• Shareel

I have currently 12800 mana in my classic haste gear. For me, its possible to reach 15300 mana if I ignore all socket boni and go straight for INT. I get only 14500 mana (full buffed) if I use [Luminous Pyrestone] in the red sockets and [Dazzling Seaspray Emerald] in the blue sockets to get my socket boni and the meta gem.
The highend loot up to KJ brings around 10 additional INT, so it won't make an difference.

 

nevermore_85

chardev.org v4 - A World of Warcraft character planner - template #97368

That would be my gear, but it might be a little over top. With Int maxed out, it's around 17,5k mana fully buffed, remember that there's a Int enchant for bracers and weapon, according to the itempoints in Aanzeijar's lootrank list, these rank far higher than the spellpower enchants.

 

Durnitol

I have several problems with this list...

1. Water Shield is likely to be Glyphed, add 30% (2340 total).

2. We don't use oils anymore. Earthliving Weapon is the weapon enchant of choice.

3. Isn't BoW exactly 50 mp5? why is it less than 1800 total mana restored?

4. It looks like you are assuming Distilled Wisdom and Golden Fish Sticks(or something equivalent) instead of Mighty Restoration and Blackened Sporefish.


On a related note, can anyone confirm that Healing Stream, Mana Spring, Mana tide are not only supposed to be raid-wide, but actually work raid-wide? I have googled this particular subject and I get nothing but conflicting statements, hearsay, blatherscyte, balderdash, and general speculation. Is it supposed to be but just not yet? If we can add a 2nd shaman into the raid for Mana Spring and or Mana Tide, the numbers look even better. I thought they nerfed Healing Stream for exactly this reason.

 

Qrio

I've been trying to find definite info about healing stream & mana spring as well all day long, but alas nothing.

Mana tide I found is supposed to be only to your party unfortunately for the other casters.

 

Didion

My understanding is that water totems affect your party, whilst all other totem's effects are raid-wide. I've also found conflicting information on this, so that's based on what the tooltips say (which I assume are still subject to change) rather than anything concrete.

 

Gellor

Just tested Mana srping and healing stream on the PTR, neither are raidwide, only affects party. Going to submit it as a bug (hopefully it is).

 

Qrio

I am on the beta as well, and that's what I saw yesterday when I tried it out. However, all the reports were that "most" totems will go raid-wide, and that's why I figured healing stream is one of the totems that are party-only.

Anyway, this brings me to my questions, which after reading quite a lot about, I'm still unsure about.

1) Come 3.0.2 I am aiming for this build 0/8/51 with 2 talent points to spare - I am quite confused between 2 points in Thundering Strikes for the 2% crit, and 2 points in Ancestral Awakening, leaning slightly more toward TS. At 70 I don't have enough points to play around more, and it seems that Ancestral Awakening is slightly less beneficial. My reasoning behind it is that in 25man raids (which is pretty much my only focus) we will not start suddenly using let's say 3 times as many Healing Waves/Lesser Healing Waves than now, and AA proccing after a crit will not be good enough to put 2 points in at first. Am I correct in my assumptions?

2) Glyphs - taking into account skill levels to actually craft the major glyphs before the expansion, resto shamans are left with four choices for 2 major slot glyphs - Glyph of Healing Stream, Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave, Glyph of Water Mastery, Glyph of Earthliving Weapon. The first choice is rather easy to make - Glyph of Water Mastery seems like a must. However, my problem is the second glyph - personally I would not use my only slot for the Healing Stream glyph, especially if discussed as above it is only a party totem. Making it r/w might change my mind slightly, but for now I would skip it. LHW glyph - yes, it seems nice, although is strictly situational. Again, I'm leaning toward the Earthliving Glyph - small chance, but it still helps
As far as minor glyphs go - Water Shield glyph, (maybe) glyph of renewed life, and the last one depends on what I can get hold of early on.

I am strictly talking about the situation at lvl.70 with patch 3.0.2 and I would appreciate all your help in making me clear up my mind about these doubts.

 

Pitbuller

1. Good point. +540mana.

2. 150mp5 is still good estimate no matte where you get it.

