Originally Posted by Anedris
The priest IHC talent is absurd at the moment. I really can't see a 60% haste proc remaining in game (and I'm a priest). I would fully expect that to be nerfed before it sees live servers. (Even just 16% clearcasting is really powerful given our regen mechanics.)
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I don't disagree. Not only is it extremely powerful, but it encourages a strategy of spam-casting heals. Indeed, it's so potent that there are probably a number of situations where it ends up making Binding Heal a better heal than Flash Heal even when the Priest themselves is completely undamaged. My suspicion is that at the very least they'll change it to "+60% haste while clearcasting" (so the next Flash/Binding/Greater Heal consumes the Clearcasting and stops the haste benefit).
However, even in the absence of IHC, you've still got some pretty big disparities going on. Our crit-heavy Resto Shaman is still lagging pretty far behind our Holy Priest in terms of mana efficiency - and that's without even considering the impact of being refunded the mana for overheals. Coupled with the Holy Priest's significant edge in mana regeneration, that means any fight based around Holy Priest longevity will leave Resto Shaman gasping halfway through.
In terms of throughput/burst, our IHC-less Holy Priest wins anywhere above "tank is nigh-unto-dead" (and depending on how often it comes up, he may well win here, since he can prevent the 'dead' part with his 51-pt. talent). The only time you get Ancestral Awakening on your tank is when you've just thrown a critical heal that still leaves your tank the most damaged person in the raid. Which means he must have been extremely low on life in the first place. And in the "nigh-unto-dead" arena, I'd argue that you're probably better off with a Resto Druid. Resto Druids have +50% to critical with Regrowth (which is probably more than even the best geared Resto Shaman will ever have), an on-crit talent and the instant Swiftmend to add even more healing to the equation.
Which is why all this emphasis on critical healing worries me. All that critical takes a Shaman's mana efficiency from "hideously bad" to "terrible". All that critical takes a Shaman's single target healing from "truly abysmal" to "merely awful". And while critical is certainly useful in many Chain Heal applications, Chain Heal doesn't get much in the way of love with the alpha WotLK talents.