I usually view this as a challenge to wring the strength out of a class/spec… People have had time to figure out shaman, but maybe the creators just have not figured it out.
At the risk of talking about builds in feedback and suggestions…
Strong builds are all about synergy, which means not only aligning the scaling of the skills and passives, but also using multiplicative bonuses between them.
I do not see how it’s possible to make a very strong build with both tornado and gathering storm, because they scale differently. I also think spriggan is strongest when you have lots of minions (as it heals/buffs all allies) not when you have none.
Just looking at the trees and the math, if someone forced me to play spell damage tornado shaman, I would focus on ranged damage skills… which means leveling Fury Leap → warcry → storm crows → upheaval → eterras blessing → storm totem → maelstrom (on totem) → tornado → avalanche… and I’d have to experiment with what final combo of skills was the best as there would be a few viable. There is a possibility I would throw bear tank in there for a short while if it was needed…
One important issue is having frequent cleanse, because lots of what kills in higher corruption is dots… On my beastmaster I am constantly getting cleanse “for free” whenever I use fury leap or warcry… As a shaman we can get cleanse from Fury Leap and Eteras Blessing, but the blessing cleanse could be awkward if we have minions that are getting targetted instead.
I’m really not sure what the endgame build would be… I don’t love using totems as ranged, because I’m kiting and running which often doesn’t play well with stationary totems, but then shaman tree has lots of bonuses for totems.
I’m out of time right now (researching all that was fun but took a while!), but I want to try this tommorow. I’m typically 2 hrs to level 30 monos, so it wont take too long to have some real experience.