I'll add the Cleansing Waters suggestion in the next update, but keep in mind that it's going to be very difficult to get any details on spell coefficients until a future build fixes the bug involving transferred characters having phantom talents (i.e. free points in talents that were removed from the game or otherwise altered). This makes it very difficult to accurately test coefficients, mana regenerate rates, and other forumula that require large amounts of raw data and/or modeling, as different shaman may have different phantom talents and there is no easy way to tell which ones a character may or may not have.

The thread has gone without updates for a couple weeks because of very little new information for Restoration other than the addition of Totem of Tranquil Mind as a counterpart of Concentration Aura and a post by GC regarding the inevitable removal of our Restorative Totems talent. GC also mentioned in a related post that the talent trees we are looking at are rather different than the ones currently available in the Beta.

That being said, I have several qualms with our talent options as they currently stand. First, the tree as a whole goes against their stated goal of being unable to go 31 points into a tree without picking up some optional utility talents. Even if we ignore Telluric Currents, Focused Insight, and Cleansing Waters as optional utility, we still end up with 31 mandatory throughput/regeneration talents (WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie). Replacing Restorative Totems with a utility talent would free up two points, but as things stand I am unable to pick up *any* utility/fun talents, e.g. Ancestral Resolve or Cleansing Waters.

Second, even though above I treated Focused Insight as an optional talent, in reality it feels like a mandatory PvE healing cooldown because the effect is too strong to ignore. Even worse, it shares a lot of design space with Unleashed Life. Both abilities have short timers and let us trade a GCD and some mana now for a stronger burst heal in the near future. Assuming the two stack, a shaman could trade two GCDs for a ~69% increase in a future healing spell. That's pretty significant for dealing with burst damage on a reliable timer (think of abilities like LK's Soul Reaper or BQL's air phase). Finally, the stacking must occur in the order of Unleashed Life--> Shock --> Heal, or else the Unleashed Life's initial heal will consume the Focused Insight effect. There are just too many odd interactions to keep two abilities that both compete for the same design space.

Third, the Acuity talent in Elemental feels like a talent intended for all three specs, but it feels very uninspired. It essentially reads "Increases the critical strike chance of every ability capable of a critical strike." Talents like Cruelty in the warrior Fury tree were changed from a blanket +critical chance to increasing the critical strike chance of specific iconic abilities. I wonder if a similar treatment would feel more compelling than the current state of affairs.

Correct me if you see this another way, but I understand it as if you cast it on anyone in your party, it will jump to own party members only. How about casting on someone outside your own party, does it then jump to that party only, or does it act normal (jumping between parties)?
Good sides: Yes, nice if you have to heal your own party only. Which imo is a bad way to assign heals. Unless you spend alot of time sorting the groups proper.
Bad sides: any fights where massive raid damage is needed to be healed, id rather have chain heal to always act like a smart heal.

Never the less, yes a fun change, calls for more awareness on the healers side.

Chain heal has always had this funny wording. If you are in a raid, mentally replace the word "party" with "raid." The restriction only really matters in outdoor combat, such as group questing or world pvp. For example if you are fighting in the Wintergrasp battle and your faction comprises 2 raid groups, a heal cast on someone in your raid won't bounce to the other one. (But a heal cast on someone in the other raid will bounce to anyone in either group.)

As a quick aside to Jessamy's post, Chain Heal will also not bounce to temporary pets (labeled as "Player's Guardian"), even if they are in your raid or party. This is only really useful to know if you need to heal up your fire elemental for some reason -- Chain heal will bounce properly to your party/raid if you chain through the elemental, but the elemental is not a valid target for a secondary bounce.

Some numbers:

1000 + 600 + 360 + 216 = 2176 (live, glyphed)
1000 + 700 + 490 + 343 = 2533 (new beta version)
900 + 720 + 576 + 461 = 2657 (beta, glyphed)

Same, but target only needs 500, anything more is overheal:

500 + 500 + 360 + 216 = 1576
500 + 500 + 490 + 343 = 1833
500 + 500 + 500 + 461 = 1961

So whether you consider overhealing or not, you need to hit 3 targets for the glyph to be a healing gain. If hitting 4 targets, the glyph provides a ~5% raw throughput gain, and a ~7% gain in my simplified overhealing example.

