This page is simply intended to provide a general overview of leveling the Shaman class. For a more in-depth and highly detailed resource on the Shamam, including PvP, Raiding, talents, leveling, and gold making, check out this Killer Guides' Shaman guide.

This page is specific to leveling your Shaman. For a more general overview of the class check out our Shaman Class Guide or, for more info on specific builds, look at our Elemental, Enhancement, and Restoration guides.

• 1.0 - Introduction
• 2.0 - Talents
• 3.0 - Gear & Progression
• 4.0 - 1-80 Shaman leveling Guide

Introduction

Shaman leveling speeds lie at the comfortable cross-roads between ‘I think I'll cut my wrists now . . ’ and ’80 in a couple of days.’  At one end of the spectrum, the ‘cut’ end to be particular, we get holy priests, protection warriors, and the protection paladin – at the other end we have the candidates for ‘gods of leveling’: rogues, death knights, retribution paladins, and hunters, who have it entirely too easy in general.

As a shaman you preserve a balance, you aren’t so easy to level as to make it a one-and-done process, yet you don’t lag so far as to make it to the level cap only to discover it’s been increased by another 10 levels, once again.  You can level quickly enough to be satisfying.

However, without proper talent selection and gearing, you can easily find yourself a lot closer to those at the dreaded ‘cut’ end as opposed to the speed demons - not a pleasant prospect at all.  Therefore, read on and follow these guidelines to avoid that undesirable fate.

Note: The 3.2 Patch did not significantly affect the builds below.

Current Patch notes are here.

3.1 Patch Notes - a quick overview:

• New glyphs
• Mana regen from stats dropped by 40%
• Miscellaneous tweaks
• New Talents: Frozen Power and Booming Echoes
• Some taletns redesigned for more PvP effectiveness
• Patch notes are here

2.0 – Talents

Glyphs:

• Major: Stormstrike, Flame shock, Windfury Weapon, Lava, Lightning Bolt
• Minor: Water Shield, Water Breathing, Water Walking, Thunderstorm

The glyphs are the "short list." Pick what you need depending on what you are using.

As the base talent build for leveling, I like to focus on Enhancement long into the 40’s before picking up a few key Restoration talents to round out the build’s strengths.

The first build, Elemental/Enhancement Leveling, is for those who do a little more spell casting. The second Enhancement Leveling build quite obviously emphasizes melee; it’s a straight up Enhancement pick going for the primary damage-dealing talents and picking up the side-grades when extra points are abundant. 

Let’s cover the big picks of the Enhancement tree, what to get and when.

One of your first real damage increasers is Thundering Strikes, however given that it’s simply a passive increase, +critical%, it won’t be nearly as flashy or noticeable as what it leads to: Flurry.

Flurry is a diamond, and a very large one at that.  Much like the effect for Fury Warriors, Flurry makes a Shaman feel alive as it beefs up your attack speed with every critical hit.  Overall this not only looks fancy when you go on a criticals streak, but also adds a massive increase of damage-over-time, a real winner.

Shamanistic Focus is one of the talents I see a lot of Shamans skip. Frankly this flabbergasts me. Why throw away a free shock or two, or more depending on luck, in almost every battle?  Honestly I’ve come to love this talent; combined with a high-critical rating, it gives yet another large boost of damage-over-time.

Moving back up to the second level on the talent tree, we have Improved Ghost Wolf. Why would you get this? It really speeds things up pre-30, and even after that it comes in handy quite frequently.  Whenever you need to escape combat this practically guarantees you won’t have a lengthy corpse run ahead of you, and, honestly, I find the cast time of untalented Ghost Wolf just annoying. However, now that we can pick up mounts at level 30, just shortly after we get Ghost Wolf, skipping this in favor of taking more damaging talents isn't a bad idea.

With everything else it's fairly obvious as to why you’d want to take it. Dual Wield, one of the more notable ones, really proves itself to be quite an increase to overall damage dealing.  Despite the increased miss-rate, you can’t beat the straight DPS growth provided by this, even though it removes the possibility of any shield armor bonus.

So, the talents I’ve gone over above are the truly necessary ones that shine for a leveling Shaman. If you're PvPing or doing a fair number of instances you should look into a few of the other talents (such as Unleashed Rage.)

Here's another 16/55/0 Enhancement buid that has a little more emphasis on instance running and teams.

3.0 – Gear & Progression

Well, the primary statistics for an Enhancement Shaman are quite simple: they all revolve around our melee damage.  In general, finding the proper gear for this is also fairly easy, and it becomes even more so at around 50-60+

Dual Wield: Once you have this try to get the slowest, hardest hitting weapons you can find.

Agility: Increases Attack Power with melee weapons, increases armor, increases your critical strike rating, and increases your dodge. Get this stat first!

Strength and Attack power: this equals a straight up increase in damage, so is quite helpful.  This is increased at a rate of 2 attack power for each point of strength, therefore it would help to stack armor that either directly increases attack power or simply adds quite a bit of strength.

Hit Rating: Another primary and important stat is +hit rating, however by the time this truly becomes necessary you should have the maximum of 9% hit rating, all from talents in both the Enhancement and Restoration trees. This means that you won't need to go out of your way to fiind more unless you're raiding. If you're raiding you're probably done with leveling.

Crit rating is obviously important, combined with the Thundering Strikes talent this allows you to have an almost constantly active Flurry effect going.  Flurry counts for quite a lot of damage and therefore is quite handy to have going 24/7.

Spell Power: If you're lobbing bolts all the time then this is a good stat to get, otherwise most of what you will be doing is hacking things to bits so you won't need it too much.

For your leveling it's basically: Agility, attack power, strength, and critical rating. Anything else is secondary, except possibly stamina if you’re really gimped health-wise.

Enchants, Gems, Glyphs: Chasing down the best gems or enchants is of little use while leveling, since you'll burn through a lot of gold and you'll probably be leveling fast enough that you will outgrow any enchanted/gemed gear that you're using.

If you do get the enchants (and gems) look for those that match what's mentioned above. Agility, AP, etc.

Glyphs are cheap enough and you don't outgrow them since they're not attached to your gear. Get glyphs that enhance the abilities and talents that you actually use. For example, we recommend the Windfury Weapon glyph, but if you never use that ability (for whatever reason) then why bother?

4.0 – Shaman 1-80 leveling Guide

The best way to get to level 80 fast is to do it with a pre-written leveling guide. WoW has thousands of quests and a few million mobs to grind and it's easy to get lost (in terms of what to do next) or just bored. A full-blown guide will make your blast to 80 much smoother.

Constantly having to stop mid-game to ask for help or look up "where to go, what to do" on sites like thottbot.com can become something of a pain. So, now take a guide that's in-game and automated to the point where you don't have to look up anything. The guide not only includes all the important quest details, it automatically updates as you go and posts an arrow (on screen) always showing you where to go next.

Zygor's Guide fits this bill, constantly showing you where to go and what to do, without ever leaving the game screen. Assuming you stay focused on leveling (as opposed to raids, PvP sessions, and endless Auction Housing) you should be able to hit 80 (from 1) in well under 10 days, and maybe as few as 6 days as some of gamers on the Zygor forums brag about.

Snag your copy of Zygor's Guide here or read our review.