there are several handicaps that shaman have in general.

1. roles and style of play- shaman are one of two classes that have 3 completely different roles and styles of play. shaman are ranged dps, melee dps and healers. the druid is ranged dps, tank/melee dps, and hearler. most other classes have 1-2 different roles and styles. e.g. the warrior is either a tank (prot spec) or melee dps (arms or fury or both). so the warrior has 2 trees to choose from if you want to do dps. thats 58 talents to choose from. mages basically have only one role. ranged dps and the 3 specs are for either pvp or pve. shaman have been good healers because there are few choices for that role, they are much better melee dps with the new talents, but still suffer in elemental.

2. talents- elemental shaman have only 24 talents to spend there points on, most other classes have 28. shaman talents are more expensive than other classes, if we had 4 more talents than shaman would see an improvement.

3. totems are ineffective- pre BC shaman were a powerful hybrid class. one reason was the buffs and damage that totems provided. at this time half the totems are useless. e.g. sentinel and resistance totems. seering totem at lvl 60 did max 50 damage. post BC most armor and health doubled, but the damage increase to seering totem only went up 20%, max of 60 damage. that 10 extra damage increase means nothing when fighting a warrior with 6k more health and 7k+ additional armor. other totems suffer the same.

4. scalability- shaman don't scale the way other caster classes do. so as gear gets better shaman don't improve at the same rate as locks, hunters, rogues, mages or druids.

5. lack of clear party or raid purpose- elemental shaman are not the best in any role. there are better ranged dps and our buffs can be duplicated by other classes. so why bring a shaman now. we have become filler. need one more to fill the group, " ok, i guess we can bring the elemental shaman, better that than not go at all".

6. burst dps- the shaman can create some good burst damage but they suffer from a good rotation. with the cooldowns, shaman dps actually goes down with if you add too much haste to your gear. you either do nothing while waiting for one of the cooldown to expire, or you cast a lesser damage spell and push back your high damage spell. our cooldowns don't line up very well.

7. shaman were horde only for a long time. shaman were OP pre BC but got nerfed post BC. with the problem listed in 5, it was not the draw that pally was for horde players. so pally numbers went up while shaman numbers went down (as a percentage of class specs)

these are my observations of the numerous shaman handicaps. I think it is a fun class to play, easy to solo, but with most end game content, elemental shaman are the red headed step child.