To answer Sprout, technically, with any more than 20% spell crit Imp Water Shield makes Riptide cheaper per cast than Chain Heal. It's still worse HPM, but not by anywhere near as much as you think.

Riptide is a tank healing talent. It does indeed fall short in most scenarios as a raid healing tool, but so do all tank heals when compared to raid heals.

Edit to clarify: Riptiding while tank healing is not worse health per mana. It is better health per mana, and the fact that this rotation is an entire second faster every time around allows you to fit an entire extra spell in every two times around. In this sense, you are spending mana faster. But if this is a bad thing, why exactly is haste such a good stat?

Unless Koraa misspoke or I'm misunderstanding.

I can't say I like the idea of fixing riptide by increasing the base healed. It's a bandage that in the long term is just going to wear off as gear scales up. I'd much prefer they increase the base by increasing the coefficient on the initial heal if that's what they want to achieve.

The base heal change is indeed very weak.

The big change was allowing Riptide to proc Tidal Waves and Improved Water Shield.

This was brought to my attention on the shaman forums; while the haste boost from Tidal Waves is currently wasted if you're chain casting due to the time it takes for the buff to apply itself, you can chain cast Riptide and due to the fact that it's instant and triggers a GCD no bonus from Tidal Waves is lost. If this doesn't end up getting fixed Riptide will be vastly superior for chain casting on a tank when compared to alternating between chain heals and healing waves.

But that's more or less the main problem at hand isn't it? A chain of Riptide followed by Tidal Wave Healing Waves and a Chain Heal when Riptide is close to ending, would be best served on the MT due to Ancestral Fortitude and Healing Way. With Ancestral Awakening you're looking at a reversed Beacon of Light idea as well. All this indicates we would be best at Tank healing, or at least single target; Hots up, improved hots for low health, bonus to big heals with haste buff. But the thing is, we do not have the mana management to do it.

Furthermore, if we are meant to focus our healing at one target, why doesnt Earthliving stack or at least refresh? Assuming 7.5 seconds for a RT > HW > HW > CH rotation (assuming some lag) and assuming EL procs on the first cast, you're looking at around 6 wasted casts to proc Earthliving, lowering it's effective proc chance dramatically.

The role of the resto shaman gets too vague. EL tells us we're supposed to Raidheal as the chance to proc of any bounce on CH is just too good. Riptide buffs Chain Heal, but with Tidal Wave works best for single target healing....

Looking at raid groups for wotlk as a raidleader, my preference right now (without any testing done, based on talents purely) would be (for most generic fights):
- Disc priest on MT
- Holy Priest on raidhealing
- Druids on raidhealing with hots on MT
- Paladins on raidhealing with BoL on MT

To be honest I'm not sure where to put shamans at this point. With Spirit Link their role was obviously at healing MT and offtanks, hopefully bouncing of CH to melee. Purely looking at the skills and talents, I would want them there right now as well, but I fear they wont last with their manapools as it is. Reports from lvl 80 raiding so far have only confirmed that Shamans go oom way too quickly, which could mean we'd end up spamming Chain Heal again, simply as other heals cost too much.

Perhaps we are to perform a hybrid role in this case, much like our paladin counterparts, in which we keep up Riptide and HW's on the MT, using Chain Heals to help the raid. This would nullify the buff to CH on Riptide as most of the time you cant bounce Chain Heal off the MT to the raid (just melee if you're lucky). Or are we supposed to use Riptide as a raidhealing tool? Put it on the locks so they can lifetap and bounce of our Chain Heals from there? A waste of Chain heal buff right there.... I'm getting so confused just thinking about it

I'm not sure I agree. Let's review:

Holy Paladin - While Beacon of Light may look like the greatest thing since sliced bread, I'm not sure how much of an impact it will actually make on raiding. For non-tank healing, Paladins are pretty much confined to the incredibly low throughput Flash of Light because Holy Light is (a) too big and (b) too slow to be effective. And once you're talking about using Flash of Light for raid healing, you're really comparing an eyedropper to a firehose with respect to classes like Holy Priests and Resto Shaman. So unless you like the idea of one of your healers performing a tenth the effective healing of your other healers, I'm not buying Holy Paladins as raid healers.

Resto Druids - I think this is the key change. In BC, you can't really stack Resto Druids because they can generate a great continuous stream of health but can't handle burst at all. Your second Resto Druid just ends up casting HoT that grind away on a full health tank without really helping much when he takes that flurry of hits that nearly kills him. In WotLK, Resto Druids get spammable direct heals that are actually pretty good so you don't really need the 'Holy Paladin' role of burst healer to nearly the same extent. Moreover, you've got a lot of stray instaheals - from your SoL-proc'ing Holy Priests and your Maelstrom Shaman - that you can use to cover the gaps even more.

