Lightning Shaman is sorely lacking in appropriate skills (spells in particular).
Ice Thorns are cold\phys, Thorn totems are phys\cold; Swipe has good lightning pen, but is served better with beastmaster who can grab the shaman nodes. Tempest Strike at 100% scaling, no attack speed and lower than 100% chance for casts is awful. Maelstrom is pure cold and one lightning subskill doesn’t help. Similar point with tornado (why is STORM orb a physical spell?).
Storm totem is hampered by being a single totem (so a totem build will want to add other totems, at which point you’ll also switch damage type to cold or go phys and abandon storm totem altogether). For Shaman storm crows are just flat lightning damage.
EQ and Avalanche are obviously skills that can carry a build by themselves, but both don’t like lightning. Avalanche get some base lightning damage, but the bulk is still phys\cold combo or only one of them. EQ for some reason gets a node that doesn’t convert the damage into lightning, but adds it along with physical, so adaptive damage is still split between physical and lightning.
It’s hard to support a 50 mana skill on class with almost no flat mana gain as is (evident by bhuldar’s EQ builds using no mana at all), but having to itemise lightning spell damage instead of adaptive is even worse.
I hear ya my man. I really want more options as a lightning Shaman. I’m currently running a Tornado based lightning Shaman with Eterra’s Blessing for resists / spell damage leech, Storm Totem for shock stacks / increased lightning damage, Tempest Strike for lightning strikes / mana and Leap for movement / global damage. It is working quite well around level 75 with a dragon staff, but I fear it might not cut it at the end game. Certainly fun to play at the moment though.
Welcome Crauler to LE,
The Lightning Shaman is due for a rework, after just completing the druid for this patch to bring better synergies to the skill and passive trees. In the past, the dev team stated if the premise of the druid changes works out then they would use more of them in the other masteries.
This playstyle is really underwhelming and I have spent many posts lobbying for improvement. It just takes time. One of the shaman’s issues is that it lacks one top-end skill after the avalanche (which never made sense to me) to complete its tree and the lack of effective passive/skill integration makes it rough. We also petitioned for better flat and % scaling damage mods on at least one additional piece of gear to balance out the mastery. It is a very heavy key rotation or auto casting mana recoup style which really hurts the hands after a while.
Personally for me, it’s not about getting another top-end skill, since EQ is exactly that, it’s about something else that could synergise with EQ (although making spell version pure lightning would help). If the druids can get permanent forms (and pretty much infinite mana as a result), shaman can get mana generation too. The only current options are bound to melee skills (swipe node and tempest strike passive) which goes against a spell shaman (and shaman in general is more fragile among the three). Other useful thing would be a low\zero mana-cost spell or medium cost fire-and-forget spell like an Eye of the Storm Tornado.
I feel like shaman is thematically so much fun but when you translate that to gameplay is feels akward and janky. There some wierd interactions and decisions. Like how you have tornado and maelstrom but they are both different types and if you want lightning on both of them it’s at a detriment cause they are both damage over time non-lightning skills so if you focus lightning dmg it only buffs the lightning they strike and not the spell itself and if you focus damage over time for the actual spells it does nothing for the lightning dmg. It’s akward.
Both avalanche and eq are high cost spells that take your mana out in big chucks, neither of which feel good even if you have high mana regen. They would fit better if there was mana return. Instead of having 20 mana regen for example having 60 mana returned ever 3 seconds so right after losing a huge chunk of you mana you gain back that huge chunk but can’t regain more mana for a while. I’m not saying thats how it should be but that sort of thing fits better with huge mana cost spells more. It makes casting them more fluid instead of the currently ridged design. I think high mana regen goes well if you are casting multiple mid cost spells constantly which the current shaman design doesn’t have.
I am also very underwhelmed by the Lightning Strike in the passive tree. For all that point investment you don’t really get much out of it. I think it should either do more dmg or have defensive component to it or maybe it could return mana on hit to provide that mana return I mentioned.
And a minor pet peeve of mine is how all lightning in shaman has the exact same animation. I hope it’s not all going to be lightning coming down from the sky at launch.
Also I find the lack of totems in shaman weird too, especially since there are a lot of passives and synergies with having multiple totems and all that cold and lightning dmg on minions yet thorns totem only does half cold half physical and storm totem can only have one of itself.
For me shamans passive tree is extremely weak, filled with generic damage nodes with low/mid values and not very many defensive perks, when I get 400 or 500% potential damage on a good staff, that 5% physical damage node is literally worthless to me, id much rather invest into defensive stuff.
Shamans skills also get lent out better then he lends from others.
I am planning this funky little shatter upheaval build, shattering thorn totems for big aoe spell bombs, it scales melee and spell. So we got thorn totem, upheaval, need a companion okay throw in spriggan for juicy untyped base crit… and now im stuck. What the hell else do I even grab here? Tempest strike for mana recovery lets me go more greedy in thorn totems I guess? im still missing one slot…I thought maybe the avalanche set cause the staff is pretty decent but the other two pieces really suck for me… and nothing else from other masteries really sticks out. Having frenzy totem locked into BM now is a huge blow to shaman. At this point im probably gonna grab storm totem just for an extra totem to break that casts a shocknova on death 
praying next major patch cycle comes with a shaman revamp, cause he is so funky and is really cool thematically, he just needs some refining.
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