Raiding Shaman Guide, LS Edition

Raiding Shaman Guide, TOB Edition

Ryft

 <Realm of Insanity>

Discord: travi771

Last Updated: 7/22/25

What’s Changed?

The Outer Brood (TOB) has made some fairly significant changes to the raiding scene and this has caused some changes in how to play a shaman.  This guide has been updated to reflect these changes.  If you have read it previously you will find a brief summary of the changes below.

• Extra spell slot added, changes to spell lineups
• Changes to aug, heroic stat, and tribute optimizations

• Expanded section on choice of 2hander augs

• Lack of Feralista in TOB
• Single target Malo changed to be instant cast

• A nice quasi DPS boost for us since we can start dotting mobs a second or so faster now

• Fully moved to level 121-125 spells
• Discovered there is a key bind for inspect buffs, thanks Szilent

In addition, I plan to add a couple other sections soon:

• UI optimization
• Table summarizing DoT Damage, Recast, and Duration
• Listing of best type 18/19 augs
• Dealing with mana issues

Introduction

I wanted to start this by saying a couple things about the context of this guide.  This is intended to be a guide about playing a Shaman in an EverQuest raiding guild.  It is intended to be useful for all raiding Shamans, but the focus will be on playing the class in a raid force that is focused on overall efficiency and speed.  It is written with respect to the current meta at the time of the last update, meaning that as new releases happen some parts of it may be out of date or no longer best practice.  In addition, it will likely be very long and verbose. I will attempt to make a summarized version as well, but that may happen much later.  It is separated into different sections with the intention that some readers might find some sections more useful than others and thus may want to pick and choose the parts they read for the sake of brevity and usefulness.

The focus of this guide is to be the best all around Shaman that you can be.  That said, the hardest part of playing a modern Shaman is maximizing DPS so there will be a heavy emphasis on that aspect of the class.  That does not mean the other roles of a Shaman are unimportant. 

I’d also like to add a thanks to Goratoar.  A significant portion of the content in here are things I learned/leveraged from his NoS era guide.

What is “multi dotting”?

Multi dotting is the concept of having dots on multiple mobs at once.  In the current meta it is extremely powerful given that most raid encounters don’t have much damage output so spawning lots of adds and increasing overall raid DPS by hitting more things at once is beneficial.  This will be described in much more detail later, but I wanted to put a quick definition upfront.

Setup (spells lineups, tribute, gear, etc)

Spells that should just about always be memmed:

Heals

1. Immortal Intervention
2. Grayleaf’s Recourse
3. Spiritual Shower
4. Reckless Resurgence
5. Reckless Reinvigoration
6. Reverie of Renewal

1. Given the high AoE damage and several fights with moving parts in TOB this spell has become more important.  Some people still find it not useful, but I think it should be in your full time spell line up these days.

Dots

7. Hotariton Pandemic (Combo Disease)
8. Fandrel’’s Curse
9. Malediction
10. Chaotic Bloodcurse (Combo Poison)
11. Krizad’s Affliction

Utility

12. Reciprocal Roar

Useful spells for the last two slots include:

• Malo Totem: This one is rarely used in TOB compared to its common usage in LS.  The combination of single target Malo becoming instant cast and the lack of very large add waves means that it’s pretty easy to get full Malo coverage without it.  The 8 target limit for Wind of Malaise (AoE Malo) rarely comes into play currently.  That said, it can still be useful to put down at the start of certain events like Silence the Cannons, Dock the Bay, and Brood Architect Hazuri.  However, I will almost always put the totem down right before we start and them un-mem this spell for something else during the actual fight.
• Traumatic Exchange (baby canni): Given the length of TOB fights, mana is a real thing again and this is a useful way to help with that.  The very low hp cost means it’s unlikely to kill you, but over the course of a long fight can provide a substantial mana boost.  Generally speaking you should try to only cast this during “slow” parts of a fight, meaning there aren’t any mobs you could be dotting or people needing heals.  Times when there is just one mob in camps and it’s fully dotted or you have nothing else going are better than times when there’s a lot going on, but also if you are desperate for mana you may need to use it more frequently.
• Alliance: Slightly more useful than it was a year ago, but still not super critical.  It’s best use is on High Priest when positioning isn’t as stacked up (and damage is very high) or Control Room.  If you do use this, make sure the shaman(s) casting it are not in a group with the tanks they are casting it on.  
• Nectar of Obscurity: Even more multidots.  Not generally as used as Blood, but if you have the targets and they will live long enough for the doom mem this.  The use of this DoT heavily depends on the DPS of your guild and the event.  In a high DPS guild it is unlikely you would ever cast this on a regular add, but even in high DPS guilds there are opportunities to use this on Silence the Cannons and High Priest.

