Out to Outland
By the time I had gotten my Shaman to 70, I had already cleared through some of Karazhan on my Druid and was forced to heal, which subsequently caused me to shelf my Druid and retire from healing until Naxxramas in Wrath. I remember doing a Heroic Hellfire Ramparts with 4 max-level guildmates at level 67 so I could mooch the experience gain and I remember their jaws dropping when I blew them all away in damage for the run. All I know was Lightning Overload was tearing it up in there, and I felt rather over-powered. I loved many things about being a Shaman at the time... it was new to me, and it was fun, it was different than I was used to. I had a totem for everything under the sun. Spellpower buff? You got it. Disease cleansing? Poison Cleansing? Tremor totem? I felt like a dynamic buffer in any raid group I was in, and I held my own as far as damage for most of the content we were doing. I remember after all of our 10% hit from talents, 3% spell hit from Totem of Wrath, and 1% Draenei aura, I remember needing to plunk 34 spell hit rating's worth of gems into my gear while all those other casters fought to reach the seemingly high hit cap.
All of Kara I remember being a beast, and as we progressed farther, from Gruul's, Magtheridon's, got our feet wet in Serpentshrine and began to lay siege to The Eye, that slowly I began to slip down further in the ranks as all the other classes started to scale better in higher gear. While I still seemed to hold my own when we would do Zul'Aman or Karazhan for Badges of Justice (ha, anyone else remember those?), it slowly dawned on me that most of the remainder of BC I was able to do mediocre damage while providing 4 buffs to people in my party. Yes, I said party. Totems, long, long ago, were party-restricted. I remember specifically being responsible for setting up my group in raids with our heavy-hitting caster DPS for buffs like Totem of Wrath, Wrath of Air (this was a spellpower buff at the time!), Mana Spring. I still did well for our raids, but as every other mage and warlock got more gear, I remember having to fight harder and harder to keep my reign towards the top of the meters.
This isn't even taking into account that our "rotation" at the time was rather dull. You cast Lightning Bolt. That was it. I think I remember throwing in Earth Shocks for "burst" at the time, or using Chain Lightning for cleave damage. There was no Lava Burst, no Flame Shock, hell - there was no Flametongue Weapon as we know it today. Weapon imbues I remember being largely useless, especially for Elemental, because our weapons were never used. We would drop our totems one at a time, then begin to hurl Lightning Bolts at the big-bad, and after 2 minutes, we'd re-drop our totems, and then continue. Our resident Enhance Shaman was leaving the Stormstrike debuff up for me so my spells would consume the charges and benefit from the +Nature damage debuffs on them. In some ways I miss portions of Burning Crusade because of the things that brought joy to me and that revitalized my interest in the game.
Facing Off with the Lich King
I definitely enjoyed aspects of Burning Crusade, and I hate to come off like I'm looking back with jaded glasses on, but ultimately, game balance between classes to me has never been so good. I may get destroyed now by Rogues and Mages, Warriors, Death Knights.... but when I look back at BC and remember Warlocks, and I remember how skewed damage was between the classes, I am thankful for the steps forward that have been taken to attempt to remedy this and bring the classes more on par with each other.
Wrath of the Lich King brought around some new toys for Elemental Shaman. We received Lava Burst, a heavy-hitting nuke on an 8-second cooldown that would auto-crit with our Flame Shock active on the target. We got Thunderstorm - finally, a way to get a gap between whichever melee was chewing our faces off. A lot of our totems were changed around - Wrath of Air became the spell haste buff it is today, and Flametongue/Totem of Wrath were changed to be flat spellpower buffs. Our buff totems were changed to a 5 minute duration, as they are today. I believe we also saw our Cleansing totems combined into one (Disease & Poison together, instead of separate), and we also saw our totems (save for Mana Tide) turned into raid-wide buffs. No more were the days of having to analyze groups and who was in it to ensure you got the biggest gain possible for your totems.
