I have thrown this idea out myself many times.....infact its really just a revamp of an existing ability, our stoneclaw totem which used to shield any currently active totems with a small absorb shield. Instead, give Shaman a 30 sec spell that puts a shield on the shaman as well as a smaller shield on any active totems to give them some temporary protection......either absorbs a % of damage, like 10%HP, or it absorb 2-3 direct attacks from anything like melee, spell, ect.
Making it work for Shaman was just my own tweak to it but its mainly cause I miss our stoneclaw totem's short cd shield and I think it would work pretty well, its active defense for our totems and would make you play smarter. A shield that absorbs 2-3 attacks might not be a big deal for the shaman, but will be a big help for totems that can be basically one shot even with 5-10%HP.
The thing that you (and Blizzard) are forgetting is that PVP is not 1v1, its group play of usually 3v3 or more.....a healer may or may not be able to quickly kill a totem with 10%HP, but a group can easily do it, or just one dps in your party who an quickly mouseover the totem and insta shot it wiht a spell. This is what makes totems so much more crappy in group PVP is because of just how easy they are to kill with just one DPS, so if you have a party its a joke......certain totems should require a group effort to kill quickly because they have powerful buffs that need to be removed quickly like stormlash, spirit link, capacitor......all 3 of these totems have only 5HP which means one person can easily kill it, which IMO is unbalanced for group pvp gameplay.....when you drop one of those totems the other team should voice out a warning to switch and the whole team targets the totem so after a few seconds its dead, not just one second and one gcd but 3+ gcd's. This is why something like stormlash, with it's 5min CD, should easily have atleast 15-20% HP. Those 3 totems are also all air totems, meaning we cannot protect them with grounding totem......another flaw in design and making "Active defense" not possible......Grounding totem should be a spell or a non-element tied totem so we can protect ANY totem we want from an instant spell. A shield spell like I previously mentioned would serve the same purpose of protecting a totem like capacitor or stormlash for atleast 2-3 gcds.The idea of increasing totem HP brings more balance problems. Example: If totems did have 5-15% health, then healers and DoT classes would have a lot harder time countering them. On the other hand it wouldn't matter much from melee since they will still 1 shot them. There is no difference if a melee hits you totem for 5 health and 30K over kill or hitting it for 30k and no overkill, it's still a 1 shot. 5% or even 10% doesn't effectively increase totems survivability (outside healers).