Depends on the situation, obviously. You only need to keep them up till the next heal lands, where is that heal coming from?

Hey all. I'm working on getting Rawr updated for WoW 3.0, which is approaching way too quickly. The RestoSham model in Rawr is mostly up to date, though doesn't take a few things into account yet. If anyone can help complete it and update it with the changes in 3.0, please PM me. You'll need to have experience with C# development, and an understanding of the Restoration mechanics as they have been changed in WoW 3.0. I'll be available all the time to help with the development and questions about Rawr's framework, etc.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Rawr is a user-friendly theorycrafting tool, designed to help people choose gear/talents/enchants/buffs/etc, and see the effects of changes to them. It's used by tens of thousands of WoW players, and currently supports almost all classes/specs. Further info on Rawr, the latest version, and our latest source code (it's open source) can be found at Rawr. Thanks!

Got my resto shaman and I have a few ideas floating around thanks to this thread.

It seems like the resto tree has some major bloat, at this point it is essentially two trees in one. I would almost liken it to the discipline and holy trees being squeezed into one. We have the option of focusing on both CH-centric and HW/LHW builds, both of them being able to benefit from RT now that it affects TW. It would be nice if there was enough synergy between the two to encourage a rotation rather than cutting one or the other out.

Assuming blizzard has no major changes in store, let's assume this is what we have. It seems that at any given point it would be optimal to primarily (but not entirely) spec towards one or the other and free up talents to dig into either enhance or elemental, both of which have some low hanging fruit for the resto tree. In particular, I'm interested in being able to level as resto without too much pain. You might notice my other character is a warrior, who will have the privilege of comfortably leveling protection. Ideally I'd like to find a spec that is sufficient for leveling and healing 5 mans, with a respec assumed at 80.

So far I've quickly fleshed out a leveling spec
with a slight favoring to chain heal (but not by much). If I were to end up doing predominantly 10 man content, perhaps I would focus exclusively on HW/LW where possible, for example a build such as this Interestingly I don't feel it would take many points to switch to a chain heal focused build, since at least a few talents like TW and riptide benefit both.

0/16/55 does appear to be the new cookie-cutter. But moving 1 point into Shamanistic Focus is probably something your "leveling spec" should consider...

During Sunwell raids, I agree with Rips that chain heal is all that should be cast in the 25person environment.

In patch3.0x, and in a 5person or 10person environment, then all these fancy talents will likely have massive use.
None of these new talents provides any benefit to sunwell.


All sunwell bosses deal massive raid damage. All main tanks take massive damage. Good raid tactics dictate that healers specialize their role. Set your job, positioning and spec to do the best raid healing or set your job, postioning and spec to do the best tank healing. Don't think that you can keep a 3stack of healing way on two tanks and non-stop-spam chain heal around the raid.

And here's the crux of the rant.
I don't wait for someone in my raid to get down to 5% life and then decide that the burden of reactively healing them falls on me.
1- Tank gets down to 5%, dammit the tank healers are sucking, not the raid healers.
2- Anyone other than a tank gains aggro, I switch over to casting chain heal on that person before they take any damage from an add. That's my job as a raid healer, it's their job to not take aggro, so they'd better feign/shatter.
3- Boss uses a random secondary target mechanism, such as encapsulate. My raid members know that means they need to heal themselves with healthstones/healthpots/arcane pots, whatever they have to buffer until the heals start pouring in. And again, I'll cast chain heal, because it'll still bounce and heal others.
4- There aren't adds or random secondary target mechanics, then no one in the raid should ever take super-massive-gonna-kill-you before raid healers are healing them.

With all the raid-wide damage in sunwell, I personally never see an opportunity arise where it would have been better for the raid healing shaman to cast anything other than chain heal.
Again, this only applies to the raidwide damage of a 25person sunwell. In black temple the raid wide damage is laughable compared to what happens in sunwell.

FINAL THOUGHT:
I pray that LK raids stay in line with black temple, in terms of dealing some raid-wide damage. I don't want to see another Teron/Mother fight, but all the other fights were within reason.

This depends on gear - on the PTR, my TW HW's are 1.48 seconds. Although, as was mentioned above, TW affects LHW as well as HW

I think this is the key to this whole discussion, so you are not derailing it at all.


With buffs being homogenized, we do lose our free meal there.

That means the second reason for bringing a Resto shaman is now our entire draw, and that's Chain Heal.


At this point, CoH priests and Resto shamans are THE core AoE healing devices, with CoH being limited by party, and Chain Heal filling the gaps and providing more focused AoE healing. Chain Heal is what gets us in, not Healing Wave, and not LHW, and certainly not Riptide.

While the changes to LHW and HW do make them better than they were, your raid leader is not going to assign you to tank healing. Healing Wave costs over 50% more than Chain Heal, which as people have shown, is pretty impossible to spam. Twitch healing aside, you're not going to be doing a paladins job, especially with the buff to Divine Plea.


