I can confirm your testing. I got those same results almost a month ago on beta. Posted a bug report about it on the forums (in game report wasn't working at the time), a squib on totemspot, and then completely forgot about it. I did one additional test in casting HW on someone else and hitting myself with procs (swapping in and out 1 piece of gear to drop my health slightly) and found the same results there.

Your analysis is much better thought out that what I gave to Blizzard, my two small confusions were in hypothesis 2, where it took me a couple seconds to realize you were talking about AA procs double dipping from those talents. And secondly, AA procs off CH?

A minor mistype in the second paragraph of your analysis. Typed "before accounting for" twice.

How much additional healing does our mastery do? If it was at a consistent 11% increase in healing done(i.e. you get 11% when they are at full health), that might be the culprit. I'm assuming blizzard will not let ancestral double dip into our mastery.

If nothing else, try re-testing with various levels of health and see if your AA% change.

Micro Edit for response with lack of spam:
Well there goes that theory... guess blizz did just nerf and never compensated....

It's rather annoying to test mastery (the only spell we have that benefits from mastery and doesn't have a large difference between the upper and lower bounds is the direct heal portion of Riptide), but the druids have tests that their Deep Healing scales linearly with health, from +0% at full health to +x% at 1 health, where X% is the total healing granted by mastery. I have no reason to believe that our Deep Healing functions differently.

I did a little testing on the mastery.

My tooltip says "Increases the potency of your direct healing spells by up to 31%, based on [...]".
I have 3895 Spell Power and used no buffs (no earthliving, no totems, nothing). I have 604 mastery rating (which are 4.42 mastery). I am level 84.

I casted a few heals with Riptide which really has almost no variance in its upper or lower bounds as Philondra has already mentioned. I noted down the percentage of HP i currently have and the amount that the direct portion healed (the HP percantages are rounded to whole numbers so there might be some slight inaccuracy).

I entered the values into a spreadsheet and the results were the following:



So yes, it is obviously linear and shows the results that could be expected.

It is interesting that it increases by a percentage. That could imply that it doesn't actually add any Spirit on it's own, hence hybrid casters getting extra Hit from this. Now I don't think that's the intention, but the tooltip is fairly vague on this. Of course Kings and Gift are in a similar boat. But basically all they do is to increase the value of Spirit from gear.
To no mislead the tooltip should really say: "... now adds Spirit equal to 200% of party members within 40 yards." This clearly adds Spirit on it's own.

Kings and Gift don't give spi anymore.

I've got a couple more updates to the OP coming in the next day or so, but I just wanted to address a couple questions/concerns really quickly:

1. This thread is our thread, of which I am but the humble organizer. However, in the absence of strong community input, many of the things contained in the OP (such as talent recommendations) are going to be my best analysis coupled with conversations I have had with thread contributors and other shaman I know and trust. Please use this thread to discuss anything and anything you wish (provided it's related to resto shaman and abides by the rules of this forum) and I will do my best to keep it updated with the current community consensus.

2. Haste and hots: This does not warrant a full analytical post as it is easy to check for yourself, but I have noticed that haste does not affect Earthliving or the Riptide hot. It does, however, affect Gift of the Naaru. It's unclear whether or not this is intended.

3. Cleansing Waters: I'm happy to provide the full data if interested, but I have done tests that place the coefficient of the Cleansing Waters heal (with 2/2 Cleansing Waters) at approximately .3302. The variance between the upper and lower bounds makes it difficult to get clear data with a small sample size, so I welcome any raw data that anyone can supply me with.

Haste is affecting the riptide HoT on the current version of the PTR, earthliving however is not affected by haste yet. I also noticed that Riptide hot and Gift of the Naaru ticks were critting. Cleansing water crits as well as healing wave glyph crits are not procing AA as anticipated.


EDIT: removed incorrect information posted based on testing proved my claims were inaccurate.

That is a very odd observation given what Rouncer posted in the enhsim thread

The Healing Wave glyph has never procced AA or Ancestral Healing when critting, unfortunately. At this point I'm willing to say that it's by design.

I too noticed that they fixed the Riptide hot benefiting from crit and haste, and it's also worth pointing out that Riptide hot crits will not proc AA or Ancestral Healing either. Again, that's probably by design, as priests are experiencing the same behavior with Renew.

September 30th:
* Mana Tide Totem now increases Spirit by 350%, up from 200%.
* Cleansing Waters now also reduces the cost of Cleanse Spirit by 20/40%.
Source: mmo-champion.com

Without reliable coefficients for spirit-to-mp5 I would assume that this just brings it back up to par with current behavior on live. Can a beta tester test that out?

The Cleansing Waters ability is more interesting, mainly in that there does not seem to be any corresponding mana reduction for the Paladin, Priest or Druid talents. This could be a new specialization niche for Shamans in a world of limited mana and greater task coordination among healers.