I do not share your concerns. I think IWS does not have an internal cooldown, as it's mostly not needed. The crit levels we have are not so high to assure back-to-back procs in a consistent manner. Also, the "issue" you have spotted is not an issue at all, as Healing Surge has 60% chance to proc IWS when it crits. I call it unfavorable RNG. Unless we are looking at a range of over 100 iterations of back-to-back HS crits, the data is unreliable. As I said, I do not think it has an internal cooldown, but further testing (or revealing the values for those tests) can prove me right or wrong.

For everyone wanting to check this on WoL, here is a handy query to filter exactly what you need:

(spell="Water Shield" AND type=TYPE_GAIN and targetname = 'Aanzeijar') OR (type = TYPE_HEAL AND fulltype != SPELL_PERIODIC_HEAL AND spell in ("Healing Surge", "Healing Wave", "Greater Healing Wave", "Chain Heal", "Riptide") AND isCritical AND sourcename = 'Aanzeijar') OR (targetname = 'Aanzeijar' AND type = TYPE_DAMAGE AND fulltype != SPELL_PERIODIC_DAMAGE)

Edit the name of course. It gives you Water Shield procs, non-periodic damage incoming and critical Water Shield proccing spells outgoing for a player.


Edit: From this log (pre 4.1):

[21:33:17.670] Aanzeijar Healing Surge Naturwichtel +*24763*
[21:33:17.670] Aanzeijar Riptide Helara +*10045*
[21:33:18.463] Aanzeijar gains 1517 mana from Aanzeijar's Water Shield
[21:33:18.463] Aanzeijar gains 1517 mana from Aanzeijar's Water Shield

[21:33:25.686] Aanzeijar Greater Healing Wave Shiyrea +*46525*
[21:33:25.686] Aanzeijar Riptide Shiyrea +*477* (O: 11270)
[21:33:26.486] Aanzeijar gains 1517 mana from Aanzeijar's Water Shield
[21:33:26.486] Aanzeijar gains 1517 mana from Aanzeijar's Water Shield

Your right Divis0R, I spaced the 60% chance.

Running the query's Aanzeijar listed gave me a pretty solid answer towards IWS not having an ICD;

From tonight's raid log.

[19:30:32.318] Zuzum Healing Wave Rockmellon +*12894*
[19:30:34.537] Zuzum Healing Wave Shebull +*6552* (O: 7825)
[19:30:36.350] Zuzum Healing Wave Shebull +*8536* (O: 5155)

[19:30:32.740] Zuzum gains 1745 mana from Zuzum's Water Shield
[19:30:34.709] Zuzum gains 1744 mana from Zuzum's Water Shield
[19:30:36.725] Zuzum gains 1744 mana from Zuzum's Water Shield

Base Mana is 23430, 1% of that is 234.3 mana. Each Riptide will have 8 opportunities to proc (below the second haste breakpoint), making it worth 234.3 * 8 * 0.4 = 749.76 mana. We also know from logs that shaman had about 40-70% uptime on the 4pcT11. Lets take 50%. So for reality we can expect it to return 749.76 / 6 * 0.5 * 5 = 312.4 mp5, give or take 20% for how well your uptime is. Seems like a better 2pc bonus than our current one. Personally stronger than our 4pcT11, but weaker for the group.

You forget that our 4piece now has just the 6 sec duration. The new 2piece will count your whole glyphed Riptide of 20+sec. Additionally you'll have multiple riptides up most of the time. I usually have at least 2 RTs up which tick about every 2.5sec which would mean 4 RT ticks per 5 sec so 4*0.4*234.3 = 374.88mp5 with an optimal reggen (if you recast RT on CD) of 618.55mp5 (~20sec duration, 6sec CD => 3.3 RTs up at every time point, with 2.5sec tick intervall that means 6.6 ticks every 5 sec so 6.6*0.4*234.3=618.55 mp5). seems to be quite strong for a 2 piece.

No I didn't forget that. I just took evidence from the uptime of our 4pcT11 to get how often people would cast Riptide. 6s cd and 6s 4pcT11 would mean 100% uptime for optimum. I calculated with 50% (based on logs) and got 312 mp5, you calculated optimum and got 618 mp5. Having 2 Riptides up at any time would translate for my calculation method to 11.5s between your Riptide cast, which is slightly over 50%. Seems like we both got the same result. Only your ticks every 2.5 seconds inflate the mp5 a bit, because you don't get that 8.4 tick at the end until the next breakpoint.

I noticed that all of the new mail non set gear has haste on it. With that much it should be easy to get a 9th tick out of Riptide, which is instantly 40 mp5 more.

Ya there seems to be a lot of people complaining about it, but Chain Heal is already our go to heal on 25 heroics. A straight buff for it seems like a solid 4 piece. I also cannot see avoiding T12 pieces in favor of the T11 set bonus when the 2 piece T12 is, based on the math, at least as good.

T11 is not an option, but other bonuses from the same tier are.

On our farm raid this week, I had 6.9% Chain Heal, with only 16 of those hitting 4 targets over an entire raid evening, and half of those were in Maloriak's black phase and not even intended to hit more then tank and melees. For me, the 4pc bonus is worthless.

Now, it will be interesting to see how they implement the 2pc elemental bonus. Resto Fire Elemental already is 40% longer active, and TC and FI are accepted tools. In any case, bringing a few extra dps to the fight looks like a better option than buffing a healing spell I rarely use (now).

Source: 4.2 Patch Notes

Apparently the new IWS will scale with the amount healed by the crit, but I can't confirm this yet since I'm loading up the PTR right now. I got that information from the Shaman forums.

