You don't have to regem or go crazy with INT for hard mode Vezax. You need people to not miss shadow crashes and for MT healers to be smart and not overheal. I usually stand behind the boss with melee and treeform auto-attack. Everytime I get a Clearcast, I throw a Rejuv up on the MT. If I get another CC before Rejuv ends, I Regrowth the tank. But that's all I do until the Animus spawns. Basically you shouldn't need to spend more than 1-2k mana at MOST before P2.

I beg to differ. Having played all four healing classes and lacking extensive raid experience with none but priests I am fairly confident shamans are the worst choice for tank healing.

- Earth Shield, AA and Earthliving is nice but can not compete with our HOTs and seed in terms of both cushioning spikes and healing back moderate damage.

- Shamans lack the on-demand short CD burst we have. Riptide and Tidal Waves is not on par with a precasted Nourish followed up by Swiftmend, likely NG procs and proper juggling of tri-stack Lifeblooms.

- Even fully geared for crit their longevity is nowhere near that of paladins. In fact I have yet to see a druid run OOM sooner than any shaman save an AFK one.

- Talking about armor value you have a point here. Frankly I have not seen the numbers before. Still if anything I consider it a nice bonus towards passive mitigation rather than something that's going to save lives. I am sure we can agree it is spikes killing tanks, my concern about shaman burst potential remains.

Regarding that "pants down" situation, that should simply not be happening. When Swiftmend is on cooldown you are obviously more vulnerable. Force seeds and sustain NG regardless of 100% tank HP, be conscious about directing potential blooms towards that window of vulnerability and precast after meeting all these conditions. Communicate with your tank, he has his CDs for a reason. Communicate with your healers, even paladins need assistance now and then. If all else fails you still have NS. Should you run out all of these options and still need NS twice within 3 minutes then something else is awry, certainly nothing a shaman could have managed better than you.

I will be the first to admit calculus is not my choice for communication, Nourish may indeed look weaker on paper. But experience says otherwise, plus we have quite a big and powerful arsenal to complement it. In the end of the day the point is moot since no sane raid is going to run regularly without a pally or disc priest and 10 man is a non-issue. What I do feel is an issue though is I argued they are the worst for tank healing. And as we agree there are better raid healers save for a few special cases. Do our shamans suck so bad - highly doubt it - or are they really that much behind the rest? If so I can not begin to imagine why this has not raised some eyebrows yet. Yes they have nice utility but that does not offset the gap what I believe exists between their sense of achievement and other healers. I continue to refuse asking our shamans to respec elemental for farm nights but this has been going on for too long.

One last thing and please believe me it is nothing but genuine curiosity: That 20K HPS you mentioned is an actual number of effective healing you have a parse of? Just the other day after Mimiron I was playing around with numbers and came to a ~15k hypotetical cap for my current gear (2500 sp unbuffed), something I manage to near the more the less healers we do fights with. Correct me if I am wrong but isn't Prayer of Healing the highest HPS spammable heal in the game? If so that affects up to 5 targets and Frozen Blows is 4000 damage unresisted every 2 seconds. Barring crap DPS - which I am sure Vodka does not suffer from - Hodir hard mode does not require players to ignore Biting Cold excessively. Thus that leaves 4000 * 5 / 2 = 10k damage per second per party that needs to be healed disregarding JoL, VE, PoH glyph, HL glyph, Healing Stream and all the like, assuming 2 priests and a pally. Now if there is a link and it was more than a lucky spike I am jealous, although druids still retain more control over deciding whom to heal when doing their RJ / WG spam.

I thought I would share my XT-002 Hard Mode parse with everyone in case there are folks who use Revitalize data.

linky

From the data on XT, there are 2 resto druids both who use a fairly intense RJ/WG spam. There was an average of 47.67 procs per player with a mana bar, which translates to 47.67% mana per player or 23.835% mana per player per druid. Given that the fight was 10 minutes long, this normalizes to 0.039725% mana per player per druid per second. The absolute mana gains, of course, depend on how many players you have with mana bars and how big those bars are, but for this particular raid setup we are looking at 91.075 average mp5 per player or or 45.5 per player per druid.

I haven't looked at the relative energy gains, rage gains, and runic power gains, but I suppose I could just total the number of procs over the entirety of the raid to calculate the average procs per second.

Also interesting is my 4T8 Rejuv data (I ran to Dalaran right after the FL kill because I got enough tokens to pick up the chest. Yay!) which accounted for nearly 10% of my total healing that fight.

20k is roughly the theoretical maximum for priests that they rotate their PoH through groups to optimize the PoH hot ticks. On fights such as Hodir, this amount amplifies greatly because of the 100% haste buff of the moonbeams. For druids, we're not far behind if you include ~1900 hps you get from 4T8. I'll go crunch some numbers. The only drawback is that we are completely capped haste-wise whereas priests can potentially reach a 1s PoH cast time and potentially over 40,000 hps. Of course this isn't at all sustainable and highly overkill in any current encounter, but I'm guessing on fights like Mimiron P2 Hard Mode it's better to overheal than underheal.