The OP has been updated with some of the more recent changes. As always, let me know if you spot an error or have some additional information/data.

I'm convinced that the new Chain Heal glyph is much, much stronger than the unglyphed beta version. One of the most basic tenets of Resto Shaman theorycrafting since TBC is that the Chain Heal bounces are always more efficient than the initial targeted heal for three reasons. First, the initial heal is generally more likely to be overheal because it heals for more than the damage received from a typical source of raid damage. Second, the smart bouncing effect means that subsequent bounces always go to the most needy raid members. Third, Chain Heal's slow casting time means that the initial heal is susceptible to being heal sniped. Even though the raw numbers between the glyphed/unglyphed Beta versions are virtually identical, the glyphed version has a more favorable distribution.

MMO-Champion has posted some major changes from a new internal build.

A lot of Resto changes:
* Lesser Healing Wave seems to have been renamed Healing Surge
* Improved Chain Heal is dead (yay!)
* Restorative Totems changed, now buff Healing Stream and Healing Rains
* The crit chance has been removed from Blessing of the Eternals

All in all, the changes seem to have opened up more opportunity to spec into some of the fun, optional utility talents.

First thanks for this thread and to all the posts. I'm interested in anyone's thoughts on a couple items. First is Focused Insight. It is recommended here and i understand the benefits from mana efficiency and burst healing. but it requires casting a shock spell first that w/o any hit rating may miss and then we waste a GCD and then don't benefit from focused insight. am i understanding it correctly? Is this really the best use of 3 points cause it seems that it will benefit only specific situations?

It is mentioned also that the new talent tree allows us to specialize in either raid or tank healing specs. Is it possible to build an effective spec that allows for both raid and tank healing, in the cases when a raid might not have a pally healer? Is skipping focused insight and having 3/3 in nature's blessing and 2/2 in soothing rains a viable alternative?

Focused Insight allows me to spend mana and a gcd now, in order to increase my healing in the future. This could be useful for a boss that has a predictable large attack that my tank needs to recover from, like a dragon's breath.

As to needing hit, the tooltip says I get the effect "after casting any shock spell." This implies that it will proc even if I miss -- I still cast the spell. Note that Focused Insight is multiplicative with Unleashed Life. This means that on the one hand it can offer a larger than 30% bonus to a future heal, but on the other hand it's redundant design.

While the ability to "spend a gcd now to heal better later" obviously does have some uses, the problem is simply that this talent costs too much and returns too little. A whopping three talent points so that you can use an entire GCD to only bring up one spell by 30%? This is only a good deal if you actually have that free GCD.

This also runs counter to the supposedly intended cataclysm design. The intent, as they say, is for there to be a lot of healing needed a lot of the time, but none of it being particularly life threatening. There isn't meant to be a "My tank is at full but if i don't land a big heal in a two second window he's going to die" moment. It is meant to be a more gradual decline and while sure, there will still be dragons and they will surely breathe, if the tank (or anyone else really) isn't at full health going into it, spending that GCD gaining 30% of a heal instead of 100% of a heal seems like a pretty bad break. Now will they succeed at this design? I'm sure not all of the time, but very likely enough of the time that its just not optimal to be throwing out shocks over Yet Another Heal.

Really the problem comes in that theres not actually really relevant other option to put those talent points in, but "the other Blessing/Soothing point" or Cleansing Waters seem like they will come into play more often and provide more real benefit than three points into "every once in a while, on some fights, when theres a huge lull and then a from-max-health-to-life-threatening tank burst, I can heal with one spell for 30% more once."

That said, it is a nice way to spend the second gcd while moving when Spiritwalker is down...

On another note, sad to hear Telluric is meant to be mana neutral, in the twitter conversation they had said it would be a viable regen mechanic. I can't imagine it would ever have been worth the two points, but sad to see it hit like that nonetheless.

I would like to submit my testing of Ancestral Awakening for community review. Please let me know if anything I did looks awkward or if there are any other variables I should account for.



