Shamans shields

[fassaassa]

Should abilities like a Blizzard, Arcane Explosion, Holy Nova etc, triggered Lightning Shield/Water Shield shamans?

[phaidon]

Not sure exactly what you are asking, but in general Lightning Shield and Water Shield proc from all attacks. They even changed the tooltips to reflect in later TBC patches to reflect that, so that now they read in patch 2.4.3 state (player spell state of server):

Lightning Shield:
"The caster is surrounded by 3 balls of lightning. When a spell, melee or ranged attack hits the caster, the attacker will be struck for XXX Nature damage"

Water Shield:
"The caster is surrounded by 3 globes of water, granting XX mana per 5 sec. When a spell, melee or ranged attack hits the caster, YYY mana is restored to the caster. This expends one water globe. Only one globe will activate every few seconds."

In fact, even with tooltip changes to reflect the intent of "attacks" and all damage types, the spells themselves would proc from almost ANYTHING affecting the player, e.g. bonfires, the nodes that give water bubbles, PvP powerups in battlegrounds, most forms of environmental damage, rogue's Sap, picking herbs that changed your status like Mana Thistle, etc. Lightning Shield could even be tricked to proc and then any nearby guards would kill the Shaman. Blizzard had to individually put exceptions for all these things precisely because the damage trigger for Lightning Shield and Water Shield was so broad!

As for Earth Shield, proc conditions were later enforced as being only from direct damage attacks. This was probably to reflect how other shield or shield-like effects work on the other healing classes, rather than be like the other shaman shields.