Well the downraking penalties + high mana costs are simply needed to fix the manaregenaration system. In TBC mana has harldy been an issue ever, get more + healing and downrank as much as needed so you could keep on spamming 24/7. For some spells you even get more HPM if you downrank, that can't be.

Where haste was introduced to put more presure on mana pools it did the opposite, people downrank simply more and their HPS was going up so fast with haste that the lower ranks didn't really matter.

It should be noted that blizz has stated that the mana costs for spells are not finalized and they do plan to do another pass to fix the issues(Source). With that in mind I would recommend to hold off on making any decisions until they are finalized.

It remains to be seen. This sort of Paladin spec will be great at generating raw hps. But it will be all the 'wrong' sort of healing - unpredictable HoTs coupled with relatively slow burst healing.

Consider who you'd rather have as a 'burst' healer on your tank - a guy who is almost never (once every 2 minutes or so) in GCD and who can predictably throw a 1.9s large heal every time, or a guy who is frequently trapped in GCD and has a 25% larger heal at 2.0s? I'd argue the former (Shaman) is better than the latter (Paladin) because as a raid leader, the value of a 6k heal I absolutely know will be there in 1.9s is more than the value of an 8k heal that will be there from 2.0s -> 3.5s from now.

Likewise, Paladins can potentially generate huge 'rolling HoTs' via Sheath. But when it gets right down to it, I'd rather have the Resto Druid generating those HoT so every other healer has a good idea precisely how much healing is steadily flowing into the tank. The valleys and peaks in HoT performance provided by Sheath aren't matched to the damage the tank is taking in any way, so the overall impact isn't very useful in a multi-healer environment.

That doesn't mean I think Shaman will be MT healers (I didn't touch on what Druids/Priests bring to the task) - just that hps isn't actually the whole story.

I have yet to see any new ranks of Chain Heal, so its tough to determine how much the cycle will actually cost.

That being said, my suspicion is that a precise CH/HW/HW or CH/LHW/LHW cycle won't actually be the way healing works out. Without better information on post-70 CH ranks, we can't run the numbers precisely. However, the level 70 disparity is sufficient that a pure CH cycle will be both more efficient and higher throughput (aggregated across all targets) than intermixing HW/LHW. So if you're actually using a 'cycle', it would be CH/CH/CH.

However, the reduction in cast time isn't useless. It radically ramps up the reaction speed for single target healing. So my supposition is that the 'cycle' would be more akin to "cast Chain Heal, repeat unless someone is taking a lot of single target damage, in which case cast 1-2 HW/LHW". Since you're constantly casting CH anyway, the casting time reduction will be up whenever you need it.

Right now its a useful talent to partially for the damage component, because there is a little to no damage in healing gear. With the damage component is removed as it seems to read to me and a resto shaman already having significant spellpower, wouldn't that make it less desirable? I could certainly see taking a pass on it in pvp builds in order to go deeper into enhance for improved mobility/survivability.

Like I said I am fine with not gaining a higher heal/mana from down ranking I just hate overhealing when I know I could down rank and pick a heal that is appropriate. I am not against blizz normalizing downranking for all heals so that downranking is now longer higher hpm. I am against making it so a heal that is half your max rank is 80% of the mana of your max rank.

For example if blizzard whats to make it so our max rank healing wave is only 5 heal per mana even with 2k spellpower thats fine I assume they will balance accordingly. However what I am against is with the current system having your rank 6 healing wave drop to something like 2 hpm almost. Why not just make it so all spells stay at the same hpm as your max rank making downranking a good choice to prevent overhealing but otherwise not desireable for any type of healing throughput.


I never thought it was all that great of a damage talent but if thats what you use it for then I guess there woudn't be much reason to use it now (we still haven't seen it even reach the beta servers yet though). I still think it offers a fair amount of healing bonus for only 3 points and I would expect any PVE build to pick it up.