Summary (i.e. the most salient points for those not interested in the actual data)

* Ancestral Awakening continues to behave oddly on the PTR/in Cataclysm.
* With 3/3 Spark of Life, AA will heal you for 32.91% of the original heal.
* With 3/3 Spark of Life, AA will heal someone else for 28.6% of the original heal.
* Without Spark of Life, AA will heal its target (you or someone else) for 27% of the original heal.
* None of these numbers match the 30% stated in AA's tooltip.



Background
From 3.0.8 through the end of 3.1, Ancestral Awakening double-dipped from the Purification talent, providing 33% healing instead of the listed 30% healing (see original testing and data here: [Resto] Glyph of Healing Wave and Ancestral Awakening Data) In 3.2, Ancestral Awakening was fixed to provide 29.7% healing, likely because Blizzard took the easy method of nerfing the talent itself rather than fix the Purification bug.

Test conditions
I preformed two short tests to determine how AA functions in Cataclysm. In test one, I used what I feel would be a fairly standard Resto build core including Spark of Life (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft). In the second, I used a similar build that left out Spark of Life. (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft).

Under both test conditions, the casting parameters were the same: I was not in a group, did not use Earthliving Weapon, and did not have any shield spell active. I cast Greater Healing Wave on myself until I got 6 crits, noting both the amount of each crit and the corresponding AA proc (which always healed me). I was also at full health at all times so as to remove mastery from the equation.

Hypothesis
My first hypothesis was that in the build without Spark of Life, the base Ancestral Awakening behavior would be unchanged from WOTLK: AA would heal for ~29.7% of the initial crit.

My second hypothesis was that the Spark of Life build would show that the talents would all be multiplicative (as was the case in WOTLK) and that Ancestral Awakening would heal me for ~36.20% of the initial crit (0.27 * 1.1 * 1.06* 1.15), where .27 is the unmodified initial AA proc, 1.1 is the Purification bonus, 1.06 is the outgoing healing from Spark of Life, and 1.15 is the incoming healing from Spark of Life.

Raw Data

Test One (with Spark of Life)

Crit Heal	AA Heal	Percentage
20459	6734	32.91%
19676	6476	32.91%
19750	6500	32.91%
20295	6680	32.91%
20902	6879	32.91%
20067	6605	32.91%

Test Two (without Spark of Life)

Crit Heal	AA Heal	Percentage
16459	4443	26.99%
17485	4721	27.00%
16912	4567	27.00%
16285	4397	27.00%
16584	4478	27.00%
16529	4463	27.00%

Analysis
The first thing we notice from Test Two is that whatever blizzard changed, they managed to fix the Purification bug (this is probably because it's a passive benefit rather than a talent.) Without any other talents for AA to double-dip from, it's only healing for 27% of the critical heal, or 3% less than the value indicated by the tooltip. This lends credence to the theory that Blizzard nerfed Ancestral Awakening back in 3.2 rather than fix the double-dipping issue. The question is, why does Ancestral Awakening no longer double dip from Purification? Is it because it's now a passive ability rather than a talent?

Additionally, Test One shows that we now have a new problem: AA double-dips from both portions of Spark of Life. We conclude this by looking at the percentages and doing a quick calculation: .27 * 1.06 * 1.15 = .3291. Given this, we can reach two conclusions: With 3/3 Spark of Life and before accounting for mastery, Ancestral Awakening will heal a third party for (.27*1.06=) 28.6% if this bug isn’t fixed, or (.3*1.06=) 31.8% if it is. Either way, the expected values differ from tooltip values by +/- ~1.5%.

Conclusion
My data makes it very clear that in 3.2 Blizzard decreased the healing provided by Ancestral Awakening to provide a band-aid fix to AA’s double dipping, but did not actually fix the code it, resulting in the strange interaction between Ancestral Awakening and Spark of Life that I have documented above. It also provides a strong case that the problem lies in the talents, not in any passive bonuses gained from non-talent sources.

Notes

* I performed more trials than those shown above, but the percentages always came out the same, +/- 0.01%. Only the first six data points are included for brevity.
* To make sure this wasn't an issue with GHW specifically, I also tested HW, HS(LHW), and RT. The results were the same for each test.