Ghostcrawler has shown that the devs consider Shamans to be 'amazing AoE healers'. What they've done is make HW/LHW usable, not optimal. As has been said, in 25-mans, Chain Heal is going to be our job.


Until they put some serious polish on the tree, a more important discussion, in my opinion, is how Chain Heal will stack up to CoH in the expansion.

Edit: I'm not saying one can mindlessly spam CH the entire time, I make use of LHW on certain fights, such as Kalecgos topside, but I would never waste time on a LHW/HW on Brut or Twins. It's not my job to heal the tanks, my tank healers are good, and unless I'm bouncing Chain Heals off the MT into the melee, or NS+HW after Shadowfury, or even clutch heals if the MT healers fumble during a switch or a confound, I will not be using it. It's simply not worth spending so many talent points for, considering our primary purpose in a 25-man raiding environment. I believe that if we truly consider these talents from this aspect, they fall short for fulfilling our primary objective of AoE healing, and don't make us adequate enough tank healers for us to be allocated to such a position.

Of course, another key to this thread is resto shaman performance in 5mans and 10mans. With Blizzard's new attempt to balance all classes so a random selection of 10 can do a 10man raid (spec-appropriate), we also need to make sure that shaman can be decent tank and raid healers in the lower raids. Sadly, I don't think that's the case, and judging by the comments in this thread, a lot of people would probably agree.

I don't know until I get there, but I honestly don't think 5-mans are 'srs bsnss'. Time and gear will make them laughably easy.

As for 10-mans. With the focus on them, and the addition of 'heroic' modes, and hopefully more ZA Bear-run style goodies, we should of course be able to 2-heal effectively. I don't predict we'll have any problems with 10-mans, I just don't think they're going to be as difficult as 25-mans no matter what they say.

Here's a beta video of a Resto shaman in one of the new 10-mans, courtesy of Gentleman's Club: GCvsArchavonBeta.wmv - FileFront.com

He's barely healing half the time, just playing around, tossing Healing Waves, LHW, and Riptide for giggles.

Once the talents like AA are polished, I'm confident we'll be perfectly able to handle tank healing, while throwing out raid heals. However, a Paladin or a priest could do it better.

Here's a quick thing I wrote somewhere else:


It's not that we can't do it, it's that another class, at this point, 'should' be able to do it BETTER. We have the least efficient heals, while having the least amount of efficiency talents and tools. We'll see how Divine Plea does in conjunction with Illumination for paladins, who were also a Mana Pot/Spriest dependent healer.

As people have shown, even if we use our new talents to the fullest, they fall short for mana, because our 'new' mana return mechanic is inherently flawed and insufficient.

At this point I am inclined to predict a regen patch someway into the second raid tier again, just like the mana shield/mana spring/spirit patch in TBC. We do know that shamans get a regenration head start because of mana shield, and just scale badly with other stats (read: int). OTOH a shaman without mana issues is bound to be completely out of balance, as we were in late TBC, when we just had to get a shadow priest, and then pumped out effective healing for two paladins even if they managed to get out similar raw values (i.e. at twins).

So far most shamans seem to be doing fine in naxx10 and even in naxx25. It's a bit heretic, but it seems to me they'll just leave it be for the moment, and when shamans and priests are getting better gear, and the design of higher tier justifies higher healing troughput, and priests are getting the upper hand, we will get our regen.

I've been mulling over some things and I had to wonder why no one in the Beta forums has suggested the obvious fix for 2 new talents.

Improved Water Shield and Static Shock both try to make use of a very outdated mechanic. Our shield charges.

Mage armor has a similar function to our Water Shield, but they have no charges and are always on for 30 minutes.
Molten Armor is better than Lightning Shield in most cases and again, no charges.


Wouldn't the easy and sensible fix be to have our shields be duration buffs with a "charge" proc and no charges?

Water Shield: "Summons a shield of water around the shaman. While shielded the shaman will gain X mana whenever the shaman is struck in combat. This effect cannot happen more than once every 3 seconds. The shaman also regenerates Y mana every 5 seconds."

Lightning Shield: "Summons a shield of lightning around the shaman. While shielded the shaman will cause the attacker to take X damage whenever the shaman is struck in combat. This effect cannot happen more than once every 3 seconds. (The shaman also gains Y %crit. I can hope they make it almost as good as molten armor, can't I?) "


This simple change makes improved water shield a REAL mana regen system. No more GCDs in clutch situations. It will simply do it's job. It also makes static shock somewhat better, although there's not much hope for that spell.

At the moment I can't see myself taking Tidal Waves - even though I want to and think it's a good talent!

It's just fundamentally broken.

