ELE SHAMAN ADVANCED TIPS

ELE BLOODLUST TIPS

Bloodlust ain't just for enhancement anymore, now it's our turn to have fun with an iconic PvP talent. But before you go guns blazing, there is definitely a few things we need to check before using this ability.

Without getting ahead of ourselves though, let's briefly discuss how this talent works. It's pretty easy, when pressed on a friendly player, it's going to grant both of you 20% haste.

99 times out of 100, you're going to be using this on your DPS partner. The DPS gain honestly is just too high that you want to avoid pressing it on your healer unless it's a dire situation.

If you've been following along through this course from start to finish, we've mentioned the importance of syncing up your cooldowns no matter what. You always want to pair Ascendance with Primordial Wave, and you guessed it, you want to also be pairing Bloodlust with these cooldowns too.

Your first pop of the game should include your entire cooldown stack, Prim Wave, Ancestral Swiftness, Bloodlust, and Ascendance, giving you massive boosts. If you're a beginner, you'll definitely want to use this ability to get a better chance of getting a better cooldown.

If you're a beginner, you'll definitely want to use this ability to get a better chance of getting a better cooldown. If you're a beginner, you'll definitely want to use this ability to get a better boost.

If you're a beginner, you'll definitely want to use this ability to get a better cooldown. If you're a beginner, you'll definitely want to use this ability to get a better cooldown.

And the best part is that if your partner is playing their role properly, your Bloodlust will empower their cooldown window, which they should be in at the start of the game.

Then, a minute later, you should have Prim Wave, Ancestral Swiftness, and Bloodlust ready within a few seconds of each other, and once again, you should try and make everything sync up.

Your fourth pop is when everything from the opener should be aligned again, and we sound like a broken record at this point, but please, line everything up. It's worth it.

Trust us.

STORMKEEPER

With the recent rework to our talent tree, Stormkeeper has become a more accessible talent, but before you get too excited about this fan favorite from the past, we need to discuss the true role Stormkeeper plays.

Now despite the fact that this spell does give you powerful instant cast lightning bolts, this isn't really why we should care about it. Yes, the damage can be good, but what we really care about is how Stormkeeper will summon a Storm Elemental, which is going to buff our Earthshock damage by 10%.

So, in a twist of fate, Stormkeeper is not the star of the show, but instead, it plays a support role for our burst. Ideally, we're using Stormkeeper before we plan to Ascendance, since by doing so we're going to have that extra 10% modifier for our Earthshocks.

And of course, Stormkeeper with Ascendance means more lightning bolt overloads too, and more Maelstrom to work with. To give yourself a guaranteed Stormkeeper in the early game, you should consider pressing Stormkeeper proactively as the gates open, when it's going to be impossible to interrupt.

So the obvious downside to Stormkeeper is its cast time, and when you're getting trained by melee in the mid and late game, getting a seal cast off can actually be pretty dang difficult, and you shouldn't try and force a Stormkeeper in the face of kicks if your burst is ready.

This is one case where it's simply just better to send your damage without pressing Stormkeeper first. You're going to be losing out on some damage, sure, but wasting time getting interrupted, might actually be the bigger DPS loss.

The best way to get your second Stormkeeper off is through your Spiritwalker's Grace, allowing you to free cast a Stormkeeper. You don't necessarily have to always use it for this, as you may want to get important Hexes or Lightning Lasso casts beforehand.

But, if your second Stormkeeper is ready, and you have this talent, while there are interrupts ready, you can use this to cast out your Stormkeeper, allowing you to get off even more damage.

PURGE TIPS

One question we get on our Discord all the time is how to use Purge. This question does make a lot of sense.

We're already GCD camp as it is, which is why Greater Purge is the play, since it saves us one global that we could be using on damage. But since damage still is our number one priority, we need to be more selective on how and what we aim to purge.

There are several high priority buffs that should be dispelled quickly if you have the time. This includes major shields like Mage Barriers and Alter Time, offensive cooldowns like Power Infusion, and even freedom effects like a Hunter's Master's Call.

