If we're discussing Arena buffs to shaman, I'd rather have a talent that returns 300%-400% of the totem's cost if it was destroyed. That way, there's a choice for the enemy team: kill the totem, remove a shaman totem buff, and give the shaman some extra mana for healing/DPSing, OR leave the shaman's totem buff up. Totems will never be destroyed in a PvE encounter, so this talent gives some viability to Arena shaman.

Also, make Riptide a Frost school heal. That way, a shaman can heal with at least 1 spell, even if he's locked out of the Nature school of spells.

This would be interesting, but any way you slice it, Riptide is a terribad talent. It needs something for sure.

Although nice to have a fun pvp talent, my main concern lies with pve. Spirit Link was overpowered in the sense that it made resto shamans required in every raid, which is exactly the idea Blizz is trying to remove from raiding. It either had to be nerfed or replaced, having it replaced with something most resto shamans always wanted: a HoT, is great in my book.

From my testing in the PTR I must say the spell looks good in theory, but lacks the scaling. As been said 1.5k-ish direct heal followed by a tiny hot is a little on the low side. My Earthliving proc ticks for just below Riptide which makes little sense for a 51 point talent. This is being looked at last I read blue posts, so I'm confident it will get up to scratch by the time it goes live.

One thing that has come to mind is a new way of healing because of this. Lately I've been dropping Healing Stream over Mana Spring as I usually have a spriest in my group. The amount it can heal is quite substantial and that's just for one group. Seeing as Healing will now affect 25 man and considering the 20% increase glyph, I can see a shaman speccing for raidhealing in a different way. Get the healing glyph, add the +1 target for chain heal and pick up the Earthliving glyph and things can get quite interesting. From what I've read, Earthliving can proc on any of the 4 targets of Chain Heal as well, making it a very nice hps output on the raid.

From what I've seen on PTR, I'm not as impressed with Tidal Waves and Ancestral Awakening. They are fun, but gimmicky and too much of a mana impairment to truly function in a raid imo. Granted, it's on PTR and at 70, so things could change quite quickly. But comparing the chances of proccing Earhtliving with Chain Heal, the new added bonus via Riptide and the mana costs, I have a nagging feeling we'll only be using those Tidal Waves in combination with Tidal Force to keep up tanks in a tight spot.

I don't really understand some people's dislike for riptide. Sure it should be slightly more powerful but an instant heal is really missing for PvP and a HoT is a great addition. If they buffed the scaling I'll be happy. Pair it up with ES and an EL proc and you get quite a lot healing over time while you're being cc'd.

I agree with Ribs about healing stream, it's looking really useful with the raid change and the glyph. I hope though that they change the awful talent from 5p to 2p, 25% each. Then I wouldn't grind my teeth everytime I had to put points there and it would be extremely useful for bosses with dmg auras.

Koraa just posted this little gem concerning Riptide

Looks pretty good. Glad they added a charge to Tidal Waves.

I'll have to check if thats in yet when I get home. But if they just boosted the base heal without touching the coefficient the change is negligeable. It would be an extra 250 healed.

For tank healing you'd probably want to do RP -> HW -> HW -> CH. The RT cooldown would work out really well doing this, and i think with the RT buff on CH it'll end up being more mana efficient than adding another HW after the Tidal Charges are out. With my gear that would be about 3k hps i think? Pretty nice but good god will we go through mana quickly.

Edit: Actually....CH-> HW -> HW will probably be better still, i guess it depends on if the healing on RT still sucks.

I doubt riptide will get much more than 22% coefficient on the initial heal (except from talents). For comparison regrowth has 2.0 second cast time and a 28% coefficient on initial cast - what it does have is a nice crit chance and a few more talents affecting it (1.1 and 1.2 multipliers to be precise).

Still, as a general rule there doesn't seem to be whole lot of scaling on the initial hit of such spells, they generally fall behind both direct heals/nukes and hots/dots in each individual portion (even if base values on regrowth at least are quite high). That doesn't mean regrowth wouldn't be a fantastic heal, however, so there's definitely potential for riptide if the talents etc. give it sufficient support (and much depends on mana cost also).

I think adding a mana cost discount to Tidal Waves equal to the haste would make it a successful talent and actually achieve Blizzard's goal of making LHW/HW desirable in PvE. Right now the talent increases our mana drain considerably, and that's the last thing this spec needs.

Agreed, without any mana discount I don't see myself using HW or LHW much at all, except for certain situations and possible when Tidal Focus is up. Even with all the Ancestral goodies, we are still bad MT healers, simply cause of our mana. Especially now with Riptide, CH will still out hps the rest of our spells unless you have an insane crit percentage.

