The main thing that helps tuning is sometimes in the details, describing a situation or laying out the numbers.
The game really hasn’t been balanced around the levelling scene since the original release, where the journey was a multi-week endevour (memories of level 41-50 was a wild west of “well I guess I go-”). Everything really does ask for balance at 70 currently.
We can see over-tuning/under-tuning (believe it or not, just tuning) of individual abilities when we can look at specific situations given their intended operational situation. Then given the situation, lay out some kind of comparables. That can be actual numbers.
PvP
For PvP, it’s really complicated for a lot of reasons. One example though is “average time to death” (TTD) or effective health, and “average time to kill” (TTK) or effective damage dealt. The reason we can do this is because player health is relatively bracketed. Temporary defensive abilities can provide a health multiplier for a short period of time. Similarly, offensive abilities provide damage multipliers for attack power.
Other factors can be related to other factors like “Counter-play” which include laying out questions of “what’s the ramp up time?” or “how well is a play telegraphed?”
For example: Getting stuck in a stun, especially from stealth, other than the use trinket, there is no almost counter-play for shaman. Countering stealth in itself is really tough situation as shaman as well, since our damaging aoe requires ramp, so there’s limited counter-play for such a situation.
Add in the previous idea of comparable metrics, if a rogue can kill within that window (TTK), that’s a broken situation that can only be resolved with balance changes by the developers by adjusting damage or increasing defensive counter-play in some way, like idk lightning shield electromagnetic-pulse or sentry totem that detects stealth.
PvE
In PvE, I’d say that things are lot easier. This is because most of PvE revolves around boss fights. While they can be wildly designed in various ways, most can be simulated or will be attempted providing a broad body of data. Especially great are the break down of abilities taken, used, and even abused. Community tools break down the data pretty well for us to create very comparable situations and present reasonable concerns.
Less well defined are the asks for abilities that make us more attractive in the player economy. Players want to have competitive damage, utility, or just power in general, so that other players can recognize and want to play with others. Right now, there’s a lot of different utilities offered by totems, but it’s kind of a question as to which ones are really worth it, even at max level. Utilities like the returned Mana Stream Totem for elemental is almost more of a talent tree short-cut for getting to Ancestral Guidance while we are playing in content that doesn’t stress healer mana. Poison Cleanse Totem is situational, but largely accessible with a quick talent switch if given the time to prepare and impactful. But Elemental’s talents are situational in a lot of ways, like Magma Chamber which is wildly amazing if given the time to ripen, but utterly trash early on when creatures have very little health, like in the early game before 70. There are still the problematically boring talents, like Improved Flametongue Weapon, which is 5% competing with and even overwriting weapon oils.
Comparisons
Are any of the utilities as powerful as other abilities which can stack up to basically be another full player in a raid setting like mage’s Arcane Intellect or druid’s Mark of the Wild, to make shaman competitive in a player economy, is a real question.
Does our damage stack up to others? I think it’s a real question too.
BUT
I think, and my experience is all I’m going by, I’m doing well within my cohort of friends playing through Mythic 0’s that I’m very competitive damage-wise. And even more than that, experimenting with talents to match the profile of the dungeons has been improving my performance in many ways. Sometimes radical changes like switching from Stormkeeper to Icefury or Primordial to Earthquake, or small ways like ensuring I am bringing the poison cleanse.