Note that Feralista has been removed from this list.  This is solely because none of the raid mobs in TOB are humanoid and thus cannot be feral’d.  This may change next expansion.

Tribute

Twinge of Pain is absolutely required as it lowers the cast time on our dots..  Second chance is also quite good.  After those two nothing else is critical, but increasing your hDex and Dex cap provides minor benefits.  Increasing hSta and hWis can also be useful (see gear section for more info on heroic stats).  Visions of Suffering is one that was previously written off, but should now be considered.  It provides 1% more detrimental mana preservation than gear does, which can be useful if you are having mana issues.

Gear

There honestly are not many choices to make in terms of gear in modern EverQuest, with most of the choices coming via augments.  I strongly recommend using a 2handed weapon over a 1hander and shield.  As mentioned in later sections, our melee DPS is very much not a joke and the 2hander also helps with spell DPS because of the better proc.  Most mobs in current raid content don’t put out that much melee damage and realistically we should never be being hit anyway.

I use 2x sympathetic heal proc augs (https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=151788;source=lucy and https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=148048 ) in my 2hander because the heal proc is really powerful.  Someone asked me about this choice recently, so I am going to expand on it.  The only real options are either sympathetic heal proc augs or straight damage proc augs.  The damage augs provide a small boost to damage, which certainly isn’t horrible, but I think the heal is just better.  My reasoning is that these heal procs aren’t the same as most healing that happens in a raid.  The vast majority of shaman healing is what I would call “inconsequential” healing.  Most of it goes to healing Jober, Kenaber, Ryft’s Pet, Sancus’ Pet, Wholewheat, or some Bard that is at 95% health anyway.  This healing is guaranteed to always be directed onto someone who currently has aggro on a monster.  Sure, they may very well be at 100% health when it happens, but you at least know it’s guaranteed to be landing on someone who is in some amount of danger.  The heals themselves are not massive, but the way I look at it, increasing your total healing by a few percent and providing valuable healing is better for the raid than increasing your personal DPS by a few tenths of a percent.

This brings to (potentially) one of the more controversial opinions in this guide, one that I need to give extra credit to Goratoar for as I stole it from him.  Shamans should prioritize hDex in all aug slots.  Current raid content is so easy that survivability is not a concern at all, making hSta useless.  Mana hasn’t been a concern for shamans for years.  So, the only remaining viable heroic stat is hDex.  This also ties in with the 2handed weapon mentioned previously and represents the only realistic benefit we can get from heroic stats right now, a boost to melee DPS.

I run three evolving items and max out as many melee/spell proc augs as I can as well as using a Ventral Defense aug.

Previously in this section I recommended fully prioritizing hDex in all aug slots because content at the time was so trivial that nothing else mattered.  I am happy to say that this isn’t (entirely) the case anymore.  There are events in TOB where dying is a real possibility, even without tanks falling asleep at the keyboard.  For launch day this year, I prioritized reaching 4k hWis and hSta in order to max out spell shielding and stun resist.  This has proven to be useful as there have been plenty of times where many people in the raid have died to overlapping AoEs or such and I have survived and helped recover.  I will say, as we move deeper into farm I am likely going to stop caring about the hWis and put that into hDex, in part of that because it takes so much hWis in order to gain just a few percent of spell shielding and with more gear I don’t need it as much, but I do plan on keeping the 4k hSta because I find the stun resist extremely useful.  There are a lot of stuns on TOB fights and resisting one of them is an indirect DPS increase due to the lack of spell interrupt and a significant boost in survivability to myself as well as the rest of the raid since I can heal in that time.  I will also mention that there is basically 0 benefit in going above 4k hSta or hWis as those returns are essentially nothing, so it becomes a fun math problem to try and keep those just over the breakpoint without going too far over.  Any extra slack you have with regards to these heroics may as well go into hDex as it is the most useful stat left.

I recommend doing some planning of your augs to figure out how to best achieve this.  Generally speaking, for type 8 augs I find it most useful to use any recent aug that has either hDex and hSta or hSta and hWis as this helps maximize useful heroics.  With full TOB type 5 augs it’s very easy to hit 4k in 2 heroic stats, so looking at the total heroics added by each aug rather than just one of them will help.  As you get over the breakpoints you can consider switching to the harmony type 5 augs (the ones like https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=173172;source=lucy ) in order get value of other stats without wasting over the soft caps heroics.

