Floria

Regarding Spirit Link in a level 70 context (since we don't know how level 80 encounters will go), we saw most spells see a mid-60s upgrade and a level 70 spell. Maybe since 70 won't be the cap, it'll be 66, 74, 80, but all the same:

It seems fair to say that the level 70 version of Spirit Link would be double the effectiveness, or 4400 damage redirection. At the least, I'd expect 42% scaling like other instant spells. With 2000+ healing, that's 840 added, or a "shield" of 5280 damage, at instant cast. That's a pretty massive "shield" for any predictable burst damage. If Illhoof was a 25-man encounter, you'd better believe something like this would be necessary to keep Demon Chains targets from being insta-gibbed (or lightning-fast reflexes, but some people fail there.)

We'll see how it comes out in the end, but I'd also imagine a few talents might be retooled to add a percentage to your Spirit Link along with other heals, or maybe a higher coefficient than 42%. As is, a 5k proactive, instant "heal" is pretty amazing at 70.

 

malveux

Kortar,

Not entirely true, in the last build they put a 5 player cap on CoH and Flourish. COH will still cross groups, but only hit 5 max. This begs the question, will it use the CH target choice algo, or just hit the 5 closest? In case anyone was wondering the 6 second CD is still present.

 

• Iku

I wonder if the transferred damage from Spirit Link will break CC effects. If it does, SL could be uses as a BoSac style anti-CC (on two friendly targets, but not reliably targettable when there are more than three friendlies).

 

malveux

Also, where is everyone getting this 60% number for IHC. The only info I can find is rank 1 IHC 20% haste and increases chance by 4%. Every calculator(even the new yartools) has rank 2 and 3 as the "old" version that let mana regen stay. Knowing blizzard, they probably just forgot to delete the spellids for rank 2 and 3, and all the calculators are being built using that information. I have a sinking feeling that IHC is only 1 talent point now. While 20% haste for 20 seconds is still amazing, its not nearly as game breaking as 60%. Really in the end, 20% for just the duration of IHC(or use) is probably the best balance overall.

 

madrix

Well then chain heal is still going to be the best multi-target raid heal. Good to know.

 

malveux

Well that depends on the coefficient and strength of flourish in its first few seconds.

 

Zzbzq

One of the main things people are forgetting about Spirit Link is that every other 51 point talent except Flourish is PvP-centric. About ~3 others are almost 50/50. As a PvP ability Spirit Link is probably the best ability in the game because it reduces burst damage and presumably breaks strong-CC.

 

Shakes

You're forgetting the extra mana return when hit. And if you're chain casting, it's usually because everyone is getting hit.

 

Tmac

At least in this stage of WOTLK it feels like they're catching everyone up to the point of where Chain Heal is.

Problem with that is Shaman doesn't really have anything past Chain Heal that really seperates'em from the pack, or that some other class doesn't do better.

What's their heal role that they bring to the table others won't?

 

Touf

...

Bloodlust?

 

PsyBomb

Now, I never raided Naxx seriously. Can any of our truly old-school restos give a brief rundown of what the bosses were like from a healer perspective? This will be fairly important, since the new Naxx bosses will be based at LEAST loosely on the Naxx40 ones. It'll give another very nice frame of reference for us.

EDIT: Geez, post I was quoting for the first half got deleted between type and post. Anyway, my reference point stands

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.

 

Anedris

I said it earlier and I'll say it again:

The shaman's healing role that no one else can do is intelligent targetting. Priests have a little bit of this in PoM and maybe in the new CoH on its 6-second cooldown. Shaman have two heals (chain heal and ancestral awakening I think it was called - the one where 60% of your crit goes to the lowest health friendly within 40 yards) that do this and they're both spammable (one is a proc, though one that should be happening 40%ish of the time with appropriate gear for it). This is very very good.

