Anedris

Please use capitalization.

The ability of the same name in Warcraft 3 did not work on hostiles, and I would be extremely surprised if this one did.

 

asan

One thing I noticed is that Nature's Swiftness seems to have a much lower CD - 10sec. Mage's Arcane Power has a 1.5sec CD too in the talents listed, but druids didn't get any change to their version of NS (3min CD). If this change remains, it may be the solution to our lack of mobility as healers. I am skeptical, anyway, but it may be that they are toying with this change in alpha.

I am particulary concerned with the lack of "AoE protection" and Spells to cast while moving. This can be experienced in the fight of Shirrak the Dead Watcher (H Crypts) or even in trivial fights in BT like Shade of Akama (in my guild shamans are preferred to be placed in the left/right side as healers due to EB totem) or Council. In those fights, frequently we are asked to keep a tank alive and I particulary have issues during the (heavy) AoE fire (specially if it happens two times in a row), a task any other healer would have tools to deal with. Maybe this NS change is a step in the right direction, if it remains.

 

Daidalos

A 10s NS CD sounds amazingly OP. NS bugged out on me in a kara run one time preventing it from being consumed after I had activated it. I had a giddy 45 min or so of jumping around spamming rank 1 CH until I got healing aggro and the tank got netted. While 10s won't be nonstop spam its still a class redefining change. I think something more like 20-30s would be reasonable if this is the route they are going. Not that I woudn't take 10s CD but i'd be weird to be OP in pvp for once.

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

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

 

PSGarak

I was under the impression that the 10-second cooldown was actually the semi-linked cooldown with the force-crit in Elemental to prevent them both being used on the same spell.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Daidalos

That would make alot more sense. Thinking about instant heals though I've always though that if healing stream output increased by 50-100% I'd actually use it ~50% of the time. As it is I only use it when there is raid wide aoe dmg and mana isn't an issue (e.g. felmyst)

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

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

 

PsyBomb

Random thought. With the merge of +damage and +healing into one stat, the talent Nature's Blessing got an unexpected boost. Since the way healing spells will regain their strength is a massively boosted coefficient, that just nearly doubled in effectiveness for the healing side of things for us.

Just food for thought.

EDIT: Blessing, not Guardian

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.

 

Logio

Some new Shaman WotLK Stuff announced at WWI:

Source: mmo-champion

I honestly expected a windfury-nerf in WotLK but they´re making it even more viable.

 

Kortar

OK, I had a few inklings and glimmerings from looking at the various talent trees, but I'm willing to state it baldly right now: Resto Shaman will not be a raid-viable spec in WotLK.

Let's review:
1. Circle of Healing as a raid-wide smart heal is dramatically better than Chain Heal. Chain Heal loses a lot of efficiency from the fact that over half of the healing is bundled up into the initial 2.5s heal. Coupled with the fact that Circle of Healing has a much higher heal/cast time, slightly better heal/mana than Chain Heal does inherently, and is buffed by WotLK talents (while Chain Heal is not) and there really isn't any comparison. About the only advantage for Chain Heal is that the bounces are longer range than the radius on Circle of Healing. Couple this with Druids receiving real multi-target healing, and the trend seems fairly obvious.

2. Shaman single target healing isn't remotely competitive in WotLK. I've covered this at length earlier in the thread, but when Resto Shaman heal at 60% the throughput and half the efficiency of other healers against single targets, they're just too far behind to be useful healers. In 5-man instances, this discrepancy appears to be bridged by Spirit Link, but the fixed cap on Spirit Link renders it of limited use on raid bosses.

3. Raid-wide/condensed totems negate the value of multiple Shaman. If you've got two Shaman in the raid, you've got basically all the totems you ever need. And those two Shaman will likely be an Elemental and an Enhancement Shaman, as these Shaman will likely perform much closer to their 'pure' dps peers than Resto Shaman will to 'pure' healers. About the only advantage you'd get for an Resto Shaman is possibly a raid-wide Mana Tide totem - which is probably around triple the normal power (affecting 15 mana-users rather than 5) if it remains the same.

Add in the heavy emphasis on criticals and the healing/damage merge into spellpower, and what it really seems is that Resto Shaman will be a primarily PvP spec that can additionally cover healing chores in 5-man groups. While we have yet to see information on Holy Paladins, I'm getting the vague impression that they'll be going back to the pre-BC division of "primary" and "secondary" healers - and making the healing variants of Paladins/Shaman into PvP specs, while having Resto Druids/Holy Priests into the main PvE raid healers. This would likely be a bit more balanced than current "PvP-only" specs in that both could cover a useful role in a 5-man group.

