Earthquake is the dumbest ability in the game. It’s an AoE spender, a so called “big payoff” and it sucks.
First of all its hard to understand when to use it. In 2 target situations most of the time you’re better off using EB or ES since they flat out do more damage, kind of like how Ele sham does more damage spamming single target abilities in 2 target situations but i digress. Even though 2 targets seems on its face like a situation that you would use your AoE spender you actually do less damage by using it than by using the single target spender.
Second of all its cumbersome. By default the ability has two modes, its either a ground targeted ability or a cast at target AoE. Having two iterations of the exact same spell with two completely different interactions is bad design. It’s confusing to new players when they see two versions of the same spell in their spell book, something that the design team has gotten away from. I’m not actually sure why Blizzard went with this, because in the current iteration of WoW there’s hardly ever situations where you would want to ground target your AoE. This would be mitigated if EQ was a general spell, like Blizzard, but its not a general spell its a spender. You can’t spam it or cast it at will, let alone the fact that if you get aftershock procs it feels bad to use the ground targeted mode on AoE pulls.
Third of all, even if you don’t use the ground target mode the spell still feels bad to use because of its range. With the way encounters are designed currently, when a tank micro adjusts to the next pull, or has to move out of a circle, all your big spender damage is gone because the pack that used to be on top of your earthquake is now moved slightly and isn’t taking damage from it. THIS FEELS ESPECIALLY BAD.
Fourth of all, the graphic for the spell looks like something you should not be standing in. I’ve had lots of M+ tanks that move out of my EQ for literally no reason and I’ve often wondered why, and the only reason I can think of is that they see the ground cracking and fiery and say ‘well I shouldn’t be standing here’ and all of a sudden my dps goes down. It’s not an uncommon thing. Imagine if Blizzard had a big frozen circle on the ground, people would move out of it all the time. Sure you can recognize it and know what it does over time but on first blush it doesn’t have that effect, and EQ’s ground effects aren’t loud enough to be memorable. It suffers from the same deficiency that smoke bomb does.
I honestly would prefer if the AoE maelstrom spender payoff for ele sham was just Tempest, and if the rest of their damage profile was adjusted to compensate. In my ideal world Tempest is the AoE Maelstrom spender, Lightning Rod is the thing that makes stormbringer unique (while also being easier to apply to every target than it currently is) and the left side of the Ele talent tree is redesigned.