Bunni

Is anyone else feeling a little uninspired by the WotLK changes so far? There are some things in there that are potentially pretty cool, but overall I'm not sure I see where the playstyle is headed. I know it's hard to make a call at this stage, we won't really get a feel for how the class plays until 80 and start getting the new gear and facing the new encounters. But for right now I'm just feeling very "blah" about much of what they have added. Meanwhile when I look into Holy my Priest is starting to look more and more likely to be my healer for the expansion. Not because I think Resto Shamans won't be viable or anything that drastic, it just seems like their new stuff fits better into my idea of what a Holy Priest is for if that makes any sense.

 

Prinsesa

I think that's kind of the point. One side-effect of downranking is that it allowed throughput stats (healing) to pull double-duty as longevity stats.

Instead of trying to maintain a balance between healing and MP5, healers were just piling on the healing and using downranked heals instead.

You have to separate between what may be wrong with the changes and what is a byproduct of using old gear under new rules.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....63815BffMm.png

 

Plummer

I hear it a lot and I really don't like the statement that healing(sometimes I even hear haste) pulls double-duty as a longevity stat through down-ranking. The problem with the statement is that as you gear up, so do the raiders around you as well as the difficulty level of each encounter. So while chain heal rank 1 with X amount of +healing may do as much as chain heal rank 4, it doesn't mean that you only need to use rank 1. As we see when we do progress, the healing throughput stats are used for, big surprise here, healing throughput. The only case where we see +healing shine as a longevity stat is when we massively over gear a particular encounter or instance and our healing throughput is largely unnecessary.

I should probably mention that +healing is natively a longevity stat. If it takes 1 spell to heal 10k health while before it took 2, you just increased your longevity. So every point of healing we receive, it becomes less and less a benefit to have as our health pools remain the same. So as we obtain a comfortable level of +healing, we should focus on other stats like mp5, haste and crit.

I do believe that our current library of spells is lacking a slow, efficient and low healing mop-up spell that can replace our current HW rank 7/8 and possibly chain heal rank 1. Healing stream totem doesn't exactly give the necessary amount of healing in a good amount of time while also taking a water totem slot, earth living weapon has to proc off of a max rank heal already, and our earth shield only procs off of incoming damage. I really don't want to have to use LHW unless the the speed is necessary.

 

Kortar

I don't think this will be the case. They're going after specific spells, like Earth Shock. A max rank Earth Shock is simply too expensive as a spell interrupt, so a 'gimp Earth Shock' is necessary. But I'd be astonished if they went to all the trouble of implementing a nerf to downranking and then simply undermined it by giving everyone interim heals to replace downranking.

 

Plummer

You can also say that HW/CH/LHW are simply too expensive as a damage mop-up spell, so a 'gimp healing spell' is necessary. You can say they would be undermining their 'nerf' but as it stands our current line-up of spells is very lacking, or they could always give us over-heal protection.

 

Skyhoof

Blizzard needs to give shaman (and paladins) some way to compensate for the lack of downranking. Priests have the Serendipity talent, which returns 60% of the mana cost if the Greater Heal or Flash Heal overheals for 50% or more. It would be worth adding the same talent to the resto shaman tree. I could see paladins (who mainly single target heal) benefiting from a talent that puts a HoT on the target if the heal overheals for 50% or more.

 

Kortar

Paladins have a talent (albeit in the Retribution tree) that places a HoT on criticals.

In terms of the overall downranking nerf, keep in mind that downranking is merely an exchange of throughput for mana regeneration. Which you can do via gear. Just changing out your trinkets/weapons provides a massive shift in the balance of mana regen vs. throughput. All the nerf really does is raise the skill level required to play a healer effectively. You can't just slap on 'best in slot' items and pretend you know what you're doing any more.

 

Plummer

While our gearing strategies will most certainly change, I will remind you that downranking allowed an in-combat solution to exchange throughput for efficiency, which you simply can't do with gear. What will happen, if no changes are made, is that shamans will be sitting around waiting for someone to take more damage so that they can heal them without going through their mana pool in 2 minutes.

Also, any good healer right now can outperform a better geared healer who doesn't know what he's doing, and downranking helps that fact.

Edit: The efficiency difference between chain heal rank 5 and chain heal rank 1 is 560 mp5 given no haste. You can't acheive this with gear.

 

Skyhoof

Let's take a look at the best in slot gear (without raid buffs):

Healing: 2,591
Mp5: 296 (147 while casting)

Now, let's regem and re-enchant this gear. Instead of +30 healing on the wrists, we'll use +6 mp5. And we'll put Vitality on the boots. Gone are the spinels. In their place are Shadowsong Amethysts with +11 healing and +2 mp5. However, I gain only 32 mp5 (and lose 140 +healing)

Healing: 2,451
Mp5: 328 (179 while casting)

That's an extra 384 mana each minute and Chain Heal 5 costs over 500 mana (with talents).