Admittedly, this requires quite a bit of "reading of tea leaves" - trying to discern intentions from the changes made by the Blizzard team. But I find it hard to believe they would make so many changes that seem so directed towards the results above without even realizing they were doing it.

 

Pitbuller

Circle of healing get 8s cd.
Druid aoe hot ins't spammable to same targets.
Spirit link is maybe must have to tank.
Earth shield with two improving talents is very good to have.

Still there is Woa, wf and tranquil so three shaman needed to get all totems.
Talented raid wide manaspring is just much better than non talented.

Or maybe resto spot is combined with elem. You use spec that will be better for selected encounter.

And you can't compare healers now becouse spell power co-efficent might be different than those use to be.
But if you think resto will suck go some other forum to whine about it.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Shan

In TBC the differences between the baseline priest and shaman spells are small. I'd be surprised if this changes in WotlK.

Where did you get your spell stats from Kortar?

 

PSGarak

With overlapping gear and, apparently, two swappable talent trees you might see some encounters heavily favoring resto shamans, with elemental duty in between. I don't quite see how they can favor resto shamans at the moment though, except requiring Spirit Link to avoid a one-shot or needing Mana Tide for longevity. But at this point I'm leaning towards the idea that other classes are approaching, but not reaching, the same raid-healing ability of a resto shaman, which still leaves you with a niche but allows some more flexibility.

Combining str and agi totems was just an example. I expect the changes to filter out so that you don't really need more than 2 of any element except under specialist considerations, and I would already consider TA specialist.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Kortar

It's 6 seconds right now. The consequence of this is that CoH will likely generate about 75% of the cyclic throughput of Chain Heal, but use 25% of the casting time. So instead of having 3 Resto Shaman who do nothing but Chain Heal the raid, you have 4 Holy Priests who each use a fraction of their time/attention to do the same job.

You also have to keep in mind that Priests also get Prayer of Healing, which is almost double the cyclic throughput of Chain Heal. With raid-wide totems and my speculation that your healing team will be all Holy Priest/Resto Druid, this means that for truly massive raid-wide damage you've got Priests in almost every group for Prayer of Healing.

It really depends on how the scaling-over-time of the HoT works - it is phrased as providing most of its healing early on. Given the short duration, this likely means Lifebloom-style 1-second ticks. If this is the case, then spam-casting it would merely be a bit less efficient, not an ineffective tactic.

If it has a hard cap on it's effectiveness, then it's merely another heal - and a bad one - for raid tanks. It has the about the same sort of efficiency as Power Word: Shield, but it doesn't actually heal damage - it just allows the conversion of multi-target heals into single target heals. When solo-healing as a Resto Shaman, this is useful. In a 25-man raid setting, it isn't because there are healers who can match the WotLK's multi-target throughput/efficiency with their single target heals.

I did speculate on a way it could be useful in a raid - if the Spirit Link 'held' for the complete lump of damage that knocked it down. But even in this case, its usefulness would result in a Resto Shaman whose only job was to spam-cast it on the Main Tank.

Earth Shield is nice. But it isn't even playing in the same league as Druid HoT. Lifebloom heals at triple the throughput of Earth Shield and double it's mana efficiency. All those two improving talents do is take Earth Shield from being equivalent to Renew to being slightly better than Renew. But since you can stack any number of Renews from multiple Holy Priests anyway, this isn't really a big deal.

Dumping a Tranquil Air totem would be worthless, since it affects the entire raid. The fact that your dps has 20% less threat is precisely counterbalanced by the fact that so does your tank.

It's 25% better, which is nice. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of mana from Vampiric Touch, which is hitting the 4 mana-users who use it best. And when you look at what I'm speculating about 25-man raid composition, it becomes almost superfluous.

Your entire healer corps will be composed of high-regen healers (Priests and Druids) who won't care much about the dribbles of mana they're getting from mana spring totem. So that's half your mana users right there. Your 4 best mana-users will be grouped with your Shadow Priest and won't notice mana spring. So you're down to 4 or maybe 5 mana-users - most of these folks like Hunters - who really benefit. Is 25% more on mana spring worth much? Not really.

Not to mention that it's shallow enough in the tree that if it's essential for 25-man raid, your Elemental Shaman can take it.

It's certainly not easy to do. We have only two real 'data points' to work from. First of all, currently +healing has an itemization cost about 54% that of universal +damage, indicating that healing coefficients will be about 80% larger than damage coefficients. Second of all, one of the empowered healing talent has so far been revisited - Druid Healing Touch - and that has doubled in anticipation of spellpower changes. None of the empowered damage talents has been revisited.