Burning one global to remove these buffs is almost always going to be worth it. What you need to be aware of, though, is how many trash buffs are on the target.

If the target you're trying to dispel is littered with multiple rows of pots, it's still going to be worth attempting to purge, since at the very least you're going to get 16 Maelstrom in the process, which is worth two Lava Bursts.

But in moments where you're super ahead, even maintenance buffs for healers like Lifebloom and Earthshield can still be worth a dispel, but only if you run out of damage globals to press.

Despite the fact that many healers have some built-in purge protection, a single dispel can negate a significant amount of healing and put your opponent at a GCD disadvantage. We really want to stress that purge can be such a vital part of your rotation, despite the fact that it deals zero damage.

The act of removing important buffs with one, simple button can totally be worth over a million damage in some cases, so get out there and weave purge into your gameplay.

SPIRIT WALKER’S GRACE MID CAST

Did you know that you can get almost guaranteed precog with Spirit Walker's Grace, giving you unstoppable damage in CC? The mistake many players make is using Spirit Walker's Grace just to lava burst or do damage.

It seems convenient in order to chase a target down, but we can do better than that. Instead, we want to be using Spirit Walker's Grace on high-value casts, like Lightning Lasso and Hex.

Now we rarely have time to hard cast anyway, and we need to fit these in somewhere. But here, we can play a simple mind game here.

Because Lightning Lasso and Hex are such high-value spells, enemy players are more likely to interrupt them.

Now what this means is that we can almost guarantee a precog by starting our Hex cast or Lightning Lasso channel, and then pressing Spirit Walker's Grace mid-cast, which now gives us an additional layer of protection against any stops.

LATE KICKING IS OP

If you think Windshear is the worst kick in the game, chances are you aren't using it properly. Its short duration lockout might seem like a deal breaker here, but there is one trick we can do to double its value.

It's called late kicking, which simply means using your interrupt very, very late into the cast. Here's why this is so broken.

Imagine you could instantly kick every cast within one millisecond. Sounds pretty good?

But think about the duration of the lockout. It's going to be two seconds no matter what.

Now imagine delaying your kick until the very end of a cast. Your opponent not only has to deal with the lockout, but they just spent one to two seconds trying to cast their spell.

That means you just extended your functional lockout by over 50%. Late kicking is extremely effective for this reason and for the simple fact that people love to fake cast all the time now with Precog.

If you're patient and avoid getting baited by someone, you're going to be able to get a lot of free kills. If you're patient and avoid getting baited by someone, you're going to be able to get a lot of free kills.

If you're patient and avoid getting baited by someone, you're going to be able to get a lot of free kills. If you're having fun with Spam Fakers and holding your kick instead, you're basically interrupting without even using Windshear.

Your opponent is juking themselves.

TOTEMIC PROJECTION IS BETTER THAN YOU REALIZE!

In this video we're going to be teaching you some advanced tricks with Totemic Projection, including a few you might not know about.

Hopefully by now you know that you can move Static Field Totem in order to launch your opponents in any direction you want, but you have to be careful here because it does have a maximum range. You can only move your opponents the same distance as the diameter of the Totem.

If you're trying to launch them super far away, it's going to bug out. But did you know that it's also a good idea to move your Capstun too?

The biggest problem with Capacitator Totem is that players will instantly kill it before it explodes. The workaround is to plant the Totem away from the enemy team and then transport it on top of them with Totemic Projection right before it explodes.

Problem solved. You can also move your Earthgrab Totem too.

The root effect will happen with every 2 second pulse, so if you root one player, you can project it to somebody else in the distance, and now you've rooted the other player. If you're using Totemic Projection, you can use it to protect your Grounding Totem.

Better players are going to instantly try and snipe it down, so once you have it summoned, you can move it out of LOS to prevent it from instantly dying. Just be careful not to move it out of range, otherwise the Grounding effect won't work.

You can do something similar with Tremor Totem. If your healer gets feared completely out of your range, summon your Tremor and then chuck it at him to break the feat.

Against casters or healers, you can also move your Grounding Totem. This is going to be amazing against them as you can move it out of line of sight to make it more difficult for them to kill off, providing you with more protection against spellcasts for longer.

