Elemental is the shaman's caster spec. You keep Flame Shock burning and a Searing Totem attacking, cast Lava Burst each time it comes off cooldown and fill every other cast with Lightning Bolt. On a long fight your mana runs out before the boss does, so the rotation switches to a cheap low rank of Lightning Bolt to keep casting. On a one-minute single-boss fight that adds up to 550.1 DPS, which puts Elemental 24th of 25 damage specs.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Three bosses at once. Magma Totem burns every boss in reach and Chain Lightning jumps to two more, so Elemental climbs to 21st on a three-minute fight against three bosses with 716.1 DPS.
• Any fight length. Nothing in the kit needs lining up, so your one-minute and three-minute scores sit close together: 550.1 DPS and 539.7 DPS.
• Totems for the group. Your party totems are worth more to others than your damage meter shows (see below).

Weaknesses

• A weak main spell. Lightning Bolt rank 10 hits for 189 to 211 plus 71.4 % of your spell damage in Forever's data, under half of Classic's 428 to 477. On a one-minute single-boss fight that leaves you at 50.4 % of the top damage spec.
• Mana on long fights. Over three minutes you spend more than your pool and regeneration hold, so a Major Mana Potion adds 3.8 % there and 0.4 % on one minute.
• No burst. Forever removed Elemental Mastery and gave nothing in its place, so your only cooldowns are a trinket and a racial.

Why Elemental sits at the bottom

On a three-minute single-boss fight Elemental is 25th of 25, and most of the gap is one spell. At level 60 a Lightning Bolt starts from 200 damage and a Frost Mage's Frostbolt from 475, and you cast about as many of each. Blizzard's notes explain the lower coefficient (a 2.5-second cast instead of 3) but not the lower base damage, and Lava Burst was tuned to sit about 10 % above Lightning Bolt. Chain Lightning and Flame Shock were cut too. Running short of mana costs the rest.

What the simulator may be missing:

• A weapon oil. Our benchmark gives Elemental no Brilliant Wizard Oil, though every mage, priest and Balance druid carries one. It is worth a little more than a Greater Arcane Elixir (3.2 %).
• Lightning Overload's chance. The talent's rank data gives 10 % at 3/3, which the sim uses, and Wowhead's tooltip prints 30 %. A beta shaman's tooltip at 1/3 would settle it.
• The low-rank penalty. Blizzard cut the spell damage of ranks far below your level on 1 October. Our simulator doesn't, so your rank 4 fallback scores better here than it will in game, most of all on three bosses, where it deals 27.4 % of the damage.
• Level-60 tuning. Nobody has cast rank 10 Lightning Bolt yet, and Blizzard rescaled the low ranks again on 8 October.

The oil and a 30 % Overload together would add roughly a tenth, which still leaves Elemental near the bottom on a three-minute single-boss fight.

On every fight

Elemental ranks 24th or 25th on every single-boss fight and moves up to 21st against three bosses, where Magma Totem and Chain Lightning hit all of them. Each row opens the guide on that fight.

Races

For the Horde, Orc leads on a one-minute single-boss fight, and the table shows how little separates the top three. Orc's Blood Fury (10 % spell power for 15 seconds) counts most on one-minute fights. Tauren's Endurance now adds 1 % hit, Windshaper's Wind Blessed 1 % haste. Troll leads no fight longer than a minute, because Berserking's faster casts mostly spend your mana sooner.

Alliance shamans are all Dwarves. Mace Specialization's 1 % crit needs a mace and the set's main hand is a staff, so its racials add nothing to your damage.

What a Shaman brings to the raid

Totems are what a raid wants a shaman for: Strength of Earth Totem for the melee, Mana Spring Totem for casters and healers, and the Restoration shaman's Mana Tide Totem. The table prices them for the specs they help on this fight. None of it counts in your own DPS, and our benchmark already gives every group a shaman's totems.

Changes

How Elemental's score on this fight moved with each simulator or game-data update. The details of each are on the Updates page.