Popular End-Game Shaman Builds

I was very excited when I got to 50 with my shaman the other day because it meant I could finally use Shamanistic Rage, the ninth-tier talent atop the Enhancement tree. “Great,” I thought. “Now I can leverage my DPS to regenerate my mana. No more drinking downtime for me!”

Maybe my expectations were too high, waxing nostalgic as I was for my drain-tanking, Life Tapping warlock that never needed to rest. When I actually tried Shamanistic Rage, I was very disappointed with the results. I rarely regained more than 10% or 15% of my mana from a single use, despite a fairly high attack power and dual-wielding with Windfury. Sure, it’s only got a two-minute cooldown, but I still found myself drinking between every third fight. If you ask me, as far as 41-point talents go, it’s pretty lousy.

This got me to reconsidering my spec. After all, if Shamanistic Rage is such a poor choice, I wonder how many shamans actually use it. According to a spec survey over at Build Mine (thanks so much for the wonderful data, Kuroshiro), only 16% on shamans using the top 10 most popular talent distributions use it, and the most popular Enhancement build bypasses it altogether. Granted, all of these are level 70 builds, so mana efficiency may not be very important to end-game shamans, but I still think these statistic speak volumes to the low desirability of the talent.

So what did most shamans choose instead? Interestingly, none of the most popular builds ignored the Restoration tree. In fact, none of them put fewer than 16 points into it, and several of them spent all or almost all of their points there. Considering most level 70s are involved in running instances, this comes as no surprise. Even the melee specced shamans, however, spent the remainder of their points there.

Here are the take-home lessons from the Build Mine data. If you follow in the footsteps of the most experienced shamans, Restoration should be your primary or secondary talent tree, or even your only tree, but should never be ignored. Barring that, the choice between Elemental and Enhancement is a matter of personal preference. Note, however, that taking the “balanced” approach and sinking point into all three trees is not recommended.