What it isn’t intended to be the is be-all-end-all of Elemental theorycrafting. We’ll delve into more complex stuff later on.

Let’s get started!
1. What is Elemental?

Elemental is the ranged DPS tree available to the shaman class. You deal damage from afar with Nature and Fire spells.

2. Elemental benefits

* A simple rotation and easy mechanics.
* Damage increases dramatically once you acquire Lava Burst, making you competent DPS immediately at 80.
* Lots of buffs to nearly every class/spec you could party with.
* Little mystery in gear upgrades.

3. Elemental drawbacks

* A boring rotation. Very little to watch for or keep track of.
* Your damage doesn’t scale as well with increasingly powerful gear compared to other classes/specs after the initial boost from Lava Burst. You’ll notice.
* Few “unique” buffs and many buffs that are trivialized by ones provided by other classes.
* Highly specialized gear means it’s harder to find from bosses — and Blizzard doesn’t provide much emblem gear suitable for Elemental, either.
* Elemental has few worthwhile instant-cast spells or DoTs, making them ineffective in any fight that involves moving around.

4. Stats to look for

Besides the ever-present intelligence and stamina, which will be on all the gear you want anyway, you’ll be looking for four main stats:

* Spell power. Obviously, you want a lot of it. More spell power equals more damage.
* Haste. Haste does two important things: increases your spellcasting speed, allowing you to fit more spells into your rotation in between cooldowns; and decreases your global cooldown down to a minimum of one second, allowing you to cast more spells in shorter periods of time.
* Crit rating. Besides the obvious factor of making more of your spells critical strikes, crit rating also helps keep important Elemental talents, such as Clearcasting and Elemental Oath, active.
* Hit rating. Elemental shaman should focus on hitting the spell hit cap as soon as possible. You want a total of 14 percent or 368 rating if you’re anything but a draenei, who need 13% or 342 rating. Remember: After you hit 14%, hit is 100% useless.

In terms of priority, it’s: Hit (until capped), spell power, haste, then crit.
5. Stats to avoid

Just as important as what to look for is what not to look for.

* Spirit. This is not a “shaman stat.” None of the shaman specs, Elemental included, have talents that give us extra benefits from spirit and, quite frankly, our built-in mana regen is plenty.
* MP/5. While it’s a good stat for Restoration, Elemental doesn’t need it. Avoid it.

There are exceptions to these rules, mind you — many of the first available post-80 badge rings have some useful stats (SP, haste/crit) but also have spirit on them. If they’re the best you can get or afford, it’s okay to have gear with a little bit of spirit or mp5 as a stopgap until you can get something better.

6. Typical PvE talent setup

The Restoration tree has no viable benefits for Elemental in the early tiers, so you’ll be sub-speccing Enhancement.

Here’s an Elemental sample tree. You have two points remaining, which can be used for either Improved Ghost Wolf (if you PvP), Improved Fire Nova (for extra AoE damage), or a few points in Convection (if you’re having mana problems).

7. Talent overview:

Elemental talents in italics are considered expendable. You’re free to move those points around as you wish. Talents that are struck out are ones you should avoid. For Enhancement, we’ll only be discussing ones that are viable talents for this spec.

Elemental:

