madrix

Trying to think of a way to get all 14% crit bonus to LHW and HW as that would be very interesting indeed. Coupled with the ancestral awakening that could be very effective healing.

Thinking a 1/6/64 Raiding PvE build. Get all 14% to crit and nature's guardian.

Leaves alot of options depending on what the shaman is doing. If going to continue with chain heal spamming, you can for go the talents to LHW and HW and put them else where. Even pick up the clear casting for mana efficiency.

 

Skyhoof

Where did you see the change to Healing Focus? If Healing Focus is only 3 points, then I would probably go 11-8-52 and max out the new Ancestral Knowledge talent.

 

Fenzter

What I don't get is why they would make a clearcasting proc focused around two heals that I don't use in a raid environment. Unless they are going to dramatically change the way Shaman heal(which would be silly), then giving out very specific talents like that just sounds like more respec costs to me.

 

Daidalos

This is also my assesment and assuming we are right I am quite happy about it.


I would agree that the value of criting is going to rise substantially Possibly surpassing haste as the highest HEP but its really too early to tell atm. I think the other big unknown is how much raid dmg will there be? If Lich king has more of a sunwell style encounter design I'm still thinking that chain heal will still be the primary heal.

I do really like the large range of extra heal Ancestral Awakening possibly making it superior in situations where there is a fair amount of raid dmg but its randomly distributed possibly out of CH jump range. I'm curious if it has to heal another person or if it could heal that same person twice. Say its a tank n spank fight and the raid is topped off but the tank spikes low would it heal him twice? That would be a huge amount of single target healing. From that wording I'd say its quite possible. The other quite nice scenario is when the healer is the low and throws a heal on a tank getting that heal on yourself would also be quite handy in that kind of situation.

Elemental Shaman calculations: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWuwb3e2IkuZKw

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

rava

NEW (8471) - New patch is out - Amagad!

"Healing Focus - Now 3 points, 23%/46%/70%"

That guy posts just about everything on the site.

I'll have a croque monsieur, a paella, two mutton pills, and a stein of mead.

 

zoombini

Very nice stuff - although Blizzard just made the bloat already present in resto even worse. My initial pass through the tree ended up with 62 points in there.

The thing I'm curious about is how will spirit link work. Offhand I can't think of any buffs that work on exactly 3 friendly targets, let alone working on 1 friendly and 2 other friendlies. I can think of two ways this could work:

1) You cast it on the tank, and then you need to right click on the two people they're linked to. VERY cumbersome, but it gives control and would be very useful if macros allowed us to automatically link the same 3 people together.

2) it links the tank to the 2 closest people. This is dicey - it requires good timing by the shaman and good positioning by the raid so the link doesn't end up going onto a rogue or passing mage. Also would be troublesome on fights where the tanks need to stand close to soak up meteor style stuff - fights like Mother or Bear boss.

Also, we won't know the answer to this anytime soon, but I wonder how mitigation will work on this. Will it figure out the total damage the tank would take, and then give 1/4 of that in a non-resistable format to each soaker? Or could you split it to an avoidance/resistance tank who'd barely take any damage?

Also, I'm curious as to what would happen if you had 3 shamans spirit link 3 tanks to each other? In 3rd Edition D&D, there was a way you could use a situation like this to achieve omnipotence . . .

 

rava

With the current wording it sounds like it would target the tank. You also get a little bit of discretion on who the secondary heal will target with Spirit Link provided you're critting, but as you said it's largely dependent on the style of encounters wotlk will house. My original thoughts were to link the tank with paladins so they could get spiritual attunement or snakes from a snake trap :x I doubt you'll be able to link pets once it actually goes live though.

I assume it'll work along the lines of Blessing of Sacrifice. It does unmitigatable/unavoidable damage. It actually works amazingly well with chain, 3 targets ect.

I was under the initial impression that it would be targeted, but after thinking about it a bit I'd assume it will follow some sort of rule on proximity making you force it on to specific people.

I'll have a croque monsieur, a paella, two mutton pills, and a stein of mead.

 

Valderen

I'm not much of a raider, so this is mostly in the perspective of a casual raider(10 man stuff). I mostly do 5-man stuff.

I find Spirit Link quite interesting, Chain Heal is our best heal, but often in 5-man instance it is not as useful as noone but the tank is taking damage.

Noticing that Improved Chain Heal is a requirement makes me think that it might be intended as a way to insure that you can always use chain heal by spliting the damage between 3 targets, this way even in 5-man instance you can use chain heal all the time with 3 garanteed heals maximizing it's use.

Not sure how much use it would be in raids where I am sure that more 1 person always need healing.

 

PsyBomb

The following assumes a "closest 2 friendlies" function on Spirit Link.

