Originally Posted by Eleven
While I absolutely agree with you on this, if elemental DPS was scaled to warlock/rogue levels, although unlikely, would the 25-man buffs still be necessary?
As far as healing goes, I think that the biggest problem for healing as elemental is mana efficiency, wearing less mp5
and not having the throughput to be able to downrank, EF and the itemization changes are going to help immensely, but with EF being available to resto shamans will healing mana usage be based around that assumption?
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Wouldn't need to be quite rogue/warlock levels, just relatively close. ToW isn't negligible, just minimal. And we're definitely going up from where we are with the new talents/skills/moonkin buffs, if they stay as they are. But, yeah, if we became an output class instead of a group buffer, that'd be ok. Would just need to buff some other things elsewhere since one of our biggest downfalls is that we don't have any raid debuffs to scale our damage aside from Misery and Stormstrike.
Personally, I think we just need 1 more raid utility talent of some sort to set us apart from a resto shaman in the same group a little bit more. There's no question that enhance is better in the melee group, but you could make an argument the extra mana return from a resto is not that much worse than the 3% hit/crit on some fights.
Could be anything, really - make mana returns from thunder apply to the whole party or tack on an effect to some deep elemental talent to give us extra spell damage or haste or something from Wrath of Air. Something simple like that works - just needs to be something, and I think we're golden for WotLK.
As for the healing part... It seems that with Elemental Focus working on healing spells too now, crit heals can help elemental shamans maintain mana even in elemental gear (which is probably the same thing as resto gear with different gems and some different trinkets/accessories)... and if there's one thing Elemental Shamans have never been short on, it's crit.
Naturally, I wouldn't expect the class to go so some sort of "hybrid" role in raids, but it should help for 5 mans, or those random emergency situations where a tank healer goes down and somebody needs to help keep him up for the last 10% or something.