Clickies

The only clickies I would say are essential to the class are Bifold Focus, Epic 2.0, and Staff of Forbidden Rites.  The first two are described in later sections.  Staff of Forbidden Rites is simply a 1.0 second cast rez on a 30 second cooldown, use it to rez people who die.

A few other useful clickies that I won’t go into depth on include Jeweled Apothic Dragon Spine Hammer, Rod of Dark Rites, and Valia’s Unyielding Bravery.

Buffs

Won’t go into too much depth here.  You obviously want your unity buff and Tala’Tak on yourself.  Also keep Preincarnation, Visionary’s Unity (swarm pet proc), and Evocation Focus proc potions on yourself.  Make sure you have spell haste.

Healing

The most important thing to understand is when to be healing, when to be ready to heal, and when to not worry about healing. Focus on healing is when there is a lot of incoming damage on tanks and/or the raid and the chance of deaths is highest.  

This is generally when the raid is dealing with newly spawned or a high volume of adds.  This is also when a shaman has many other competing priorities such as AoE slowing, and multi doting for significant DPS gain.  The exact priorities are heavily determined by the type of group they are in, the amount of damage being taken by the tank, and the total number of healers, specifically other shamans in the raid. When in doubt, it’s better to err on the side of over healing at first and slowly ramp down as you get more familiar with the events and your raids needs.  Generally, if there are more than 10ish mobs up at a time Shower should absolutely be used on cooldown.  Less than that and it’s ok to be a little looser.

Sometimes there will be big spikes of damage that do not represent threats to people dying.  For example, large AoE damage that is spaced out.  A giant 400k AoE that goes out every 30 seconds is not a lot of pressure just because it drops the entire raid under 50% because other than the main tank there is not a threat to those people dying until the next AoE.  You don’t need to immediately react in that circumstance, top off the raid before the next AoE at the most efficient time.

Spell Overview 

• Shower (aka splash heal): An AoE heal around your target that comes in 3 waves.  Your best heal, more about this later
• Reckless heals:  Quick cast single target heal with 13 second cooldown.  Mem at least 2 and put them on a multi bind to mitigate the long cooldown. Used to spot heal people taking spike damage.  
• Intervention: Fast cast group heal with higher potency based on missing health.  If they have any significant damage this will usually be a full heal.  This is your main emergency heal.  Save this unless you really need it since it has a 1 min cooldown.  Don’t be afraid to use it when you need it.
• Recourse: A group heal that puts a buff on that will heal again later, and then repeats.  Good when your group takes AoE damage and isn’t going to be healed by splash heals in the immediate future.  I often use this heal to provide “patch” heals on my group because it doesn’t require switching my target.
• Reverie:  Group heal over time.  Generally try to keep it up on your group, there are some valid arguments that it isn’t that useful, but given the content in TOB, I think it’s very much worth keeping up on your group when you can.

Spiritual Shower

Generally speaking, Spiritual Shower is the most busted spell in EverQuest right now and possibly ever.  In most circumstances it should be used roughly on cooldown.  This doesn’t mean you need to strictly cast it every 12 seconds, but you should average 3-4 casts per minute.  Targeting this is easy since it bursts around your target-    meaning you can still hit the full raid by casting this on the boss or another mob in the center of the raid instead of having to change target to a player

Counter-intuitively, heavy splashing is also recommended when there is only one mob being fought.  This might seem weird since more mobs = more heals needed, but the reasoning here is different.  If there is only one mob then there is very little else a shaman needs to be doing.  Once your dots are all on, splash healing is your next best action and is the most common “filler”

.  

To be honest, if this section doesn’t make sense, then just fallback to the following advice: cast splash as much as you can.

ADPS

Shamans have a couple ADPS abilities, all of which are pretty simple to use.

