madrix

Tidal force is an "on activate" ability, not a passive one and has i believe a 3 minute cooldown. If anyone can confirm this please feel free.

 

Daidalos

If all 3 jumps of the chain heal crits tidal force is consumed. You no longer have the buff. Your 3 min cooldown is used up on one cast. I wasn't all that impressed.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Negg

Tidal Force simply isn't impressive, thats it. Decent for countering some incommining damage by increasing the chance on AA jumps, but the amount of heal added is very marginal, in the end it's 60%+40%+20% crit, 120% crit, so 120%*60%(AA)=72% of a HW or LHW extra in healing output in the next few seconds.

 

Expat

I think people need to bear in mind its an 11 point talent. It is impressive for its location. What isnt impressive is improved earthshield for its location and power.

 

Vuldunobetra

Yes, it is only a one-point talent, available on Tier 3. Shaman can use more "Oh Crap" buttons. Currently we got Nature's Swiftness. If the group gets into trouble, we get one instant heal, which still takes away a GCD.

Tidal Force will allow us to crit on demand for a few casts, which triggers Ancestral Awakening, Ancestral Healing, and Water Globes. It's a great little 11-point talent.

 

Daidalos

Yes its fine for HW, but I was pointing out its rather bad for CH.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Kortar

Which is one of the reasons why WotLK Resto Shaman are likely to be better than WotLK Holy Paladins for tank healing. The Resto Shaman can cancel out of their Chain Heal instantaneously. On the other hand, the Holy Paladin is going through a sequence of intacasts which leaves them trapped in GCD - which you can't cancel out of.

This sounds a lot like how people thought in Karazhan, when Paladins could FoL-spam forever and this was viewed as viable healing. In WotLK, Paladins have the most expensive (by a fair clip) main heal, and very limited ways to recover that mana. That's why the Paladins are speculating they'll be forced to melee/judge to deal with the mana issues they face. In contrast, Shaman have Water Shield and Mana Tide. While Healing Wave isn't exactly cheap, using it only intermittantly when the damage to the tank overwhelms the Resto Druid's ability to burst isn't going to break the bank.

 

Sprout

Mana costs for spells are not set surrent, so who knows which class will be the most efficient....

As for cast/cancel rotations, I personally rarley do that now (alliance shaman obviously never did MC/BWL/Naxx where this was common). If its a skill I need to start using Im sure Ill pick it up then, but this would be a fairly big change in healing style and I think it would be pretty tough with 1.5s HW casts.

 

Kilted Raven

I'd heartily agree with that at the moment. It could use a little something, a small mana reduction component on the talent would just tip it into 'nice to have' territory. Its quite weak for such a deep talent currently, although as it has to be attached to Earth Shield I don't suppose there's much choice in that.

On talent points, I guess we're probably in for a small revision on our pushback talent as well. With the new spell pushback changes we've started to see some talents being condensed in recogntion of their slightly reduced power.

 

Vernichter

I would argue that the main benefit of Imp Earthshield is the charges, because it directly increases the duration and reduces the frequency of reapplication. Personally, I'd prefer it to add two charges per point, returning it to the original 30 second minimum duration, but I'll still take it as a way to free up more GCD's.

 

Kortar

I'm not referring to cast/cancel. In WotLK, it's likely that cast/cancel will not be a viable technique due to the spell at which large heals are cast. I'm referring to the fact that the moment you cast an instacast, you're 1.5s away from casting any other spell - and 3.5s away from resolving a 2.0s spell. This is referred to as "being trapped in GCD" and it's one of the reasons that tank burst healers in raids tend to avoid instacasts if possible.

Avoiding instacasts as a Holy Paladin in WotLK seems to effectively cripple them. In contrast, most of a Resto Shaman's instacasts are either avoidable (such as the Shield) or specifically timed (such as the totems), so they can be adapted around.

I don't believe that this current situation will persist until release. However, given the current set of talents/spells, if I had a Resto Shaman and a Holy Paladin in my 25-man force, I'd make the Holy Paladin respec Retribution and the Resto Shaman heal the tank.

 

Vuldunobetra

It's bad for CH, but for a different reason. If it was changed so that it could only crit once per CH cast, it wouldn't be any better, IMO. Both CH5 and HW12 hit for ~5400 healing. CH5 hits for about 2700, then 1800, then 900. Even if the first target always gets the crit, it's only boosting the 2700 by 1350. Meanwhile HW12 gets the 5400 boosted by 2700. Therefore a bonus crit from talents is much better for HW than for CH.

The talent would work better if it was a flat rate for a short time-span. Something like +30% crit for the next 15 seconds. Or a bonus crit to the next 5 Healing spells cast. By having a limited number of procs consumed on each chain of CH, it weakens the talent for CH.

 

Shakes

Given they're still balancing around 7-8 healers, and they've added a new non-healing class, I think most guilds will be in exactly the same situation they are in now: beggars can't be choosers, take the healers you happen to have.