However, the actual change in healing coefficients isn't really all that relevant when you consider the base numbers and the scaling factors involved. If a heal dramatically outperforms another heal with no gear whatsoever and it scales better, it will always outperform the other heal. In the numbers I listed earlier in the thread, I simply used existing calculations rather than get into speculation about coefficient changes.

I never claimed Resto Shaman would "suck" - I claimed they would be oriented towards PvP and 5-man content, but not raid viable. You don't see Discipline Priests, Demonology Warlocks and Subtlety Rogues in 25-man raids, but this doesn't mean they "suck" - it merely means they excel at a different form of content.

WotLK Info Wiki

To summarize:
Greater Heal (Rank 9) - 1290 mana, 3950 to 4590 healing
Flash Heal (Rank 11) - 775 mana, 2054 to 2386 healing
Healing Wave (Rank 14) - 1600 mana, 3034 to 3466 healing
Lesser Healing Wave (Rank 9) - 965 mana, 1606 to 1834 healing

 

Shan

These numbers can't be right. The differences are just too big.

 

Skyhoof

Yes, an enhancement shaman will no longer need to totem twist to give melee both WF and GOA at the same time. I just hope they give players the ability to click off a buff so that we can also use our Tranquil Air totem on the raid. I'm guessing that Mana Tide will be one of the totems that is NOT raid wide.

 

Raputo

Kortar, it seems like you're making too many assumptions for the conclusion you're jumping to.

For example, your comparison with shadow priests is off...have you seen the intended changes to Vampiric Touch?

At this stage of the game (so to speak), it's waaaay too early to be calling this IMO.

 

Anedris

Regards tranquil air, it's *really* not hard to make it work raid-wide. Just have it not affect people in defensive stance, frost presence, bear form, or with righteous fury up. Ta-da!

I disagree that resto shaman will be "non-raid-viable." But I suspect you're pretty set in your opinion so I won't try to argue it.

 

PsyBomb

The example of the totem compression that they gave was of combining Strength of Earth with Grace of Air. In order for this to happen, they'll either have to re-flavor the totem entirely or greatly change the way totems work from the ground up. This could mean a LOT of things, ranging from "Each totem has the possibility of taking up more than one of your elements" to "You can have 4 totems out, and elements don't matter". The likely escape will be for them to rename it to Whirlwind Fortitude or Earthen Power totem and just shoving it into the one slot with both bonuses, but the twist needed to be brought to light.

Just food for further thought.

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.

 

Kortar

They're pulled from the alpha WotLK client. They may not be what the numbers ultimately end up being, but they are numbers Blizzard developers decided to include in the initial tests of the game.

I've tried to avoid anything but the most basic assumptions. But unless you identify the assumptions you believe are false, I can't justify them.

Yes, Vampiric Touch is reduced from 5% to 2%. However, if it was not reduced the conjunction of improved Shadow Priest damage scaling and the rate of improvement on damage vs. mana regen would cause Vampiric Touch to outperform any reasonable game balance.

Also keep in mind that a change in the relative scaling - which is what we're really concerned about - would be likely reflected in the costing of Shadow Priest damage spells since they always have Vampiric Touch as an option.

I'm not making any claims about what the game will be like when WotLK is released - I can't know that. All I'm doing is saying that if WotLK went live right now, Resto Shaman would almost certainly not be viable healers in a 25-man raid unless there were some fairly radical and unusual changes to core game mechanics.

It may not be hard, but there is no indication they're going to do this. And if they were going to make this sort of change, they could have made it work for 5-man instance groups long ago.

Also, keep in mind that the original justification for adding Tranquil Air to the game was to counterbalance the advantage provided to Alliance by Blessing of Salvation. Given that this advantage no longer exists, there really isn't any reason for the developers to give Tranquil Air much consideration.

Please do argue it. The point of a discussion about the proposed WotLK changes is to determine how the game will actually be affected. If you refuse to participate in analyzing the mechanics, you're just venting your feelings, not contributing to the thread in a meaningful way.

 

Anedris

We accept as given that every raid will need two shaman. Totems are simply that powerful. The average number of each class per raid is 2.5, so shaman are already fine. Your concern is more that resto shaman, specifically, are not fine, however.

Basically, you are concerned that the gap between a resto shaman and another healer will be greater than the gap between an elemental or enhancement shaman and another DPSer. The DPS shamans will be favoured for the two "shaman spots" because they each bring something new (unleashed rage and totem of wrath) whereas the resto shaman is just a gimped healer.

We have not yet seen the paladin talents so we can't compare WotLK resto shaman with the one other buff-based healer. We can only compare them to the two healers who must justify their raid spots based more or less solely on their own healing power.