Hmmm...let's put Lustrous Empyrean Sapphires (+4 mp5) in the blue slots. I now gain 40 mp5 (and lose 184 +healing).
Healing: 2,407
Mp5: 332 (183 while casting)

That's an extra 480 mana each minute and Chain Heal 5 still costs over 500 mana (with talents).

Now, CH4 is 414 mana and CH5 is 513 mana. Let's say I cast a Chain Heal every 2.5 seconds or 24 times per minute. I effectively gain 202 mp5 by using Rank 4 instead of Rank 5. I effectively gain 256 mp5 if I use Rank 3 instead of Rank 5.

So no amount of regemming or re-enchanting will make up for the mana saved by downranking. It doesn't even come close. You would need an epic-quality gem (in the live version of the game) that gives you 18 mp5 to make up for the loss of downranking.

 

jaredh

just got into beta today and here my early impressions:

1 - I struggled in full BT/SW gear to heal the first instance. Had to let people die and/or sit at 50% health and have healing stream keep them up.

2 - Healing Way is not worth the talent points. You cannot keep it up else you will OOM far too fast. The timer on the charges needs to be extended to 20, 25, or even 30 seconds for this talent to stay viable. As it stands, start taking these 3 points and finding another home for them until Bliz does something significant to it or the healing strat as you simply aren't going to be able to keep the buff up, even in a 5 man where you typically expect this buff to shine.

3 - The changes to crit make things very interesting in the short term, but LHW and HW just cost too much to get into too much of a pattern outside of CH.

I have not tried without my T6 set bonus reducing CH cost. It scares me to think about it. I don't think I could have healed the first boss in the first instance w/out the CH 10% cost reduction and the 5% healing increase. It was really that tight. Granted, Mana Spring and Mana Tide are both bugged but that does not make up for it. I'm running this instance with gear that vastly outstripps the equivalent drops and I'm having to let people die rather than heal them for fear of going OOM and the tank dying. That's not cool, and trust me, the DPSers that it happens to don't think it's very cool, either.

My expectation of that fight was that I should have ended with 50% mana, not 2% and having to pot AND use a demonic rune.

We are going to see substantial changes on this coming, I feel confident. Blizzard cannot let it go in anywhere close to the way it is now...you'd have nobody wanting to heal because it's lame to not be able to heal people who need it, and it's lame to get yelled at because you can't. Nobody is going to be willing to heal and thus there will be massive revolt/compliant.

As it stands right now, only two healing classes are raid viable...

Priests - they have overheal protection and thus can still spam heal for all it's worth for a significant time period, especially with their spirit based regen and talents.
Druids - they are still kings of the HOTs and they have innervate.

Paladins and Shaman do not have the staying power beyond 3 minute fights. So unless 99% of all raid encounters are going to be 2-3 minutes max, they have alot of thinking to do on healing still.

 

Daidalos

I"m not sure if you are only responding to part of my post meaning that you agreed with the rest of it or you are ignoring it. The issue is that if a tank is down 4k hp but he only has 11k hp to begin with you need to heal him since a spike could kill him. Without a smaller heal there is currently no good solution.
You can:
1: Throw on a big heal and massively over heal.
2. Use chain heal even tho its only one target.
3. Throw on earth shield and just hope he doesn't die.

My opinion is all these options suck and I somehow doubt my having full 5-6 pcs from sunwell means I shouldn't be able to ran a lvl 72 5 man when I'm lvl 76. Admittedly the tank wasn't really geared for tanking but its a non-heroic 5 man so it should be easily viable for my gear level. I also have ~150mp5 unbuffed while in the 5s rule so I'd hardly say other healers are going to have a much easier time.

The main issue isn't that I stacked +heal the issue is I cannot pick a rank that fits the hp deficit. I only have a 5-6k heal or a 2.6k fast heal (which is also mana efficient) or a chain heal. I strongly posit that if your max rank heal heals for 8k you should have a tool in your abilities to heal for something less like 4k for approx half the mana cost. I'm perfectly fine with downranking not being MORE efficient but I'm completely against removing this adaptability on healing size from the game.

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

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

 

Darkmantle

However one of the blue statements associated with the down ranking nerf said they wanted spells to be more intuitive, in that as you leveled up your best heal was your highest rank no matter what. Your claim that they want to stop people using their new shiney tier 8 +heal gear because their previous tier 7 gear had more regen on it doesn't fit into that model.

