Stacking spellcrit is useless as a healer unless you have some sort of on-crit ability.
It's not reliable, and unless you have something like the paladin mana-back talent, not all that useful.

Personally, I'd take the hauberk over merciless because of the better mana regen (both item and the 2 mana per tick set bonus), and the fact that the hauberk has BRY sockets rather than RYY (yellow sucks for healing). As for Earthblood/Merciless, it's a toss up really.

Yellow don't suck for healing. You can get the +int and +mp5 gems, or the +healing/+int. Yeah I would rather have blue/red slots for royal nightseye or royal shadowsong amethyst, but the yellow gems don't suck.

Look at gurgthock's gems:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mal'Ganis&n=Gurgthock

9heal/2mp5 > 4int/2mp5 or 9heal/4int imo (which is why I said "suck")

If you look at his sockets, the only time he uses yellow gems is for yellow sockets, and there is the 2 yellows required for his meta. The belt/chest socket bonuses are such that using non-yellow gems will not get you better stats.

Belt: 7 heal bonus.
2x Royal Nightseye = 18 heal, 4 mp5. (11 heal 4 mp5)
2x Dazzling Talasite = 7 heal, 8 int, 4 mp5 (8 int 4 mp5)
2x Luminous Noble Topaz = 25 heal, 8 int (18 heal, 8 int)

So there isn't really much in it, I prefer more mp5 at the moment, and I need the 2 yellows for my meta.

Looking at the T5 chest, it's 9 heal, 4 int, 2 mp5 v 9 heal 2 mp5. Easy choice.
T4 chest though, the bonus is 4 int, so 9 heal 2 mp5 v 8 int 2 mp5 (if I don't need the extra yellows) means I'll probably stack R/B on my T4 chest (when I finally get it).

Generally, if it's a blue/red socket, Royal Nightseye is the way to go. If its yellow, it's a call between another royal nightseye or the socket bonus.

I never understood why Earthpeace Breastplate (Earthpeace Breastplate - Items - World of Warcraft) didn't enter the debate more often. It's ridiculously good and ridiculously easy to make. Now granted, if you did have Merciless Gladiator or T5 or whatever, I'd say yeah, just use that, but otherwise if you have access to easy blues like that, let someone else who has more of a pressing desire for it grab T4 chest/Earthblood (paladins?).

Hello all! New member ^^

Is there any confirmation that Pendant of the Violet Eye procs several time during Chain Heal?

It will add one to the enlightenment stack for each chain heal you cast. If someone told you each jump added one to the stack, they were incorrect.

Yea, I had to know better than to trust a single post on wowhead. :/ Thanks a lot.

This question is for the shamans currently in Hyjal/Black Temple. How did your healing style change once you started working on late endgame? In particular, with Lesser Healing Wave?

My current style of healing generally involves using downranked/maxranked Healing Wave on tanks, using Chain Heal primarily for raid healing, and using LHW to top people off when they are either going to die really fast or a Chain Heal wouldn't bounce. We are working on Kael'thas and I am quite satisfied with my performance and efficiency.

However, I've been talking to some of the shamans in the top-tier guild on my server (they are working on Illidan) and they are telling me they use Lesser Healing Wave more than any other spell, even on tanks. The rationale is that everything else is 'too slow.' I hear echoes of this sentiment on other boards as well. This flies in the face of what I would consider good healing practice, but having never seen any of this content for myself, I am very curious.

It really just depends on the fight. If you've done it a few times and are aware of the kind of damage people take, you can relax a little more and adapt what you do on a fight-by-fight basis.

On learning attempts, and things that aren't really on farm status, it makes sense to use LHW more then HW, since things can happen and shit can go bad fast. Spamming LHW is going to keep a more steady stream of heals on the tank, which makes it nice against any spikes of damage. If it's a group of people taking damage, most of the time its better to use chain heal over LHW.

Traditionally LHW has always been the cornerstone of any successfull raiding resto shaman.
In vanilla wow, chain heal was sort of a "meh" heal, id rarely use it, and healing wave was almost never used.

However, i find myself using all three heals evenly now.

Like TeeWee said in the above, it really depends on the fight. If there isn't too much raid damage going out, its safe to say that a smart shaman will be casting LHW and HW whenever their set bonus triggers.

However, in opposite conditions - fights such as RoS and Gorefiend require resto shamans to almost exclusively cast Chain heal, and maybe dump a HW on the MT if things get rough.

So I guess what im trying to get it is LHW is still our "main heal" with Chain Heal and HW being the odd heal that you toss out situationally.

Healing Wave is "too slow" generally speaking. In a raid environment with Paladins sniping heals these days, its very hard to get max efficiency out of a Healing Wave, so i say stick with Lesser Healing Wave, and make that time spent casting actually count

It all depends on what fight, indeed. I find myself casting LHW quite a lot though. From the top of my mind, I know I cast LHW during Supremus p2 and e.g. on Solarian when someone gets targetted with AM and is on low HP.

Other then that, Chain Heal all the way. There's not a lot of fights where I'd prefer to spam LHW, unless I'm really fed with mana.