Finally, you can do the same thing with Totem of Wrath. Whenever you press Primordial Wave, this Totem will automatically spawn at your feet, making it an easy target.

So to prevent it from getting sniped down, just move it to safety with your Totemic Projection.

FORCE GROUNDING BEFORE BURSTING

If there is one thing that will absolutely crush your soul, it's Grounding Totem. Which, in case you didn't know, completely owns Ascendance.

That's right, if you send your 30 second pop or Ascendance into a Grounding Totem, all the damage is going to be countered. So what can you do to make sure that this doesn't happen?

We need to bait out Grounding Totem first, and if there's one spell that's really good at doing this, it's Hex. If you have your go ready and you want to get Grounding out of the way, try casting a Hex first on the enemy Shaman.

It's a win-win. Either you Hex them and they can't Ground, or they Ground and you can send your damage.

And if it wasn't obvious, you should definitely track Grounding Totem and any other miscellaneous stops. You can do so by using our Omnibar profile exclusively for Skill-Capped members.

HOW TO KITE AS ELEMENTAL

Think elemental shamans are all about soaking damage and powering through the pain? Well, you're gonna have to think again.

The best elemental shamans know that survival means staying mobile through kiting their enemies and controlling the pace of the match. So let's break down how they do it.

First and foremost, elemental shaman kiting is a whole lot different from that of a mage, a warlock, or pretty much any other caster. Well, except maybe shadow priest.

But why is this? Because our primary kiting tool isn't blink or some fancy teleport.

It's ghost wolf, which gives us a 30% movement speed boost, but more importantly, it reduces the effectiveness of slows and snares. Now what this means is we can shrug off things like hamstring or poison slows a lot easier, which lets us create space and reposition more effectively.

However, this becomes really noticeable if we play around our thunderous pause talent, which completely removes the snare and makes us sprint an extra 25% faster every 20 seconds. Now that said, none of this is gonna matter if we kite like a mage.

It doesn't matter how much distance you create if the enemy has gap closures like charge or shadow step, it just jumps right back on top of your poor little ghost wolf body. So, when we kite, we need to do it the elemental shaman way, by using pillars to line of sight.

This prevents gap closures from landing. It buys us some real time to recover.

A really great habit is to use gust of wind to launch ourselves toward a pillar, then shift into ghost wolf and circle around the edge when thunderous pauses up. This combo creates maximum distance and it gives you precious breathing room when you're getting hit a little bit too hard.

Now, of course, this is world of mobility craft, however, so just hugging a pillar and hoping for the best isn't always gonna cut it. And that's where the rest of our toolkit is gonna come in handy.

And that's where the rest of our toolkit is gonna come in handy. And that's where the rest of our toolkit is gonna come in handy.

And that's where the rest of our toolkit is gonna come in handy. The star of the show here for kiting is of course gonna be thunderstorm, which with its massive knockback will allow us to bump melees away every 30 seconds.

Now, naturally, this spell is particularly effective on two platform maps, so try your best to knock melees off ramps and ledges to get the most bang for your buck.

But even on flat surfaces, we can easily abuse thunderstorm by chaining it with our earth grab totem and rooting them after the knock, essentially shutting melees out of the game until they receive a dispel. Or simply, we can just knock enemies away and use gust of wind after to outrange their gap closers and recover.

Now, as for gust of wind itself, other than gusting to the pillar to ghost wolf and gusting after thunderstorm, we can also use it to gust onto pillars, which is particularly effective on a map like Tiger's Peak.

This is because you can gust onto the platform from the middle while the melees will have to run all the way around to connect, making them waste a ton of time and energy. This strat was so powerful, in fact, that Zeep Eye even won a whole series doing this versus a counter comp in the AWC.

So next time you're up against a melee, try kiting like a shaman and abuse those pillars, knocks, and gust of winds, and you're going to be taking far less damage than before. Want to know how to use our other defensives?

Well, then join us on our next video all about our walls and burrow. We'll see you there.

