What's the point of Surge of Earth?

Was playing on the PTR and I just don’t get it, did we really need something else for raids? Presumably this is mana inefficient for 5 mans since it can hit 6 players. With all of our multi-target healing abilities, why did we need this one?

I actually like the idea a lot of consuming Earth Shield charges to provide a separate effect, but maybe this should have been something like “Consume all remaining charges of Earth Shield and heal the target for 5% per charge consumed. Additionally, the target’s armor is infused with the elements of the earth and they take 40% reduced damage for 8 seconds.” on a 4 minute cooldown.

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I agree, it seems like yet another aoe heal that lacks very little punch and offers something in area we already have a lot of… aoe heals.

I would like to see it consume stacks left and turn it into a absorb, where the number of stacks left decides how much is absorbed. For say 15secs or something. Even just take the earthen wall totem ability and shove it on there lol

Its just a worthless talent that just reinforces never switching off of echoes.

Yeah that’s not a bad idea either. I don’t know it just felt so weird going on PTR, using Surge of Earth and it was like oh cool another one of these - it’ll do nothing for us in M+.

Exactly, echo is so strong you really need something like a decent DM or the like to try and present and even close to real option.

Imo echo should be baseline. It handicaps that entire row every xpac

Lol yeah it seemingly did nothing, and with no real animation or spell effect that I could see, often let me wondering if it had actually triggered or not

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It was a terrible choice.
They give us back Earth Shield as our one tool for keeping the tank alive, and they add a talent for it. Great, so I can specialize my build for dungeons by buffing my Earth Shield to be a better tank saver, right? Nope, wrong. If you invest points into your main ‘keep tank alive’ skill, it gets slightly worse at keeping the tank alive and turns into another spread aoe heal sprinkle which RShaman already has pouring out of every orifice.

It has a singular purpose, and that’s in the very rarely occurring situation that the raid stacks on the tank. You’ll never use it in 95% of encounters because the tank will be pointing the boss away from the group or the group never stacks.

If Surge of Earth worked with the Earthen Harmony legendary that buffs ES charges by 300%, I think it could be a decent cooldown for single target. But from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t work with the legendary right now in the beta.

Yeah its pretty disappointing all around

I actually posted frequently about making earth shield baseline to help with tank healing in M+ and asked for a talent to improve earth shield instead. I, too am disappointed in this talent as it doesn’t do enough to replace echo of elements. The one recurring issue you’ll see shamans complain about is not having enough single target healing or cooldowns for M+ and a strong ES talent could fix that, but it has to provide that single target output.

I have a couple options that would make this far more useful based on my experience in M+

First off, and this is important, the consumption nature of this talent basically requires you to refresh ES at 3 stacks to ensure you have enough stacks to consume to get the full effect meaning you now have to re-apply ES after 6 procs which is like 16-20 seconds. At least give ES 12 base stacks so we’re re-applying at the same rate as shamans who don’t choose the talent, it’s already annoying enough as a maintenance buff. Think about it, it makes sense, do the right thing.

Now if you want to really make this talent competitive with Echo, consider one of the following:

1: Make it a powerful single target heal, and any overheal would be split between 3 targets close to the tank. The reason I’d ask for this is that it allows this talent to either be an AOE heal for up to 4 players or a very large heal for a single player. I’d even be willing to accept a 30+ sec cooldown

2: Base the split of the heal off the health of the tank. A tank at 99% health takes 1% and splits 99% evenly, a target at 50% health splits 50% and keeps 50%, a target at 1% health splits 1% and keeps 99%. Similar effect, and I’d still be happy even if it had the same 30 sec + cooldown.

This type of functionality would keep the flavor of shamans with heavy AOE heal focus and but still give us a shaman flavored swift mendy tank saver ability since we have fewer externals than most other healers.

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