• Pact of the Wolf (Aura):  Group buff, more hp and haste, including pets and swarm pets.  It lasts forever.  If you die, don’t forget to re-cast it. Easy.  
• Epic 2.0: Increases the damage of melee crits.  Generally, you use this at the start of a fight and then again every time it repops.  Some events have early trash clears or important burn phases where you want to hold this a bit.  Ask your group when they want epic before each event to confirm.  I use an audio trigger to alert when it is off cooldown.  A good shaman should be on top of epic clicks and maximize usage
• Ancestral Aid:  HoT that more importantly increases the dex cap, thus increasing melee DPS.  Given the power increase to melee DPS in recent times, this rotation has become very important.  Large gaps or missed rotations cost your raid force a lot of DPS so make sure to have a solid rotation.  Each raid should have a pre-planned rotation for MGB/TB Ancestral Aid.  Discuss the rotation and plan its usage.  I use a trigger when the person before me casts theirs to know when I am up, a simple 60 seconds countdown from when you see “<shaman before you> begins casting Ancestral Aid.  Make sure to click TB before each fight starts.  Fights in TOB almost always last over 10 minutes, so it’s important to use TB as you will likely have a chance to use MGB Aid later in the fight as well.
• Reciprocal Roar:  1 minute group buff melee proc that does a minor amount of damage and a small heal.  Its duration is exactly as long as its recast timer.  Keeping strict 100% uptime is not critical, it is an efficient action if you don’t have dots to cast or need to heal.  Cast this before an event starts or during lulls in the action.  I use an audio trigger to alert when this is off cooldown also

DPS

This is the section where I will go over how to do the most DPS you can.  At this point I must also reiterate something very important.  While shamans can do very good DPS, we are NOT a primary DPS class.  Our other duties (healing, slowing, etc) come first in almost all situations.

Melee

An often overlooked part of shaman DPS is their melee.  With the right ADPS setup and fight a shaman’s melee damage/procs can account for up to 20% of their total.  There isn’t all that much to say about maximizing this DPS, it comes down to a couple things.  First, make sure that if you have a ranger or rogue in your group that you can slam and you have /autoskill slam turned on for their class synergies.  This comes out to around 50k dps.  In addition, use Rabid Bear liberally, it provides a significant melee boost.  Lastly, maximize your time on target.  More swings =  more DPS.  Don’t sacrifice your other duties, but if healing, slows, and dotting are taken care of,you should be maximizing melee.

Nukes

This is the one section where I will be brief.  Don’t use them.  They suck.

Pets

Give your main pet legs with ferocity on them and a haste belt.  Give them two clubs so they can benefit from feral.  You can check your pets current gear with /pet inventory check.  Keep your swarm pet buff on yourself and use your swarm pet AA (Spirit Call) as much as you can.  Make sure you are hitting pet attack often and that your pet is on greater hold.  I multi bind my pet attack key to my combo disease spell gem so that I can never forget.  My pet attack key also directs my swarms to attack the same target.

You no longer need to block procs on your pet or use /pet spellhold.  It won’t really matter whether you do or don’t but that bug was finally fixed.

DoT DPS

This is probably the most important section in this guide and IMHO the hardest part of playing a shaman.  It’s going to be long and in-depth, so buckle up.  We are going to start with some concepts to understand and then get into applications and examples.

DoT Overview

I think before we dive deeper into dot DPS theory and such, it’s important to go over the similarities and differences between each of our dots.  This will be important later to help understand the best way to maximize DPS and select the best dot in a given situation.

