Lucitron

Beta is over - Summary
The beta is over and this thread appears to be the appointed thread for theorycrafting of Elemental Shamans in WotLK. This means in extension that most of my posts are way out of topic, if anyone would search for information, or actually take their time to read through the thread. With this in mind I've decided to go through this post and make it to more of a summary.


1) Buff-stacking policy
The biggest change with WotLK must be the new buff stacking policy. My initial fear was that this would hit Shamans overall pretty hard, since we are designed as a group-supporting class. In the end it was only the most powerful totems that became raidwide. Every new Shaman will contribute with Mana Spring, Healing Stream, Poison Cleansing, Disease Cleansing, Grounding and Tremor Totem.


2) Curse of Elements and LB
The next big change is probably the removal of the hidden spell coeffecient on Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt, while at the same time Curse of Elements and Improved Scorch were changed to also include nature-spells. Stormstrike was also changed so it now only benefit the Enhancement Shaman. The end result is that our solo-dps went down, while our raid-dps went up, despite all negative comments that screamed otherwise.


3) The Spell Hit
If we look at the talents, then we lost 9% spell hit in comparison to the TBC tree. That we dropped down to just 3% talented spell hit is nothing surprising since it mirrors what other spell casters have in their talent trees. Finally we will profit from Spell Hit on gear, and not spurn it as dead weight. The drawback is however that the high Spell Hit through talents allowed us to have an initial high dps, due to we could focus on Spell Damage right away. Some of this loss was compensated with the changed version of Flametongue Weapon, but not all.

We lost: 9 * 12.6 Spell Hit Rating, i.e. roughly 114 rating. 10 Spell Hit Rating is gem-wise compareable to 12 Spell Damage, thus we lost around 137 Spell Damage. Flametongue Weapon gives us 96 spell damage, but since it compete with weapon oils, the end result is a boost of just 56 spell damage.


4) The Anti-Bloat
There was a beta post where Blizzard pointed out a wish that classes have bloated talent trees, so that you have to make trade-offs when you spec. If you're a PvE oriented Elemental Shaman then this is not really the case. There is a very clear cut path of pro-damage talents, with filler-talents that boost our mana regeneration. We have quite many talents that boost our PvP performance, one talent (Elemental Devestation) that is purely for Enhancement Shamans and then a talent (Reverberation) that is only considerable if you glyph for it. To this we can add that Elemental Oath becomes obsolete in raid-setup the moment we have a Moonkin around.

Overall, there is room for improvements. One way to achieve bloated talent tree without introducing more pro-damage talents, is by offering talents that boost your utility in raids. To this we have AoE damage or for example talents that would boost Hex, or our totems. Another option would be to give a more personal incentative to spec for some of these talents, like Elemental Oath. Finally we have some talents that could just outright be changed or replaced.


5) Scaling
This is a hot issue, which is discussed extensively in this thread. The basic part is that reports, theorycraft models and general Elemental Shaman opinion is that we both push out too low dps and scale too bad. Blizzard more or less disagrees, but has promised too monitor it closely.