I think you think I’m talking about enhancement, when I’m simply talking about Paladin that can go Wings, Ashes, DS, DS or fill in with whatever instant cast ability have ready.
If we’re comparing things side by side, sure the numbers are similar and overtime the performance curves are similar. Elemental gets up and running, eventually. But for the instantaneous or on things under (just a random number) 20 million hp amongst 5 targets in the first 5 seconds? Yeah paladin is a light switch in comparison.
Elemental’s AoE involves managing debuffs in the form of Flame Shocks and Lightning Rods that need to be used as setup, requires a build up in the form of Maelstrom, and is broken up by a considerable number of hard casts including the heroic Tempest in the case of Stormbringers.
There is significant ramp to get to 55/60 maelstrom before being to be bring Earthquake online, and then its damage exerts itself over time. Plenty of things happen before that but it’s at that point when AoE really feels like it’s online with all the features running to achieve the amplitude of a paladin’s AoE rotation.
There’s two major portions, which depend on how the cooldowns are rolling.
Lava: Summon Elemental, LMT, PW, AS, LvB, EQ
Lightning: Cast storm keeper, cast chain lightning, EQ, FS, cast CL, CL, EQ diff target, CL CL
If running Stormbringer, heck Tempest is a Cast, and you ideally are changing targets.
It’s so many GCDs that it’s one of the reason why Ascendance is receiving a huge change of casting the flame shocks and then sending the lava bursts out just to help reduce all the preparatory work that you have to ready for AoE situations.
Also, being able to break portions of encounters because you can go fully immune is still huge compared to shaman toolkit in general.
Over there being a narcissist over the aesthetics of best looking racial models