• Chaotic Bloodcurse, aka Combo Poison:  This spell casts both Nectar of Oscurity and Caustic Blood (see below for further explanation of these dots on their own).  It is instant cast and moreover, it does not even trigger global cooldown, meaning you can cast this spell and then immediately cast another spell.  Because of all of these things, this is the strongest DPS spell we have and should be the lead off spell in any DoT rotation.  The one downside of this spell is that it has a 42 second recast time, so without using Forceful Rejuvenation it means you can only use it on one target except in certain circumstances mentioned later.  One very important thing to note here, because Nectar is a “doom” spell, meaning it triggers a secondary dot after it fades, it is very important to not re-apply this dot before it fades.  Because of how the game works, sometimes one of the two dots triggered by this spell will wear off before the other one.  Make sure that you always wait for Nectar to fade before re-applying, even if Blood fades first.
• Hotariton Pandemic, aka Combo Disease:  Generally speaking, this is our signature dot.  Like Chaotic Bloodcurse, it casts two spells at once, Breath of the Hotariton and Skraiw’s Pandemic.  Both of these dots are relatively long lasting (1:24 base duration) and together their damage per tick is roughly tied with Malediction for the highest.  A standard base cast time of 3 seconds.  The only other thing to note is that the combination nature of this spell makes it less efficient when it comes to twin cast charges so while the damage per tick is high, there may be times when you want to prioritize other dots to use twin cast charges since this will use two of them.
• Fandrel’s Curse:  In terms of a single (non-combo) spell, this dot has our highest total damage per cast.  It is slightly less damage per tick than Malediction, but it lasts longer than Malediction with a base duration of 0:54.  Because of this fact, it is the best choice for twin casting when we have only one charge available, i.e. Bifold Focus. It has a base cast time of 1 second which is faster than most other dots and with Quicktime on it’s nearly instant.  The one downside is that it has a recast time of 12 seconds, meaning you need to weave it in with other spells (more on this later).
• Malediction: Our highest damage per tick spell outside of combo poison.  Also the shortest duration of any of our dots with a base duration of 0:30.  Standard 3 second cast time and re-cast time of 6 seconds.  Another good option for a single Bifold focus charge, slightly better than Curse in the situation where a mob is going to die within the next 40ish seconds.
• Krizad’s Affliction: Our longest duration dot at 1:36 base duration.  1 second base cast time and 4.5 second recast.  It also triggers a significant “doom” component like Nectar.  Generally speaking, if the doom component of this spell does not get to trigger then this dot is not a good use of time.  If there is nothing else to do it certainly isn’t bad, but casting it on an add should only be done if every mob currently up is otherwise fully dotted as the damage per tick of this spell is much lower than all of our other options.
• Caustic Blood:  The damage of this dot is slightly lower than Curse, but roughly on par with Combo Disease/Curse/Malediction.  Like combo disease, this spell has no recast time and a 3 second cast time.  Base duration of 0:42.  Probably our most “vanilla” dot
• Nectar of Obscurity:  3 second cast time with 0:42 base duration.  Lower damage per tick than most other dots, but has the doom component mentioned earlier.  It is very important to let that doom component trigger as it basically doubles the damage per cast of this spell.  If the target isn’t going to live long enough for that to fire then this dot is usually a waste of time.

There are a couple of important concepts to understand for dot DPS.  Uptime, twin cast, crit chance, and damage modifiers.

Uptime

Dot uptime is the most fundamental concept to maximizing dot DPS.  The idea is simple, the amount of damage ticks you get out of each dot divided by time.  If there are multiple instances of a dot running on multiple mobs that increases the uptime.  In a single mob scenario it should be trivial to keep near 100% uptime on that mob for each dot, meaning that each of your dots is doing damage on every tick for the duration of the fight.  The most mobs you can possibly keep close to 100% uptime on for any extended duration is 4 and that is quite difficult.  If there are more mobs than that, which there often are, then it means you will have to prioritize where you dot.  Generally speaking, if you are given the chance to cast a dot on the boss of an encounter or an add, the boss will be a better choice because it is more likely that mob will live for the full duration of the dot and get more damage out of it.  Along that same line, if there are multiple adds up, you want to prioritize the mob with the highest amount of HP remaining because you will likely get the longest duration of your dot there.  Generally speaking, I start at the bottom of the extended target window and work my way up.  I will jump around as I see new adds spawn or if I can find a mob that has higher remaining HP than the others.  Keeping a standard order will help you keep better track of which mobs you have already dotted whereas jumping around may make that harder.  My best advice for that is just that practice makes perfect and do your best to keep track as re-dotting a mob you have already dotted is a waste of time and DPS.

Another major point I want to make is that you should strive to not refresh your dots until they fade from a mob.  There is simply no need to do this because when a dot fades you have 6 full seconds to refresh it before you lose out on any damage by it wearing off and it will prevent you from overwriting Nectar and Affliction dots and ruining their fulmination component.  I find it best to watch for wear off messages and use that to know when to re-apply a dot.  In the circumstance where 2 dots wear off at the same time, simply prioritize refreshing the one that does higher damage per tick first.  In most cases you get two dots re-applied before the next dot tick anyway.

On that note, I recently made a tool that can help you keep track of which dots you have on a mob that I find much easier to use than watching the NPC debuff window.  The triggers can be found here {EQLPT:6c2F0ug1EYUGtm}.  You may need to edit them slightly if you are using LS dots, but it should be trivial.  You will also want to create a separate timer overlay and assign these triggers to it.  The way this trigger works is you hit a key that is bound to inspect buffs (Alt + O > Keys > Commands) and timers will pop up with the dots you care about that are currently missing from the target.  If nothing pops up, that means the target is fully dotted with every dot that you can cast.  If anything pops up, that is the dot that this mob is missing.  I would recommend not relying on this all the time, it is much easier to watch for wear off messages and follow that as your cue to re-apply dots, however there will definitely be times when you lose where you are in dot rotations while other things are going on.  In addition, when there isn’t much going on this trigger can be useful to confirm that all the available targets are fully dotted to make sure you aren’t missing out on potential DPS.

