you have to come back to early tier talents.
A note of advice: it might seem tempting to go for Improved Ghost Wolf, but take into consideration that you can now buy the slow mounts at level 20, so Ghost Wolf loses a lot of its appeal. Sure, it’s still a great getaway talent, with its instant cast, but overall it’s not worth spending the two points for it anymore.
This is how your enhancement spec should look at level 60. Another way to spec is to skip Maelstrom and Feral Spirit and go into the Elemental tree as soon as you get Mental Quickness and Shamanistic Rage. This allows you to reach Call of Thunder and Unrelenting Storm in Elemental, which some prefer to the spirit wolves (the lightning bolt boosts lose a lot of their oomph without Maelstrom though). Again, personal call that you should decide upon based on your play style.
Outland
Unfortunately, what shamans lack in comparison to other classes is AOE power. In early Outland, with AOE heavy areas like the Hellfire Peninsula, Zangamarsh or Nagrand you’ll feel at a loss, so grinding won’t be your main powerleveling option. I suggest focusing on quests for the time being and go for the clustered ones only, don’t waste time on long chains that have you running around for 20 minutes – even if they reward you with some nice blue mail, remember that your goal is to powerlevel and get to Northrend ASAP – any gear you get now will be replaced in the blink of an eye from the early Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord quests.
As far as spec goes, if the elemental talents aren’t that urgent, do try to invest in Improved Shields, mainly for the Water Shield buff. You get 50 mp5 and 170 mana restored at level 69 (Water Shield Rank 8) and with 3/3 Improved Shields, plus a Glyph of Water Shield you’ll almost eliminate downtimes completely, although casting Water Shield over and over again WILL get annoying, but it’s a necessary evil. The reason why you should only get it now and not invest points in it earlier is that in Vanilla or Outland you’re practically overpowered and shouldn’t have much difficulty powering through mobs like an unstoppable killing machine. If you decide to go to Northrend at 68 (which you should), try to have Water Shield up and buffed as much as you can through talents and glyph.
Northrend
This is where things get interesting and what was an annoying handicap in Outlands, your lack of AOE in favor of stronger single target and chain-pulling capabilities, will prove to be an awesome advantage in Northrend. There are few AOE grinding areas here and it’s usually riskier to even try AOE grinding early on, especially on PVP servers. Thankfully, things even out for your class and an enhancement specced shaman will be able to blaze through mobs, one at a time with almost no downtime, reducing risky situations and getting an awesome experience-per-hour ratio.
I suggest you head on to Borean Tundra when you start out in Northrend, the quests there are a lot more clustered and the distances between hubs tend to flow more naturally than in the Fjord, with its spiky geography. The Fjord becomes a viable option if you have the BoA flight tome early on, but that’s obviously situational, as you’re depending on a level 80 cash-strapped main on the server.
Your progression path will be determined by how much rested experience you have and whether you decide to finish both the Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord areas, but I suggest you don’t skip Dragonblight from your zone list. It’s full of quest hubs that can be grinded through in perfect shamanistic style, it has a lot of mail armor that will last you a couple of levels and quite frankly, it offers some of the most fun quests in the game (not to mention the awesome zone ending, which I won’t detail since it could be a spoiler for newcomers reading this).
Another zone that you simply shouldn’t miss as a shaman is Sholazar Basin – think Un’Goro meets Nagrand, with a pinch of Searing Gorge: a tight area packed with a hundred quests, most of which involve killing lots of mobs (long live Nesingwary and his awesome quest lines). And killing is your game as a shaman, the area offering the added bonus of mobs not being packed too tightly, offering a perfect setup for your single-kill chains.
If you’re on a PVP server though, be on your guard as the Basin takes the features of its earlier cousins involving Nesingwary, Stranglethorn Vale and Nagrand: a high risk PVP area that has players competing for mobs, thus the incentive to eliminate the other faction is doubled. Keep your shocks ready and try not to pull too many mobs on your ass, limiting the opportunities those sneaky rogues will have to gank you mid-fight.
Conclusion
I know the leveling guide above might seem a bit biased on my personal leveling process as an enhancement shaman and many of you who leveled as elemental will be able to point out major differences in play style that would make or break a specific section of the leveling techniques proposed above. That’s fair play and although I still think Enhancement is the better leveling spec, what it really comes down to is your own personal preference and I know how important that can be. For example, when leveling my priest, even though every guide out there suggested I go shadow, I simply couldn’t adapt to the shadow priest play style and went disc/holy. Thankfully, whereas the leveling difficulty between a priest’s disc/holy and shadow specs is huge, a shaman’s elemental and enhancement specs are balanced a lot better and each will do a decent job once you get the hang of things. Totems be witcha mon!
