It seems quite straight forward not ?

Upon activation you get +60% crit to your healing spells, then each crit reduces the effect by 20%, till it's 0% or the 20 seconds are over. It will probably have a internal CD so you dont crit 3x on a CH and consume all charges at once.

Seems decent for PvP when you're in a tight spot and want that AA to pop up. PvE wise it might also be decent when you know a lot of damage is incomming and more AA procs will save people's live.

Just hope it has a short CD, it's effect isn't that major or anything, anything more then 90 seconds would be to much.

Glyphs for shamans, only posting ones potentially relevant to Resto:

* Glyph - Water Shield 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Water Shield has 3 additional charges.
* Glyph - Chain Heal 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.
* Glyph - Lesser Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Lesser Healing Wave heals for 20% more if the target is also affected by your Earth Shield.
* Glyph - Earthliving Weapon 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Increases the chance for your Earthliving weapon to trigger by 5%.
* Glyph - Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone else.
* Glyph - Mana Tide 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Mana Tide Totem grants an additional 1% of each target's maximum mana each time it pulses.
* Glyph - Healing Stream Totem 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Healing Stream Totem heals for an additional 20%.

no Mana Spring totem so far, which is disappointing, loving the Water Shield one, though.

I'm pretty underwhelmed at the mana tide one... it only pulses 4 times so thats just 4% extra mana per group member. Similair with the water shield one, the only reason its any good is because of the new improved watershield talent... which suggests they should have just designed the talent better.

All of the shaman glyphs seem pretty boring. Small crit chance to some totems, an extra jump to chain heal/lightning, more charges to WS . . . yawn. The only one that is actually interesting is the self heal from HWs, and that doesn't jump out as incredibly useful at the moment, but I guess time will tell.


And the with the extra charges on WS, does that mean shamans aren't getting a new rank with more charges? I hope not.

the other ranks of WS don't have different charge numbers, just values of each charge and the MP5 change. I like that glyph, and the one that makes Chain Heal hop again is decent. They interact and enhance our talented abilities, but I was looking forward to seeing the radical playstyle shifts of the Druid ones.

Y, shaman gluphs seem quite underwhelming, can't compare it to a glyph as

Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.

That is major (if I read it correct, 5x10% of a HL as splash healing).

Right now, neither efficiency nor throughput is really the important consideration in healing those bursts of damage - reaction time is. Essentially what it boils down to is that when the tank takes a massive burst of damage, each healer working on the tank has time for a single heal. The size of that heal and how quickly it lands are the crucial features of that heal. That's why Holy Light is the preferred tank heal. At T6 levels of gear, Holy Light's throughput and efficiency are pretty much the same as Greater Heal/Healing Wave. But if you only have time to land a single spell, the fact that it arrives in 2.0s rather than 2.5s is a big deal.

In terms of whether they'll change this, I'm a bit skeptical. While I can't predict every possible permutation, two likely consequences of going down the road you suggest are:

1. Predictable damage. In this case, basically everyone but Resto Druids is worthless in a raid. If you rarely have to worry about large bursts, there's nothing more efficient than just letting all those HoT tick away. There really isn't even anything close. Couple this with the fact that you could have a monkey do your tank healing if all you need to do is refresh HoT, and you're looking at a rather boring game.

2. Mana constriction. If you played in the very early days of WoW, you'll understand what happens when you make tank healing an issue of healer mana. You take Priests (back then, Druids also, but the structure of Druids has changed a bit) only and have them form a 'rotation'. Because the Spirit Regeneration model rapidly outstrips any other possible way to recover mana the more downtime you allot, adding another Priest always provides you more longevity than adding another healing class. And, of course, such healing rotations are both boring and technical. My impression is that their goal is to have WoW be played like a jazz quartet, not a symphony orchestra.

Since the WoW developers have already seen the consequences of not using burst as the limitation on tank healing, I don't believe they'll revert to previous models.

The 4th CH bounce is far weaker then a 6th target for you CoH (which is a flat +20% more healing, both of course subject to that an additional targets needs healing).

The resto shaman glyphs are a little underwhleming, but I'm finding it hard to think of alternatives. The chain heal one is definitely nice and I'm sure everyone will grab it.

