I was reading the sticky post about resto shaman and I have a question regarding the stats resto shaman need to stack mentioned in there. I know in wrath we need to stack lots of haste because mana was never a problem, so more haste gives better healing. But as of now, healer's mana problem is such a great issue, why is haste still more important than spirit? Haste gives faster heal but also eats up mana pool faster. I am just quite puzzled by this. Hope someone can give me some reason into this?

I hope this isn't too hand-holding and infraction worth:

Considering our standard approved build currently includes fire nova talents in an expansion that has little "burn the trash" type moments due to CC being needed i'd assume it would be better to put the points into either Reverberation or Precision.

Precision would give us a bit more damage from everything but Stormstrike and white hits while Reverberation would increase the amount of shocks we can dish out in a given timeframe.

Would this not be a better spec to run over the one including fire nova? I've gone for reverb and 1/3 in Elemental Precision but i'm not so sure. The answer is of course "sim it and see" but i'm not sure our tools are updated enough to model/handle this well enough and there's not going to be MASSES in it.

Kitteh the issue is that you can't trade the points in Imp Fire Nova for Reverberation or for Elemental Precision since you need those 2 points to get to 31 in Enhancement so you can put any points in the Elemental tree.

2/2 Imp Fire Nova or 2/3 Imp Shields or 2/2 Totemic Reach or even 2/2 Frozen or Earthen Power or 2/3 Toughness are the available options. Imp Shields offers a small single target damage boost (roughly 0.5% per talent point) and Imp Fire Nova offers a decent boost for 4+ target encounters. Saying which is better really comes down to the specifics of the encounter but neither option is going to be very good or very bad so just pick whichever feels more valuable to you.

How come enhance doesn't use Primal Strike?

A couple things I would like to nitpick...

First, I personally don't use Riptide + HW, it seems like a waste of TW to me. For tiny top off heals HW works fine on it's own, or even Riptide on it's own.

Second, I don't know if the casting order was implied in UL + Riptide + GHW, but Riptide consumes UL. You would definitely want to change the order to Riptide + UL + whatever heal you want, since Riptide's direct heal is rather small and you wouldn't see much of a boost from UL.

Third, if you're going oom too often get more spirit (obviously). Also, since you're not raiding, swap out that CH glyph for WS. WS may not scale, but the chance of landing all 4 bounces of a glyphed CH in a heroic pug are almost nil. That means that you're losing hpm on CH by having it glyphed.

Paddington_Bear, Unleash Weapon also affects the Riptide HoT, so it's not a bad idea to buff it. And while I agree that the CH glyph isn't good for heroics, you can't switch it out for WS, because CH is major and WS is prime. A likelier candidate would be Hex.

I was about to ask the following questions, but then I said: why not testing it myself?

Test environment
I was using a Warlock friend, who was keeping his health as low as possible with lifetap to fulfill two goals: Minimize mastery inconsistencies in data recorded, make CH cast on me proc a jump on him.
Didn't do a lot of tests (15 mins?) but I think it's enough to understand how certain things works.
Previously I did the same tests with Riptide, and found out the power up indeed affected all jumps.


Does the Unleash Earthbind buff affect all jumps of CH, or just the first?
From my tests it showed UE indeed affects all jumps.
Normal jumps were healing for averagely ~5.1k, whereas with the buff they were averaging ~6.8k

Does the Unleash Earthbind buff stack with the riptide powerup?
Yes, it does indeed stack with it, I was getting even higher numbers on jumps when I was consuming the Riptide buff cast on myself.

Does the Unleash Earthbind buff stack with Riptide?
This has been tested already but I had to test it again. It works with the initial part of the spell, not with the HoT.



Hope this will be useful.
Now a question for everybody else. The current Resto guide says that Ancestral Awakening cannot proc off Unleash Earthbind. Are you people sure about this? Because I got a couple of Ancestral Awakening proc from Unleash, when I was testing on my friend.
Or maybe it was just the old "lagged AA" bug, and what appeared to me as a fast proc from Unleash, was actually a very slow and delayed proc from the CH I cast previously.
Just wondering if this has been already tested thorougfully or not.



Edit:
From what I found out, it would be logical to assume that the Unleash Flametongue works the same way, hence, it should affect all the jumps of Chain Lightning. Wouldn't this make it an interesting option to use in situations where you want to maximize your CL damage?
I find myself using Unleash Flametongue a lot, probably more than I should be. But it sometimes represent a good filler to use before a Lava Burst, for those situations when you're waiting for cooldown, but LB would take too much, and the GCD of Unleash looks perfect, doesn't it?

Few resto questions from a beginner shammie:

1. How to raid heal in a fight when raid takes a lot of damage? (eg: Maloriak). Is riptide/UE worth casting when all raid is hurt, or do you just stick to HR/CH? Should I worry about keeping 3 riptides up, or is it okay to use CH immediately after Riptide?

2. How good is [Jar of Ancient Remedies] for resto shamans? Is there a list of 359 BiS items? Is there such a thing as too much spirit? .

3. I read in the Resto thread that Int>Haste>Spirit>Crit>Mastery, but are there some aproximative coefficients for that? Eg: Is [Enchant Gloves - Greater Mastery] better than [Enchant Gloves - Haste]?

If there is a big source of damage coming up that you can clearly foresee and you can afford to waste the GCDs before it happens, then I guess placing riptides around the raid, maybe even storing 1 Unleash Earthbind powerup, and then shooting Chain Heals around is a very nice thing. Especially if you cast 1 CH and then use another one right after with Nature's Swifteness.
Don't think there are a lot of situations where you can behave like that, but when you do it's a good way to cure a lot of raid damage in a short time, I guess?
In all other situations the answer would probably just be a "no", just stick to CH and single target heals accordingly, without bothering about the powerups mechanics.


I think the current guide doesn't mention it, except briefly in the glyphs section, but if you're just starting out with raid and your gear is still bad, I think you might want to put Spirit above Haste in that tier list.

Few questions:

1: The tooltip for Windfury weapon says "Each hit has a 20% chance of dealing additional damage equal to two extra attacks with X extra attack power". Does this mean that those are not 2 seperate attacks and do not increase your odds of procing on hit abilities? Do they even count as 1 extra swing or is it just straight up bonus damage on one swing?

2: What is the PPM rate of the various weapon skills, flametongue, frostband, etc?

2a: Are PPM rates calculated using normalized numbers? For example, if I am using a 1.4 speed oh dagger, is the ppm for frostbrand calculated using the daggers normalized 1.7 speed?

Why would you swap SS for FT when you could swap Feral Spirits for FT and gain even more dps?