I travel too much to get down to the math. I would find it helpful if someone could do a breakdown on the mana return of Crit rating. Because of Improved Water Shield, the critical strikes of our heals will trigger a mana return. It seems quite sizable. The lower cast time of Healing Surge, coupled with its lower critical strike trigger on Improved Water Shield, will keep it and Greater Healing Wave at a fairly constant mana return. Play styles then will have very little effect on the mana returns we get from Improved Water Shield being triggered.

Critical strikes then return mana, Crit rating (and Intellect) will then affect mana return. How does that affect compare to the mana return gained through Spirit. What is the "In Combat" mana return we can expect from let's say:

100 Spirit = ? In combat mana return
100 Critical Strike = ? In combat mana return
100 Intellect = ? In combat mana return

Before we can evaluate the importance of Spirit to the Resto-Shaman, we must know exactly what we are sacrificing when we get Spirit instead of Crit or Intellect.

I think our first concern should be to evaluate mana return as product of critical strikes and find out if perhaps the critical strike is the key to mana regen. A shaman that concentrates on Crit return, may have better mana regen than one that concentrates on Spirit stacking to regen mana. I don't have the time to do the math, but would appreciate it if one of you could do the evaluation for me. We might have a "gold mine" right in front of us.

Mastery is something that will never be constant for any two Shamans. If you are in a group with borderline healing, Mastery may be very valuable (such as during progression). If you are in a well established group where your healing demands are seldom pushed to the limit, Mastery will not be as valuable. Evaluating Mastery will not be complete until the stable known quantities like Spirit, Crit, and Intellect are completely evaluated.

My only concern on this - if you're factoring in the crit of tidal waves, shouldn't you use the reduced cast time of GHW with tidal waves?

Hmm. I've been running some numbers myself (I want to give them a once over and compare my findings to a couple of logs before I post them).

My numbers took into account the added crit for HS as well as the added Haste for GHW and every time I run my Spreadsheet I get almost identical HPM and HPS for RT/HS/HS vs RT GHW/GHW. GHW worked out to have slightly more overall healing for a 6 minute fight but HS was way ahead in the number of AA procs.

I've done some testing regarding our spells with mastery, unleash life, shock buff (focused insight), and earth shield buff (nature's blessing). Here's what i found out.

Spell	Mastery	Unleash	Shock	Earth Shield
Riptide Direct	X	X	X	X
Riptide HoT	o	X	o	X*
Chain Heal	X	X	X	X**
Healing Rain	X***	o	o	o
Earthliving HoT	o	o	o	o
Earth Shield	o	o	o	o

* = Check occurs at the time RT is cast (not per tick)
** = Only the bounce that hits shielded target gets the buff
*** = Mastery bonus is re-calculated every tick.

Opinion: This is somewhat disappointing for mastery, since it doesn't apply to earth shield or the earthliving hot, which are both often applied to low-health targets. Also, unleash and shock buffs can't be used on our biggest single spell, healing rain. The per-tick mastery bonus on healing rain is nice, and makes it a good candidate to pre-cast before big aoe damage lands.

Although not specifically for shamans, [Core of Ripeness] and [Figurine - Dream Owl] can currently both be used at the same time. I assume it will be fixed at some point.

Also, with regard to the Telluric Currents debate, I have found it invaluable on a few fights (Magmaw, Halfus) where you can easily regen your entire mana bar many times over the fight. But more importantly than that it is nice to be able to cast LB in burn phases knowing you don't have to save mana for it (Chimaeron < 20% for example). I'd definitely never raid without it.

Although a bit silly, it may still be decent to go back to [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] as one of our trinkets. Time it with Mana Tide and you get some pretty crazy regen.

I just bought a Blue Dragon to test, and yes, it does provide 100% of your Spirit based regen on a proc.

That is incorrect Krayleyna. What was mentioned in an earlier post was that the UnL buff lasts long enough that if you queue a Riptide after any heal, that heal, the subsequent RT direct heal and the RT HoT all benefit from the increased healing from UnL.

If a Riptide simply follows a UE, the buff is consumed.

I'm curious as to the interaction between CH, UE, and Riptide. What kind of direct healing can we see if we cast UE+CH into a target that has Riptide? Do the 25% from Riptide and the 30% (talented) from UE stack additively or multiplicatively (call Webster) or do they stack at all? If multiplicative we could see an increase of 1.25*1.3=1.625 or 62.5% increase for all jumps of Chain Heal making the spell quite useful.

This sounds tasty, but don't forget you're using 2 GCDs and you're completely losing the HOT component of the riptide, which causes you to actually do less overall HPM and HPS. I've been using UE before CH occasionally, but more often when I know group damage is about to come but hasn't yet (dispelling Valiona's blackout is a perfect example of this). For riptide it seems to me like it's usually better to just let the hots roll.

1. I've noticed that Riptide and ES consume UE. I assume UE + ES won't benefit from the bonus, since ES is not a hot or direct heal. I ran H Deadmines using the UE + ES combo and didn't notice a big increase from ES healing (following percent). Are others having the same results?

2. I've seen a split in CH and spot healing (HW) in early raiding. I'm not seeing the crazy proc effect of HW we did in late wrath.
e.g. Completely Different: Inziladun, 10 man
Primary heal, by count: HW (91)
RT (56)
AA (37) % of total healing 4.2
EL % of total healing 6
Compared to Play: Stattix, 25 man. Stattix mostly CH'd off the tank, Inziladun spot healed 4 - 5.
Primary heal: CH (86)
RT (16)
AA (25????) % of total healing 4.5 (21 HW, 2 GHW total)
EL % of total healing 7.8
If AA only proc's off LHW and HW crits, how did Stattix proc 25 AA with 21% crit?
With the proc rate off HW being so low, is the best recovery rotation HR + RT, CH x 2? or HR + RT, spot heal with HW?
It seems as though HW would be best given the mana regen off crit and EL proc rate (only 21% for CL, 100% for HW on targets below 35%), but I'm not seeing it in the logs.