How about cosmetic glyphs... I'm a sucker for those!

I know it's not really contributing to this discussion, but I'll throw it out there. I would love shaman healing appear "blue" and "like water" to match their aquatic theme. Like bubbles instead of leaves...

EDIT: To add something useful to my useless post, I think some of the glyphs need to be reworked so players have to make a decision on what they personally find best. Blizzard's original example was either you increased the root on a mage's Frost Nova OR increased its damage.

I know it requires many more glyphs, but when you have a spell such as Chain Heal, which is such an integral part of shaman healing, it would be great to give players more than one choice.

Example:
Glyph of Chain Heal: Alter your chain heal spell so that it heals an additional target for less or has a higher base healing coefficient.

BAD example but I hope I got my point across.

I think we should be a bit careful with comparing other classes early on, not all glyphs are equal so comparing what might be a Minor Shaman glyph to a Greater Paladin one is going to give us a skewed idea of equivalence.


* Glyph - Water Shield 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Water Shield has 3 additional charges.
Water Shield glyph isn't too bad if it's a minor (or lesser), but it's really just a convenience glyph that saves you time refreshing on the GCD. Admittedly with the new talents we may be burning through Water Shield charges an awful lot, I was hoping to see more charges built into one of the talents somewhere along the line. But if it's a low level glyph, I'll take the convenience because it'll save some mana for those times when you're getting battered but don't have a GCD left to refresh your shield (Hex Lord Barrage springs to mind).

* Glyph - Chain Heal 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.
Possibly some more options like having our CH bounces reduced by 1/3 instead of 1/2 might have been an interesting variation (or more bounce range), but to be honest I'm not going to complain about an extra CH bounce.
Guessing we're going to see that one at 1/2 the 3rd bounce, although it doesn't say.

* Glyph - Lesser Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Lesser Healing Wave heals for 20% more if the target is also affected by your Earth Shield.
The LHW glyph is actually quite nice, it gives us some pretty serious emergency output in a crisis. My mana bar is crying at the thought, but for something like a tank-targeted version of Zul'Jin's Claw Rage this would be ideal.

* Glyph - Earthliving Weapon 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Increases the chance for your Earthliving weapon to trigger by 5%.
Earthliving Weapon glyph is rather underwhelming, that could have been a great candidate for either your EL HoT affecting yourself on proc as well as your target, or maybe giving either you or the target a Mana regen effect when it goes off.


* Glyph - Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone else.
Nice idea, not mandatory, but good to have. Seems solid enough.

* Glyph - Mana Tide 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Mana Tide Totem grants an additional 1% of each target's maximum mana each time it pulses.
Not really seeing much here. That's 4% extra mana for the group, which isn't bad. But I'd really have liked to see a standard glyph for Mana Spring. Depends what size of glyph this one is really.

* Glyph - Healing Stream Totem 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) - Your Healing Stream Totem heals for an additional 20%.
Not bad, but once again it's not going to set the world on fire. A secondary effect pulse of some kind would have been a nice touch.

Agreed that they're not the most exciting set of glyphs around, but it's a first pass and I'm not so much worried about exciting as I am about getting some glyphs with solid workaday utility for doing my job. The kicker for me is seeing what type some of these turn out to be. A few of them are underwhelming Greaters, but would be pretty decent Lessers.

Plus I'm sure they're currently going flat out to get at least a basic set of glyphs in place for every class, so the initial passes are likely to be fairly simple.
At least the good thing about glyphs is that they can always add more.

Go into game and cast a Chain Heal on 3 targets and see. In WotLK, I'd imagine 4000 Chain Heals are easier to get to than now. That means you'll do 4000, 2000, 1000, 500. That extra healing does nothing but pad meters. Yes, I'm sure other healers will whine at the fact that we have a heal which heals for 7500 without critting, but whatever. I'd rather have a flat 5% increase to the 3 heals that we already have than the 7% increase going to a fourth target.

This is especially laughable considering that this is literally the only improvement to our most-used heal.

Of these glyphs, I'm most likely to use the Water Shield, Healing Wave, and Earthliving Weapon ones. The Healing Stream one might be useful, it's my opinion that Healing Stream isn't used nearly as much as it should be, but it's about as groundbreaking as the Chain Heal one.