Discipline Priests - Tank healing (at least, non-Druid tank healing) is mainly about fast, reactive heals. And Discipline Priests are just about the worst around at this. The only way for them to drop effective heals in short order is to cast PW:S - and it can only be recast every 15s on a single target, or every 4s on different targets. Even worse, PW:S is an insta-cast so in order to speed up their casting, they have to lock themselves in GCD. Right now, Discipline is basically a mess. It tries to combine weaker versions of Holy's direct heals with a greatly improved PW:S - seemingly oblivious to the fact that PW:S is one of the worst possible ways to heal a tank, even in improved/empowered/super-duper form. Now add in the fact that Discipline Priests bring pretty much nothing to the raid except for healing and I think you have a recipe for a "PvP only" spec.

Holy Priests - Some rather important details are still in flux here, but it's looking like Holy Priests are out in front in terms of healing non-tanks. They can rapidly switch targets better than anyone else, they're amongst the most efficient healers, they've got some extremely effective multi-target healers, etc., etc.

Resto Shaman - I'm somewhat in agreement that Resto Shaman are in a bit of a bind. The BC role of Chain Heal doesn't really seem all that competitive with what Holy Priests can do. And, frankly, if I'm going to take two Shaman along for buffs, Elemental and Enhancement look a lot better than Resto.

Strangely enough, the 'niche' I can see Resto Shaman occupying is actually tank healing. Tidal Waves allows them to set up Healing Wave as perhaps the best single target reaction heal in the game. Sure, as a basic heal it sucks compared to Holy Light or Greater Heal, but you can drop it on the tank a lot faster and that's probably more important than minor deficits in efficiency/throughput.

Also consider that Resto Shaman have inexplicably into the number 2 spot in terms of HoT. With Earth Shield, Riptide and Earthliving Weapon, Resto Shaman are dramatically better than Priests at the type of healing that is most linked to healing tanks in raids.

Truthfully, I think your healing can be accomplish by only Resto Druids and Holy Priests without really losing all that much from a more diverse healing crew. So the only reason to take other healers would be for the buffs/debuffs.

nvm

Don't forget that Beacon of Light does not transfer overheal from one target to the other. You place a beacon on the hateful tank, he gets hateful striked. The main tank dodges a string of attacks and you can't manage to heal the hateful tank because of it. Either one of the melee gets gibbed by the next hateful strike or you have to switch targets, effectively taking a healer off of the main tank. It's a potentially helpful ability when placed on two tanks but I would much prefer something reliable.

On the topic of how useful holy paladins are in all aspects of the raid setting, how much is holy light hitting for on the beta? Preferably with crit chance and effect averaged in for more accuracy. If Glyph of Holy Light transfers overheal they could very well be able to fill a raid healing roll in fights where people are bunched up, or on the melee.

I do agree that priests and druids could probably form a healing group without the need of shaman and paladins, but truth be told they haven't exactly come up with any fights that come to mind where the reverse isn't true as well. Chain heal has been viable for years now and our tank healing is looking to get a great boost, I'm not too worried about my raid spot in WoTLK.

to me it seems like the best option for BoL is to put it on the tank and raid heal. Less chance of over heal of you are spamming FoL on raid dmg. This is espeically true with the whole glyph of HL thing.

If pallies end up raid healiong and Shammies end up MT healing the irony may very well cause me to choke to death.

In beta testing the major problem with Shaman healing is that you run out of mana extremely fast and the mana regen doesn't keep up. I run out of mana on trash pulls and when the boss is at 75%, then stand around waiting for enough mana to cast one heal. I've discussed this issue with multiple shamans who are also testing and they are running into the same problem.

Keep in mind that the gear is pvp (premade char) so not the best in a raid setting ... but the priests and druids in the party are healing in pvp gear also and not having the same mana issues.

I've tried
> multiple combinations of heals
> tried re-jewelling everything for crit
> then re-jeweled for mana ticks
> stacked the group to gain the most mana from other raid members
But nothing has helped.

I have sent in suggestions to reduce the cost of the heals, increase the mana received through crit, increase the mana return on mana stream and water shield, and/or change the mana regen from crit based to spirit based. I hope that Blizzard is working on this issue and it will be resolved before release.

Edited to add that in the raids I've been in .. priests and druid healing is far superior to shaman healing. Even before I ran out of mana I couldn't keep up with main tank OR raid healing. Chain heals are inferior to the priests and druid raid heals as things stand at the moment. I haven't been in any groups with pally healers (they are having too much fun ast dps atm =)

I don't think this was Blizzard's intent so I hope things will be corrected before release. If they aren't I believe that the totum buffs will be provided by dps shamans .. and resto shamans will have limited places in raids.

Missbehaves, as a sidenote Blizzard has stated that they consider Druid and Priest efficiency to be a bit too high as it is. I'm not concerned just yet, let's see what's coming in tonight's patch.

I was just pointed out the slight change in the tool tip for Chain Heal. "If cast on a party member, the heal will only jump to other party members." CoH on the other hand, has no such limitation. I'm probably more worried about this for 10-mans than 25s, as it effectively halves the number of people that CH can jump to if I cast it on my own group. It seems like a weird limitation on the spell and I'm just wondering if someone could verify how it works, if it is working that way at all.

It seems to me that this is the root of all shaman problems.