I guess it just doesn't seem better than purification (point for point) anymore to me despite being 2 tiers deeper. I'm not suggesting a full restoration PVE shaman wouldn't take it as it is now, but I don't think its out of line to suggest it be just a bit better. I guess I need to see the new final ranks of spells and healing coefficients to really rate it.

The issue, for the most part, with the new talents is not that they're not powerful. They are. The problem, in majority, is that Chain Heal really is that much better than any other heal out there. It's insanely mana efficient and outputs more healing per cast than pretty much any other heal in the game. All the new talents for HW definitely make it a more attractive healing option, but adding procs isn't going to change the fact that if you're spamming a spell, it will be Chain Heal. The new talents don't make Shamans any more of a main tank healer than Paladins and Priests already are, though they certainly have an option for that which they didn't previously have.

Remember, however, that there are blessedly few fights in a raid environment where swapping between single-target and mass healing is necessary, especially with the base advantages that Chain Heal has. That's the reason that I fully intend on going a low-Resto spec and remaining a Chain Heal spammer, and progressing far enough in other trees to gain benefits from them as well. Depending on your raid composition, especially in 10-mans, I can see going into the other trees deeper while sacrificing all the Healing Wave-oriented spells. Sure, you don't get Spirit Link, but at this point, Spirit Link doesn't appear to be a necessity, and if it is, you only need one Spirit Link Shaman per raid.

While I think Shamans got some of the more powerful talents out of the expansion, a good majority of them are wasted trying to make a spell which is inherently sub-optimal more useful. It does make HW a viable option, and I wouldn't begrudge any Shaman to gear up for crit and spec for HW crits, but I'd be more inclined to remain in my raid healing role. If I wanted to be a main tank healer, I would have rerolled Pally a long time ago.

Chain heal being the most powerful heal is BC thinking. As you note, it hasn't been improved at all by anything in WotLK. Meanwhile both druids and paladins got AoE heals, and priests got talents to make CoH 10% better all the time, 15% better and 10% more crit on targets at < 50% health, and it now crosses groups in a smart manner like chain heal.

Given CoH in it's current state is approximately equal or perhaps slightly better than chain heal on fights where you have an entire group bunched up and all taking damage, I have a hard time believing it wont always be vastly superior to chain heal with these changes. Flourish and Beacon of Light are harder to judge, but Flourish on paper looks very strong, and Beacon of Light looks situational, but in the right situations could be really good.

On the other hand, for shaman, a CH, HW x2 rotation is far higher throughput of healing than just casting chain heal. In fact it's not even close, my calculations have the rotation caster doing about 40% more healing in the same space of time (mostly due to tidal wave and ancestral awakening). Sure, the nature of chain heal means the chain heal will probably do less overhealing than the rotation, but I have a hard time believing it can even come close to bridging the gap.

The way I'm seeing it, unless things change before release a shaman that just wants to chain heal is a waste of a raid spot.

CH is good, no doubt about that, but the new CoH will be way better, without a doubt, Flourish (or nourish) might be good, but first have to see how it will work, will it be smart like CH/CoH ?

Also don’t forget that CH lacks on big thing, and that is mobility. CoH, lifebloom and flourish will have that mobility, and if you did SwP, then you know how insane valuable mobility has become.

-> Kortar. Sheat of light is good for it's 30% AP- > spellpower part, will add around 500-700 spellpower (=1k-1.5k healing), the HoT part will hardly do anything for tank healing. Now a pally with his 1.8 sec HL (+haste, we'll see 1.5sec HLs) and also a good instant heal will be the most reliable/consistent tank healer, he was so in TBC and he will be so in WotLK. Only class that I can see getting close is priests, +15% armor, the ability to do 30% of all your healing to a selected char (+30% healing if both are the tank) and the 50% mana returned when you overheal more then 50%.

And the shaman wont be doing consistent healing on the tank, not with a CH-HW-HW cycle. IF Soul link will be working on Main Tanks (which I doubt) then such a cycle could work. Or if AA would heal a target 0,5 or 1sec AFTER you landed a crit heal, that would improve shaman tank healing a lot.