SURVIVING AS AN ELEMENTAL SHAMAN

Now, let's go over Shamans' main defensives so you know exactly how to budget them throughout your games. Now, when it comes to Elemental Shamans, we have a plethora of defensive buttons ranging from heals to shields to damage reduction and even damage immunity.

And since most of these have fairly long cooldowns, knowing when exactly to use them is going to be crucial for your survival. The two most basic defensives that we have in our kit are Healing Stream Totem and Earth Shield, which we should honestly just be using on cooldown.

Healing Stream makes up a large portion of our overall defensive budget per game, and for good reason. Its healing is very strong, and its cooldown is only 6 seconds longer than its duration.

This means that if you press it every time you should, and it doesn't get killed, you can have it ticking away for the vast majority of your match, allowing you to focus more on dealing damage, because you're simply just going to be less dead.

This also goes for Earth Shield, though, as well, which we should honestly just think of as a Healing Stream amplifier, as it buffs our healing done to the target by 20%, as well as being an excellent purge protection.

So the bottom line of Earth Shield is you really just keep it up all game on yourself and your partner, as it's well worth the one global maintenance for the extra survivability.

So with those minor defensives out of the way, let's dive into our first major defensive item, which is the most important defensive cooldown to use at the start of each game, and that, of course, is Astral Shift.

Astral Shift is our 40% damage reduction wall, and should be used whenever the enemy team are popping offensives early on. Now, because this is a damage reduction, you want to use it at fairly high health so you avoid dying through.

40% damage reduction isn't going to do anything when you're 20% HP. This is especially important in solo shuffle, where rounds are really short, and they're really fast paced.

Using Astral Shift early can let us fit in two uses per round if we're running the Plane Traveler talent, which reduces its cooldown to one and a half minutes.

Now, that's not to say the shorter cooldown is always the best choice, though, as running the standard two minute wall with Astral Bulwark for an extra 20% damage reduction can be incredibly valuable against classes with strong two minute burst windows, like a Feral Druid's incarnation.

But outside of those more niche matchups, the shorter cooldown from Plane Traveler is usually the better pick for most situations. Now, once we've used Astral Shift, our next defensive is Stone Bulwark Totem, though we're going to be using it pretty infrequently since it comes with a 2.9 minute cooldown.

Now, what this totem does is instantly apply a large shield to us, and then continues to pulse smaller shields over its duration, as long as we stay within that range. While this totem is a long cooldown, the absorb it provides is no longer as good as it was in the first game.

It's still as potent because in this recent patch, damage is through the roof at the moment. Now, as such, you're going to be trying to use this whenever you're taking heavy damage, but don't rely on this cooldown alone to keep you alive against heavy offensive cooldowns.

The only other downside with this totem is that since it's an absorb, it's affected by dampening, so try not to hold onto it too long in the game, or its effect is just going to be far weaker.

Our final defensive is Burrow, which functions more like a hunter's turtle, which functions more like a hunter's turtle, than a mage's ice block. While it prevents direct damage by making us untargetable, it doesn't make us immune, so we'll still take damage from dots and any effects already on us.

With how high the damage is, and if you're constantly a kill target in a matchup, Burrow is going to be a nice extra button to have. It's essentially a great defensive cooldown that helps get you out of trouble when you don't have your astral shift ready.

You're going to now probably need Burrow in most matchups, only dropping it if you aren't prone to dying. That said, when you're up against comps that win through heavy crowd control chains like rogues, hunters, or mage setups, Burrow becomes almost a necessity, so kind of contradicting myself here.

But that's all right. Without it, you're going to be extremely vulnerable during those windows when your healer is locked down and can't help you, making it easy to get overwhelmed and dropped.

Now, for this reason, Burrow should be paired with your PvP trinket almost every time. It's your get out of jail free time, helping you survive those unhealable moments when your healer is stuck in crowd control and can't assist.

As for when you're actually in Burrow, try to get some distance from melee, your untargetable underground, so you can force them to burn their gap closers just to get back on you.

But thanks to its knockup effect, when facing casters, we can actually run on top of them to prevent their next cast, which can often be the difference between life and death.