https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...67044715515904
https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...11778318176256
Earthquake totem will be instant cast, but the big benefit that the perk brought us was the increased damage (earthquake does 4x as much damage after a 3-target chain lightning). Without it, our earthquake will take a huge hit.
The perk allowed EQ to be a great source of damage, even with all of the burst AoE brought by other classes, because it allowed for EQ to be both a single-target and an AoE damage ability. With the perk gone, EQ will go back to being its former low-damage self that does damage over 10 seconds, causing it to lose out massively to all of the burst AoE damage in the game (if EQ does damage over 10 seconds, but adds only last for 5 seconds, we lose a lot of value - may as well just go back to CL spam and use our maelstrom on earth shock).
They could potentially just increase the damage of the totem, but that may cause you to run into an odd situation where EQ is a part of the single-target rotation again (at least during periods of excess maelstrom). What I would propose is to either:
A) Add the perk back in as an artifact trait or passive ability.
or
B) Make EQ's duration scale from 10 seconds down to 5 seconds (same total damage) based on the amount of maelstrom spent. Additionally, remove the cooldown of the totem, allowing you to use it more often with higher DPS during periods of excess maelstrom, but still preventing you from having two down due to the nature of totems.
I'd really hate to see EQ become unused again, because I was very happy with its state during WoD (after the buff to Emp CL). Hopefully Blizzard has something planned to keep it powerful, as it was one of the most interesting parts of our current kit.