This was one of the shaman changes in patch 2.3:
Earth Shield: This ability will no longer be overwritten when the new Earth Shield would do less healing.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except that it doesn’t work. No matter how many charges are left, I can’t overwrite an existing Earth Shield with a new one. What makes it even more annoying is that it completely disregards trinket use, so I can no longer overwrite a non-trinketed Earth Shield with a much, much more powerful one.
Temporary fix: ask your tank to manually remove his Earth Shield. Not the most elegant solution, but it works.
But what if you discover too late and you’ve already popped your trinkets? Temporary fix #2: cast Earth Shield (rank 1) on yourself, making it disappear from the tank. Then cast it on the tank again. 600 mana down the drain, but at least you didn’t waste your healing bonus.
But it gets worse. For patch 2.3.2, Blizzard had planned to reduce the mana cost for Earth Shield but add a 30-second cooldown. PvP-flagged shamans worldwide protested loudly, and rightly so. A buff that’s so easily dispelled shouldn’t come with such a long cooldown. Thankfully, this change has been removed from the patch, but only until the developers have looked into the dispellability of Earth Shield. (Yes, dispellability. That’s a perfectly fine word and you know it.)
I don’t PvP much, so I can only hope they will look into the buggy “A more powerful spell is already active” error as well. Combining a cooldown with the inability to overwrite an Earth Shield will make me a sad panda indeed.