Twin Cast

Shamans have access to two ways to guarantee dot twin cast.  Bifold Focus of the Evil Eye from Rain of Fear raids gives 1 charge of twin cast with a 5 minute cooldown.  Fleeting Spirit AA gives 21 charges of twin cast with a 20 minute cooldown.  This is in addition to a small innate chance to twin cast any time they cast a dot. Deciding when to use your twin cast abilities is an important part of having the best DPS parse possible.  Twin cast dots do double damage per tick and effectively count as two dots for the purposes of maximizing effectiveness of damage modifiers which we will get into later.  The most important thing for picking when to use these abilities is that you want your twin casted dots to all run for as close to full duration as possible.  Twin casted dots that do not last to their full duration lose out on potential value added by the double damage aspect.  At the same time, having more dots running at the same time during damage modifiers like glyphs and crit modifiers like Auspice also greatly increases DPS so there are tradeoffs to think about when deciding when to twin cast.  Generally speaking, I think a good rule of thumb is that you don’t want to be using twin cast charges on mobs dots that won’t last at least 30 seconds.  

Another thing to consider is that combo dots are going to eat up two charges, so there are times during fleeting spirit that you may want to skip combo disease in your multi dot rotation depending on how long the mob will live and cooldowns of other dots.  That said, you should only be skipping this if you can replace it with another dot in the same time frame, don’t skip it and spend that time doing nothing.  If this part doesn’t make sense to you I would recommend just ignoring it as it is a bit hard to explain.

So what does this mean in practice?  In reality it means you are going to hit fleeting spirit during the best time for multi dotting in each encounter, which is ideally a time when there are multiple mini boss type mobs being fought at once or a time when there is a boss + some decently high hp adds up.  If neither of these opportunities exist then you are likely just using it on the main boss of the encounter.  Bifold focus is a bit simpler because of the much shorter cooldown, you can pretty much just use this whenever it is up, but you should be strategic about which dot you use it to twin cast.  As mentioned previously, if the target is going to live for the full duration, then Curse is the best dot to twin cast.  If the target isn’t going to live that long, then Malediction is the best option.  One last note on twin cast, if you have fleeting spirit running you can still click Bifold Focus and it will use that charge first, allowing you to get the cooldown on the Bifold started soon in hopes of getting it to refresh before the fight ends.

Another niche concept for maximizing DPS is the concept of “fishing for twin casts”.  Basically, this means re-casting dots in hopes of getting twin casts.  The only time this is viable is when there is a single mob part of an encounter as any other time you would be better off multi dotting.  That said, there are several fights in current content where this is the case.  This concept is also a lot more relevant when you have an enchanter in your group as it raises your innate twin cast chance from 5% to 16%.  I personally wouldn’t bother doing this without an enchanter because the gains are just so small, but if you want to it doesn’t hurt.  The idea is simple, you just re-cast dots that are not currently twin casted on the mob in hopes of getting a twin cast.  In order to do this you should use an audio trigger for keep tracking of which dots are twin casted because if you re-cast the dot and it was previously twin casted you will overwrite the existing version and likely lower your DPS.  In the end, this is a much less important skill/concept than other ideas outlined in this guide, but it’s something to consider.  