Priests do it all the time in current BC raiding. To generalize a great deal, Holy Priests are your 'reserve' of healing. Everyone else has a fairly specific set of tasks - Resto Druids HoT the tanks, Resto Shaman Chain Heal the raid, Holy Paladins burst heal the tank. What Holy Priests do is back up each of the more narrowly focused healers as needed. If you look a good Holy Priest's WWS for most raids, you'll notice they use virtually every healing spell they have in a raid. Those Flash Heals are going to raid members, those Greater Heals to tanks.

Holy Light is 2.0s after talents in a Sheath spec (you can't go down far enough for the Judgement haste and still get Sheath). Healing Wave is 1.92s after talents as long as you can cast a CH every 2 HW - a situation I'd say is pretty likely. Both can take advantage of haste from gear, so it's likely that Healing Wave will always be faster than Sheath-spec Holy Light.

But even more importantly, our Resto Shaman has something useful to do when he doesn't need to casting Healing Wave.

That's one of the major problems with Paladins right now. The reason you take Holy Paladins at all is because their 2.0s Holy Light is a faster response to burst than a 2.5s Greater Heal or 2.5s Healing Wave. But when they're not responding to burst on the tanks, pretty much everything else they do is meaningless. In a typical raid, a Paladin might usefully throw 1-2 spells every 8s. The rest of their casting is basically just making them look busy - other healers with better heals are already covering what they're doing (in WotLK, FoL is likely to look really silly compared to Nourish in any case) - and you can see the consequences of spending so little time doing useful healing on the meters. In contrast, our Shaman queue'ing up Healing Wave with Chain Heal is doing something useful with that 'downtime' - they're healing the raid.

Now, if you don't go Sheath and drop Holy Light to 1.8s via Judgements, you have another problem - global cooldown. When you're the primary burst healer on a tank, you absolutely cannot get trapped in GCD. Unlike normal cast spells, where you can cancel to another such spell, GCD completely locks you out from casting. So that Holy Light @ 1.8s is great - until you mistime your Judgement and it ends up being a 3.2s Holy Light due to having to wait for GCD to finish. The same is true of the "instaheal". Even at Paladin levels of spell critical, Infusion of Light ends up have a 'cooldown' similar to Swiftmend, which is simply too long for predictable burst response.

Shaman also have GCD problems - Earth Shield and totems. But these are predictable GCD problems. Your other healers can count on them occurring more or less like clockwork, so they can cover the narrow window of vulnerability.

The other competition Shaman would have for burst heals on the tank would be Holy Priests. But while Holy Priests are technically 'better' than Resto Shaman at this task, Test of Faith likely makes a team where your Holy Priests backs up the Resto Shaman on burst heals far better than one where you do the reverse. Also, the haste provided by IHC is less reliable than the haste provided by Tidal Waves. While it is theoretically possible for a Resto Shaman to hit a point where they need to cast 3 HW in succession without an opportunity to toss a Chain Heal, it's somewhat unlikely - a burst of damage that long means that every other healer in the raid has plenty of time to start landing heals. Once you've cast 2 Healing Wave, you might as well just cast a Chain Heal anyway since you've got piles of backup to cover the shortfall 3.5s after the burst started.

Blizzard has stated they want Discipline Priests and Holy Paladins to be the high throughput single target healers. While this is most certainly not the case with Discipline Priests at the moment, it is probably the case with Holy Paladins (Paladins may have some pretty serious scaling issues that make that huge base Holy Light dwindle in power at raiding levels of gear). The only problem with this is that single target throughput is meaningless in a 25-man raid. Your healing team can muster an order of magnitude more single target throughput than any bosses' dps. If you were only concerned with throughput, two of any healer could heal any boss currently in game (with appropriate gear). But you can't do this because the dps doesn't come in steadily. It comes in huge bursts and healing those bursts is all about how fast you can land large amounts of healing - normally with a single spell. That's why a 1.9s spell that heals for 6k is probably better than a 2.0s spell that heals for 8k (I say "probably" because the difference in speed is fairly minor).

