That assumes you have something to go hit for 30 seconds that isn't going to hurt you in any way. And that you can give up healing for 30 seconds. If you're healing for a critical fight, you'll probably have healing gear on (unless you want to give up tremendous +heal and mana/5), in which case you'll be losing much of your attack power and shamanistic rage will give you back less mana than you expect. If you don't have healing gear on, your heals are much lower than they would be and you're a rogue that can spot heal at the cost of dps.

Speaking of which, I always thought that naming a talent tree, an "enhancement" tree was stupid.

Definition of enhancement:

An improvement that makes something more agreeable.


Comon, that describes every single talent tree that exists.

Oh well, at least you don't have people constantly mispelling the name of your class.

Hello Rouges!

What the fuck does this have to do with elemental vs. restoration compromises between DPS and healing?

Get out of the thread if you aren't going to post on-topic.

I would like to see some numbers about the average mana return with different speeds of weapons. It would be interesting to see a comparison of how much mana per 2 minute strength provides vs mp/5 for the same item budget.

I think that items itemized for hunters will end up being very good for enhancement shaman. Lots of attack, some agil for crit, some int, some sta, some mp/5. Throw in maybe some +healing spots to boost up the strength of the heals. I'm getting 200+ mana a pop with sort of mediocre gear, that seems like an awful lot of mana especially when compared to spirit or mp/5.

Enhancement shamans appear to be stealing the feral druid title of Corrupters of Every Damned Thread.

I've been very pleased with variations of 31+/0/21+ so far. Currently sporting a 40/0/21 build playing roles of dps, main healer, and the grey area between (including Lightningohnoaggrorun Overload). The mage-in-mail role, while still disappointingly lacking the added flavor that most class trees received in 2.0, is very effective. Wearing Stormcaller and assorted 70 blues I find myself pulling in just behind mages on the e-peen charts while maintaining totems and spot healing. Mana is less of an issue than I was originally concerned about. Trash and most bosses end with some blue bar remaining, though longer fights like Kargath or Murmur sometimes run me dry prematurely. I imagine this will become less of a problem as I replace more of my 60 epics with +damage/healing equivalents with more +Int. I have no Karazhan experience to throw in here yet.

Main healing, my ability to solo heal depends on group comp. It's no problem with a couple forms of CC in the group, but melee heavy groups with low CC can get tricky without backup. Hard-hitting melee bosses on bear tanks leave me stongly craving Healing Way, depending on how often I'm in this position I'd like to pick it up. Regarding longetivity, I'm usually alright unless the group is taking in a ton of damage over a prolonged period of time. Shadowpriests are my best friends, alleviating much of my worries... should one be along I find myself with an excess of mana and nothing to heal! Earth Shield is a tool I miss but I don't find myself pining to respec for it as I do Healing Way or Purification.

Overall I'm pretty happy with where Elem/Resto falls in the spectrum of things. Gear and talent duality are enjoyable. Long-term sustained dps/healing and dps threat remain issues, but I'm going to play with equipment and consumable options more before raising my level of whining. :cthulhu:

why not drop Lightning Overload to pick up Healing Way? (and two points in Nature's Guidance as well)

something like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=GE0zVs0qAoZZx0gx0eo

I can't get wowhead to work on this computer, so here's my tinyurl'd worldofwarcraft.com build that I'm hoping to use ay 70: http://tinyurl.com/33fgmd

It's 30/0/31 with 5 in purification, 3 in healing way, and mana tide. I figure with this I would be basically as good a single target healer as with full resto; I just don't have the hax chain heals. In the resto tree I didn't choose healing focus; I was hoping Eye of the Storm would make up for that at least somewhat, and that enabled me to pick up nature's guidance and ancestral healing.

This might be a bit offtopic, but since most Elemental gear has +dmg/healing is it possible to effectively heal 70 raids in elemental gear while still doing a decent amount of dps? More importantly, what balance of +dmg vs +heal should we be looking for endgame?

Definitely, as a secondary healer. If you're the main healer, you'll want healing gear. For your second question, it'd be subjective on our raid's class balance I suppose. Play around with gear and see what works for you.

A couple thoughts to build on what has been said.

The more I think about it and run the numbers in my head, the more I lean towards 30/0/31 being the ideal build or better said, the ideal compromise amongst all the Shaman builds.

Pitting a healer with only 31 points in the tree up against a pure Restoration build and attempting to go strictly by the numbers, this is how I see it.

The first drop in effectiveness the hybrid sees is 3% from only having two points in Tidal Focus, the second drop would be an additional 2.5% from not having any points in Tidal Mastery (chose Healing Way instead) and lastly another ~5% from not having Improved Chain Heal (going under the assumption that it comprises 25% of your heals). So from this quick and dirty analysis, is it reasonable to think that a 30/0/31 build is ~90% the healer a full blown Restoration build is? I think the answer is not really given that there are a few obvious details not included in the breakdown.

The first of which is the loss of 5% crit chance on your heals, as I’ve already stated, in terms of pure healing output it’s a loss of 2.5% but what about ancestral fortitude? The problem is of course that it’s something that’s extremely hard to quantify. If there’s sufficient number of Priests and Shamans healing the main tank to ensure the uptime of the armor buff is 100% than the side effect of critical heals is of little value, if it’s not though, what then, how much is it worth? Perhaps if people were to provide some insight as to the average crit chance of a priest and the mitigation boost provided at current armor levels than it might be possible to get at least a ballpark value.