Crit Chance

Base crit chance for shaman dots with max AAs and DoN progression done is 56%.  That means we need 44% or more from other sources to hit 100% chance for dots to crit.  Because dot crits do nearly 4x the damage of non-crits, it is very crucial to your overall DPS to properly stack these abilities in a raid setting.  I highly recommend using the EQLogParser DPS Overlay to assist with this.  It has a feature that will show you your current crit chance modifier.  You can set it to only show your DPS in the overlay if you wish so that it doesn’t take up too much screen real estate, which is what I do.  There is a picture in the appendix showing what it looks like.  Note that this value is the adjustment from your base value of 56%, so the magic number you are looking for is 44% or higher. The main sources of increase dot crit chance are Auspice (33% for 1:42), Fierce Eye (17% for 2:12), Bard Epic 2.0 (12% for 2:00), Spire of the Ancestors (30% for 1:30), Glyph of Ultimate Power (15% for 2:00), and Intensity of the Resolute (50% for 1:00).  The first three of these are things that we can’t control and rely on other classes to optimize.  Your raid force should already have an established Auspice rotation, so my best suggestion is to make an audio trigger for Auspice landing on you with a 1 minute countdown timer.  This may be a little redundant if you are good about watching the EQLogParser overlay, but given the relative uptime of this compared to the two bard abilities I have found it useful to have an additional trigger to monitor this.  Both bard abilities have very high uptime and bards should be clicking them on cooldown, so I have found triggers for those unnecessary, but your mileage may vary.  That brings us to the 3 ways we can affect our dot crit chance on our own.  While glyphs do increase your crit chance, their ability to increase the damage your crit dot ticks do has a far bigger impact on overall DPS and for that reason you should not worry about the crit modifier and instead focus on maximizing the damage increase which will be talked about in the next section.  Intensity is going to follow the same logic as spire, with the big difference being that it is a once per night ability whereas Spire has a 7.5 minute cooldown and can be used on every fight at least once.  Spire is the main tool we have available for impacting our own crit rate and thus the one we will talk the most about.  

If you imagine a graph with crit chance on the Y axis and time (in minutes) on the X axis, your goal on any given fight is to maximize the area under the curve.  A visual example can be seen below.

With the important caveat being that obviously going over 100% crit rate is wasted.  Each time you click your spire you should think about 3 things.  1) How much time is left in the fight? 2) When are the next auspice and bard abilities coming? 3) Of the 30% increase the spire applies, how much of it will currently be wasted?  You probably don’t want to click your spire if you currently have a fresh Auspice on, but no other modifiers because you are already at 89% crit rate.  However, if you know the fight is going to end in the next 90 seconds (the duration of Spire), then you may as well click it anyway because there is no use in holding it.  On that same line of reasoning, if you know that all Auspices have been used and you just got refreshes on both bard buffs for +29% crit rate, the main question you need to ask yourself is how much longer the fight is going to be.  If the fight is going to last 3 more minutes, then your best option is to wait for the bard buffs to expire and then hit your spire so that none of the increase in spire is wasted by going over 100%.  However, if the fight isn’t going to last that long, then you don’t care as much about overlapping spire with bard buffs because if you don’t use it it will be wasted anyway.  This is admittedly a hard estimation to make and my strong advice is that if you aren’t sure whether or not now is the best time to use spire, then just use it.  There have been far more times that I have held it for too long than times that I have clicked it and wasted it, with the obvious caveat being there is never a reason to do it when you are at 100% crit rate.  All of the logic presented in this section assumes that you have the same number of total dots ticking at the same time, which we will see in further sections is not always the case.  You may need to adjust some of the advice in this section to trade off against situations where more dots are ticking and/or you have damage modifiers running.  There is no hard and fast rule for any of this stuff, the idea in this guide is to just understand how dot damage works as much as possible and make the decisions you see most fit.

Damage Modifiers (IoG and Glyph)

The next aspect of dot damage to consider is damage modifiers that affect how much damage each dot tick will do.  This is quite similar to crit chance.  There are 2 main sources of damage amplification that affect dots, Illusions of Grandeur (IoG) and Glyph of Ultimate Power.  IoG increases dot damage by 140% for 2:00 (and also increases crit chance by 13%).  I won’t spend that much time talking about IoG because when a shaman is lucky enough to have an enchanter in their group it is likely that the other true DPS classes in the group will drive when IoG is used.  If for some reason you are lucky enough to get to pick when the enchanter uses IoG, you want them to use it roughly 30 seconds after you start your twin cast burn.

On the other hand, we have control over when we use our glyphs.  Glyph increases crit dot damage by 70% for 2:00.  In simple terms, you want to use your glyph over the 2:00 interval in which you have the most amount of total dots running.  For this purpose, you can consider a twin cast dot to be 2.  Because glyph has a 15% crit mod built in to it and we have access to our spire for 3/4 of the glyph duration (even if Auspice isn’t available) you shouldn’t need to factor crit chance into this calculation too much because realistically you should be able to easily hit 100% crit chance for the entirety of the glyphs duration.  If for some reason your glyph is running and you aren’t at 100% crit chance then this is almost certainly the best to hit your spire because the glyph damage increase only works on crits.  If you think of the following notational example graph with number of dots on the Y axis and time (in minutes) on the X axis, you want to find the 2 minute window which maximizes area under the curve.