* Convection: A small decrease in mana cost of spells. We only partially fill this one up, or not at all, as the points are better used elsewhere.
* Concussion: A must-have set of damage increases to your bread-and-butter spells.
* Call of Flame: A solid damage increase to Lava Burst and our newly-useful Fire Nova.
* Elemental Warding: Not a necessary talent for DPS, but it’s one of the few non-PvE/PvP-specific talents in a tree not known for bloat, and that 6% is handy in a pinch.
* Elemental Devastation: This is a purely Enhancement talent. As Elemental, you’ll never be using your weapons to melee. Don’t put points into it.
* Reverberation: As Elemental, Flame Shock is the only Shock spell you’ll be casting regularly; its direct damage is negligible and you lose DPS from the DoT when you recast it and clip it before it’s over. To that end, this talent is unnecessary.
* Elemental Focus: Vital! Clearcasting, the proc from this talent, is incredibly important in reducing our mana consumption. Each time you get a crit with a spell, the buff will refresh; with high enough crit rating, you can have almost 100% Clearcasting uptime, making all of your spells much, much cheaper.
* Elemental Fury: Another no-brainer, this talent doubles the damage bonus of our critical strikes.
* Improved Fire Nova: Given Fire Nova’s newfound usefulness and the lack of other, more compelling talents to throw two points into, this talent is a fine choice.
* Eye of the Storm: I originally had this listed as a don’t-grab, but many readers disagreed with me. If you find your casts getting pushed back often enough to merit a change, this is a fine choice for a few talent points.
* Elemental Reach: A range of benefits to your basic spells. Grab it!
* Call of Thunder: For one talent point, you get an additional 5% crit on your main damage spell. Definitely worth it.
* Unrelenting Storm: Sort of in the same boat as Elemental Warding — not a necessity, but there’s little else to put your points into, and additional mana regen on top of Clearcasting and Water Shield can’t hurt.
* Elemental Precision: Necessary both for the increase to our spell hit and threat reduction.
* Lightning Mastery: Reduces our base Lightning Bolt cast time to a maximum of 2 seconds, which is further reduced by haste. Necessary for a proper rotation.
* Elemental Mastery: Elemental’s only on-click cooldown, EM is best used early and often. If you have a lot of haste, you might consider not popping it during Heroism due to decreased benefit from the spell’s new haste buff, but as you run heroics or early raids, you may find the DPS boost pretty reasonable when used in conjunction with your other cooldowns.
* Storm, Earth, and Fire: Besides helping with AoE (Chain Lightning cooldown reduction) and emergency add rooting (roots on initial Earthbind Totem cast), SE&F also dramatically boosts your Flame Shock DoT damage, making this a vital talent.
* Booming Echoes: As Elemental, your use of Frost Shock will be extremely limited, but the direct-damage boost to Flame Shock is at least worthwhile enough to merit popping points into this talent.
* Elemental Oath: Vital! This talent is the equivalent to Moonkin Aura, providing you and your party members an additional 5% spell critical chance, but beyond that, it also grants you 10% more spell damage while Clearcasting is active. Like Elemental Focus, the buffs from this talent are nearly always active, depending on your crit rating.
* Lightning Overload: If you’ve leveled as Elemental (why?), you know how neat this talent is when you get it. At the level cap, though, it’s really just another DPS boost, albeit one you’d be crazy not to get. The second bolt that procs is threat-free, which is a nice touch.
* Astral Shift: A pure PvP talent. Not worth getting in a PvE build.
* Totem of Wrath: Get it. Performing the same functions as both Heart of the Crusader and Demonic Pact, this totem will be your bread-and-butter Fire totem unless you happen to party/raid with a very geared Demonology warlock.
* Lava Flows: Though the first portion of the talent is undoubtedly PvP oriented, the additional Lava Burst crit damage makes this a must-grab.
* Shamanism: An obvious necessity.
* Thunderstorm: A great source of emergency mana regen and a surprisingly useful skill if adds get loose. You can always glyph it to receive some bonus mana recovery and remove the knockback completely. If you’re a big baby.

Enhancement:

* Enhancing Totems: If you don’t regularly party or raid with death knights, this can be a useful talent to help your melee friends with a boosted Strength of Earth Totem. Definitely not a necessity, though.
* Ancestral Knowledge: Can’t argue with 5% more intellect. Grab it.
* Thundering Strikes: Doesn’t just boost melee crit — it’s all attacks, including spells. A necessity.
* Improved Ghost Wolf: If you do world PVP, this is a nice pickup for those shamans constantly on the move. If you have extra points lying around, that is. Remember that it doesn’t work indoors.
* Elemental Weapons: An additional 30% spell damage on Flametongue Weapon, the only weapon enchant you should rightfully be using as Elemental.
* Shamanistic Focus: Given that you’ll only really be casting the Flame edition of your Shock spells, this talent normaly wouldn’t be worth it — but at only one point, it’s a welcome addition to your talent repertoire.

8. Leveling as Elemental

In a word? Don’t. It’s incredibly tiresome and only picks up at two points: The first is when you first get Lightning Overload, and the second is when you get Lava Burst. Even with Lightning Overload, though, you’ll essentially be pressing your Lightning Bolt button over and over and over for 74 levels until you get Lava Burst. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not engaging. Level as Enhancement.

If, for some reason, you feel that you absolutely must level as Elemental, then you’re at yet another disadvantage, because the shaman-specific Mystical Pauldrons of Elements and their companion chest are loaded with mp5 instead of more useful stats. Want to go to cloth? Too bad! Everything else has spirit on it. Given the mana issues that players of this spec encounter early on, though, you could do worse than some mp5. You could just certainly do better.

