A 15 second duration on ED would let us fall into a fairly standard LvB/LB/LvB/LB/LvB rotation, with the occasional double cast depending on how lucky or unlucky we are. That, coupled with Earth Shock and Static Shock makes good use out of the nature damage portion of Stormstrike. If we are only going to be using LvB, then I would agree that the nature debuff doesn't have much of a place left for us. Maybe they could find some other use for the debuff, such as protecting searing flames from being consumed by a Lava Lash, or protecting the frostbrand snare and flame shock dot from being dispelled.

I doubt skill will play that big role when it comes to keep up Elemental Devestation. If it proves to be the highest dps, then it will be mentioned here, which will in extension set the standard. It doesn't take much skill to replace Lightning Bolt with Lava Burst. I.e. I wager a bad Shaman in this regard is the same kind of Shaman that fails to grab enough hit rating and in generally does a whole lot of other mistakes.

Dumb question time: Static Shock no longer consumes a charge from Lightning Shield meaning the only thing that consumes charges are damage.

.... so are charges really necessary any more?

Charges are still consumed from taking damage, just like all other elemental shields.

Long story short, the ORIGINAL design philosophy from the WRATH Beta was for Enhancement to stack up MW and use it to get a auto critical hit LvB to maintain 100% up-time for Elemental Devastation. As you have probably heard from Rouncer numerous times, I found some very interesting beta mechanic issues with Enhancement that led to use wanting to use super fast weapons, caster gear, etc due to how LvB worked. Of course Blizzard did not approve of this play-style, so they first removed LvB from MW, then reduced its coefficient so that we wouldn't want to hard cast it either, indirectly leading to problems for Elemental and Enhancement as far as dps balance are concerned.

Flash forward to CATA Beta, and they have put LvB back on MW, again for the purpose of us using it to maintain near 100% up-time for Elemental Devastation. The above mentioned problems are solved because we no longer get a 200% bonus damage for spell crits. The problem is not that LvB is on MW, but that it has a 8 second cooldown and Elemental Devastation has a 10 second duration. This leads to some new issues, at least in the first couple of raiding tiers, where we will most likely want to save our MW stacks for LvB just to make sure we keep ED up 100% of the time. They can solve this quite easily by either making ED have a 15 second duration, or making MW stacks reduce the cooldown on LvB itself making it our primary single target nuke. There are also a ton of other suggestions on the Beta and Live realms to take a look at.

Unleashed Weapons are currently bugged atm, and hopefully so that they can make the spell worthwhile. In any case, UW Flametongue should NEVER have affected Flame Shock in the first places: its needs to only provide a 20% bonus damage to LvB or LL, though having it work with both FS and LvB gives us an easy indicator to show us who knows how to play their class and who doesn't!

So I was thinking on the Unleash Windfury thing again today and in some post on the forums was some comment related to controllable burst and then like in the cartoons, the light bulb idea popped into my head. We have zero burst that does decent damage that is 100% controllable. We can't switch targets and blast them for 5k in 1 cd.

So on that note, I was thinking "What if Unleash Windfury actually unleashed windfury?" In other words, Unleash Windfury grants your next windfury-imbued weapon strike to proc Windfury. Coupled with the intended ICD drop of WF, this shouldn't clip another CD and be wasted, and yet work for both in melee and if used at range.

With the 15 sec CD on Unleash Weapon, it shouldnt be OP, and is interesting (for me at least).

It is possible that the 100% uptime of Elemental Devestation might be an unintended side effect. There have afterall been blue comments about other proc based talents and items, where they have reflected upon in hindsight that when the triggered effect has a close to 100% uptime, then they could just have made it to be a constant passive effect.

Personally my guess is that they intended to boost Enhancement Shamans burst damage by allowing Lava Burst to work together with Maelstrom Weapon.


Addendum:
Another benefit of allowing Lava Burst to work with Maelstrom Weapon is that Enhancement will be able to cast some spell when they face nature immune mobs. However then again, there might be problems against fire immune mobs if all damage comes from fire spells.

Actually in light of our current problems with our rotation, it would probably not be the worst idea to make LvB exlusive for Elemental and balance our dps around not having it. The 20% bonus to fire damage of UE would then just be a minor effect for us increasing our Flame Shock hit a bit.

Because sometimes less is more.

Fortunately, I've already done some ground work for us regarding LvB vs LB for MW procs. Obviously because the simulator isn't set up for beta mechanics(I did change all buffs/debuffs to CATA values and left out %damage bonus that affects both equally), this is an imprecise method for testing, but it was useful in that it shows the approximate dps difference between using MW for all LvBs vs all LBs. My results, which were based on having 10,000 spell power, and moving from 10 to 25% spell crit and 5 to 25% haste, showed that spamming LB at the expense of LvB resulted in AT BEST 342 dps gain at the cost of 2.35% melee crit and AT WORST 34 dps at the cost of 4.96% crit. Based on those facts, and my belief that we wont have that much sp, haste and crit by end game, I believe we will only use MW for LvB unless something is changed.

You can review the data here: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Shaman Feedback] MW and LvB vs LB

The Lava Burst cooldown is the biggest complaint for both elemental and enhancement shaman right now. For both roles, haste is the culprit.

The cooldown makes haste less attractive for the caster, because Lava Burst is more damage per cast than any other spell (by a lot). Blizzard acknowledges this and is trying to address it in Cataclysm with the lava surge talent, but the consensus seems to be that the proc is not intuitive, and often wasted. (And only indirectly benefits haste, with faster flame shock ticks.)

Haste makes the cooldown potentially frustrating for melee priority management, for reasons you've already gone into.

So why not just make the Lava Burst cooldown scale with haste? Then melee don't need a funny maelstrom weapon mechanic and casters don't need a funny lava surge mechanic to lower the cooldown. It just works like you expect it to intuitively.

Mastery is ingame and its indeed 20% elemental dmg (aka fire frost nature) just a few quick test but seems to work on all our dmg including totems.

UE is working and they updated the windfury part to 20% haste for 12 sec OR 6 autoattacks (tooltip doesnt say 6 stacks but the buff you get does)
FT part works aswell now but only on actual spells so no boost to LL. (8 sec duration on buff 20% more dmg)

They seem to be working on fire nova, imp FN has no icon and the spell itself is a W placeholder.
We also got a totem of tranquil mind aka shaman version of conc aura.(water)

The talent trees seems to be pretty much the same convection lost its icon to a W placeholder aswell.

Thats all that I can find at the moment, will update as I go along, please do ask if anything is unclear or if I missed something.