No love for Elemental Shaman?

[Kuroyu]

I'm looking to roll shaman soon, and wondering why 70% of the shamans I see are enhance. Why are there (seemingly) so few elemental shamans out there?

Pros/cons of ele shaman vs other casters would be appreciated

[Oldlemon]

the main issue is that shamans have ZERO mana regen abilites. Mages have evocation + mana gems, Warlocks have life tap. All elemental shamans have is mana spring and thats barely much. They are pretty horrible for long fights, if you dont get any clearcastings then you will be oom in like 30 seconds, mana pot will get you another 10 or 15 seconds if that. Then you basically sit there for mana for the rest of the however mana minutes left are in the fight.

For pvp though they have amazing burst, but again if you get into a long fight you are going to go oom and useless.

[Aethelwulf]

A lot of people prefer big 2H crits, but I do think that Ele is the better spec for PvP since Enhance has a hard time entering melee range against most ranged PvPers and against most melee PvPers you'd rather want to wear a shield. Here's an Elemental Shaman PvP video from the vanilla days of WoW: Part 1 Part 2. If you can't watch Part 2 because of a region thing, just download it through this KeepVid link. I believe he is using this 30/0/21 build.

As for mana issues in long fights, that drawback is a bit overstated imo. While it's true that a Shaman's mana regeneration is crap, people tend to overlook the mana efficiency Ele Shamans have going for them. Rank 4 Lightning Bolt gets full spell damage coefficient and only costs 75 mana. With talents, that's 67.5 and every time you proc Clearcasting you can cast a max rank Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning for free (you could macro this). And a Shaman's Lightning Bolt scales really well. The lowered cast time ensures that it's a 2 second cast with the spell damage coefficient of a 3 second spell and it gets damage and crit on top of that. With a Mana Spring totem, some minimal mana/5 gear, and the usual major mana potions and dark/demonic runes, he can keep himself going just fine spamming Rank 4 bolts. He would need a lot of spell damage gear to DPS though.

[ceen2]

^
Sure spamming a level 20 damage spell is the way to go

[Aethelwulf]

He does get some very nice multipliers on it and he can cast the occasional max-rank CL with Clearcasting.

If you go all-out, you can get a Lightning Bolt with +5% damage, +3% spell hit, +11% spell crit, -10% mana cost, 10% chance of proccing clearcast, and a -1 second cast time (while keeping the coefficient of a 3 second spell, ie 50% more DPS than spell damage normally provides). All of this from talents alone. The base is shit but Lightning Bolt scales like a beast if you have the spell damage to back it up. I'm pretty sure you can go beyond Rank 4 too. Just pointing out that one is trivially easy to spam.

[showtime]

elemental is superior

[Oyani]

I've never been fully enhancement... i just don't see what's so good about it... i mean sure 2h + WF can get some nice hits but all you're doing is white damage... you have no melee abilities whatsoever except Stormstrike so you're just relying on those WF procs...

I do elemental because it has some wicked damage, i pop WF and strength totems for the melee nubs and then blast away with lightning bolt, got about 20-25% crit chance and crit around 1100 usually which isn't great but my gear still sucks. There is some truth to going OOM a lot... usually this isn't a big deal because if you got 5110 mana unbuffed like me, just bring a mage so you can drink after every battle.

Here's my spec: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#hEcuVb0qoZVoez0x

[Jurary]

I've never been fully enhancement... i just don't see what's so good about it... i mean sure 2h + WF can get some nice hits but all you're doing is white damage... you have no melee abilities whatsoever except Stormstrike so you're just relying on those WF procs...

I do elemental because it has some wicked damage, i pop WF and strength totems for the melee nubs and then blast away with lightning bolt, got about 20-25% crit chance and crit around 1100 usually which isn't great but my gear still sucks. There is some truth to going OOM a lot... usually this isn't a big deal because if you got 5110 mana unbuffed like me, just bring a mage so you can drink after every battle.

Here's my spec: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#hEcuVb0qoZVoez0x

you're missing out on 2 of the most important talents of any ele spec, which are Elemental Reach and Nature's swiftness.

I'd roll something like this: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#hE0zirMqZZq0ez0xo

There's a couple points that can be switched around for personal pref, like reduced mana cost on healing into reduced cast time for HW and so on.

[Oyani]

I've never been fully enhancement... i just don't see what's so good about it... i mean sure 2h + WF can get some nice hits but all you're doing is white damage... you have no melee abilities whatsoever except Stormstrike so you're just relying on those WF procs...

I do elemental because it has some wicked damage, i pop WF and strength totems for the melee nubs and then blast away with lightning bolt, got about 20-25% crit chance and crit around 1100 usually which isn't great but my gear still sucks. There is some truth to going OOM a lot... usually this isn't a big deal because if you got 5110 mana unbuffed like me, just bring a mage so you can drink after every battle.

Here's my spec: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#hEcuVb0qoZVoez0x

you're missing out on 2 of the most important talents of any ele spec, which are Elemental Reach and Nature's swiftness.

I'd roll something like this: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#hE0zirMqZZq0ez0xo

There's a couple points that can be switched around for personal pref, like reduced mana cost on healing into reduced cast time for HW and so on.

I thought the point that i am PvE specced would've come accross but apparently not to everybody.

[Jurary]

ofc not, ele pve is as useless as it gets