Encounters like the Eredar Twins aren't hard because of the DPS to the raid, they're hard because that DPS comes in uneven chunks that produce gibs. Damage spikes happen faster than human reactions can reliably counter. There are two ways to deal with this - overheal a lot, or have a spell that chooses its own targets. The power of smart targetting is huge. If you want to put a numerical value on it, consider how much overheal a priest or paladin has to do in a random damage setting to reliably keep targets alive. A shaman will do far less and yet be more reliable, generally (not a perfect equivalence - CoH is faster than chain heal, chain heal heals for a lot more on its targets, etc. - but that's more or less what it boils down to).

Oh, and shamans still have totems, and bloodlust. Which would be enough to justify raid spots even if shaman were inferior healers, which they are not.

 

madrix

Yeah i agree totally, i don't know of a guild that would not consider using a resto shaman or recruiting one right now. Most guilds are stacking them (and maybe healing preists as well) in sunwell. Don't get me wrong, i don't want to not have a raid spot, but fights should not require 5 of us either. Good for priests and druids to catch up a little with their new abilities and it is very good for resto shaman to be able to atleast do on par or above par tank healing (which i am considering possible with these new changes). Gives us more options and even more flexibility in small size groups (5-man, 10-man).

And yeah i don't ever see a resto shaman not having a raid spot. Maybe you wont need 5 of them, but you will always take atleast one.

 

Ribs

Bad wording on my part there. I was referring to the cooldown on CoH and the lack of buffs on Chain Heal.

I think this much is true. The only problem here being the intelligent targetting on itself. With CH you could have some minor form of control of who got healed by selecting the group. The new Awakening could potentially lose a lot of 'quality' healing to people moving late from fires, locks tapping at the wrong moment or aggro hungry dps. This alone makes the shaman a bad single target healer and places it in between our old position as top raidhealer and single-target monsters as paladins. I suppose our roles will be much like a druid on raidhealing, targetting one by one having our intelligent targetting assist. All in all it has the potential to be brilliantly effective, but a bit too random for my taste.

The same goes for spirit link really. In potential a great ability. Normally you'd have 3 tanks running about of which 2 have a try at dps on singletank boss encounters. With SL you might actually be able to save out on a lot of spike damage. But the problem is that at this moment the damage cap is just way too low. Even if the current amount is based on lvl 60, I think we can expect the lvl 80 version to be gone pretty quickly on most burst attacking bosses. It's too gimmicky imo, and the extra buffs it will need will no doubt make it too imba for pvp

 

Shakes

The problem of having the game target for you is it's just not as fun as getting to make decisions for yourself. Which is why I think a lot of healers are healers rather than DPS to begin with: healers get to decide on the fly which spells to cast on who where as DPS follows a pretty much static rotation.

I was rather hoping rather than make more "intelligent" heals, and passively nerf chain heal (by way of lack of buffs), they'd keep chain heal very strong but require manually targeting by allowing you to mark any two raid members as jump targets at any one time.

After all, I want to be playing the game, not leaving all the decisions to some server side AI, no matter how much better it may be at them (with its 0 latency and reaction time) than me.

 

james

I read this post, then I read it again!

In terms of group utility, we've not seen anything so far that displace Resto Shamans from their throne. So far, a lot of the talents seem to be pushing shamans towards improving the rest of their healing abilities. Whilst the new weapon imbue doesn't seem so strong, the HOT will provide a nice throughput boost. Earth Shield too!


The changes we've seen to abilities (Sap working on beasts, Resto shamans getting decurse for example) seem to imply that they don't want certain classes to bring something to the table that others can't because in 10 man content, you can't guarantee that this class/spec will be present.

 

Mistaya

I think it is very important for Blizz to make sure Shaman are good 10 man healers as well as 25 which may be more the focus of these HW/LHW talents. How much single target healing do we do in the average Karazahn and ZA? A lot. I would be very surprised if the 10 mans in WOTLK require more than three healers in the raid so we need to be competitive there as well as be able to heal the heroics of the future without too much trouble.

Aside from that, remember that Chain Heal's efficiency is going to tank once we lose our T6 bonuses. I don't expect blizzard to continue to let Chain heal on a single bounce be more mana efficient than HW. Personally I still use CH even when it doesnt bounce because there's usually enough splash damage that it MIGHT bounce. Now HW can bounce on its own so it's actually preferable to use single target.

