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.

You should get the Merciless Ringmail armor for PVP/arena and then keep Cyclone Hauberk for PVE.

Spell crit is good for PVP for ancestral healing as well as the extra healing boost. Not only that but the extra armor, resilience, and stamina. Toss in three solid stars of Elune in the PVP piece, and put in PVE healing gems into the Cyclone Hauberk. A resilience enchant for the Merciless piece, and a 6/mp5 or a +6 to all stats to the Hauberk would be the best option.

I would only use the Ringmail armor for PVE if you cannot get t4 or earthblood. As soon as you get t4 or earthblood, use that instead.

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?).

Excellent regen, that's true. But it has no stats whatsoever - I prefer the [Void Slayer's Tunic] over that one, since there are so many AE's, even in 5-mans.

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.

The lack of Stam/Int stats make it far, far worse than T4/Earthblood. Chest is one of those slots where there is typically a lot of Stam/Int loaded onto the gear (you're losing 40 stam and 40 int versus Earthblood), so it isn't the best piece to make the sacrifice on. I'd far prefer someone in one of the two excellent rare healing chests (Void Slayer/Deep Currents) than Earthpeace. We're the durable healers after all.

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.

I would say chain heal is our main heal. On most fights people are taking lots of damage, so most of the time we should be casting chain heal. You only really want LHW if someone needs healing RIGHT NOW, which really only happens during certain fights, or if someone is out of range or doesn't get healed. The latter generally doesn't happen that often. If you check out our WWS from recent run through things:

First batch of BT bosses for Gurg, Kemosabe, and Ghando:
Gurgthock - WWS
Kemosabe - WWS
Ghando - WWS

Heres our last Hyjal clear for Gurg, Ghando, and myself
Gurgthock - WWS
Teewee - WWS
Ghando - WWS

We all have relatively high overheal, between 40 and 50%, but we are generally top 3-4 healers. We all use a different range of heals, but most of the time, chain heal is the one we use most often.

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.

CH > HW > LHW is how I go.
Chain is for raid or tanks-with-friends healing, HW is for tank healing, LHW is 1-2k top ups.

Now that paladins have, imo, become the best one target healers, and with their flash of light heal being as cheap as it is and having em' spam it, I rarely get to cast my LHW in time.
Not that I use it in the first place, but I find myself mostly taking the ''filler'' role and of course toping up the raid with chain heals.
After healing way got fixed I couldn't utterly find a reason to cast LHW other than to heal spike dmg in emergency situations.

One of the suggestions I've always made is the addition of an Improved Water Shield component to the Imp Lightning Shield talent, increasing the mana returned by 15%. If this addition was made, would people take 8 points in Enh for it? Or, do you find yourself using and refreshing Water Shield? I try to keep it up as much as possible, and I'd totally go for Imp Water Shield over Elemental Warding.

I would never take it over EW, mostly because the return from WS is low, especially as it's an on-getting-hit return. If WS (and maybe even LS) were passive buffs either with/without the current charge system, then I would say that would be a useful talent change.

So far in T4/5 instances, our 3 resto shaman tend to be 65-70% CH use. Probably a little bit over the top, but there's so much aoe damage that the melee types take it's more sensible to use it than not.

No, I wouldn't spec for an improved water shield. Two reasons:

A 15% increase is very small. Right now, 3 procs of my water shield return about 370 mana and cost me 63 mana to cast. To put that into mp/5 perspective, I looked up a recent Karathress fight and found I used up one complete water shield in 46 seconds, so my mp/5 from water shield in that time period was (370 - 63) / 46 * 5 = 33.4 mp/5. Increasing the mana returned by 15% would only result in 6 mp/5 more: (425.5 - 63) / 46 * 5 = 39.5 mp/5. That's not bad, but not really worth 8 talent points - speccing for totemic focus would actually result in more effective mp/5.
I also think that 46 seconds for 3 water shield procs is one of the best-case scenarios for water shield. For another random example, it took me 162 seconds on Morogrim to go through 3 procs of water shield. That would just be 9.5 mp/5 ((370 - 63) / 162 * 5) for regular water shield and 11.2 mp/5 for the 15% improved water shield.

The other reason I wouldn't spec for improved water shield is that I almost never renew it during a fight. I think I should try to recast it more often, but I'm usually very busy chain casting heals and totems in a boss fight and I hate to waste one of my cooldowns on renewing water shield.

What I'd like to see from water shield is more charges or a passive mana regen only - basically anything that means I could cast water shield ahead of combat and re-cast it at most once in a 10-minute fight while still getting the full benefit from it. I think that should be part of the basic water shield though, not talented. I can't really think of any talent improvements to water shield right now that would make me want to spend 8 points in enhancement to get it - it would have to be something very massive, like a guaranteed extra 30 mp/5 from taking the talent.

I'm curious how many of you still use the Boots, Belt, Bracers of Ten Storms as it allow you for full T5/6 yet with the +30% Chain Heal on 2nd and 3rd targets set bonus from 3 T2. It appears to me that the lost of 15-25 Mp5 and about 200-250 +heal was more than made up by the 3pc T2 set bonus. The 3pc T2 bonus sacled pretty well with Improved Chain Heal, and the new rank, as well as the sheer amount of +heal we have now. Am I grossly mistaken?

I would love to see some math on that. I imagine with BT gear you could get around 1800 healing and 170ish mp5 while using the 3 set T2. It might almost be worth it on some fights.

I wouldn't think about it. You lose too much. Not only do you lose the armor, stamina, and int, and potentially spell haste, but you lose a whole lot of healing and mp5.

To add onto that, we also try to raid as much as possible with 5 shaman, one enhance, one elemental, and 3 resto. Three people spamming chain heal generally means that everybody is topped off fairly quick, and we usually have a large amount of overheal. Then that extra 30% would be mostly wasted.

It's a nice set bonus, just like tier1 5 piece, but you just lose way too much to wear old pieces of armor for bonuses that just barely help.

As as side note, how do you justify bringing three restoration shamans to raids? We're only up to Bloodboil/az'galor, but so far two has been more than enough, and I don't see the use of a third restoration shaman over another paladin, provided you use a holy priest and two restoration druids?