Rugrud

The reason i prefer to cast max rank and canceling when the fight isn't on farm status isn't the mana regen tick, it's that by doing that, i have a big heal closer to land on the MT if he takes i big hit. If i'm spamming HW7, when the hit land, he will get a HW 7 1.25 sec later on average, then a big heal 2.5 sec later. That's more than 3 sec with just ~2000 HP back.
By chain castin HW 12 and canceling, the next big heal is only 1.25 sec away on average. It is this quicker answer to spike damage that makes me use max HW and canceling. Not the mana regen.

 

Kirion

Sorry, but you are not solo healing mt, right? Most of times big heal wont be answer for spike damage (we have NS and LHW for that) but guaranteed way to waste other heals on overheal. This is better for your position on healing meters though :P
If you are solo healing tank casting max rank is better, i agree.

42.

 

Glayde

I prefer to spam heal rank 7 when doing MT heals since it's fairly sustainable and around 2k with healing way up. It's the 2nd most efficient healing wave for me atm, (the most efficient doesn't heal enough per pop yet imo).

When damage spikes i throw the max rank in.

Lesser healing wave is for emergency spot heals, max rank.

Chain heals for healing melee dps etc, or general raid topping off when people are grouped.

And to reiterate some other posts here, for the OP,
Improved healing wave (faster cast time) is one of the most important talents.
Focused heals (interrupts) and Ancestral healing (AC bonus on crits) are right up there too.

I'm 16/0/45 (clearcast, elemental warding and +crits from the elemental tree) and 3 in nature's guardian instead of maxing out tidal focus. (full tidal mastery for more crits).

I put together a crude 2.1 healing gear comparison table (without rings/trinkets) for raid rewards, with links to wowhead.

http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/tle/moo/healgear.htm

I have to say absolutely wow at the fathom-helm, and not regretting socketing it up now while i waited for a t4 (which now seems quite inferior).

 

Zerath

This thread has helped me quite a bit, thank you.

Does anyone know the coefficent for Earth Shield? (That would be the correct terminology, right? >_<) This is my first healing class in WoW and really wanting to get to the bottom of it all.

*Edit*

Searched around more thoroughly, ~30% +heal per charge of ES. Is this still true after 2.1? Thank you in advance.

 

Donzilly

300%; 30% over each of 10 ticks.

http://ctprofiles.net/2303173

 

Macar

Well finally got around to doing some testing in-game. I used Wrath of Air totem and Mana Spring totem (with 2 set bonus from Tier 4), and then Mana Tide totem once. No mana pots or nothing.

HW rank 7 before patch 2.1: healed 109652 before OOM. 14.2% heal crit rate.

HW rank 7 after patch 2.1: healed 164818 before OOM. 14.5% heal crit rate. With Crystal Pulse Shield

Have we really been buffed that much in 2.1?

Also some interesting things:

With Light-bearer's Faith Shield 2.1, samt setup as above 157875 before OOM. 10% heal crit rate.

Looking at this, it seems like the extra 20 healing from the Light-bearer's shield is better or on par with the 6 mana regen from the Crystal Pulse Shield.

Sure the healing done was less, but so was the crit rate, so with similar crit rate it woul probably be similar to Crystal Pulse.

http://www.siglaunch.com/sigs/wow/1/...11159sMIJL.png

 

• Binkenstein

There's the item buff, and there's the fix to Healing Way.
Previously it was doing ~12% with three buffs, rather than 18%. It now does 18%, which for me was a gain of ~500 heal per cast (lowest heal with three buffs up is 4.9k, most are 5.2kish)

 

missiletoad

I think the biggest factor in your findings is the mana/5 bug which was fixed in 2.1.0. The mana regeneration difference for healers who stack the stat pre- and post-patch is absolutely amazing.

 

Reservoirdog

I think this is a pretty solid post. Ive parced heals many times and came up with basically the same conclusions; Rank 12 is best HPS by a very good amount, and barely less efficient than ranks 7-9, whereas ranks 10-11 are not not only less HPS but less efficient than rank 12, & 7-9. If you have a solid group of healers, you can afford to down rank in heals, but IMO the minimal gain in healing per mana is not worth the rather drastic loss in HPS. If more than one target is tanking damage, chain heal is by far the best heal in the game, for ANY class. LHW has very limited uses, and if this is your primary heal, run a healing meter and you will see that your fellow healers are kicking your a$$.

That being said I'll give a rundown of what i use for healing. My arguments are based off of my personal tests/experience with around 1600 + heal and 130 mp5.