It looks like crit will be jumping up as a better regen stat for us, and will scale hand in hand with mastery (Lower health for larger crits will give larger mana returns). It'll be interesting to see if this pulls ahead of secondary stats with these upcoming changes.

It won't scale with the amount healed by the crit, you will get more mana from slow heals (hw and ghw) and less mana from fast heals and multi target heals

It will still be less hps vs other stats.

the 100% crit means it's on par with haste throughputwise as a % of stats. 1% crit = 1% throughput. 1% haste = 1% throughput. However, because of needing less haste rating to hit 1%, haste has the hps edge.

For mastery, the buff basically means that crit for aoe has the same breakpoint as single target heals now (67%). Single target I can't say, but it will be no lower than haste breakpoint (48%).

You also need to take into consideration that crit is a proc of throughput, while haste and mastery are not, you can count on them when you need them.

All this being said though, come 4.2 if this holds, I'm thinking crit will be stacked, but not in place of mastery or haste. What I'm thinking however is that crit will very well become our replacement for spirit.. Since blizz seems perfectly fine with an active regen mechanic from TC, and since MTT was nerfed into the ground, I'm thinking just completely dumping spirit will be viable. Then its just stack 2k crit instead of 2k spirit, and have a pure hps build, much like wrath gearing style. Mana return from crit and TC will fill in the gaps that Int and replenishment can't cover for your fight length.

It will of course depend on the fight (as many glyph choices tend to), but I can certainly imagine Glyph of Unleashed Lightning becoming a popular third prime glyph for TC shamans, especially over the lackluster Glyph of Water Shield, which serves a similar purpose.

Based on the math of Jynus in R41#4 the health breakpoints for crit/mastery would be

• multi target - 66.7%
• single target - 46.7%

Also, I've locally modified the GHW/HS spreadsheet to use the current coefs and the 4.2 crit modifier, and under Tidal Waves GHW and HS are virtually identical in HPS and HPM. Below ~25% HS is even better HPM than GHW, assuming they kept the 60% IWS procs for HS.

When checking Crit vs Spirit don't forget one important point : in term of personnal effect Crit should be on par with Spirit or even better, but Crit won't help your fellow healers. In 10 men raids that may be worth going for Hast/Crit or Mastery/Crit, but in 25 men raids even a 'nerfed' Tide is still the main reason why we are taken in the roster, so switching to a no-Spirit equipment may have an impact on the whole raid.

In order to update thoses spreadsheets : HS vs GHW and Stat comparison, I should change the 1.95 crit modifier by 2*1.3 = 2.6 modifier, shouldn't I?
I see that someone modified the spreadsheet using 6365 as HS average 'base' heal instead of 7697 and 10182 as GHW 'base' heal instead of 10255. Should I take those values as the 'right' ones?

N.B.: According to sodrow, the mana returned by Mana Shield will depend on the cast time of the heal, so the HPM part of that spreadsheet may not be accurate for PTR (and thus for 4.2).

You mean despite Chain Heal and Healing Rain providing a massive amount of groupheal, GHW being one of the strongest single target heals in game (although it's quite expensive) and being the only healer that can assist on interrupts and that can "heal" healing immune targets such as ChoGall heroic 100 corruption player, Halfus-Tanks and Chimaeron P3 tanks. I think by now we bring much more to a 25man raid than just a Mana Tide.

You can take the coefs of GHW and HS from the first post, I verified them 2 days ago while I was testing accuracy of tooltips. My tests resulted in at least 3 significant digits being correct with +-3 on the forth digit. That's good enough.

As for changes to the spreadsheet, when I modified it, I added a little switch "4.2" that increased the crit modifier to 2 and 2.6 and IWS gains by 50%. Currently IWS gives 60% for HS, and has 60% base cast time of GHW. Until tested I think 60% is reasonable to assume for the new IWS and HS.

The exact numbers on mana restored by 2/2 resurgence:

HW and GHW - 2293 mana
Riptide, Unleash Life, and Healing Surge - 1376
Chain Heal - 764

So it seems the feedback has forced a change to the 4P and we can pretty much ignore the earlier theorycrafting done on the extra chain heal jump.

Restoration 2-Piece Bonus: Your periodic healing from Riptide has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.
Restoration 4-Piece Bonus: Your Chain Heal spell no longer consumes your Riptide effect on the primary target.

Will this affect how Riptide is calculated in spreadsheets in terms of output? I think the change will be fantastic and we can measure CH higher now that we can multicast chain heal on the same target.

And even better we can now roll Riptides on melee camp + 2 range camps simultaneously to always have a target for an +25% Chainheal where it's needed. This will lead to >90% buffed Chainheals instead of the ~30% right now. And additionally it will increase Riptide Healing by a small amount and will work really good with the 2piece.

I fear this will start a new wave of bad "only ever heal the Riptide target" advice similar to the "never heal the beacon" stuff of the paladins. It is however nice to be able to chain over the tank once more.

"Only ever" is to harsh. This is why I said 90% buffed CHs. There will always be situations where you have to CH non-riptided targets but most of the time you'll be able to cast buffed CHs due to smart jumps accounting for most of the heal CH does anyway.
Same was true for Healdruids only rejuvenating Wild Growth'ed people for maximum mastery effect. It's actually a quite common concept among healing classes, like it or not.

This new set bonus is also significantly better for 10-mans. I assume that was part of Blizzard's decision in canning the old one (extra CH bounce).

Moreover, it increases the reward for Shamans who set up ahead of time with Riptides rolling on multiple targets, and unlike the other classes's 4-piece bonuses (which are more or less automated and uncontrollable) the Shaman's bonus requires preparation and intelligence.