Improvements to Water Shield / Earth Shield

[Imonobor]

Greetings, fellow element connoisseurs!

I recently hit 60 with my shaman and was exposed to the awesomeness of Water Shield and Earth Shield.
However, I believe that these can be further improved.

As a start, they should be acquired at earlier levels. They would have helped my leveling journey tremendously if I had access to them. Rank 1 of Lightning Shield requires level 8. So Water Shield should start at level 20-25, and Earth Shield could start at 35-45.

Furthermore, I think they should be affected by talents, specifically "Improved Lightning Shield" - it should be renamed to "Improved Elemental Shields" and apply its 15% bonus to the healing and mana restore of Earth and Water shield respectively.

The capstone talent "Thunderhead" should also be reworked to "share" (copy) your current shield type to your target ally (without removing it from yourself). It will have a 1-2 min cooldown. This can be used as a CD to heal, give mana, or shield an ally. It will also still have its mana cost reduction, but applied to all 3 types shields.

A different idea for a capstone talent would be a way to pop your own shield orbs yourself somehow. Perhaps on every spell crit (including healing crits, so resto can also do it)? Maybe we could include melee crits in there as well, so enhancement can make use of it too?
Personally I like the idea of sharing shields more, because this one was done in WotLK and wasn't very interesting to play with. Sharing would fit better into the vanilla shaman design of a support class better.

And finally, visuals!
It would be super cool if we could visually see how many stacks of a shield we have by the amount of orbs circling around our characters. Their spawn animation already includes all 3 orbs, so just make them stay instead of having only one.

[Avalok]

I like the suggestion of Improved Elemental Shields. I also agree that Water and Earth shields should be learned at lower levels.

As for the rest, I believe it's a bit too OP.

[Burunduk]

Shields will make your leveling much easier, it's not classic experience.
Two Earth Shields on you and on your target is retail thing, Turtle will not go so far.

[Manletow]

As i've mentioned before: I assume the reason T-WoW devs did not add "Earth/Water" Shields to lower levels was to encourage the use of the custom talent 'Thunderhead'.

Despite this... even WITHOUT "Earth/Water" Shields available most players STILL don't take Thunderhead due to it overall being a rather mediocre 'reward/effect' for 4 talent points investment.

SO yeah IMO they should:
- buff 'Thunderhead'
- OR give lowbie Shammies access to "Earth/Water" Shields.
- OR buff 'Lightning Shield' via allowing it to crit. (Earth Shield CAN crit BTW).

[Volkyte]

Or simply rework thunderhead to give shaman mana once they get hit in melee with shield up and only if using a shield.

[Imonobor]

I leveled my shammy 1-60 in turtle mode and got Thunderhead as early as possible. I didn't use it AT ALL, except for the mana cost reduction. It's just too clunky to use, combined with the fact that you can't have a shield on yourself if you give it to someone else, I don't think it's very useful.

I have a poweraura set up that shows me when I don't have a shield spell on. I can't have such an aura set up to show me when my focustarget is missing a shield, so it all becomes manual, and that's too much work for a meager DPS gain.

So yeah, Thunderhead needs a rework. My idea might be a bit on the powerful side, but it offers an interesting playstyle that fits with the vanilla shaman design. I'd love to hear your ideas as well

[Burunduk]

How to make players happy.
Take ability from TBC, nerf it, then buff it to it's original state in patch with class changes.
Easy.