I believe some of your oom problems are a result of low crit - as a ele shaman you become much more mana efficient once your buffed crit is above 40%

with 3 shamans you got 9% coming from totems and 10% coming from talents so you got 19 with no gear at all! If you are having that much trouble when leveling it wouldn't be a big deal to just spam lightning bolts. But, without any haste, 3/1 rotation will maximize your dps.

On another note just general ele information that could help you in the future.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16947-s...lemental_shop/
Learn, read, understand how the class works. Your gear choices are vastly different then other classes and you have to balance your gear accordingly.


http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hEczq0MsAotZxbjz0x

This is your basic starter spec. The 1 point in reverb can be reassigned as you like, but ultimately its just one really questionable point to spend. As you gain more hit, you can move talents around in resto to max out totemic focus, tidal focus is not useful as you should not be healing unless it is an emergency in pve. Although, this is a raid spec so some of those points could be changed around as you will be using your shamans to dps and heal.


This how you should gem/gear yourself for best possible DPS as an elemental shaman, in a nutshell.


Step 1) Cap hit, its a joke to do at only 3%, but until you do its the worth about 2 spell damage per 1 hit rating, far more then equivalent pieces.

Step 2) Crit. You want 40% raid buffed crit before you start delving into haste. This reduces your dependence on a shadow priest so that you can dps for the entire duration of a fight while not having to drop chain from your rotation at any point. The other reason is DPS. A lot of your damage is dependent on you critting and to go any lower then that reduces how much damage you do overall in addition to fucking your mana.

Step 3) Haste. I don't remember the numbers offhand but you want about enough haste to get you a 1.5 lightning bolt to give you the cleanest possible 4/1 rotation. You don't want to be swapping to a 4/1 rotation until you get ~1.8 second lightning bolts. Keep in mind haste procs like the VERY VERY amazing Skycaller's Totem (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33506) let you hit this cap so a lot of your play in a fight is paying attention to haste procs and where your lightning bolt cast time is at.

Step 4) Spell damage. Spell damage is not something you want to be gemming specifically for, it should be more of a natural side effect from your gear. In very end-game gear with all the best pieces in the game, you should be able to keep 40% raid buffed crit, a clean 4/1 rotation, and then have a couple of gem slots where you can put spinels.

Gemming
Though at lower gear levels, sometimes you have to use yellow gems to get your crit up, ultimately you want to be using mostly oranges whenever possible. In terms of your 2 blues to activate the meta, greens are much better then purples. Try to avoid yellow haste gems as you gear up, and stick to orange haste gems because of how our scaling works. Basically around the time you can start really looking at haste, your generally at a point in your spell damage where pushing too much of one stat (talking about haste vs damage) causes the other to become slightly more valuable, and by gemming oranges, your pushing them both up at closer to the same rate and ultimately leading to slightly more dps (though this is generally measured in 10's - 20's rather then hundreds) in the long run.

Hope this informations helps a lot - ele shamans are so different than ever other caster class and this should solve some problems you might be having.