First of all, yes, we're talking about tank healing, for ANY other role, pallies are the least good healers, even Beacon of Light wont change this I think.

But also don’t forget that tank healing changed a lot, it aint 15 healers spamming one tank anymore, it are 2-3 healers, so you need every of those healers to be able to heal fast and consistent, and those tank healers wont do anything else then tank heal, so to talk about the time when they aren’t tank healing is kinda pointless.

As for casting time, I said 1.8 because of the wrath totem (-10% casting time on spells). Shamans will have 2,25 CH followed by 2 insane fast HWs 1sec (-50% from tidal waves and -10% from Wrath), that is simply not a dependable tank heal cycle.

So having the shaman being one of those 3 and having him cast a CH every 3 casts and a totem/new water shield, that's simply not the consistency you're looking for. Keep in mind that this is also without Spirit Link, because if Spirit link works on tanks, then tank healing as we know it is something of the past.

Blizz also wants Disc priest in that mix (of tank healing) yes, the -6% damage and +6% healing talent is a obvious pointer in that direction, if they make it, doubt it.

I would assume AA has similar effects to the SSO neck and Illidan mace where the heal comes slightly after the heal that proced it. Not entirely sure how much time that would be but probably enough to notice on a boss with high attack speed (say Bruttalis?). Spirit link should work on MTs, I can see no reason why it would not work on them. That should further add to the effectiveness of the CH HW HW cycle, as purhapse the chain heal will hit those who are also spirit linked. And maybe the AA will take care of them if they actually get lower then the MT.

CoH is going to be good if they leave the cooldown off of it. Though it's still only got a 21.4% coefficient with +healing (likely changed like all the other healing spell coefficients). But with the new ranks of chain heal not yet out, it is hard to say just how far if at all chain heal is behind CoH. It scales better at a 71.43% , 35.71% , 17.86% coefficients (also subject to change). So really I don' t see how a judgement can be made until the new ranks of CH come out.

Rank 5 Chain Heal: 833 to 950 540 mana (at level 70)
Rank 5 COH: 409 to 451 550 mana (at level 70)
Rank 7 COH: 684 to 756 890 mana (at level 80)

Where X is some scaling factor to account for spellpower changes:

Chain Heal will gain X * 2.5 / 3.5 * 1.2 * 1.1 * 1.75 = 165X % or 66X %/sec.
Circle of Healing will gain X * 1.5 / 3.5 / 2 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 5 = 136X % or 91X %/sec.

So Chain Heal scales better with regard to mana efficiency, but Circle of Healing scales better with regards to throughput. Note: In all likelihood the auto-targetting algorithm selecting lowest health members probably means that Test of Faith procs a great deal, rendering Circle of Healing better scaling on both mana efficiency and throughput.

That's only the case if it hits all 5 targets though right? Is that what the 5 in that CoH formula is? I mean there are alot of factors to consider, even say everliving weapon hot (only notable since it is worth several thousand healing and has no internal cooldown), or the new tidal force giving 60% crit for chain heal (also depends on how it works, but overall much higher crit) as well as the other talents.

Each spell will have it's place, though if less then 5 people together are taking damage, CoH will become less and less effective, but that all will depend on the raid encounters and such. Other then making a complete analysis with all talents / effects, it is hard to say which will be more useful.

Edit: the 1.1 and 1.05 are for what?

The Chain Heal formula uses "1.75" in the same manner. And considering it's an instacast, auto-targetted heal, chances are pretty good that it will hit all 5 targets.

The Everliving HoT will be nearly useless in most raiding situations since your next Chain Heal will simply snipe the HoT. I don't have sufficient details to model Tidal Force, but given a 15% critical for your Holy Priest a Resto Shaman would need to average over 90% critical to catch the scaling on CoH with Chain Heal.