The raid precision "required" by Spirit Link is not really there. Keep in mind that each of the two other targets will be receiving at most 25% of the attack. Even in Saber Lash situations, they should survive the blow. using this on the main tank during a Saber lash fight (Halazzi for example) would take the edge off of the person taking the most directly, instead putting it onto the guy who is just sharing the cleaves.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Daidalos

My first thought was something along the lines of mother sharaz but instead of the boss doing it for you, the shamans have to do it or the tank gets one shot. Something like mother 2.0 hitting for 60k dmg where 2 other dmg soaks have to split it to make it manageable. I'm sure there can be other uses but that jumped out at me as something that seemed very likely.

I'm wondering if you have to use it on 3 people. Could it be used in 2v2? hrm wording seems to imply there have to be 2 nearby targets.. but maybe not.

Elemental Shaman calculations: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWuwb3e2IkuZKw

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

PsyBomb

Not so sure about that, the spell will have a hard cap on how much it can disperse, and Blizzard is against forcing certain SPECS into raids. forcing base abilities, sure, but not specs.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Valderen

I wonder that too, and can it be clicked off by one person. If the main target clicks it off, I guess it would break the link...but can 1 of the other 2 player affected click it off, creating a link between the main target and just 1 person, or will it also break the link completly.

 

Daidalos

Yeah I can't see the talent tree from work is it a skill or talent? Sky listed it as a skill so I was thinking all shaman would have it. So if only certain resto specs have it maybe not.

Elemental Shaman calculations: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWuwb3e2IkuZKw

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Skyhoof

I'm going to assume that because Spirit Links requires 2 points in Improved Chain Heal that it's going to link to the two closest targets, perhaps based on highest absolute health or who is missing the least absolute health. I don't think we'll be able to select who is in the Spirit Link. I'm also going to assume that like most talents deep in a talent tree, Spirit Link will have at least a 2-minute cooldown.

I'll also make it clear in the first post that it's our 51-point talent.

 

◊ s4dfish

Is there any reason to suspect that Spirit Link wouldn't use the same mechanics as Chain Heal (baring seeking targets who have less than 100% health)?

 

Daidalos

Seems like a NS type ability but instead of healing them you divert the dmg to others..at this point I'm not really seeing it being worth 51 points (assuming it has 2 min CD)... am I missing something?

Elemental Shaman calculations: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWuwb3e2IkuZKw

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

◊ s4dfish

I don't think it's reasonable to expect that it'll have a 2 min cooldown, it's hardly OP as it is without a cooldown.

 

• Chicken

The current version of Spirit Link doesn't have a cooldown on it.

The 8 mana is actually a percentage of your base mana. The actual spell cost is about the same as curing a disease or poison. It's also the only rank of the spell currently in, and 2200 damage would most likely be very low for a level 80 raiding environment, so this is far from the final version of the spell.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

◊ s4dfish

Well you can get Rank 1 at 60, so another rank every 10 levels?

 

Skyhoof

I was speculating on Spirit Link having a cooldown. For the moment, let's assume there will be no cooldown. Being able to divert damage could be incredible useful, especially when you consider we could follow it up with a chain heal to top off those affected.

Blizzard seems to be designing the 51-point talents so that they are nice to have but not absolutely essential to a particular spec -- Spirit Link for resto, Feral Spirit (spirit wolves) for enhancement and Thunder for elemental. These are not nearly as critical as the 41-point talents such as Earth Shield and Totem of Wrath. Neither an Elemental nor Resto shaman is going to show up to a 25-man raid without these 41-point talents. I don't think the same will hold true with the 51-point talents. They don't seem essential to raiding (except perhaps for particular fights).

However, it does seem like we will be respeccing a lot more in the expansion to customize our talent choices to the encounter. I'm sure there will be fights where Spirit Link will be extremely useful. Imagine if you could use it on Brutallus today.

 

Spazzball

With good timing, it should be able to be used to break free from any CC effects (like Maiden's Repentance). Edit: Oops, I had forgot it's like a chain heal, and thus you can't really choose who it breaks the CC off of.

I'm curious about how we'll be able to gear according to these new talents. With all damage/healing being converted to one stat, it's viable for us to use, say, Mage or Warlock gear. Cloth caster pieces (should) have spell critical rating and with these new critical talents, it seems it will be a much more viable stat. The Ancestral Awakening will be a nice free, (usually) less-overhealing spell too that will proc from criticals.

 

◊ s4dfish

The thing to note though is that Spirit Link is not reducing incoming damage at all, if it's spammable than each cast is one not spent healing, so total raid healing output would drop with its us. What it does is make that incoming damage more easily healed via any of the multitude of AoE heals. I agree that it'll be very nice to have, but I hardly see many situation where it'd be required.

 

PSGarak