Please skip the gear list and focus on the think tank. Elemental shaman have serious issues right now that have been completely ignored by the devs. Ele shaman I know are already being benched and told to lvl/gear alts if they want to raid in ICC -- or to go resto.

The Totem of Wrath < Demonic Pact issue is HUGE and really needs to be addressed. Maybe if WoW.com sheds some light on this, it'll spur the devs to give us some much-needed answers.

The Totem of Wrath excluding Fire DPS totems is equally huge in terms of elemental's viability in raiding.

Basically -- ToW is a buff that is vastly inferior to Demonic Pact at current gear levels. This gap will only widen since ToW does not scale and DP scales with the warlock's gear.

Also -- when we are forced to drop this totem to buff the raid with an inferior buff (DP can easily be twice as powerful as ToW), we are locked out of 10-20% of our personal DPS. No other spec in the game must sacrifice so much personal DPS to buff the raid.

Ghostcrawler himself even said that losing a lot of DPS for a buff isn't how they want the classes to work. Their solution: to buff demo warlocks (rightfully so) but to IGNORE elemental shaman and ToW altogether.

I think most would agree that shaman scaling issues won't be addressed until Cataclysm. But the ToW/DP/Fire DPS totem issue is something that needs to be fixed and soon, not 6 months or a year from now.

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