Bullshit. Giving people options doesn't cause someone to 'loose' credibility. You're just being an asshole.

I have successfully Hammer Stunned a paladin, Frozen a Mage, and Hexed another Shaman. Calling it useless just shows how narrow minded you are.

Allow me to explain. The trouble with Grounding Totem is that it USED to survive crowd control spells. Somewhere along the way, it was reworked to blow up with any harmful spell that came its way, which reduced its effectiveness by a whole lot.

In a long engagement environment, absorbing a random attack every 15 seconds isn't going to do much for your survivability. If it's used to absorb a crowd control spell, you just wasted the totem because most crowd control spells can be recast immediately.

Changing the mechanic of the totem to a spell reflect makes it more utilitarian. In PvP, utility wins out. Personally, I would much rather reflect a Cyclone once than absorb three offensive spells. The ability to use Grounding Totem both as mitigation (since the spell won't hit you) and to reflect crowd control warrants the longer cooldown.

Yes, this is a blog, and that's my opinion.

Sorry Zach, but you are the reason terrible abilities like earthquake will stay in the game. Baddies like you will say that it's great and fun in PvP while you flail around in the 1600 arena brackets, and we actual PvPers will be stuck putting our talent point elsewhere.

As a blogger and supposed expert on shaman PvP, you should be just as adamant about getting it changed ASAP for the first Cata season. Or you should change the title of your article to "Must-have PvP talents for casual shaman in 4.0.3".

Also you're dead wrong about the grounding totem glyph. Of course the ability to reflect spells is totally awesome and super useful when used correctly. But the cost at which it comes is not worth it by a long shot. I would absolutely destroy you 1 on 1 in a BG if you're dropping 1 grounding totem every minute and only reflecting a purge. Mages would have a lot of fun with that as well. We have very limited resources when it comes to defense against casters, and trading 3 grounding totems for a likely insignificant reflect is a bad investment.

If you plan on playing an elemental shaman in rated bgs and arena, you're not going to do very well with your current philosophy on what constitutes utility and how to spend your cooldowns.

Why would your grounding totem eat a purge? Typically, you'd cast it reactively against a long cast (cc) spell. If you're the type who just drops Grounding Totems at random in the hopes of it eating something, then I guess that's cool.