Other specs not viable

[Rowl]

I don't think you can point at any utility and say that it was needed. Thats the whole point of utility, its useful but not required. I'm not saying Warlocks have superior utility, simply that they do have quite a bit, especially compared with what you listed above. I honestly cannot speak for what Mages bring to the table since my raid does not have one. However, I can def imagine practical uses for things like counter spell, spell steal, ice block, and ring of frost.

i think we have different opinions of what utlities actually are, anyway, my whole point was simply that i think current dmg is fine, because where some classes lack in damage they have in other areas, maybe not hunters, but most other seem pretty fine to me, including elemental.

[Dekadez]

i think we have different opinions of what utlities actually are, anyway, my whole point was simply that i think current dmg is fine, because where some classes lack in damage they have in other areas, maybe not hunters, but most other seem pretty fine to me, including elemental.

If our current damage is fine, then our utility must be crucial to raid performance in, especially, heroic modes.

It's not. The hybrid tax is long gone and pures have been given a level of utility that often equals that of, certainly, melee hybrids.

The only fights where I actually feel like my 'utility' makes a dent, are those Enrage timer kills with less than 5 seconds on the timer (Stormlash), and fights like Elegon/Wind Lord HC where I can abuse Ancestral Guidance.
Overall, I feel like Warlock portals, Healthstones and Combat res offer a lot more reliable utility, applicable to more situations, than what I offer on my Elemental Shaman in the form of an underwhelming healing cooldown, a 30min ankh, and the (imo) overrated Stormlash.

And all of these are utility spells. You make the distinction with buffs, which does not hold. Buffs are also utility. In my opinion utility is anything but damage to a DPS, healing to a Healer or threat-generating abilities to a Tank, that benefit more than one person (otherwise it's simply a personal cooldown, which in itself is also a form of contingent utility, like Dispersion to soak sparks). If you have a raid comp that does not have an Elemental Shaman/Shadow Priest/Balance Druid, then the Hunter who takes a Sporebat to the raid offers some utility.

I've checked some of your logs, and while you're performing great as Elemental, I noticed that in your latest logged raids some of the players you're playing with are not performing on the same level within their own class/spec combination as you are within the Elemental Shaman population. I'm not going to single out anything, but when you're playing with a Rogue, Hunter, Mage and Warlock in your 10m raid comp (my raid comp), who are all performing at the 90th percentile consistently, it becomes glaringly obvious that our damage lacks behind far too much and certainly isn't in proportion to the added utility we bring over those 4 pures. At least, that's my opinion.

[hatchetman240]

I can speak only for my own experience with Elemental PVE issues, but I'm constantly competing for #1 DPS in single target in my 10 man. When single target fights have a lot of movement no one else gets close to me. I'm the worst geared person on the team, no tier gear, and I am doing a ton of DPS. In LFRs I'm never out DPSed by another shaman unless it's an elemental with higher ilvl than me. I assume those shaman also have a good handle on rotation because I do check ilvls after LFRs and often find I am out damaging shamans with superior gear.

I keep reading everyone complaining about us and I wonder if there's a plateau in DPS for us as we gear up (higher ilvl not resulting in more DPS due to haste plateaus and crit being less than useful). I will chuckle if we see DPS increases with the patch (with glee) but as it is I feel like most folks just haven't nailed the casting timers/priorities and don't take enough advantage of reglyphing prior to each encounter to maximize what we have. I'm 100% certain elementals have survivability issues in PVP, we just don't have a whole ton of help in the defensive cool down department.

I keep wanting to go enhance to see the DPS increase I could get from it, but even at a mere 479 ilvl it's just too much of a pain to swap everything out so I could get a real comparison.

If you are able to critique your own performance and keep re-reading the shaman guides to pick up on things you might have missed or weren't looking for before, you can do great as elemental. I think the key thing is to always be scouring the community for more information. There were certain fights where I was looking pretty average until I got some pointers on the forums to fix me up.

[Dekadez]

I can speak only for my own experience with Elemental PVE issues, but I'm constantly competing for #1 DPS in single target in my 10 man. When single target fights have a lot of movement no one else gets close to me. I'm the worst geared person on the team, no tier gear, and I am doing a ton of DPS.

