Infraction for Kortar: General Idiocy

Kaubel · 06/29/08, 10:36 AM

Post: [Resto Shaman] WotLK Talents and Discussion
User: Kortar
Infraction: General Idiocy
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Go, go, split that quote!

Original Post:

Circle of healing get 8s cd.

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.

Druid aoe hot ins't spammable to same targets.

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.

Spirit link is maybe must have to tank.

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 with two improving talents is very good to have.

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.

Still there is Woa, wf and tranquil so three shaman needed to get all totems.

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.

Talented raid wide manaspring is just much better than non talented.

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.

And you can't compare healers now becouse spell power co-efficent might be different than those use to be.

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.

But if you think resto will suck go some other forum to whine about it.

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.

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?

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