In terms of the "place" for each spell, Chain Heal is worse throughput (as far as we can tell with limited information) on 3 through 5 targets. It's better throughput than CoH on two targets, but far worse throughput than simply casting two Flash Heals. And Chain Heal (as well as CoH) are obviously pointless on a single target. Chain Heal will also overheal significantly more than Circle of Healing due to the large amount of healing bound up in the initial 2.5s cast. With the information we have right now, it's pretty safe to say that CoH is better than Chain Heal with the possible (but unlikely) exception of mana efficiency and the definite exception of range. Which is why I was somewhat surprised they removed the cooldown from CoH.

Circle of Healing is aided by Twin Disciplines (+5%), Spiritual Healing (+10%) and Divine Providence (+10%).

If AA would have a significant delay then that would make it a lot better for PvE (not for PvP) and the 30% limit on Spirit Link makes it kinda useless for tanks, they take big hits all the time.

And y, CoH stands or falls by the cooldown. Math wise, wont CoH also get a 10 or 15% more healing bonus in WotLK holy tree ? But a CoH without a CD, being instant and targeting 4 more targets smart, that is unbeatable (unless it would go up a lot in mana).

Dont discount R1 HW proccing imp WS while in the 5SR with the SSc trinket as a good way to restore mana very quickly.

Assume 25% crit, that is 400ish mana every 6 seconds + your 5SR regen (call that 600 @ level 80 easily)s. Of course you cant heal during that time, but the point is you can easily do that a few times during a long fight for a quick 1k+ mana regen

At level 70 priests and druids raid buffed are already at around 1k mp5 outside the 5SR, so that amount of regen isn't very impressive at all.

And the idea itself that you can go spam rank1HW to regen mana itself it kinda dumb and not worth mentioning. If plan on doing this you should ask your raid leader to take one healers less (pref you) and make the raid more efficient.

Latest changes:

Shaman
Elemental

* Concussion - Updated description: Increases the damage done by your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Thunderstorm, Lavaburst and Shock spells by 1/2/3/4/5%. (thunderstorm and lava burst were removed in our previous update)

Enhancement

* Improved Shields - Updated stats: Increases the damage done by your Lightning Shield orbs by 5/10/15%, increases the amount of mana gained from your Water Shield orbs by 5/10/15% and increases the amount of healing done by your Earth Shield orbs by 5/10/15%. (was 10% for all ranks in our previous update)
* Mental Quickness - Updated stats/description: Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases your spells power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power.

Restoration

* Improved Shield - Updated stats: Increases the amount of charges for your Earth Shield by 1/2 (was 1 in our previous update), and increasing the healing done by your Earth Shield by 5/10%.
* Tidal Waves - Updated stats/description: You have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance after you cast Chain heal to lower the cast time of your next three Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave spells by 30%, and your Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spells gain an additional 5/10/15/20/25% of your bonus healing effects.

Most are roll backs or fixes for changes made earlier (rank problems with shields and impr earth shield).

But 2 rollbacks are quite important. Mental quickness gives Spellpower again, full benefit for healers again, very good. Tidal waves is back to -30% again from -50% (where 50% would be to much), but I still don't see this talent as that major.

Staying with Tidal Waves (asked this earlier), does anyone know how the coefficient will work ? (spellcoefficient+0,25)*spellpower (where the spellcoefficient is high to compansate for the healing->spellpower change) or (spellcoefficient+0,25)*spellpower*1,9 (where the spellcoefficient is the same as today). I think the first (would be logicall), but this would make the +25% bonus from Tidal waves much less big then it would be with the +healing stat.

They really need to spice up Improved Earth Shield, for a rank 9 talent it's incredibly mundane and not particularly powerful - even compared to the rank 2 Improved Shields. It makes no sense to me that a rank 2 enhancement talent should increase earth shields healing by more than a deep resto talent.

Notice that Tidal waves is now the next 3 HW or LHW's rather than 2 before. This changes the proposed CH + HW + HW rotation, giving a little more flexibility as to when we slot that next CH in. Basically, to me, it seems we can expect HW and LHW to be perma-hasted with the barest minimum of management.

I'm still intrigued by the new crit talent... wish they'd clarify that one.