Its difficult to assess what we will be doing in WotLK, most likely raid healing. (there were some blues that stated that disc priest and holy pallies are for MT healing, I guess we just got improved here because we were the worst class in this dpt).
SL can change a lot the way we heal or how healing is done in the presence of a resto shammie.

Everything is, at first, up to if the 30% blow that breaks the link is done before the mitigation+sharing or after. If before, the talents is laughable to say the least. If last, almost needed.
I'd rather they split up to 30% of the damage done to the tank, so the talents is not that OP (and the 30% blow is accounted after mitigation+Sharing, ofc)

Any words from our beta testers?
the 30% blow that breaks SL is computed before or after mitigation+sharing?

Spirit link is still way to buggy to say anything definitive about it. It doesn't work half the time so when it does work its hard to tell ifs that's the intended behavior or not.

You forget that Predictable Burst is an option here; bosses with sporadic enrage cycles, timed big hits/AoEs and the like; if every 30 seconds that boss cycles, then you have situations where you blow through some mana quickly, then have some time where you can afford to go outside the 5sr, then go back into heavy healing. In this case, you need to bring a variety of healers; you want a Disc Priest and/or Holy Pally to cover your tanks, while Holy Priests and Resto Shaman cover the raid damage segment of the equation. Bringing up Shaman Tank Healing thus could be said to be about allowing Resto Shammies to cover the tank in fights with low AoE quotients and 5 man material. This would be my overall guess for the direction they're going, especially in light of the changes to Shield Block (Lasts 5 seconds, no charges, 100% Block, 30 second cooldown). Occasional, predictable bursts which require healers to shift between different cycles.

I haven't seen this mentioned, but does anyone have the current Spellpower coefficient on Earth Shield?

Not really. Since it's predictable, it doesn't matter who you have cover the damage. You could have a 10s version of Healing Wave and you'd still be fine, since you can pre-cast it in responce to the damage you know is going to occur. It's just a trivial case of burst damage.

In terms of Blizzard's stated intent, I should point out that they don't always get to where they want - especially with regards to complex mechanics like the interaction of healers in 25-man raids. I'm pretty confident that any healer will be able to cover a 5-man. But I'm very doubtful that Discipline Priests will be viable for 25-man raids in WotLK - nothing that we've seen so far even indicates that Blizzard has any idea what the problems with the concept of a Discipline Priest as a healer would be, much less how to fix them.

For Holy Paladins, I'm a bit more confident they'll massage something into shape. But right now, I'd rather assign Resto Shaman to tank healing than Holy Paladins (excluding considerations of buffs).

I discussed this at some length above, but what it really boils down to is that all you need from your 'tank healer' is to cover the burst damage - everything else is handled by your Resto Druids. Since burst comes intermittantly, this means it is generally preferable to have a slightly faster heal - and then something to do when you're not casting that heal. This very nicely describes Resto Shaman, who use their Chain Heal to set up predictably fast Healing Waves.

Resto Shaman also have considerably more endurance (as currently constituted) than Holy Paladins, who essentially need to spend all that time they're not casting Holy Light maneuvering to get more mana for the next Holy Light. And Healing Wave scales dramatically better than Holy Light does, although its base healing is far less.

Resto Shaman are also a lot more worthwhile amongst Shaman than Holy Paladins are amongst Paladins. Resto Shaman cast most of the Shaman buffs at full power, and have a special benefit in Mana Tide. On the other hand, most Paladin Blessings/Auras/Seals are tied very closely to spec, and the Holy improvements to Blessings/Auras/Seals tend to benefit your raid far less than the Prot/Ret benefits. Keep in mind that buff classes really compete against each other, not against pure classes. Each additional buff class reduces the impact of every buff class you already have, since you're reducing the number of pure classes each is buffing.

