Wow: Leveling Enhancement 1-20

Axes, maces, lightning, fire, frost, and wolves, and best of all, Windfury. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance at Big Hit Box, pens the enhance side of Totem Talk, and leads the guild Big Crits as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby.

Shaman, welcome! Today begins your journey to the realm of shamanism. You'll learn to tame the power of the elements, request their presence and rely on their support in your daily life. The earth will move for you and fires will lash your enemies. The wind is always at your back and flusters those who would do you harm. You will learn to harness lightning to strike fear into mere mortals and summon elemental pets to aid you in your quests!

It will be amazing! It will be fulfilling! It will... all come later. Now shut up and go over there and Lightning Bolt down some boars or moths.

Ask most shamans how they leveled and the answer usually is enhancement. Let's face it: it's a fun spec to play, it's easy to stay alive, and in later levels after getting a few special talents you can solo elites and fend off filthy rogues on PvP realms.

The purpose of this guide is to get you from 1-80 with the best possible talents, the most amount of information, and get good spell selection into practice now. Everything here is designed to keep you alive, keep you moving, help your quest/dungeon mates and get the most out of the class and spec.

By no means are these absolute must-do and must-have rules. Play your class the way you want to play it and the way you enjoy it. But if you're stuck and not sure what to do, then follow this guide and hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

Read on for BoA gear run down and levels 1-20...

Bind on Account gear

Before we dive in to the leveling guide let's talk about the BoA gear and enchants. For the armor go for the physical DPS pieces (you are going enhancement, right?), but for trinkets I recommend both if you can.

• Shoulders - Champion Herod's Shoulders - 40 Emblems of Heroism or 60 Champion's Seals. Or if you feel like the resilience is going to benefit you more, then the Prized Beastmaster's Mantle will cost you 200 Stonekeeper's Shards.
• Chest - Champion's Deathdealer Breastplate (40 EoH or 60 CS) is the only choice for BoA chests. Get it and you'll never need to worry about another chest until level 80.
• Trinkets - Swift Hand of Justice (50 EoH or 75 CS) should be your first choice; get on the haste wagon early! And Discerning Eye of the Beast (50 EoH or 75 CS) if you have the emblems left over.
• Weapons - Ideally you'll want to start with the Venerable Mass of McGowan (40 EoH or 75 CS) then add a second when you pick up dual wielding. If you want to go with a two-hander for the first few levels then either the Repurposed Lava Dredger because it is the only BoA two hander we can use with agility or the Bloodied Arcanite Reaper because it is sexy as hell.
• Enchants - the chest enchants are rather weak and I wouldn't bother with them, but there is a weapon enchant that will serve you well through the first 60 levels: Crusader. It procs often and between that and Swift Hand of Justice your downtime will be minimized.

In total for shoulders, chest, two trinkets and two weapons you'll need 260 EoH or 420 CS.

Level 1

Put some Rockbiter on your weapon, strap on your shield, stand at max range, and Lightning Bolt (LB) those evil, horrid, terrible, nasty boars or moths. If for some reason you get in trouble -- then you're probably doing something wrong. But if you do, use Healing Wave (HW) to top yourself off.

For starting out I recommend standing at range and LB until the mob gets in close, then continue to cast LB. We'll get into meleeing later.

Level 4

Earth Shock, nice to meet you. ES will become a part of your regular rotation for the rest of your enhancing career. Put it in a prominent place on your action bar and leave it there forever. For now still LB until the mob is in range then ES and auto attack or cast another LB.

Call of Earth

Here we get our first totem and thankfully this is an easy one for both factions. Pick up your totem and learn Stoneskin Totem. Not that you'll need Stoneskin any time soon. Especially if you're leveling with BoA gear, you'll be tearing through mobs so fast Stoneskin won't matter at all. Even later in levels or without BoA we have much better earth totem options such as Strength of Earth for offensive and Tremor, Stoneclaw or Earthbind for defensive.

Level 8

With upgrades to Lightning Bolt, Rockbiter Weapon, and Earth Shock there are nice damage boosts so be sure to stop back in and get your new skills as soon as you can. The new spell is Lightning Shield. Might as well get in the habit now of putting LS up and keeping it refreshed.

Level 10

Finally, talent points! But we're not getting anything cool just yet. We'll work our way straight down to the cool stuff in later weeks, but for now, put your first points in Enhancing Totems. Though you can spend talent points every level I'm only listing every other level here where we go back for more training so I'll tell you where to spend your next two talent points at every even level.

Talent points: Enhancing Totems for both levels 10 & 11

New spells:

• Flame Shock - Another shocking spell, use this as part of your pulls and get that DoT up.
• Flametongue Weapon - We'll be using this spell later on when we get dual wielding and some other spells, but for now stick with Rockbiter.
• Searing Totem - Not a bad little thing. If you are running some dungeons then put this down as long as there is no CC. Otherwise it will probably collect dust.
• Strength of Earth Totem - Great totem to put down when you want to set up camp and tear down some mobs.

Killing strategy: Pull with LB, Flame Shock, then melee and use Earth Shock when your shock is off cooldown.