Chain heal- If more than one target is taking damage its a must use. Since there is a large number of fights with splash damage in TBC this is my primary heal. For instance in Kara when you have multiple mobs being tanked, and there is no cleave effects, i tell the tanks to stand next to each other and i don't even have to cast any other heals to keep them up. Also works well with mages/locks grouped up for AOE pulls.

LHW- I only use this in 2 situations. 1) NS is not up and MT is within 1 hit of dying. 2) aoe pulls where one mage/lock pulls more aggro than the rest and chain heal doesn't keep him up.

HW- First, Healing way and improved Healing wave are MUST HAVES if you are going to be a main healer. Go into heroic SP and do the double bog lord pull before Hungerfen without them and you will see my point. Basically this is my main heal when I'm healing the MT and hes the only one taking damage. With healing way heals hit for over 4500 with crits over 7k. Downranking or using any other heal won't touch that HPS. For any fight with spike damage this is your staple heal.

Earthshield- I always cast this on the MT prior to every pull(unless its aoe then i use it on the highest dps mage/lock). Even though it costs 900 mana it gets amazing return from +heal so I try to keep it up the entire fight. ***remember if you are looking at the healing meter, earthshield WILL drop you because it counts as healing done by the TARGET not the CASTER, do not let this discourage you*** Also this is our form of HoT, so in any fight were HoT are necessary, such as The last boss in BM(time stop) and Maiden in Kara (Repentance) this is a must use.

 

Iol

I'm gonna get shot for this but did you try swapping your 3 worst healing pieces for 3 Tier 2? For me it's been the boots, bracers and belt right now. I really like how the 30% more healing on 2nd and 3rd target of Chain heal scaled with the amount of +heal we have now on fights where i know i'm basicly only gonna use Chain Heal. IE: Void Reaver.

 

• Binkenstein

With 3pc T2 CH gets a 2.0735 multiplier, without it's 1.75.

The question is: will an extra 32.25% on chain heal output outweigh the stat loss of using those items?

 

Daidalos

Basically Reservoirdog in right is everything he said. Just wanted to point some things out

I miss my old 3pc however I cannot justify the loss in stats to ever wear it. Many fights require 10-11k hp getting this with tier 2 would be hard without doing stam enchants on the rest of my gear which would take away from my flexibility when not chain healing. I didn't have the belt and boots since they were the bad pcs back then (I was a mp5 whore back then). So maybe you could pull it off with the right 3 pcs but still seems very iffy. The loss in stats is huge.

Basically if you only cast lhw you are wasting your mana imo. I didn't heal like this pre-TBC and its even worse now. A good healer can use hw effectively either down ranking spamming or precast/ cancel healing. I prefer down downrank spam(hw6 or hw7) since this keeps up ancestral fort and there is never a bad time after a spike when you JUST canceled. Then after my downranked hw hits if the spike is big enough I'll hw 12. Single target MT healing is really more of a pally thing (there should be 3 holy pallys in every 25 man raid imo). They are awesome at it and 90% of the time I don't have to single target heal the MT.

If you are on the raid you should always chain heal 'cept for emergencies. Even then I find myself ns + chain healing. Chain heal 4 is really what I spam 90% of the time.

As for spec. Ancestral fort plus 5 in tidal is great. even though you can't see any big numbers or win heal meters from this. Ask a tank how much this helps (its huge).

Healing way is a must. HW wave gets 101% (for rank 12 anyways) of +healing after 3 stacks of this are applied
(hw base + plushealing(.857) )*1.18.
.857*1.18 = 1.01


my spreadsheet for healing
Google Docs & Spreadsheets - healing calcs

Might seem kinda complex for a healing chart but I use it for comparing builds n stuff like the haste stuff i'm getting from BT I mostly look at heal/mana and heal/sec when selecting spells. Heal/sec for burst Heal/mana for endurance. If you don't want to get bogged down in details just look at the overview tab.

 

Murderbot

In heroics and Karazhan I generally alternate between rank 7 Healing Wave and rank 12 on the tank. Earth Shield is always up. The point of downranking, in my eyes, is to pace mana consumption. I get really lazy about canceling heals when I'm spamming rank 7; most of the time it lands usefully, and if not, not much mana was wasted. If tank got hit harder than I was expecting I'll let the rank 7 finish, and either HW12, NS+HW12, or in a dire emergency pop in a few LHW7 to top him off, depending on cooldowns and how low he got. I pay much more attention to canceling if I have a max-rank heal going in. I pre-cast heals; I don't wait for damage to be taken.

In 25-man raids I'm almost exclusively on raid healing duty, CH5 and LHW7 are my primary tools. If there's nothing to do I'll help the pallies out and cast HW7 on the MT, maybe HW12 if he gets low. If it's a fight like Karathress or Kael'thas where I have to solo heal an offtank, I treat it like I'm in a heroic (see first paragraph).