Edit: Napkin Math for our potential HPS. Using the average values from my XT data (~3050 buffed SP) and using a standard WG, RJ*5 rotation averaged over 18s,
WG = 814.2 hps * 6 targets = 4885.2 hps
WG overlap (3s over in every 18s excluding the initial cast where 12 people have WG) = 814.2 * 6 targets * 3s / 18s = 814.2 hps
RJ tick = 2456.7; RJ = 818.9 hps * 15 targets = 12283.5 hps
4T8 = 1889.1 * 15s / 18s = 1574.25 hps
Total = 4885.2 + 814.2 + 12283.5 + 1574.25 = 19557.15 hps

The initial 18s cycle will only have 2s of 12xWG, but over an extended period of time it should approach a 3s of 12xWG average per 18s cycle. I probably screwed up in the math somewhere so if someone could double check this, that would be great!

@ Omen

I think your theory is fairly good. In practice, since nearly all fights are pretty movement intensive, you won't probably maintain 18 rejuvs and a WG going at the same time.

But 15-16k is definitely achievable. Maybe even 18k. I clocked 13.3k effective healing on our last Hodir kill (really, really sloppy kill at that...) and I didn't use WG to the limit. I'll shoot for 15k next week.

Looking at your kill from May 20th, you don't do this yourself - 83 4T8 procs over 3:43 combat time.

Just saying that we're not machines.

Even if you do that, realistically a lot of your 4T8 proc will be just overheal. And you better be over your haste cap 100% of the time.

Just gonna quote myself from a couple months ago here:
Vindication!

(XT- Hard) 95% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats
(IC - Hard) 98% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats
(Hodir - Hard) 95% healing from Rejuv / WG: http://wowwebstats.com/1djiba64rhszm...80000002376578
(Kologarn) 94% healing from Rejuv / WG: Wow Web Stats

Those logs are all from last night, by the way. There are some fights where I use Regrowth a little. Usually when we are dealing with healing more than 3 tanks. For example I was keeping RG/Rejuv (more or less) on like 5 tanks last night when we did Crazy Cat Lady. But for the most part, literally 95% or so of what I cast is just Rejuv / WG.

Yes I believe the topic of blanket hotting has been covered in the past, either in this thread or another. While it is supremely effective at topping the healing meters, it provides little to no benefit to a group of people that are about to receive a burst heal via lifebloom, chain heal, prayer of healing, CoH anyways. You are much more useful providing heals to the melee while making sure the tank stays up as well.

Impressive.

However, I was just commenting on your "you always get 15 people + 3 WGs" thing. Unfortunately WWS doesn't separate 4T8 procs from normal ticks so it's hard to estimate anything from the WWS stuff. I've had similar % numbers on a number of fights. Obviously this is very mana efficient, sustainable and high HPS approach - no question about that. I don't see any competitive strategy that can achieve and sustain +10k effective raid healing for any extended period of time.

Looks like the Hodir kill is the most consistent (well, there is the least surprise raid damage there, too). So let's assume that it was exactly according to 5 RJ + 1 WG plan (we can discount the two swiftmends over 3 min duration). I find the % breakdown interesting: 77% RJ, 19% WG - 4 to 1 ratio. According to the math above, theoretical ratio is 3 to 1 (so you'd be looking more at 75% to 25% or discounted for other procs, 72% to 24%). Since WG is a 1 sec hot, one would expect the opposite - WG stealing from RJ, not the other way around...

EDIT:

@ malthrin - IMO the whole point of 4T8 bonus is that people can make a rejuv blanket smarter than rejuv a group, hit WG, rejuv a group, hit WG. In fact, based on the above from Vazu's stats, constant rolling WG doesn't really make any sense. Constant rolling RJ does because of its long duration, but WG can be hit anytime it's actually necessary on people who actually need it instead of randomly smashing it in rotation, so for example you can hit it right before the start of frozen blows and then again, but by the 3rd time people should be pretty much maxed and RJ will take care of the aura damage just fine - WG would seem to be more of a waste of mana if nothing else.

I guess I really don't understand. If someone gets Gravity Bomb on XT, a Priest shields that person. Why would I LB? I'll throw a Rejuv on them as they run back, but Lifebloom isn't necessary. It's not BAD, but it's not like the person will die if I don't choose Lifebloom to heal them with. I think that's probably the biggest flaw in any arguement people make about how to heal. People always look at theoretical numbers and maximum HPS. How can I take this spell which isn't very effective and make an arguement about why YOU think it's good. See what I mean? Math only works in theory. Practice presents all kinds of different problems which you simply can't plan for with HPS math.

Regarding your other point on IC.

If a handful of people are soaking, are you only healing those soakers? Why wouldn't you just cast a HOT on every single GCD? Blanket hoting is only bad if you're running OOM. I can't remember how many soakers we have, but let's say there are 5 + 1 tank. Are you seriously going to just Rejuv 6 people, cast Wild Growth and then stand there? Why would you do that? Why not Rejuv the soakers, WG and then start throwing Rejuvs on other people? You use DoTimer don't you? Look at your bar for the first soaker. When that Rejuv runs out, re-apply it to all of them. It's not like nobody else in the raid is taking damage except for the tank and soakers. Everyone is taking damage pretty much. Why heal reactively? I'm a proactive healer. That's why I blanket cast hots. I think what you're implying is that I just randomly mash Rejuv on the entire raid, ignoring who might be most likely to take raid damage. Nothing could be further from the truth. I may blanket the raid with hots, but I'm doing it with a strategy.

Unfortunately, if they get shielded, the LB bloom will do very little healing because most of the damage would have already been mitigated. So, if you have a Disc priest assigned to shielding XT's damage target, you're better off just ensuring he has an active rejuv, unless during a tantrum.