3. Blessing of wisdom. 41 * 1.2(+20% talent) = 49.2mp5

4. Distilled wisdom is best flask by wide margin. Even draenic wisdom elixir is better than flask of Mighty Restoration. Mp5 is so bad stat to get mana. Golden fish sticks are better than Blackened Sporefish. This is good example. If you have so much haste that you need 8mp5 over 44 healing(23spellpower) then haste is just not worth it. Maybe this would be best option.

When chain casting chain heal our mana burn rate is 967mp5.
One haste rating is then equal to -0.62mp5.
One haste gem is equal to -6.2mp5
That is reason why haste is costly output stat. It's best for output whit infinite mana but worst at item budget wise.
Remember that example was only 3minute long when fight gets longer and longer you need bigger mana pool. This dons't matter much now when all Sunwell content are relatively short and easy but at future we don't even have mana for non-hasted burn.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Callaloo

And what about the poison/disease totems ?

 

Grizlor

The only water totem that is raidwide is Fire Resistance Totem.

 

Shagraas

The announcement made at Blizzcon was, unfortunately, not much more telling than this. During the first class panel they noted that totems were physical which means they can be cast while silenced, and other than that they would be "tougher," without further explanation.

 

Grimtaash

any totem that could potentially stack is not raidwide.

 

Ribs

And so we're back at stacking shamans into the raid then?

With 1 mana pot a fight, I can see one shaman per caster group being very effective if not mandatory in some fights. I thought this was the very core Blizz wanted to avoid? I can understand mana tide not being raidwide, it's plain overpowered, but mana and healing stream?

 

Grimtaash

Mana spring is 85 MP5, perhaps we can cover that with gear, perhaps we can't.

Consider the alternative, then: it goes raidwide and ceases to stack. 85 mp5 for the whole raid is too important and therefore a resto shaman (with the fully talented version) is guaranteed a raid spot. This violates design principle and so some other form of mana regen is either created that doesn't stack or something like replenishment ceases to stack. Suddenly we have a totem that doesn't do anything unique, doesn't stack with other mana regen abilities, and in general the water totem becomes much less valuable to drop.

Sure, these totems don't quite line up with what blizzard is planning, but the alternative is to likely make them obsolete, not too good. I don't think it's as bad as your prognosis though.

 

Durnitol

Pitbuller, thanks for the clarification. My current gear set (a little better than T5) prefers MP5 food/flask for most fights in BT and Hyjal, and I have never chain potted. I believe the assumption behind the theory that Int and Heal power is best is that you could, in fact, chain pot. That theory is gone come tomorrow. Of course we have zero experience post-patch so all that theory will need to be reevaluated, but since things won't really "count" until max level everything in level 80 dungeons, most of our theorizing is speculation for the "best" way to set up healing gear/buffs.

Grimtaash, I like your reasoning there, but it doesn't seem to account for the nerf to Healing Stream. HST with the HST glyph and Earthliving Weapon is just about the same as pre-patch... except it lasts 5 minutes. Why nerf it so hard if it was rarely used before, still isn't raid-wide, and requires a glyph just to keep it at the same pre-patch level? With the nerf, and the glyph requirement to get the same effectiveness, would anyone cast this spell at all? Maybe on Loatheb.

 

Grimtaash

Durn: I think part of the emphasis for INT these days revolves around the fact that
A) AK now affects int, so each point of int is really 1.1
B) Crit plays a much larger role in shaman healing as we have more talents that boost crits/work off crits
C) and D) we still get 15% bonus healing and manatide based on max mana (these are old reasons to favor int)
but most importantly
E) replenishment works off max mana. The biggest source of mana refunding does not scale with a shadowpriests damage or with the amount of mp5 you already have, but by how much your max mana is. For this reason most people see int as a triple threat (capacity, throughput, regen) stat.

I wasn't aware healing stream had been nerfed. Frankly I always felt it really needed a buff since it's a really cool idea that is just constantly held back by low numbers. This is another situation of difficult to balance though. Consider, what is an acceptable amount to heal a single person for? Probably something around renew range. What if you could instantly apply renew to everyone in the party? Should you heal each person for 1 fifth the amount? Even if you did, you saved 4 GCDs and that's a big deal. Now consider that renew lasts 15 seconds, whereas the totem lasts 5. How much do you have to divide the healing by then to balance it? Furthermore, whatever you divide it by, almost every point of healing is spread incredibly thin. But what is the alternative? If you give it a high base value and it gets to tick all 5 minutes, it will heal an insane amount. If you give it great scaling with a poor base amount, you run the risk of a well geared resto shaman just dropping the totem and forgetting about it.