I'm terribly sorry, and by no means do I want to discredit your performance, but your fellow DPS need to stop sucking if you want to progress.

I keep reading everyone complaining about us and I wonder if there's a plateau in DPS for us as we gear up (higher ilvl not resulting in more DPS due to haste plateaus and crit being less than useful).

We started out the expansion in roughly the same position we are in now, so it's not a matter of us having an even progression path, while others scale upwards a lot harder than we do. Scaling is a largely overrated argument, one into which players often have too little insight to make educated statements. There are some issues for us, but other classes have similar issues of their own.

. I will chuckle if we see DPS increases with the patch (with glee) but as it is I feel like most folks just haven't nailed the casting timers/priorities and don't take enough advantage of reglyphing prior to each encounter to maximize what we have.
.

You're saying everyone of us here who have years of experience on our Shamans and are progressing (or already completed) Heroic content don't have a clue? That we don't swap out Glyph of CL when going from trash to Stone Guards (for example)? That we don't have our absurdly simple rotation under control?

It's hard to make a statement like yours when the Elemental complaints are not only widespread, but also systematically documented through the only database we have (and can be used correctly to rank and analyze performance, if done properly). Especially from someone at i479, again no offense intended.

I have said it times and times again, and I will continue: If you are playing with any pure that plays the right spec, with any melee hybrid that plays the right spec, even with the other hybrid ranged in the overall scheme, and you're all equally proficient and equally geared (the pures and melee hybrids might even be slightly undergeared compared to you), then there is no possible way that you rank consistently higher than them. It's fundamentally, mechanically impossible.

[Endus]

We started out the expansion in roughly the same position we are in now, so it's not a matter of us having an even progression path, while others scale upwards a lot harder than we do. Scaling is a largely overrated argument, one into which players often have too little insight to make educated statements. There are some issues for us, but other classes have similar issues of their own.

This is why GC recently declined to address issues referring to "scaling problems"; the word has been twisted and misapplied by the community as a whole so much that it's lost all practical meaning.

It used to refer to the relative gain in performance from a given amount of statistics from gear. In really rough terms, a Y increase of item level should loosely be an X% gain in performance across the board. If one class was consistently gaining 1/2 X%, that was a "scaling problem".

It's since extended, IMO erroneously, to;

1> cases where we still gain X%, but everyone else started at a DPS of A, and we started at A-10%. This is basically the current situation for Ele, for instance.

2> cases where one single stat scaled poorly compared to the "worst stat" for other specs. These comparisons almost inevitable ignore that other stats make up that difference; if you scale poorly with Crit but don't stack Crit and scale better than average from Mastery, that's not a "problem", in short.

2a> same kind of case, but focusing on all secondaries or Intellect/Agility/Strength, and ignoring the converse that balances it.

3> cases where a spec gains less from a trinket/enchant/set bonus proc than other specs. Not necessarily an actual problem, same reason as #2.

4> cases where talents/glyphs provide less of a gain for class A than class B, despite talents being designed with the rest of the toolkit in mind; if one class gets 87% of its DPS from baseline and spec abilities and 13% from talents/glyphs, and for another class those numbers are 95%/5%, that's not a "problem", as long as they're pulling the same average performance once you're fully specced.

That's why I'll say that Elemental doesn't really have a scaling issue. And others will disagree, because they're labelling the problems the spec DOES have as "scaling", which I disagree with. That doesn't mean we don't have an issue, that's me trying to stick to the original meaning of "scaling", to prevent it losing all meaning.

Elemental's not scaling worse than others; we're seeing much the same increase over time relative to our starting DPS as other specs. We're not hitting a plateau of some kind; we're still trending up over time as much as anyone else. Some specs are, but that's their issue, not ours. We just had a lower starting point, and you can't overcome that kind of obstacle if you're scaling at the same rate as anyone else.

If we get about a 10% gain, I'd expect to see Elemental comfortably average overall in 5.2. If it's lower than that, we'll probably be stronger but still in the lower half, any more and I'd expect us to be above average. We'll see how that plays out, though.