Greetings friends. I've been thinking about Lightning Shield not doing much in WoD for Enhancement, being kind of a "dead button", and also making AoE just a little easier in some specific circumstances.
My suggestions would be to turn Lightning Shield into Magma Shield at some point before gaining Fire Nova and allowing a Fire Nova to, in addition to what it already does, also explode out from the Shaman if Magma Shield is active.
Why?
A) This allows for some simple AoE when fighting mobs too weak to survive a Flame Shock or bad luck when you Flame Shock and the rest of the party/raid annihilate the weakened mob carrying the debuff. It's also melee range AoE so it probably goes well with the concept of being a melee spell caster class.
Damage numbers too high with an additional Fire Nova? Just tweak the numbers down slightly.
B) It makes us care more about having our Shield active, wich we should. Just having a 60 minute buff that persists through death with a miniscule damage component is not great spell design.
The change from Magma to Lightning is mostly for flavor (and damage type) but also makes it easier if Blizzard would want to tweak the ability for only one of the Elemental or Enhancement specs. Also a new tooltip could be helpful for newcomers when this function (Fire Nova) is exclusive to Enhancement.
Hopefully this wouldn't take to much development time, but on the other hand this suggestion might be to trivial, even if viable, to make it in to the game. Since Restoration already transforms Lightning Shield into Water Shield at level 20 this probably shouldn't be that technically difficult. This doesn't add a button to push, just the same old one to sustain. This is only important since Blizzard doesn't want to add "button bloat".
I guess it would need its own animation, but a small ember circuling the Shaman should not take to long to make (hopefully!). Maybe there's already a fitting animation in game?
So what do you guys think? Trivial? Non-issue?