As far as weapons are concerned, while you’d normally go for mace and shield at max level, you’re better off using a Dignified Headmaster’s Charge to level with. Feeling concerned that your spec is one of the only ones that doesn’t really have leveling gear to support it? Just wait until you get to 80, my friend. Just wait.

Where talents are concerned, just fill in your Elemental tree first and then move down Enhancement. Nothing in Enhancement is necessarily a mandatory leveling talent.

9. Your basic Elemental rotation

Elemental, as mentioned several times above, has a very simple rotation.

1. Cast Flame Shock to apply the Flame Shock DoT.
2. Cast Lava Burst, which is a guaranteed crit on a target afflicted by Flame Shock.
3. Cast Lightning Bolt until Lava Burst’s cooldown is up.
4. Cast Lava Burst again.
5. Cast Lightning Bolt until the Flame Shock DoT expires.
6. Go to 1.

This flowchart, courtesy of Propaganda Hour at Something Awful’s WoW subforum, represents the rotation visually.

As you acquire more haste, you’ll be able to squeeze in more Lightning Bolts in between Lava Bursts. There’s little variation in this rotation until you acquire certain set bonuses which affect the way that Flame Shock and Lava Burst work.

Chain Lightning technically does more damage than Lightning Bolt, but has a considerably higher mana cost. If you can get to the point where you can Chain Lightning regularly without offsetting the mana cost with Thunderstorms, you can replace Lightning Bolt with it, but for most beginners, you’ll have a long way to go before that’s possible.

For AoE: you’ll be switching to Chain Lightning over the stock version and aiming for whatever has the most health. Drop your Magma totem in a convenient location and hit Fire Nova on every cooldown for maximum AoE damage. Unfortunately, shaman AoE is still clunky, and we’re essentially the only ranged class that’s required to get into the thick of it to maximize our AoE damage.

10. Gems

Basic Elemental gemming follows some pretty simple rules.

* Gem only for SP and haste. Reckless Ametrines and their blue-quality brethren are a fine choice for any slot, but you can choose to stack either one or the other if you’re trying to hit a certain landmark (enough haste for another Bolt between Bursts, for example).
* Never gem for crit. We’ll go into this at more detail at a later date, but the general idea is that you tend to have enough crit on your gear and with your talents that it’s less effective to gem it than SP or haste.
* Never gem for int, spirit or mp5. Int and mp5 are for Resto, not you, and spirit is objectively awful.
* Use the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond as your meta and Glowing Dreadstones to meet the two blue sockets you’ll inevitably find in your tier gear to get your meta bonus.
* For jewelcrafters: Use Runed Dragon’s Eyes in three available red sockets in place of whatever you’d normally use.
* Don’t worry too much about matching sockets unless the bonus is particularly good (read: it’ll offset the loss of stats from the gem you would normally use in that slot) or it’s to get a meta bonus.

11. Glyphs

There are a number of major Elemental glyphs, though some edge others out slightly in the late game. For now we’ll talk about the top four.

* Glyph of Lightning Bolt: A static 4% increase to your most-used spell. Should be on everyone’s glyph page.
* Glyph of Flame Shock: Remember, you should have close to 100% Flame Shock uptime, so this glyph adds a good chunk of DPS (usually around 4%).
* Glyph of Totem of Wrath: Whenever you put Totem of Wrath down, you get an extra 30% (84) of its spell power for five minutes. Just you, though.
* Glyph of Lava: This glyph is outclassed by the one above until very late in the Wrath game. You’ll need above 3900 active spell power for this one to be better.

As for minor glyphs, there aren’t any that really directly affect your DPS. They’re all quality-of-life improvements. I take Astral Recall, Water Shield, and Renewed Life.

12. Enchants for the endgame

* Mace/Dagger: Mighty Spellpower
* Staff: Greater Spellpower
* Shield: Greater Intellect
* Helm: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
* Cloak: Greater Speed (or Lightweave Embroidery for tailors)
* Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Storm (or Master’s Inscription of the Storm for scribes)
* Chest: Powerful Stats
* Bracers: Superior Spellpower (or Fur Lining – Spell Power for leatherworkers)
* Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower (or Precision if under hit cap, or Hyperspeed Accelerators for engineers)
* Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle (of course)
* Pants: Sapphire Spellthread
* Boots: Tuskarr’s Vitality (or Nitro Boosters for engineers)
* Rings: Greater Spellpower for enchanters

That should be enough to get you started.