Bumping this thread in light of the recently announced changes to the shaman general tree.
When I read this, I had to come back and find this thread because the first thing that came to mind was the chart Denbaugh made roughly tallying throughput nodes on all class general trees.
Obviously, as OP stated, there’s a little wiggle room with some of the talents as to what category they fall into.
But even taking that into account, there is enough of a divide that it’s more than a bit confuddling to see them make this statement about the shaman tree when it seems to be so much more significant of an issue for other classes.
The context of these issues in our general tree is doubly ironic when you also take into account the recent hunter reworks referenced in Denbaugh’s post above this one.