I suspect it may often boil down to a shaman being slighly better than a paladin at tank healing, but a heck of a lot better at raid healing, so shaman do that (despite being vastly inferior to a CoH priest with the current talents). On fights where the raid is bunched up such that a paladin's AoE heal works well, the situation may be reversed.

 

asan

apparently downranking is dead. The mana cost of any downranked spell is higher than its max level for your char.
Now Spirit Link makes a lot of sense, and should workin most fights.
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/3...ankdeadsw2.jpg

 

PsyBomb

There is no way that the downranking thing is final. Period. If they were going to do something like this, then they would have removed the downranked spells from the spellbook completely and had them update like warrior/rogue/DK abilities.

What I suspect is that it's supposed to be the %base cost for the top rank, with slightly less cost for the lower spell. Someone just put a plus sign instead of a minus in the calculation equation.

(This is copy-pasted from my post in the Mage thread, didn't feel like retyping it)

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

asan

from a blue:
"...This change was made primarily to prevent downranking, as it's a technique that was never quite intended. Rather than continue to find ways to penalize players for casting low-rank spells, we decided to essentially make doing so obsolete. If rank 5 and rank 6 of a spell cost the same amount of mana, but rank 6 does more damage/healing, then there is no reason to consider casting rank 5. "

* the common sense is that you may wish to actually reduce the amount of dmg you produce (but not the mana cost), melees can do this by swapping to a lower dmg weapon in combat, while simply swapping our weapons won't reduce the dmg of a spell by a substantial ammount... all in combat. so they may keep the lower ranks of the spell.

WoW Forums -> Goodbye Downrankers!

 

Daidalos

This is what they did. There is now only one rank in the spell book for each spell. Although you can turn them back on if you really want seems like a horrible idea on bliz's part. So I asked this before and no one ever responded but what about my counter proposal outlined here: Restoration WotLK Talents and Discussion

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Thunderho

Shammens will be better at healing the pallies aslong as it isnt either of the two extremes of how the raid is spread out...raid super spread out to where chain heal doesnt bounce pallys win, raid super clumped pallys win. Now between those resto wins...

Now for tank healing, if they make it to where downgrading is almost pointless..I suspect pallys will win due to resto not having a viable tank spam heal to toss on the tank while pallys can use flash and sacred sheild also Sheath of Light will be up 100% giving pallys a nice hot. They can also to shocks and HL in a pintch but i might seem to be understemating the spamability of HW with the changes to elemental focus ect.

Regarding pallies mana, things arent nearly set in stone yet, they are still tossing up Illumination at 100% imo 80% would fix things. Secondly Divine Plea (Pally Evocation) might stay and fix things..

On the term that pallies will be locked in GCDs, we wont be anymore, probably less, then shammens. Seal were changed to a 2 min duration, same time as tots, judgement has a long range now and doesnt cause the GCD as it doesnt consume the seal anymore and a simple macro will sustain the haste buff for pallies, and sacred sheild is on a 30 sec duration (the min time for earth sheild) thus aslong as pallys are using Shock sparingly on tanks then we wont nearly be stuck in a GCD..

 

Malakitoo

Not being able to r1 earth shock is a massive change for resto arena.

 

Shinwei

Does the change to downranking affect all spells that are not the highest rank you have for that spell, or all spells learned before level 70? I'm a little concerned because I keep refreshing the skills list for Shaman on MMO-Champion and so far it still does not list a Chain Heal rank 6. Are we going to be stuck with Rank 5 forever?

 

thevidon

This is brutal for resto in arena. Truly brutal. In a druid matchup well basically have to let all the CC through because it will be too expensive to stop it (not the only matchup this will be horrible in, but the first that came to mind).

 

Talaus-Mok'Nathal

I'm curious to see how they rebalance the spell costs now. If they bring us back in line with priest in terms of mana cost at least. Also, I know the glyphs are out, but does anyone have any idea what level (Lesser, Minor, Greater) any of them are?

 

Ana

New ranks of most shaman spells have yet to be added to the trainers. Blues posted indicating that new ranks would be forthcoming sometime "soon."

 

KnThrak

Depends on how the Lifebloom nerf impacts PvP.
Currently the nerf is ~meaningless, but the blue poster said they intend Lifebloom as a cheap but weak sideheal, something you keep up between your "proper" heals. That's why they got Nourish, too.

SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

 

Emth.

Obviously something has to give, there's no way shaman will be balanced with other healers only being able to cast max rank heals and shocks. Maybe Blizzard have thoroughly thought this through and we'll see a/some sweeping change(s) in the next class update.

Either that or the change will be reverted. I don't see why they can't just remove all spell power bonuses for anything 2 ranks or more below maximum, that would have the desired effect without crippling rank 1 shocking and other such practices.