Just throwing this out there. The Inspiration thread got me thinking about EF 8/8 again, and after 2 months of theorycrafting with the other shamans in my guild, I decided to post my thoughts here.

OK...earthfury has 2 notable set bonus's for this discussion:
5pc (25% chance for 35% of the mana cost of a heal to be refunded) and
8pc (100% chance for your heal to jump to 2 nearby targets. 20% on the first hop and 4% on the 2nd).

You can read those as:
8.75% Cheaper heals
+24% Healing per mana (assuming all heals hit, however even if none hit, it still remains the most efficient spell, unlike chain heal)

Now taking into account my current realistic gear profiles ATM (pre-twin emps except in the case of the stormcallers set pieces)...located at http://ctprofiles.net/1606338

The differences between the sets as far as healing stats go are very slim:

EF:
4179HP
6542MP
241 Spirit
74/5 Regen
7.48 Spell crit
580 +healing

TS:
4179HP
6683MP
234 Spirit
66/5 Regen
9.63% spell crit (12.63% with set bonus)
603 +healing

SC: (with 3 ten storms)
4221HP
6465MP
209 spirit
77/5 Regen
9.45 Spell crit
614 +healing

AS you can see, the difference between the sets is very small as far as stats go, with no clear winner between SC and TS. EF is possibly weaker.

Taking the set bonus's into account however brings in a new set of issues:
#1. 8/8 EF procs Healing Way on anything hit by the bounces, improving healing by other healing waves by 18%
#2. (this is the possible bug). During heal spam on ebonroc (no MS warrior makes the fight long and boring so you have time to notice things). One of our shamans in 8/8EF noticed that he was proccing 5pc EF on almost every cast. After the raid, we decided to do some tests on 3 warlocks that would eat themselves as we healed. After approximately 50 heals. We came to very quick realization. He was proccing 5/8 EF on an average of 80% of his casts. While I in 7/8 was proccing at 22%.

Some bug eh?

Crunching some numbers shows that that makes his heals 28% cheaper instead of the standard 8.75%, as well as proccing Healing Way across the targets, and maintaining the 24% greater HP/M of the 8pc set.

It looks like 8/8 Ef will proc 5/8 over each of its bounces!

Now this is in no way confirmed. it could have been a streak of luck. But I would seriously like to have this looked at by a few more shamans. Unfortunately Luci has been evil to me for the past 14 months so I cant match my 8/8. But the 2 other shamans in my guild both were able to verify a procrate around 75%. Im just thinking the efficency of healing wave + healing way + 5/8 procs + 8/8 HP/M increases has to make EF massively imbalanced as a healing set.

Please look into this if you still have them floating around your bags (I'd assume few do...the joys of us being behind a bit in progression)

And please, discredit this post as fast as you can. I must either be insane, being lied to, or just stumbled upon something big.

Given that, I would definately notice a decline in chain heal efficiency. LHW wouldnt be too much worse.

As it were, I just put +100 mana on all as that is what is currently on my EF chest, just to establish the baseline. I agree though. +4 stats..yum.

EF is a difficult set for me and healing way made it more difficult. Right now I use 8/8 and really cant justify losing it since I have become the HW spammer in the raid. It is even better now that they have fixed the jumps so that they dont jump to people that have full health. Naxx is still a bit off for me so a noticeable upgrade will be a ways off which is saddening. I am curious if it was intentional to have 5 piece proc off the jumps(I will have to test this some since it didnt even occur to me that it might have been) and healing way procs off the jumps. I could see them nerfing it or fixing it to make TS and SC more attractive. The big issue is that with earthshatterer obviously itemization will be focused on shaman being pure healing in raids so why did they put so much spell damage and crit on TS and enhancement/elemental aspects on SC? It just doesnt make any sense.

TS was a Elemental/healing hybrid set, SC was a overall hybrid set; they make sense to me.

I think the 5 EF procs on the 8 EF hops was likely unintentional. However the armor buff and healing way procs on hops seem intentional.

However, with Blizzard focusing on 1.12, they may overlook the 8 EF bonus.

I understand the focus of the armor sets but it never made sense to me that the sets were not overall noticable upgrades in pve effectiveness. They are both overall upgrades but my primary job in raids is to heal and neither set helps with that. My theory was that overall DPS has to increase for future instances and to do that you need all classes to do more DPS. earthshatterer throws that theory out of the window so in pve terms it just never made much sense.

Ya...thats what im thinking. Is it even worth looting something between Tier 1 and Tier 3 if your focus is just pure PvE healing? I swear theorycraft gets harder everyday.

well those bigger shocks can help out if your dps that night is sucking. That and who knows it wouldnt surprise me if they "fixed" bugs or straight up nerfed the gear or they buffed TS or SC. There was a time with EF where noone wanted it cause the the point allocation was all over the place.

Personally, I went from 5/8 EF + 3/8 TS --> 8/8 TS --> 5/5 SC + 3/8 TS and felt my healing potential increase throughout that progression. (I got TS belt and bracers back when they dropped in MC in early 2005, so I never got an EF helm, belt, or bracers.) I didn't get those pieces for their hybrid value -- I got them because I saw all of them as healing upgrades (except for the dumb TS shoulders, but I got Stormcaller literally the next day after getting the shoulders as my 8th TS piece).

A shaman doesn't really need much gear to be able to contribute in his hybrid role. Just a good weapon, in my view. I'm a Resto shaman (0/20/31) with Sulfuras, and only 5 talent points spent in a way that increases my DPS at all (Thundering Strikes -- no Flurry). I expect that down the line we'll have shamans with Mauls of the Fallen Crusader and Severances and such, which are equally good if not better. When I need to do some damage, be it Nef phase 1 or C'Thun phase 2 or a fight like Chromaggus where I can cleanse-spam while autoattacking, I feel more than adequate for that role. I'm much less certain about the usefulness of elemental talents past 21 in a raid setting, but eh, no harm done there really.

Dont you want your world reknown trash mob earth shocks to hit harder? ;) j/k, I feel the same way, Im always shocking anything that runs loose. Id rather they hit the 50% mitigation shaman than the 20% mitigation priest.

Thats why I kinda want a few pieces of SC. That is a nice armor upgrade.

Meh.

From a healing standpoint, there is very little reason to pick up anything past t1. However, I have been gathering SC just for the versatility I need. It allows me to heal adequatly, and still do some dps when needed (something like cthun or anub for example). Earthshatter will suit me just fine for a healing upgrade.

An armor upgrade really doesnt appeal to me. It's going to be a cold day in hell before I can tank better than a druid, and getting two-three shot by even adds (such as noth's) helps to reinforce this idea. :(

First of all I want to tell you thats a waste of HoR not having good amount of talents on enhancement ... by your 20/31 is completely joke build compared to your stuff... nvm its up to you.
So about the 8/8 EF bonus ... It was kinda good before but now... if your guild give you MT/OT healer role so OK but if you're free healer in different situations you need to use all your kind of heals. At this very moment I am elemental shaman 30/21 with 5 SC+3 TS (when raiding Naxx and AQ40 ). As soon as most of the encounters ingame contain bosses which do AoE dmg its way better to use Chain Heal. I heal for like 2k (non-crit of any jump) with my chain heal which is just like a few more mana cost than LHW.