I would argue the fairly uncontroversial point that the combination of bloodlust and totems is superior to what a druid or priest brings in non-healing benefits. For the sake of balance among classes, priests and druids should therefore be stronger healers than resto shaman. For the sake of balance among shaman specs, absent their totems and bloodlust, all shaman specs should be inferior to their non-shaman equivalents by about the same degree. So an enhancement shaman (with his unleashed rage included) should be inferior to a rogue by the same amount that an elemental shaman (with his totem of wrath) is inferior to a mage and this gap should be the same as that between a resto shaman and a druid or priest healer.

At present, enhancement shaman seem quite strong and are probably worth their raid spot for unleashed rage (plus their personal DPS) alone. Resto shaman are also very strong however - for the major healing check of TBC (Eredar Twins) they are the best healers bar none. In TBC it is arguably elemental shaman that lag behind, but this does not really matter since every raid wants five shaman anyways.

The worrisome scenario, then, is that in Wrath enhancement shaman will still be amazing and raid-wide totem of wrath will also be amazing. The third shaman spot would naturally go to a resto, since unleashed rage doesn't stack and raid-wide totem of wrath will not stack (I know the current totem of wrath stacks but a raid-wide version will not - it would be horribly broken if it did). However, if there is no need for a third set of totems, it may not be worth taking a subpar resto healer over a superior priest or druid healer.

For us not to need a third set of totems we assume that the raid can bunch up (so that covering more area is unnecessary; alternately totem range is drastically increased), that TA is useless (it is not changed to exclude tanks and either positioning or frequent movement makes keeping the tanks out of range unfeasible, or tank threat increases to the point that more threat reduction is simply not needed), and that neither of the "gimmick" air totems are needed (grounding totem, nature resistance totem).

And then I come down to comparing resto shaman against druids and priests. I'm going to resort to point form here, and I'm just going to talk about priests because I play one and frankly I don't know the new druid stuff very well (plus it's harder to compare HoTs to direct heals):

- If CoH and PoH do not gain "smart targetting," resto shaman dominance in any encounter with uneven gib-level raid damage is utterly assured. The power of heals that can react faster than a lag-limited human is enormous, and shaman are gaining even more of this with ancestral awakening. If we want to put a number on the benefits of this smart targetting we could look at the average overheal numbers on a healing intensive encounter (ignore the druids because HoTs don't show up in the combat log when they're pure overheal).

- A raid-wide 5 targets smart-targetted PoH would be amazingly powerful. Don't expect it to go live without either a cooldown or a severe reining in of the amount healed.

- The 25%ish advantage that priests have in their base healing must be balanced against the fact that resto shamans will get far more out of crit than will priests (and will probably run with high crit levels due to sharing large amounts of gear with their elemental brethren). A deep holy priest's heal crits for 150% while a HW-specced resto shaman's HW crits for 240% (150% crit heal + 60% of that value healed to the lowest health raid member within 40 yards). The argument that ancestral awakening, because it doesn't go to the tank, should be ignored can be raised, but I would argue the opposite - that this extra healing, because it always goes where it's needed (you're almost guaranteed no overheal unless the entire raid - including the tank - is topped off) is far more valuable than a mere 240% crit modifier.

- Any true measure of a WotLK healing priest's power must account for improved holy concentration and mark of divinity. In their present form both look absurdly powerful, which leads me to be quite certain both will be nerfed or reworked, with leads me to have no good measure of a WotLK healing priest's power.

- Bloodlust. The third shaman brings a third bloodlust. I find it hard to believe this will not remain advantageous (being, of course, more and more advantageous the shorter the important phase of the fight is; unless they implement "lustbearance" in which event the third shaman becomes more advantageous once the fight lasts longer than some duration).

- Mana tide. I consider this fairly minor in the grand scheme of things but depending on how this gets reworked (I would guess either remaining in its current form but remaining party-specific or as a smaller mana return but raid-wide) it is a notable amount of extra mana for the raid when other mana-returning options (shadow priests, rumoured nerf to chain-potting) are being reined in.

Basically, if you assume priests will get all the best things that have been suggested for them (raid-wide smart targetted CoH and PoH, IHC, mark of divinity, powerful base values on their heals) they will become healing gods and obsolete all other healers. Since I don't think that's Blizzard's intention, I don't think it's going to happen.

 

Pitbuller

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Kortar

I think you're overestimating the value of the totems. Windfury is an enormously effective buff - about 15% - 20%. But the rest are in the 3% - 5% range - about what you're getting from Seal of the Crusader. Retribution Paladins aren't considered essential in raiding right now, so that second Shaman (presumably for Wrath of Air) would likely fall into the same sort of classification - especially when you consider that the raid-wide buff from Wrath of Air would likely be less potent than the raid-wide buff from Seal of the Crusader.

There might be some debate depending on the impact of Replenish, but