It is currently looking like every single healer excepts perhaps priests will just stack full regen in every slot, gem, inscription and enchant because max rank is going to be too mana intensive. There is no skill gain in that model. If group regen is so good that you can spam max rank all the time, then they have just exchanged down rank spam with max rank spam.

 

Kindralas

If their objective is simply to make it intuitive that the max rank of your spell is the best rank, then that is an appropriate trade. While it's insignificant to most players, it's not insignificant to a new player who doesn't understand what downranking is.

 

Darkmantle

Same question came up in the main wotlk thread in the public forum. The problem is to some people it is intuitive a player who has taken 2k damage with a heal that does 2k healing. Which is not how the new system is going to work. Which is why Daidalos was having a painful time healing an instance even with sunwell gear.

Before spell ranks automatically increased on your bars everyone down ranked until they dragged the new spell onto their bars.

Neither of which challenges that the only alternative to down ranking is cancel casting. Which is unintuitive to people that are used to reactive healing anyway.

 

jaehunkin

Except that it has been pointed out that it is not a fair trade because the Regen required to use max rank as the only rank does not exist. If anything this makes healing less appealing/more difficult to the very people blizzard is trying to attract to healing by making the one rank fits all format.

 

Emth.

It's rather hilarious that the current resto shaman arena gear has crit on it but the new Lake Wintergrasp gear does not, despite Blizzard putting so much emphasis on crit heals in the new talents. That is, unless they are expecting resto shaman who want crit to get the elemental gear and give up all regen.

They are really confusing sometimes.

 

Skyhoof

Latest Beta buid (8820)

I would be more excited about the change if I could get get 100% chance to prevent interruption to my healing spell through talents. But combined with the new spell push back mechanics, this will definitely help resto shaman when questing or soloing. But without a paladin aura, I now see no way for us to achieve 100% chance to prevent interruption to our healing spells.

 

Yadee

Does the ES change simply mean you will get pushback 3 times until you have lost 1 second, or that the max pushback you can get will be 0.7 seconds ?

 

Iod

It just makes the .5s pushback go to .325s, I think that if you earthshield yourself, you'll still be able to heal without a hitch (because the 70% interrupt reduction would take care of that .325s). Unless of course there's some silly multiplicative stuff going on instead of additive.

 

Skyhoof

I took it to mean that on our healing spells, there would still be a 30% chance we could get pushback but it would be reduced to 0.350 seconds. Am I doing the math wrong? I saw 0.325 in a previous post.

 

Myndflame

To give you some stuff to talk about:

Tom Chilton (Lead Game Designer) mentioned in an interview (on the Games Convention, Germany) that they've got the wish for a smaller Earth Shock as a spell interrupt on their "to-do" list.

I'm a bit short on time, so here's the _german_ source, maybe someone else can translate it:


Here's the link to the whole interview:

Interview mit Tom Chilton und J. Allen Brack - buffed.de

 

Mestok

buffed: Some other old classes got really strong upgrades, too. Shamans for examply seems to be a bit too mighty with thunder.

Chilton: Yes, we have some work to do. The point of this ability is the posibility to knockback other persons off of objects. Off ships or off towes. We are looking close how this works and how it gets used.
We are not only looking on new abilities, but rather listening to the community. Many players for example desire for a lower rank of earth shock for special situations. Such disires we have on account, too.

 

Skyhoof

There's a healing mace from "Caverns of Time - Stratholme" that looks better than the [Crystal Spire of Karabor]. It has nearly twice as much stamina, and probably a good +150 healing. It lacks mp5 but does have crit. I'm quite sad to see an end-game mace be replaced so soon and in a level-70 dungeon.

Beguiling Scepter
+43 Stamina
+29 Intellect
30 crit rating
314 spell power (~600 +healing)

The boots, gloves and shoulders do not look like they will replace Sunwell loot (unless we want to ditch our spell haste for crit, stamina and mp5). They lack any gem slots and there's a noticeable lack of spell haste on the gear so far. I'm going to guess that the epic versions will have slightly better stats but their real upgrade will be gem slots. Perhaps Blizzard plans on making haste an end-game stat as they did in BC? Or perhaps there's a deliberate reduction in the amount of haste available due to the fact that healing is going to be more mana intensive without the ability to downrank and chain chug pots.

Treads of Altered History
+39 Stamina
+40 Intellect
50 crit rating
60 spell power (~120 +healing)
[Skyshatter Boots]

Gauntlets of Dark Conversion
+39 Stamina
+41 Intellect
50 spell power (~100 +healing)
20 mp5
[Sun-Drenched Scale Gloves] or [Gauntlets of the Ancient Frostwolf]

Epaulets of Market Row
+51 Stamina
+35 Intellect
60 spell power (~120 +healing)
20 mp5
[Skyshatter Shoulderpads]