It's a tough balance, but I agree I'd love to see healing stream totem relevant in more situations. Maybe the ticks could heal for more over the course of it's first minute somewhat like nourish, and then by that justification have a higher overall healing coefficient. The danger to that of course is that it becomes a must-kill in pvp and you can drop it 30 seconds before a pve fight to make it more effective, although you run the risk of the fight relocating and it becoming irrelevant. It's a tough topic and I think people oversimplify the balance work that blizzard has to do.

 

Pitbuller

Edit: Thank Durnitol for correcting my math.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Vinraka

I remember reading somewhere that these totems are not meant to be raidwide. It's not in the patch notes but I SWEAR I read it from a respectable site somewhere.

At any rate, I see it as a GOOD thing. Shamans won't be stepping on each other's toes quite as much when there's more of us in the raid.

 

Kirion

I'd argue that if healing stream changed to raid wide, it would became usefull. Still worse than VE probably, but good enough to drop instead of mana spring.

42.

 

Durnitol

Pitbuller, I looked at your first post on the math, and I'm not seeing 1.5 mp5 per INT math.

Those two together = .3 mp5. Where does the other 1.2 come from? Is it the crit from INT applied to Improved Water Shield proc?


EDIT:
I'm trying to think about your reasoning from other posts you've written. If you are talking about total usable mana over 5 minutes...

I think you are basing everything over "1 int cost same as 0.4mp5" from item budgets, based on the fact that you can socket 4mp5 per Epic gem vs 10INT.

Applying that theory on a 5 min fight, I think I get your numbers now
In all fairness, the actual numbers make it so that 1.67 INT = 1mp5, 5.55 INT = 1 Heal Power and 3 INT = 1 CritRating when not considering item budgets, but including talents and Blessing of Kings. So yes, 10 INT = 6MP5, 1.8 HealP and 3.33 CR. To that end, I want to make gem comparisons.

INT, Crit Rating, and Haste are "yellow" gem stats, MP5 is the only "blue" stat we have (besides stamina), HealPower is "red". We are excluding haste and stam from our calculations for now, since those stats are not affected by INT. If someone could provide rough stat weights, I could plug in those numbers to generate a "best in slot" value for each color.

If the above weights are even close, badge/ZA gear is on par with T6, excluding the set bonuses, thanks to INT.

 

Kaytikat

When I last tried Healing Stream and Mana Spring on PTR, MS was definitely party only, and HS was bugged to only affect the shaman that cast it.

If it stays like this, I'd expect it to become the norm to have 2xresto shaman and 1xelemental shaman in different groups so that each caster and healer group gets a mana totem (the difference between talented and untalented MS is only 12.5mp5). This also means that Healing Stream will again be relegated to be used only on fights where mana isn't an issue (Felmyst, Gurtogg and Twins are the only fights we use it on [Twins because we stack resto shaman in a sp group]).

The only thing that's confusing is that HS has been hit hard by the removal of the overcharge mechanic and also had its coefficient lowered. This points to it becoming raidwide, but even then it will be rare that you can afford the mp5 loss from MS (or have stacked enough resto shaman!) to be able to drop it.

 

scianthe

ok Patch day and one more month of BC raiding, i am currently on Muru.
Now i have seen alot of builds going round lately.
But since all I basicly do is spam CHeal and tbh i do not expect that to change i was thinking of this: 13/48 build, with improved earthliving weapon loads of + crit and none of the HW and LHW talents cause i dont expect to use them.

I feel this build will support my Ch spamming ways the best way possible, keep in mind this build will only be used in SWP for that last month of raiding.

edit: changed link

 

Durnitol

Please, no "rate my spec" posts. This thread is full of useful information for making your own judgment. Strap on a pair and make your own decision based on what you have seen here and your own experience.

That said, I have made my own attempt and judging all resto builds simultaneously here.

 

KnThrak

Exactly.
I was thinking (when I saw the Healing Stream nerf) that either Mana Spring is gonna get nerfed and both go raidwide, or that Mana Spring gets nerfed and both totems get merged into one.

It seems od