Though we got a couple new things to add into our spell arsenal this time around, it remained largely unchanged and could be rather dull most times. Our rotation evolved from Lightning Bolt spam to Flame Shock, Lava Burst, and then stacking haste to pile as many Lightning Bolts into that 8-second cooldown as possible before Lava Bursting again. Depending on your latency, haste and cast times, you would sometimes have to use Chain Lightning to be able to use Lava Burst the instant it came off cooldown. We were still plagued by the useless Mana-per-5 stat on some of our gear, but the obscure and questionable set bonuses we saw in Burning Crusade dissolved and left us with some good ones to come. Tier 7 propped up our Lava Burst damage, our original T8 2-pc was allowing our Flame Shock damage-over-time portion to crit (until it was later made baseline when Trial of the Crusader launched). Tier 9 quickly became one of my favorites when the 4-piece bonus increased Lava Burst damage by a flat percentage, but it was subsequently nerfed when it became almost mandatory to use it in PvP because of how awesome it was. I was fond of this bonus because it was simple yet awesome. I had fun trying to see how high I could my Lava Burst crits (I believe I reached 17 - 19k on a non-gimmick fight before it was nerfed). Our T10 2pc is what Feedback in our talent trees is today (and I believe they stacked, actually, which turned Elemental Mastery into approximately a 1-minute cooldown), and our 4pc would basically let us not have to refresh Flame Shock as often because Lava Burst would add time to its duration.
Wrath definitely increased Elemental's capability as well as viability, but ultimately, we suffered from the same plaguing issues as before. Classes like Mages and Warlocks saw scaling increases from certain stats into others. Molten Armor at one point used Spirit to convert into Crit Rating; Warlocks saw Spirit converted into Spellpower. Shaman saw no such scaling things, we had nothing that scaled from our stats. Flametongue Weapon was changed into the iteration that we know it was today, but instead of being a percentage of Spellpower, or a conversion of X stat into Spellpower, it remained a flat bonus. This flat bonus helped, and helps, us in lower-levels of content, but as we progress into higher gear with everyone else, that flat bonus pales to benefit us the way it first did when we were in Naxx or Bastion of Twilight. Wrath changed us so we weren't as much of a pushover in PvP anymore.
Mending the Shattered World and On
This basically leads us up to where we are today. I began where totems came in a wide array of flavors that were 2-minute buff sticks, Elemental Mastery made your next damage spell instant cast, and the Crit bonus from Totem of Wrath stacked with other Totems of Wrath. It's not until now in Firelands that I've noticed how far we've really come - but sadly our progress will slip soon. With the iteration of our current T12 2-piece bonus, Elemental Shaman can be quite formidable on bosses due to the near-permanent Fire Elemental. This allows us to become competitive on bosses, especially bosses like Heroic Shannox and Baleroc, where we have the opportunity to stay relatively still and just turret the boss. When the 4.3 patch notes were released, we anxiously waited with bated breath for our fix to keep us performing on a competitive level. However, we saw nothing besides a redesign of the T12 2-piece, a redesign on Flametongue Weapon imbue to increase spell damage done (as opposed to increasing spellpower). Our AOE has changed as well - now we're going to become Count Duku and spam Chain Lightning into hordes of dragons, which to me is a relief over the clunky process of Flame Shock spreading and Fire Nova spreading.
While I may not agree with some of the changes (specifically I was hoping for a permanent Fire Elemental), we are seeing yet another increase to Shamanism to help boost our spells, and our beloved Fire Elemental is seeing a small boost to his damage. I'm still waiting to see how the mathy guys over at Totemspot and Elitist Jerks figure out how the new Flametongue will affect us. However, I feel that it's now changed to an increase of spell damage done shows the Devs are aware of our scaling (or until-recently, lack of) and are trying to bring us in-line with other classes for single-target and AOE situations. I eagerly look forward to putting Deathwing out of his madness and ridding the world of him for good, as well as seeing where these changes take us in the future and what shape Elemental Shaman will wash ashore in upon Pandaria.
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