I agree a perfect cycle will no doubt end up with RT > HW > HW > CH but the HW's in between will be fillers to have the RT tick down and not waste it, we won't actually use HW because of it's awesome healing. Having the haste buff is a nice way of making HW more interesting, but it only makes our mana issues even larger. We don't have any benefit from spirit (I think we're now the only casters to not benefit from it), we don't get mana returned other than our 3 charges of watershield (which will be close to nothing in endgame wotlk), we're just going oom very very quickly.

Now if they brought back Elemental Focus.... or at least give us something that procs and grants us scaling mana return which we do not have to continuously refresh.

For mana: make water shield scale with spellpower (like all other shields) and upgade Improved Water shield to contain more charges or create new charges when we crit heal.

While I'm at it, change IWS to work with any spell that crits (add an internal cooldown of 1sec).

Healing Way should also at least increase the amount of healing done by RT, maybe RT should even add stacks as HW only does now.

I agree about the talents, but I wouldn't get too excited over healing stream yet. I am a big fan of this spell, but there are some disappointing changes from live. After some testing, the glyph doesn't work at all. If the glyph is multiplicative with the talent, then HST will heal about the same as the current live version of HST, additive it will be a little less. Without the glyph, HST right now heals for 20% less per tick compared to live. If this truly is raid-wide (I haven't tested that), then I am actually pleased overall and the spell needed a nerf to balance it out, since it stacks with other HSTs.

The big reason I am saying to wait is that this nerf may not cover how useful the totem is. I can guarantee you that if HST can trivialize a type of encounter, they will either nerf the dust off of the ability or they will simply never make that type of encounter. If you bring 5 shamans to a raid and 5x 140(avg) = 700/tick raid wide, and that's not even min/maxing it, you could trivialize many an encounter. We have to watch our backs on this one.

While I initially had the same idea, it did bring up complications for PvP and for Elemental (considering the time left before release, I don't see them re-balancing mana management for Elemental). edit: or do you mean the mana return procs scaling with SP and not the static MP5. >.>

Another shaman suggested on the beta forums, and I agreed with baking scaling regen in a deep Resto talent (aka Unrelenting Storm 2.0? I believe it was agreed that Nature's Blessing would be the best option; however, the beta forums are down I can find the link later). It helps remedy Resto mana concerns without having to re-balance Elemental mana management and forcing Resto shamans be WS dependent in PvP. However, I believe with their talent "budget," this would make Nature's Blessing as a 3 pt talent way over budget.

(Note: I don't PvP on my shaman, I just went off data given to me by others, so please correct in that aspect if I am wrong.)

Having water shield charges be passively restored would be really nice. We will have enough micro-management as is with riptide, tidal wave, totems, and earth shield. Maybe stick on a talent somewhere "While water shield is active, your critical heals have a X% chance to restore Y amount of water shield charges." I think having the charges scale with spellpower could be pretty imbalanced as gear improved. Right now Imp. Water Shield is just an inferior Illumination, but if it scaled with something we'd eventually be getting free crit heals, and I dont' think Blizzard wants that. Having the passive regen effect scale should have been put in months ago though.

I think there needs to be more benefit via talents from critting with a chain heal. Imp Water Shield would be a good place to start. I bet the only reason they haven't done that already is because they don't want us consuming multiple charges at a time, or they are still stuck on trying to push us away from chain heal. There's a good amount of crit on our Wrath tier gear and except for the extra little bit of RNG healing and an Ancestral Fortitude Proc, it's not going to benefit chain heal at all. I'd really just rather have more spell power there given the current state of the resto tree. I understand that they are trying to make our single target heals more viable, but unless the mana efficiency on those spells improves, I don't see how we will have the mana longevity to use those tidal wave charges consistently. It looks to me like chain heal is still going to end up being spammed ad nauseum given the mana concerns of any other approach. The whole tree just looks like a half-assed attempt really. It needs more thought put into it.

Here are some rough numbers for the various healing cycles we are talking about. This does not include crits or AA or 2ndary and tertiary CH jumps. It also does not include the fact that TW is bugged currently. Its a rough estimation but not far from accurate. I dont have numbers at work, sorry



RT/HW/HW/CH (7.5s)
CH/CH/CH (7.5s)
CH/HW/HW/CH (8.5s)


I see absolutely no reason to ever use RT unless you need the instant heal. The HPM is way worse than HCH+HW, and the total mana throughput is almost the same. for raids, I see RT as a weak NS on a cooldown. On the upside, you will probably need the 2 hasted healing waves after the RT if its an o shit button , so that idea actually works pretty well.

I didn't see it mentioned, but it looks like HST now uses your current healing power to calculate its heals instead of using the number you had upon casting. Looks like trinket charging HST is a thing of the past.

These numbers are off, crunching some numbers to get the specifics, will edit this post to show what I find.

