[Elemental] So what's going on? (Pt. 2)

I was in the process of making a post on the original thread, but it reached the 500 post limit by the time I had finished, so I would like to keep the topic going here. Here is the original post for a refresher:

(http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21585909051&sid=1)

Q u o t e:

This is mainly about the ToW issue. It locks out our fire totems and is vastly inferior to it's DP counterpart. What is the explanation for this? No other spec sacrifices as much dps as elemental to apply their raid buff, and the spec doesn't exactly have dps to spare.

So...
Are there any plans to fix discrepancy between ToW and DP? Yes i know GC made an incredibly vague post months ago saying something about it, but many people took that as meaning 3.3, and look where we are now.

Is there any thought on the extreme hit the Elemental takes for buffing the raid? I understand sacrifices sometimes are made for the sake of the raid but what Elemental Shamans have to lost is far more than necessary. Fire totems can make up a very large portion of our dps depending on the fight.

Does blizzard plan to do anything to fix our incredibly clunky fire totem mechanics? Currently, if there is already a spellpower buff down, Elemental Shamans dps by standing in melee range and dropping magma totem. Is this intended? Does Blizzard want Ele to become a melee range caster? What is the purpose of Searing Totem if Magma does more dps on single targets?

I know things are changing in Cataclysm, but there is an entire raid instances coming out and Elemental being detrimental to the raid would be a huge shame. Yes I know Ele can do well at lower gear levels, but I am speaking about HM's, where min/maxing actually matters.

I think I might be a little confused at the OP's question. I'm under the impression that he wants to to buff the raid with 280 SP and 3% crit, but not have to drop Totem of Wrath in order to use another fire totem? Is this correct?

I really don't understand this.

Magma totem only lasts 20 seconds and Searing totem only lasts 1 minute, and from my experiences, they both don't do THAT much damage. Not to mention, you have to burn a GCD to refresh a totem which is already a dps loss. I just did some testing of my own and I'm getting an average of 200-300 dps from Searing Totem and 350-400 from Magma, on the heroic training dummy (I'm at about 2750 SP self-buffed). The Magma dps seems noteworthy, but with a 20 second duration you'd be refreshing it quite a bit, which would result in less time going through your rotation and I really don't know if it'd be worth doing.

The OP is also forgetting about the 3 other totems that we can drop. Can warlocks buff 155 Agi/155 Str? 16% melee haste? 5% casting haste? 1150 armor? 91 mp5? Cleanse poisons and diseases? Dispell fear effects? (The list goes on and on) I really don't see a problem here. I do notice elemental dps to be a little low, but I don't think it has anything to do with totems.

Shamans bring SO much (even multiple shamans) to a raid that I just can't see not bringing as many as you can (lol).

Now to Ghostcrawler... Couldn't there just be a way to make the ToW buff into an aura? Like: "Your non-periodic spell critical strikes grant your party or raid members 'Elemental Wrath,' increasing their spell power by 280 and increasing their chance to critically strike by 3%." Or something like that. That would free up a fire totem, but I just don't see the need to constantly be dropping Searing/Magma totem, unless those were buffed to deal more damage. Just my 2 cents :).