While shaman may not be as ideal as a priest/druid for MT healing we are still adequate when necessary. I don't understand the "Abysmal single target healing" comments. My raid group's priests and druids tend to be very fickle about signing up and we run shaman heavy. (4-5 of our 7/8 heals are shaman most of the time.) I've been MT or OT healer more times than I can count and while it obviously isn't optimal I don't let my tanks die and I don't need help on my assignment. We aren't exceptional at it, but we are certainly adequate when necessary.

Back to Spirit Link, I think it's probably going to have a short cooldown (< 30sec) by the end of this but it will still be both incredible for PVP and highly useful in PVE. What about bosses that are single tank but have short timed frenzies/enrages? Or Things like claw rage when a random player is fixated and takes high damage for a short period? Or just single target bosses that just hit really really hard (like Morogrim, or prince phase 2.) Toss it up before a predictable silence/incapacitate (azgalor, maiden) so the tank doesnt' die during. Another way to soak 1-shot the Robot's bolts (or any full HP predictable strike.) It could also break gouge/incapacitate on the tank if he takes one (moroes.)

I'm really excited for this skill.

Just another Tauren Shaman.

 

malveux

BTW, Healing Wave isn't the only spell that got cost bloat.

Level 70 - 450 mana, 270 healing per charge
Level 80 - 1020 mana (128% increase), 337 healing per charge (25% increase)

All these super high new costs are basically forcing us to spec 11 points into elemental to reclaim some semblance of our former levels of efficiency. The sad part is, we never had great efficiency before. Healing wave was pretty low and ES only slightly beat out POM in total HPM. The more I crunch these numbers the more I realize that elemental focus is just a bandaid to force us to use the crit heavy elemental gear, not a nice way to help with our efficiency issues. If our gearing follows the trends of elemental shamans we won't have much, if any, mp/5 on it. So in the end we get a talent NOT in the restoration tree that gets us close to where we were before with the new ranks of healing spells and we're probably losing the mp/5 we had on gear from before because its not normally found on our new gear "type". Restoration shamans still need a lot of work and I hope blizzard sees this in testing. I'm still holding out hope though. The patch notes only mentioned elemental being ready to go. Maybe we'll get lucky and see some majors changes in the next build. If not, I'll probably stick exclusively to down ranked healing wave(rank 10 or rank 12) and ES, unless they are changing their mana costs as well.

 

Habanero

Healing Wave with extra cost bloat is not gonna be worth casting. It's rarely worth casting now due to its obscenely bad HPM at any remotely useful rank. Mark my words, people will laugh at Healing Wave Shamans the same way they laugh at Healing Touch Druids now, but harder.

 

Rhaegal

Um... what? I can see a certain amount of argument saying that cost bloating of Healing Wave in WotLK might make it a poor choice, but that's not even remotely the case in TBC. LHW is terrible, but HW is still a reasonably efficient heal--yeah, it's not Lifebloom or downranked GHeal, but that's not our primary job. As has been stated repeatedly, shaman are perfectly capable of MT healing using HW, and well worth using in certain situations.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Daidalos

Since we have not seen the new ranks of chain heal and their associated mana costs I believe this statement is premature.

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

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

 

Habanero

Why, you can't see Rank 4 or 5 becoming your new bread and butter at 80 despite whatever new ranks they add?

 

Shakes

The rumour mill is saying that downranking is going to suffer further penalties, so it's hard to project at this point what rank will be good to use.

 

Daidalos

Seems unlikely assuming they add 2 more ranks of CH that in any situation where there is high raid damage requiring a large amount of HPS that you would down rank 2 full ranks. I could easily see this to top people off in the way I use CH2 right now but to assume that we won't need to use the new ranks very often seems questionable. Also you can apply your argument to the current ranks of Healing wave and argue that everyone will be using HW12 at lvl 80 due to mana cost.

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

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

 

Doodle

Anyone know if spirit links your friendly target with hostile targets? The tooltip sorta leaves it open for the possibility.