I don't actually think our new talents are pushing us away from raid healing. HW and LHW are totally unused now because they take too long to cast, heal for too little, and cost too much relative to chain heal. By buffing them they are giving us more options to deal with bursty raid damage that isn't necessarily centered on multiple people. Think of KJ for example. Being able to weave in lhw and hw for firebloom along with chains on legion lightening. It doesn't mean we suddenly become totum tossing paladins. One of the biggest drawbacks to chain heal, imo, has been the reduced heal for the person at the bottom of the chain. Tidal Waves gives us an option to throw a bigger heal on them quickly if they are still too low.

My limited experience with Tidal Waves is going to probably make the water shield glyph mandatory for anyone planning to utilize the talent. 3 orbs is really a burden to manage even with my pitiful crit rate. It can only get worse when my crit improves. I also really like the healing wave glyph. First thing I thought when I saw it was Binding Heal! A spell I really miss when I'm palying my shaman and not my priest.

Assigning a resto shaman to heal tanks over a paladin is silly. It wastes the unique talents both healers have. The aoe healing talent that pallys have doesn't replace chain heal by any means. Since pallys single target healing wasn't nerfed they are just as good at mt healing now as they ever have been. And if a pally wanted to spec sheath they'd arguably be better then live. All the new talents aren't all that role changing, imo. They are just expanding people's abilities so that Pallys aren't worthless on raid dmg fights and shams aren't worthless on fights w/ minimal aoe damage.

The new Paladin Holy Light seems to solidify the Paladin's role as the MT healer. In every raid, what's the one place you can count on your "aoe" heal to heal people in splash? Your casters and healers are always spread out, but the melee are normally bunched in the near vicinity of the tank.

Circle of Holy Light (tm), will help either top off melee or mend them up a little, it'll be up to Chain Heal to help anyone that spikes or who get critically low. 10% of a 6k Holy Light is only 600 hp. Even every say 2 seconds, that's about on par with a Healing Stream totem. Meter padding, sure, but not a replacement for Chain Heal.

Shouldn't look at this purely from a 25 man perspective though. Every healing class needs to be viable in a 5 man and a 10 man too, thus, Shamans need tank healing spells and Paladin need to be able to heal the raid up a bit better.

And I think I told you before you I disagree (aka you're wrong) with that.

The problem with burst damage is that it's burst damage that can happen at any time, thanks to the tank mechanic (dodge -> RNG), so while a raid healer might have time to do other things and look around, a tank healer doesn’t have that luxury, regardless of what is going on atm, his next heal has to land in a few seconds. So I couldn’t care less if a healer can do more things or has anything else he could do, as he will only do one thing, load that heal.

As for single target endurance, no, shamans certainly do not have that, mana wise we're by far the weakest healer out there. Give us a SP and yes, we can push out quite some HPS (CH wise) and keep on single target healing for quite some time, but not as good as a paladin.

And that 3rd point is completely besides the point (and not true). When shamans would be getting very few raid spots, then it might could be an issue, but for today’s raiding, it clearly isn’t, the opposite is could be made, having paladin healers at least gives the general raid an reason to have paladins in the raid (and thus their buffs).

You can't talk about "viability" for 5 man healing, hardly for 10 man healing. Viability in 25 mans atm only comes through having a DPS buff while being able to do the healing task, the actuall healing capabilities have little to do with viability atm.

After running an instance and observing tidal force each crit on a chain heal does consume a charge. So kinda worthless for chain heals.

I dont understand how it could be....could you calrify

To me it seems that in a pure CH spam fight that is REALLY hot.

assume (~30% crit buffed)

90%
70%
50%


Even if you have 4 CH jumps you will usually hit....Im way too tired to work the math in a 3 and 4 chain cycle, but Im guessing it will be consumed 2/3 to 3/4 of the time. When you have a group of melee or 5 man taking splash dmg, the will mean you are healing the final jumps for a larger average. Thats where the bonus comes in in my mind. Think Felmyst encap type dmg, where everyone is fairly low. Then again you are front loading the crit % so in that regard its kind of backwards.

Too bad the crit % doesnt go UP over 20 seconds. THAT would compliment CH.



For CH/3xHW cycle, Tidal force would work better if it was activated vs passive (no beta testers have calrified this). Activate after CH and your next 3 HW have a damn good HPS throughput. Once again another tool that would be nice for the 'known spike' dmg situation (along with SL)