Please tell me if I've missed anything, I want to give a comprehensive list / post to the Designers so it's all in one spot and they don't have to troll through everything and we might actually get a comprehensive response. Don't be afraid to post old issues that have never been addressed either.
Talents
First and foremost, give elemental and enhance different talents, why are we the only class without talents mixed ? even mages fulfilling the same role have themed talents now... why do enhance and ele, fulfilling different roles have matched talents ? Further to this, complete lack of creativity with shaman talents, celestalon commented that we don't have enough earthy or frosty spells? Why not give us 2 100 pt talents that are either frost or earth? Make 2 for ele and 2 for enhance? Make storm ele the 'combined' talent of the tier.
Totem tier is pointless and 0 choice, projection unless fight specifically calls for anti fear. Projection should be baseline, replace with a movement tier.
Healing Tier provides nothing, no choice but AG and AG is bad.
Echo is just straight up retarded for elemental, barely above dps neutral on any fight with movement. clunky and akward on standstill.
Scen 1; You're a good player, you use lava burst prior to moving, echo procs and then surge procs, you use surge because you are a good player, now you are sitting there having used up echo proc but unable to cast the lava burst that you 'gained', before movement ends another surge procs eating your echo, 0 gain. Even if you do eventually get to cast the echo, your still getting more downtime on lavaburst then you should be and are essentially being punished, despite good play, for having your procs happen at a bad time.
Scen 2; echo procs just before lava burst, Perfect!... During your cast surge procs, overwriting your echo. Echo gives you nothing.
Scen 3; you just cast lava burst proccing echo, then echo procs, then echo procs then echo procs then echo procs oh look you got one free lava burst from all your procs and now u get nothing for a minute hurray!
All 3 of these happen regularly, the only way the talent can become comparable is if they make the proc rate obscene. It's annoying and frustrating to play with at best.
Bonus Scen 4; it essentially gives you nothing during ascendance.
Super bonus scen 5; before you mention EQ, EQ is hardly useful in the first place being able to cast it twice does not make it more useful. The chance of it even proccing conveniently mid pull when you need it is low to begin with, and then the scenarios where EQ is even used are even more rare... Not even worth discussing the 1/1000000000 times it will be amazing.
Fusion = boring, hard to make work without making ridiculous. Highlighted by the recent changes to ES that aren't working without breaking our ST rotation.
SET = 5 min cd, why would anyone want this and is a hybrid pile of turd. and boring.
Magma spew, cool looking, decent talent, lack of control sucks on fights where you only want it to hit certain things, very situational, tied to searing totem is stupid.
Issues with rotation;
Lavaburst hits for shit all, is our primary nuke, and is being held back because of how OP it COULD be WITH 75% overloads being such a high contribution. Our mastery is gone now, why is LVB still garbage.
Searing totem should be culled in ability pruning, no shaman wants this to stay. You finally completely untied shaman dps from it by removing searing flames, and then added a talent to interact with it when the logical thing was to nuke the talent :I
New mastery is either going to be too strong or too weak for ST. If it's well balanced, due to haste crit multi and vers all boosting mastery damage, it will stay in line with whatever amount of mastery you have, whereas increasing mastery does nothing for other contributers... This means as you gain more mastery it becomes a larger portion of your dps. As it is already 20% in starter gear trying to avoid mastery im fearful of where this will end up.
Recent Numbers Pass: There's now a whole slew of issues with the recent numbers pass but I feel like some of them are more errors then intended design direction so I won't bring them up.
The whole EQ shamozle.. Having a cast time ground targetted cd based aoe which needs to be buffed by another cast time spell once the adds are already present is the most backwards arse spell in the game... EQ needs to last 4 seconds on targets to be worth casting for aoe in the first place, so 2 seconds of CL + 2 seconds to cast EQ + 4 seconds ... most adds won't last that long... or stay still that long... It's just dumb, buff CL and be done with it.
Other Issues
Lack of mobility. While other classes have evolved in different ways without movement while casting, elemental has not evolved at all, being reliant on moving LB. As clear examples, both druids and mages have movement talent tiers, warlocks have high durability (they dont have to move as much) as well as resources (they can build and spend to gain advantages whilst stationary vs our linear dps), hunters have 100% movement and spriests have high ticking dots (even in their relatively 'weak' state on live, they compete with ele on single target and crush us on split targets). Elemental has no blink, has no mobility tier... all we have is ghostwolf that is outdated and the worst movement mechanic in the game (it silences u and is slow) and this new UE sprint. The ue sprint is better than nothing, I will grant, but does nothing for people playing with the UF talent, and is a 'poor mans' version for any comparation between classes.
The mages movement tier is so strong, and goes to the class that has blink baseline... Elemental could 100% use that tier not only balance wise but thematically.
Ghost Wolf; this ability used to be a top tier movement ability, as other classes have evolved it has dropped further and further down the totem pole to the point now that it is litterally the worst movement ability in the game and basically is rarely used unless you are out of a position in a raid environment.
Melee training. Any competent melee currently can train the hell out of elemental except for maybe a DK if you play excellently. Without moving LB, and with no removal of gap closers on melee, and the reduction of burst so significantly (our one real defense) we will just get trained to death and might as well afk in pvp on WoD.
Lack of Raid Usefulness: More of an overarching concern where that elemental doesn't really bring *anything* to the raid anymore... Even if tuning works out in our favour and we are above average on dps. Our off heals are weak / non existant, we have no immunity, barely anything unique we can do, poor at movement to do mechanics, slow in general, bad at target switching... We just can't do things as well as other classes... in the past it didn't matter that we were a bit clunky because we could bring amazing off heals, and some utility, but now that 'all dps are equal theme' is come to the forefront, all the clunkiness and junk of the spec is starting to show up and fall apart.