In this example the best time to glyph would be at time = 3.

In some rare fights, there may be an opportunity to use glyph more than once (if the fight lasts over 10 minutes).  In this case you may want to use your first glyph at a less opportune time for the sake of it being up again later in the fight.  This is unlikely in current content, but could happen in some scenarios.

Combining These Four Concepts

Ultimately, the way to get the most out of your dot DPS is to combine all four of these previous concepts together.  For example when choosing when to use your spire you may want to also consider how many twin casts you have running and your current dot uptime.  If you have the chance to spire at two otherwise identical times (in terms of crit chance) you would want to pick the window that has more total dot uptime.  You may even want to use spire when you are already at 85% crit chance rather than when you are at 56% crit chance if during the former window you have three times as many dots running.  These things are hard to quantify, my best advice is to think critically and understand the math behind how these things work as described in this guide and experiment/theorize with what works best.

Spell Rotations

These are my general spell rotations for the 2 most common DPS scenarios.  They are far from an exhaustive list, but should give you general ideas about spell order.

The following is the casting order I use for the start of a fight on a “main boss”.  Malo > Combo Poison > Combo Disease > Epic click > Curse > Slow > Malediction > Affliction.  Note that I am weaving AA/click abilities in between spells here to make the best use of global cooldown.  Also of note, I usually don’t bother casting splash heal at all during this.  Likely the MT used an avoidance discipline and even if they didn’t there should be 0 other people taking damage right now so clerics should have that taken care of.

The following is the casting rotation I use for multi dotting when adds spawn.  Splash Heal > Combo Disease > Curse > Malediction > (sometimes) Blood > Change target and repeat.  The decision about whether or not to put Blood in here depends on things like if I have the spell slot available on this fight, if Quicktime is running, how long the mobs live, how important splash healing is on this portion of the fight.  If adds are dying quickly I may switch targets midway through this rotation so that the dots are going on mobs with more HP remaining.  Somewhere in here you will want to weave in AoE Malo and AoE Slow AAs as well, depending on cooldowns.  You will also notice that this rotation perfectly fits the cooldown times of splash heal, Curse, and Malediction.

Summary of DPS Section

So that was a lot.  There are probably more things I will add later as I think about them as well.  In the end, your parse is about how well you can do all of these things together and prioritize the most important parts.  Most importantly, you are never going to have a “perfect” fight.  There are always going to be times where you are late on a dot refresh, you click spire a tick too late, you miss 20 seconds of melee swings, etc.  You aren’t trying to be perfect, you are trying to be as close as you can.  Don’t get flustered, just keep focus and do the best you can.  The best way to get better is practice.  Practice on test dummies in the guild hall.  Do analysis on your parses after fights, try to do better each week.

Miscellaneous Other Stuff

Most of the stuff down here is minor and will be explained in less detail.  For the most part it’s just straightforward things to do.

ABC - Always Be Casting

Generally speaking, you should almost always be casting something.  That’s not to say there won’t be downtime, but there usually is something worth casting.  Try to make use of using AAs in between regular spells to make better use of the global cooldown on spells.  When there isn’t much going on you can also re-apply slow in order to trigger languid bite.  It’s not a huge DPS increase, but it can account for around 1-2% of your total DPS.

The End

I wrote a lot here.  Probably more than anyone will read and that’s ok.  As mentioned at the beginning I recommend picking and choosing which sections are most useful to you.  I hope you found this useful and if you did or if you have any questions/comments feel free to reach out to me on Discord.

Appendix

Example hotkey for removing Malo Trap:

Note that this will not be guaranteed to work if there is more than 1 malo trap down at a time, but that should be uncommon.

Examples of DoT Checker Trigger:

In the above picture the combat dummy is missing every shaman dot.

In the above picture the combat dummy is missing just Curse and Affliction.  

The time remaining on both of these timers means nothing, I just have the timer set to last for 6 seconds because after that I want it to go away.  You may want to tweak this time if you want it to last longer/shorter.

EQLogParser Overlay

In the above example Ryft has +50% DoT crit chance, putting him at 56+50=106=100%.

Various Audio Triggers:

Auspice of the Hunter: {EQLPT:6c1AYpZQywx351}

Twin cast DoTs: {EQLPT:6c1AmMGcei0Tn9}  Will probably need to change the sound for this one, I use a custom .wav file.