There's only 1.5 months to WotLK release, probably only 2-3 weeks until Blizzard has to push patch 3.02 out the door (including the new talents). It's safe to say that the designers aren't going to be thinking up new talents or abilities; they're going to focus their time on fixing the numbers, unless something is seriously, dangerously broken.

I understand that Blizzard wants us to have Replenishment classes (surv. hunter, ret pally, shadow priest) in raids. However, I don't like the idea of requiring one for 5mans, or needing to pot more than once or twice in a 5man.

Admittedly, I loved the idea of Spirit Link, but I can live with Riptide as well. But, I think the real issue that we have to get across to developers is improving our mana and efficiency rate. I've been reading comments of people in beta, and it seems that all healers (inc. priests and pallies) all have the same complaint about mana.

Would most people in this thread (reluctantly or not) agree that the major problem with shaman healing on beta/PTR is mana and mana efficiency, and not with the basic idea of talents and abilities?

From the new beta build;

Riptide heal value has been increased. (764-826 to 1015-1099 for Rank 4, 668-722 to 888-960 for Rank 3, etc ...)

So the ~300 increase that was mentioned is going to be just to the base amounts.

Elemental Combat

* Stoneclaw totem also protects your other totems, causing them to absorb damage.


Restoration

* Riptide heal value has been increased. (764-826 to 1015-1099 for Rank 4, 668-722 to 888-960 for Rank 3, etc ...)
* Mana Spring Totem now restores 30 mana every 2 seconds. (Old - 90 mana every 5 seconds)


Talents
Elemental

* Storm, Earth, and Fire doesn't increase the effect of spell power on your Lightning Bolt but reduces its cooldown by 0.5/1/1.5/2/2.5 sec instead.



schamanes have to much manareg, its to funny ....

Well look at that, it does. I just read a post in World of Matticus where he brought it up making it sound like they had changed it in Beta to match the tooltip then. But if no one actually playing a shaman has seen these changes, then I'll just forget it. Maybe they just mean party in a raid kind of way, not group.

So 15 less mp5 now on Mana Spring... great... And despite all the arguments on the beta forums that putting the protection on Stoneclaw keeps us from protecting Tremor and Earthbind are ignored...

Were the priests and druids requiring innervates from dps? If not, this leaves a pretty big window to drop a couple healers from a raid if you bring a few extra druids for innervates. If they were only better due to innervates, it's a bit trickier to figure out the optimal setup.

I agree with that. It seems anyone that tries to use a spell other than Chain Heal quickly runs out of mana, and even limiting yourself to Chain Heal stacks up questionably against other healers.

What Intellect/Spirit changes are you talking about? I don't see any mention of them in either 8970 or 8982, nor has it come up in the Resto Druid thread that I've noticed.

The only spirit change Druid had thrown at them was the removal of the extra 15% cost reduction on Imp Tree of Life, which was replaced by 15% spirit -> spellpower. Druids did get hard with a Lifebloom coefficient nerf, and a mana cost increase, but there was no spirit/int changes.

The change wasn't documented, but the coefficient was changed from 0.007125 to 0.005575

Source: http://fish.wowace.com/browse/WowAce...81722&r2=81866

I don't mean to be overly skeptical, but I'm having trouble finding anything to backup what the linked changelog asserts. I skimmed the EJ combat ratings thread and found nothing, checked the official beta forums for outrage and found nothing, and finally checked the wowace discussion forums and also found nothing. My search wasn't exhaustive, but I'd think such a large change would have made a bigger impact.

Some math or another source would be extremely helpful.

The tooltips confirm this as having been changed; my mp5 has dramatically decreased. The other players that I have been raiding with have reported the same, and we have determined that it is not just a tooltip bug.

To quote from The Disc/Holy Priest discussion thread
And as much as I hate referencing the official forums, there are threads about it on there as well.
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> The Int/Spirit Regen Change
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Please do something about priest mana regen..

While I can somewhat see the problems with shaman mana efficiency right now, I honestly don't see it nearly as much as everyone else here seems to be complaining about. It was bad when I was in Sunwell gear gemmed with haste/spell power, yes, but as I upgraded my Sunwell pieces more and more to heroic blues and a couple of naxx10/badge epics stacked with int, mp5 and crit, I've noticed I can heal for a very long time without any mana problems.

I regemmed all of my gear to spellpower/int in red/yellow sockets and mp5 in blue sockets and ended up with (unbuffed) around 15.5k mana, 27.7% crit on my heals and about 300 mp5 with water shield. Imp water shield procs make lesser healing waves almost free, especially with the 2-piece T7 bonus. Currently when running heroics with equally geared players, I don't pot EVER, hardly ever need mana tide or my evocate trinket, and can go pretty much forever between 2 bosses without needing to drink. In 10-mans with replenishment and other mp5 buffs it's even easier to keep mana up. It's just a matter of gearing and gemming properly for regen stats, the same as it was at the beginning of TBC.

For anyone curious I use this spec at the moment, and will probably keep the same spec for live (maybe taking the points out of Healing Way for 5/5 Tidal Focus and 3/3 Elemental Weapons)
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft