Due to its high production rates and low cost as compared to other metal additive manufacturing processes, wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) has become an emerging technology in the manufacturing industry. However, the residual stress generation and part distortion hinder its widespread adoption because of the complex thermal build-histories of WAAM parts. One of the ways to alleviate this problem is to consider the effects of scan strategies as it directly influences the thermal history of the built part. Since WAAM itself is an evolved welding process and even though it is evident from welding studies that phase transformations directly affect the residual stresses in welded parts, it remains unclear how the consideration of phase transformations for different scan strategies will affect the residual stresses and distortions in the WAAMed parts. A FEM study has been performed to elucidate the effects of phase transformations on residual stresses and the distortion for different deposition patterns. The current findings highlight that for the fabrication of low-carbon martensitic steels: The consideration of phase transformations for line-type discontinuous patterns (alternate and raster) do not significantly affect the residual stresses. Consideration of phase transformations significantly affects residual stresses for continuous patterns (zigzag, in–out and out–in). To accurately simulate complex patterns, phase transformations should be considered because the patterns directly influence the temperature history of the built part and will thus affect the phase transformations, the residual stresses and the warpage. During the fabrication of WAAM parts, whenever possible, discontinuous line scanning patterns should be considered as they provide the part with uniform residual stress and distortion. The alternate line pattern has been found to be the most consistent overall pattern.