It appears your breakpoints are largely correct, but off by one tick. I am definitely getting 6 ticks out of healing rain even with zero haste. I took off all of my haste gear and tried it several times to make sure. Perhaps you are neglecting the fact that it ticks instantly when dropped?

I then dropped wrath of air totem (which your numbers assume) and equipped enough haste for 5% from gear, after which healing rain began giving me 7 ticks instead of 6 per cast.

Lastly, I equipped more haste (1350ish) and a witching hourglass (+1710) and healed a guard until it procced, which yielded 8 ticks.

You are right of course, I totally neglected that instant tick. Thanks for pointing it out

Corrected breakpoints for Healing Rain below:

[edit]old ones were correct anyway, thanks Kethion.

Your earlier haste breakpoints were correct, as the first tick of Healing Rain will always occur when you finish casting the spell, thus be unaffected by haste (unless you count the spell cast time). Essentially, the tick at zero seconds is a "free" tick that is tacked on to the front (think of it like the direct heal portion of riptide ), meaning that, assuming 0 haste rating, there are still only 5 ticks that can be pushed to an earlier time via haste.

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to cite Paragon Resto Shaman when discussing the optimal way to gear. From what I gather the Resto Shaman in Paragon (and the other bleeding edge Guilds) are there as Healing Rain and MTT bots. Healing Rain to act as a raid wide buffer as well as to spread ELW and MTT to allow the "real" healers to have the juice to heal.

If HR and ELW are your two primary heals then I can see why they would ignore Mastery for more Haste and Crit.

Would you mind providing the math behind this?

You gather correctly, Mana Tide is the only real reason to bring Shamans to a raid atm, as in terms of raw healing potential, we're simply worse than the others.

This does not however mean that as they are forced to bring said Shamans, they haven't tried to optimize these as well. HR should indeed be your primary heal in raids, and CH is your secondary tool for spreading ELW in 25mans. Whenever you reach truly high levels of throughput, in the region of 20-25k HPS for a short period of time, ELW will make up 30-40% of your total healing. This shouldn't, as far as I know, be in any question? GHW and HW obviously can't compete, and HS is worse than CH if CH completes all its jumps. This simply leaves riptide, which is either more important in 10mans or less important in 25mans, and either which way scales best with haste, not mastery.

If you've got a solution which would improve HPS over this scenario, I'd be happy to hear it.

I agree we lack behind in raw healing power for most current raid environments. As a class i feel we have to watch our mana usage a little more since all other classes (except druids atm) have a better self regen, on top of getting our mana tide. But thats not to say that the raw healing power isnt there, or i guess it would be better to say it is situational compared to other classes. But if you recall shamans were hailed as the best back in TBC and became the weaker class in WotLK which seems to have carried into cata. Which is why i think they are reevaluating chain heal and mana tide. I am worried about the trinket effects with mana tide but will have to wait and see what finally goes live with it. You just have to remember that now shamans have to worry a little bit more about crit and spirit for regen then we did back in Wotlk so we have other stats that are taking away from haste that we used to stack up so high. If only improved water shield was a proc on cast instead of crit then we would be in business.

Mana, largely, isn't an issue in 25mans. We don't need to hold back, we don't need to gear for regen any more than anyone else, these excuses simply do not apply. For 10mans, we might be slightly more mana constrained, but gear does alleviate this. The difference is, however, that in 25mans it makes sense to bring Shamans for Mana Tide, in 10mans you're generally better off just bringing another class. In both cases, our healing output is just not there, even when gearing fully for throughput.

The upcoming patch won't change this, as it does not address the problems of mastery, the GHW buff is barely an improvement on the current HS usage (and neither is competitive/important in 25man raids) and the CH buff alone won't make up for more than perhaps 1% of the disparity in overall healing compared to the other classes.

I understand what your saying and I can not personally speak on 25man raids in cata. But recently was able to two heal all of bastion with a pally, with very few wipes. While he pretty much blew me out of the water on healing if you care to take a look at logs you can see most of his healing was on tanks, almost all of it was, while mine was almost exclusive to the raid. Could the raw healing potential be partly due to healing assignments now? Tanks get hit hard and fast in most fights and if its just tank damage that has never been a shamans specialty.

With the mana regen i do understand, there are times when i never dip in mana, then other times Its like I am hardly able to cast a HW. I think a lot of this has to do with Crits and taking light dmg that triggers WS procs. Would love to hear other thoughts on this.

Anyway, I am not doubting that other healers can out heal us, but i am simply wondering if there may be another way to work around it. Even with these changes that are coming I am in total agreement with you there that they are not enough but it at least shows that they are looking into it. Would be nice to have a talent such as if earth sheild is on a target you could cast something that would use all charges but the target takes 30-40% less dmg for some amount of time on some sort of cooldown on par with other healers.

I agree for the most part and the norm for me (in 25's) is HR/CH/ELW with CH sometimes number one. ELW does make up a significant portion of my healing but by far the majority of my healing comes from HR and CH which both benefit from Mastery.

So we have.....
HR which benefits from Mastery, Haste (at breakpoints) and Crit (partially since we don't get AA or WS procs from HR crits)
CH which benefits from Mastery, Haste (the primary use of Haste is it's effect on CH IMO) and Crit
ELW which benefits from Haste (at breakpoints) and Crit (paritally again for the same reasons as HR)

It just seems your giving too much importance to ELW in your dismissal of Mastery.

Your information about the Insightful gem is wrong. It doesn't restore mana every 15 seconds, but as a 5% chance on spell cast. This ends up being more like every ~40 seconds, not 15 to 20. Here is the math I did comparing healer meta gems:

[Resto] Cataclysm Theorycrafting (Updated Oct. 13)

Make sure to read the next few posters who responded and corrected some of my incorrect assumptions.