3 CHs healing for a total of 12k = 4k CHs.
2 4k CHs + 2 Xk HWs = 18.5k. HW = 5.25k
1 5k CH + 2 5.25k HWs + 1 Xk RT = 17.5k. RT = 2k

The healing done by the individual spells in this test are disproportionate.

First off, the mana cost of these abilities reflect their level 80 ranks, yet the difference in healing between chain heal and healing wave reflects the amount they heal at level 70, albeit badly. From level 70 to level 80 the base heal of Chain Heal increases by an average of 200 with no change in spell power, yet Healing Wave increases by an average of 1000 with no change in spell power.

Currently on the PTR at 1397 healing spell power Chain Heal is hitting for roughly 3.7k. Healing Wave with no stacks of Healing Way is hitting for roughly 5k. According to this, the amount of healing done according to Sprout's test are not that far off, when you don't take Healing Way into consideration. With full Healing Way, however, Healing Wave is healing for an average of 5.85k.

Riptide, with the same amount of healing spell power, restores on average ~1325 health with the heal and the hot restores 436 health every 3 seconds. When you couple this with the fact that Riptide is supposedly receiving a 30% increase in it's base heal (650 base at 70, so roughly +200) and that given that 7.5 second rotation Riptide will restore 436 health twice, the value of Riptide with 1397 spell power in that rotation is 2.38k health.

In the end, since the Healing Waves should be healing for the same amount regardless of which two rotations you're comparing, we're left with:

Riptide's base heal + two hot ticks (2.38k) + RipTide'd Chain Heal (3.7k+25%=4.63k) = 7.01k over 7.5 seconds (935 HPS)
vs.
Two Chain heals = 7.4k over 8.5 seconds. (871 HPS)

Higher HPS at the cost of higher HPM. Not a bad trade if you ask me.

Important point: Anything that forces you to move widens the margin between the Riptide rotation and the double CH rotation. Riptide's hot will keep ticking and Riptide itself is castable on the move, while having to move is a complete halt to all healing done during the CH and HW only rotation.

Mana costs are the same at 70 or 80, I was using 70 number because I only have PTR access. Sounds as if HW gets a bit more base heal bump

I should have put this in the intial post, but Im assuming you dont end up with 3xhealway on the target. the only exception would be a tank. If your raid healing you will lose the healing way in most cases. I did bump the 2nd HW from 5->5.5k in both examples

True the HPS is close between the two, but the HPM is where you have a huge drop off in usefulness. Even with the numbers you put in (thanks for the help), the only time I would ever use RT is if I had to to save someone. The only thing the new RT gives us is healing synergy after the RT to help someone you just saved.

As a 51 point talent, this should be something we use alot. If not every CD, almost. Look at the other classes.

Wild Growth- A group AOE HoT that is front end loaded. Definatley highly useful, especially in raid healing. The cost is high, which I suppose may limit the usefulness.. Not quite as goos as pallies and priests but still very nice.

Beacon of Light- Definatley something yu will keep up 100% of the time. It effectively doubles HPS if there is more than one tank. 2 pallies with BoL on each others tanks will make tank healing soooo much easier. The synergy with Gaurdian Spirit is also really nice.

Gaurdian Spirit- Ok this talent is so awesome it hurts. Sure it has a long CD, but if you stack holy priests you end up with wipe protection for burst damage on tanks.

I mentioned this elsewhere, probably on the PTR forum. Trinket charging is done for HST, but not for Earth Shield! HST will be the bee's knees in the Loatheb fight in Naxx, and any other fight where casting has a penalty (Zuljin Eagle Phase, e.g.). I imagine we will see a need for multiple shamans for this fight thanks to HST alone.

Actually, Druids are currently talking about completely abandoning the entire top two tiers of their Restoration tree for a 28/0/43 build. Wild Growth's healing was effectively cut by 75%, and GotEM's usefulness in the more relaxed setting of Naxx is extremely limited.

Guess they'll have to nerf the balance tree then for Droods, as they nerfed the Menthal for shamans, forcing eveyone to spec as deep as possible.

You're in "grass is greener" territory here. All of these talents are actually pretty chumpy in a raid sense. Let's review:
Wild Growth - This is pretty much guaranteed to be sniped by CoH/CH since its a HoT. And it's not like Resto Druids can't just roll HoT on multiple targets anyway.

Beacon of Light - What you might be missing is that you actually have to heal the second target. So you need not only two tanks taking damage, but taking damage in synchronicity for this effect to work at full power.

Guardian Spirit - This is not really all that different from Pain Suppression in PvE. And after reviewing parses, it was concluded rather decisively that playing the "guess when the tank will die" game is beyond the capabilities of any healer.