Moving on, the next issue with the initial 90% figure is the assumption that Chain Heal comprises 25% of your healing done. Over the course of an entire instance, this may be true but it’s ultimately the opposite dilemma that Healing Way faces. If I’m charged with healing the main tank than the talent has no value to me, if on the other hand I’m spot healing the raid, depending on how much I mix in Lesser Healing Way, the talent is worth up to a 20% increase in healing power. It is worth noting however that most all healers can fill the role of ‘main tank healer’ acceptably well, while Chain Heal allows the Shaman to perform a rather unique role and thus it’s much more likely that they’ll be tasked with the latter rather than the former.

The last major omission is Earth Shield. Though it’s certainly nice to see that others are not regarding it as a must have talent much the same as I do, it does have tangible increases, only that they’re a bit trickier to quantify. On the basis that Earth Shield scales at a rate of 10/3.5, it would go something along the lines of this:

Shaman A expends 30,000 mana over the course of a five minute fight, ten charges of Earth Shield expire every ~40 seconds (may be off here) allowing them to cast ~7 Earth Shields at 900 mana each or ~21% of your total mana spent. At 1000 +healing, Earth Shield is 40% more mana efficient than Healing Wave rank 12 with actual healing values on the order of 95% versus 80% of traditional heals, or 19% more efficient in that respect.

Let ‘x’ be the efficiency (hitpoints per mana) of Healing Wave rank 12.

Without Earth Shield
(30,000)*(x) = 30,000x hitpoints healed

With Earth Shield
(30,000)*(0.79)*(x) + (30,000)*(0.21)*(x)*(1.4)*(1.19) = 34,196x hitpoints healed

Percent Increase
(34,196x) / (30,000x) = 1.14

The above number surprises me a little bit in that it’s higher than expected but at the same time with it being the supposed pinnacle of the tree, I think any less would be disappointing. The percent increase does stand to vary somewhat based on the actual time required to expend all ten charges and the spell only stands to get better with improved gear.

It’s also worth noting that although mana efficiency is improved by ~14% by throwing Earth Shield into the mix, throughput or HPS is only increased by 8.5% (10% if it takes only 30 seconds to use up all the charges). Another point of interest would be that each cast of Earth Shield can be seen as freeing up ~4 seconds of your time to focus on other targets/tasks given that that’s approximately the time required to output the same amount of healing by conventional means.

Having looked at the omissions from the quick and dirty breakdown, can we now reasonably put a number to paper in so far as what fraction of healer is a 30/0/31 hybrid versus a x/x/41+ healer? Having fleshed out my thoughts above, I’m relatively confident in penning that value at 80-85%.

As Gurgthock already stated, the emphasis of the healing role has shifted largely in favour of throughput with a reduced importance on efficiency and with that said I think it’s fair to bias my assessment based on talents which favour volume versus efficiency. Realizing too that the aforementioned talents are split in the role they improve, I also think it’s reasonable, for the most part, to look at their benefits individually rather than cumulatively.

That is, if I’m healing the main tank I’m putting Earth Shield and an increased heal crit rate to maximum use yielding a benefit of 10-15% over someone with only 31 points in the tree, if I’m spot healing the raid I’m putting Improved Chain Heal to maximum use producing a benefit of up to 20% over someone without Improved Chain Heal, the point of all this being I can’t do both roles at once and thus the maximum benefit I’m seeing at any given time is the higher of the two percentages.

At the end of it all, I believe a 30/0/31 build leaves you as the ultimate switch hitter, able to perform at 80-85% of that of a full Restoration Shaman or able to perform at 90% of the capacity of a full Elemental Shaman in large part thanks to Mana Tide Totem making up for many lost Elemental talents.

Is this then the ultimate hybrid build?

[insert newbie poster stuff here]

I've done some TC wrt dps output of various Elemental, Resto and hybrid builds.

I think I've got everything calculating correctly, but from what I can tell a 30/0/31 build can do about as much damage as a 41/0/20 build. Also added into the mix were a 31/0/30 build and a 21/0/40 build as well (as this is looking at damage output I've ignored anything heal-centric like Earth Shield/Purification/etc).

All of these were calculated using a base set of stats provided by an elemental shaman on the google shaman group (around 330 int, 615 dmg, 55 crit rating, 67mp5), and the only things that have not been included as yet are the +hit calculations.

the calculations are available at www.binky.orcon.net.nz/shamandps.xls Feedback would be good (except for layout stuff, for I suck at layout stuff).

Boils down to the fact that Mana Tide seems to be about as good as EM, LO and ToW put together, which means Argrax is mostly correct in his assessment, except that a 30/0/31 build is more like a full elemental build, minus ToW.

Once I get the +hit talents into the equation, I expect to see an elemental build improve, but not by much, and that improvement depends on the targets level at any-rate.

These calculations initially arose from a query on whether a Nature's Blessing resto/ele build would be viable as raid dps or not.



As for healing itself, from my short experiences in 5 mans, LHW does not cut it anymore, except as a minor top up. Imp HW and Healing Way are going to be very necessary to shaman to function as a MT healer given our lack of HoT spells.

Also, it may be worth taking a look at where the heal agro for each ES charge goes, on to the caster or the target. If the latter, it'll be as useful as PoM for initial healing and agro-generation for tanks.