I have written a fairly long and detailed manuscript on shaman healing practices, which so far has received very favorable responses. I'll link it here, so new shamans can read it, and the old pros can critique it:

WoW Forums -> Murderbot's Guide to PVE Healing

http://wow.tachyonsix.com.nyud.net:8...82531SpLuP.png

 

morcag

I dont know if this was covered in another thread or not, but ill just ask anyways

Looking at the gear coming out of SSC and the Eye it seems like the tier gear is all focusing on crit, which makes since given the 4 set stat bonuses, but what i have a problem with is the lack of mp5, a stat that i stack very high.

so i guess my main question is this: is the T5 gear worth changing my already good gear for? from what i can tell the T5 gear is basically trying to make a shaman into a pally, but well it make me a better healer? im already top of the healing charts, so why would i want to rely on crits when i rather use CH and have a lot of MP5.

how does everyone else feel about the T5 shaman set?

 

Coriolis

Well you're only loosing 3 mp5 compared to T4, and gaining quite a bit of +healing and other stats as well as another socket (which can mean another 3 mp5 or better, 2 mp5 and 9 healing). Not to mention the set bonuses (particularly the 4 piece) are alot better. The main use of crit is to proc ancestral healing on the MT. If you don't MT heal it's not terribly useful.

 

• Binkenstein

Remember that the shaman/healing trinkets are regen based.

I was of a similar opinion, until I realised that I was ending most boss fights with too much mana (I was hardly potting either, and I'm an alchemist), so I'm starting to get more T5 gear.

 

Azrael511

Quick observation that ma have been mentioned before. While stacking healing way using HW1 I noticed some odd behavior.
It seems that the healing bonus applies to your +healing after the rank reduction penalty.

Expected Actual
85 85
90 174
95 265
100 355

 

Crazytrucker

I really love using 2 piece t6 (helm and gloves) and 3 piece t2 (bracer, belt, and boots). I use them on trash, Teron, EoS, and I was debating using them for Illidan healing since the hardest part for me healing was phase 2. But its really subjective to the style of the fight, its worth keeping never the less.

 

Coztomba

Did I miss something with a Healing Way change on PTR? On live R1 Healing Wave with 3 stacks of Healing Way will give you around 400-500 heals. On PTR it's only just over 100. Big nurf to down-ranking with Healing Way?

 

Smertrios

Someone a few posts back already mentioned the unusual behavior of rank one healing wave (and possibly others, I have not tested any other ranks, but I have observed the rank one behavior many times) having its +healing bonus from healing way applied after the down ranking penalty. I suppose this is a fix to that.

On a related note, I have a question for my fellow restoration shaman: Has anyone else tried using the Totem of the Maelstrom along with spamming rank one healing wave to regenerate mana during lulls in damage done to the raid? I have fallen in love with as of late.

Pats suck.

 

Coztomba

I'm loosing about 200 or so healing now from mid ranked Healing Waves like rank 7. That's a pretty big nerf to single target healing for us .

 

thorin5

I do this all the time. Evading the 5SR is very nice. It's a nice trick, but if they are "fixing" the way Healing Way applies to downrankied heals it saddens me that there won't be any more 350-400(for me) rank 1 HWs

 

Daidalos

I did this on Kael and a few other fights where you get breaks, And actually if u have chance on cast mana back trinkets you gain more than you would in the FSR. You gain all of your FSR regen plus like fathom-brooch and Insightful procs

 

Dessira

There are some damage patterns where LHW is the best option outside of these 2 quoted scenarios.

For simple scenarios where few people are taking predictable damage, HW is generally the best option, but I can think of several instances where the use of LHW is superior. Kael'thas's gravity lapse phases, the damage to the raid is sporadic, hits are for around 2k damage and positioning is not ideal for chain heal use. Sure I could use a downranked HW, but meanwhile 2 others just got hit and I'm losing ground. LHW allows me to apply the right amount of effective healing and quickly.

Najentus, I use LHW to quickly get the last few people above 8.5k hps when a tidal shield is up. Again, this is time related. I could use HW and get those last few folks above the safe shield bursting health, or I could spam a few LHW's around and possible save a few ticks of his regen while shielded.

Blindly selecting spells based purely on mana efficiency vs hps can be counter productive, There's more to it than these 2 variables. Sometimes the option that looks the worst on paper can in practice, be the better one.

 

• Binkenstein

Recent vashj logs show most of our shaman using 40%+ LHW, mostly due to phase 2 and everyone being spaced out.