Think about how you normally heal: you start a spell, then while that first spell is casting you pick a new target and start bashing the mouse button so your next spell casts immediately. The /stopcasting change a few patches back has actually introduced this situation where your HW will start to cast (at normal speed as haste is calculated when the cast starts) then the server tells you that your CH procced Tidal Waves (even though it's a 100% chance with 5 points, you still need the server to roll the dice and say it procced). Of course, as the server knows you have Tidal Waves, as soon as your cast finishes it removes the Tidal Waves buff, giving you a total of zero hasted HWs for your 5 talent points.

Now, granted you are still able to do panic heals between spamming CH as the buff will be permanently up ready for you to use, but if you really need the extra healing and try to do a CH HW CH HW CH HW rotation you'll find that the talents points are worthless.

Ouch.

Yeah, they have to fix that somehow. You won't always notice it but it's still pretty broken.

They bumped it up to 2 now I think, so you'll get 1 hasted heal ! That aside, it still bumps up the healing on your healing wave and lesser healing wave spells 100% of the time, so it might be worth taking just for that (maybe).

It should be possible to fix at least, the Paladin equivalent Light's Grace works without any issues, and it's the same basic mechanic. The only difference here lies in the fact that you cast one spell to cast another spell quicker, as opposed to casting one spell to cast the next of the same spell quicker.

I think this is actually the more powerful portion of the talent, having empowered HW and LHW is a great increase to the HPM, and would contribute to making us better single target healers.

Again, as people have mentioned, you can't necessarily have a 'rotation' as a healer, so we either will have CH -> HW -> HW, or Riptide -> HW -> HW, which is dangerous to depend on.

After searching for a while for a Paladin, I was able to test this out, and Wind Shock does proc both Judgement of Wisdom and Replenishment.

This would certainly be an interesting way to gain more mana return albeit situational. This kind of return would be very nice on a burst healing fight where you have phases of a lot of raiddamage and time in between bursts to regen and windshock (Bloodboil comes to mind). It would allow to use a lot of haste gear and still have an ok mana return. Perhaps this is the way 25 man healing is planned to become in wotlk? More burst healing? Considering the blue posts about mobile fights, the spirit regen changes for non shammy classes (which benefit mostly out of the 5s rule) and also the haste/crit gear for shamans, this may not be too crazy a thought. It would certainly be in line of the added Riptide and TBC changes. Could become a nice instant to use whilst running when the cooldown of Riptide is ticking.

However, I do have a feeling this is a glitch in the system as designed by Blizz. The idea that shamans can lower their threat whilst gaining mana and interrupt casts feels a bit OP. Although an interesting active way to regain mana, I think there's a great chance this creative use of mechanics will be taken out before the expansion goes live.

I was considering, from comparing early vanilla-WoW healing to current TBC healing to the changes in talents and spells and downranking, that the "way forward" on Blizzard's end is to take +1 healer and let the healers rotate over the healing assignments.

I know my guild did that a lot in early raiding, having the healers talk to each other on voicecomm for how long which healer "falls back and regens".

The concept is shakey because the mana problems are inherently different between the healers (the ones who got the least issues, Priests and Druids, could refill the fastest due to their Spi-based regen), but in a pinch it can work. It also helps Paladins if they don't have to continue spamming during their Divine Plea cycles as the -20% healing nearly eats the DP regen due to the reduced HPM.

Though, no beta access for me. I'll try some combinations of this, but I have the sneaky suspicion only the Spi-based healers can do this cycling. :s

I don't really see this as a big issue or even glitch. I doubt there will be a huge number of boss encounters where you have Judgement of Wisdom up while at the same time requiring a lot of interrupts that can't be done by the tank/rogue/dps war/cat druid/ret pally. In essence you give up some healing/dps time for some mana regen, cloth casters can do the same by wanding. If elemental shamans ends up geting both high on threat and running low on mana it might be good for them, but I still don't see it as a huge or even sizable advantage.

And Replenishment it procced by the paladin, hunter or priest so Wind Shock won't have an effect on that.

PTR Sunwell Clear

I found this in the rogue LK thread, and it at least provides us with data from content we're familiar with, albeit at level 70 with haste gems. They had 2 shaman healing on a few fights, but Funkymunky was healing on every encounter.

What can we tell from this? Well its hard to tell, but personally I don't think it looks good. The disclaimer is, I don't know what spec he was exactly, I'm not familiar with the strats they use on the encounters and I don't know how their guild's wws usually looks. However, the fights shaman are rarely beaten on (brut/felmyst/twins/muru) he was soundly beaten by druids and/or priests in every case. Do I think this'll change much at level 80 with naxx gear without changes to our resto tree? Probably not. I'll have a closer look at it later but its safe to say AA is worthless until its fixed.

On the plus side with the 30% hp nerf all the fights seem possible for most shaman with the changes to downranking and shadow priests. No need to regem for the last month of BC if you continue raiding.

Enhance seems to be doing decent dps though, time to collect gear if you're spirit isn't broken yet.

Edit: Fixed link.

1) Link not working for me.
2) 30% hp nerf? Are you talking abut the sunwell radiance change? I had nto heard of any hp changes.