Restoration WotLK Talents and Discussion - Page 49

Daidalos · 11/04/08, 6:19 PM

Originally Posted by bewmheels

It doesnt effect the GCD. Tested it this morning wen i got up. Doesnt look like riptide is healing more either but i dont think they changed the lvl 70 spell.

The hot portion should have had a slight buff the instant direct heal didn't get any changes AFAIK.

Kyuki · 11/04/08, 6:22 PM

They increased the HoT a tiny bit for Rank2 (lvl70), but that's it.

Barcode Too · 11/04/08, 8:29 PM

Originally Posted by Felixalias

I can see these things being true, but more for PvP than PvE. Healing meters only count healing done, not utility utilized (of course, that may mean that healing meters are a bad measurement more than meaning anything else). Having a bit of extra offensive damage is more of a buff to arenas than it is to raiding, unless raids are dramatically different than in BC.

Most people see it sort of like this: Let's say a shaman's power lies 70% in healing done, and 30% in utility. In PVP, this balances to 100%. In PvE, the utility may not even count depending on the fight, and so you're left with less healing done than a priest, who may be 90% healing and 10% utility. Budgeting mostly for PvP doesn't ensure PvE balance. Keep in mind those are just some percentages I used for an example, and have no real bearing on anything

I agree with you on the PvP topic. However, my general point is that good players will utilize the niches that each class has to offer... the niches that sets them apart. I think meters are usually a pretty poor indication of overall skill/usefulness. Certainly they matter, but they don't account for the little things that make good raiders good... survavibility. Some guy might top the meters but died when the boss was at 5% whereas someone 5 positions down on total healing dodged that AOE like a champ and was around to keep the tank up during an enrage or something. I just think such a strong emphasis on the numbers and theorycrafting can cause some players to abandon the most important elements of raiding for ALL classes... situational and spacial awareness.

Talaus-Mok'Nathal · 11/04/08, 8:51 PM

But Blizzard has moved heavily away from the "niches" in the game. We used to be raid healers, it was our "niche". Now CoH and even WG can easily out perform us. The last 3-4 pages are showing that we're also pretty heavily out performed in single target healing as well. What other usefullness do we have? Poisons can be cleansed by druids and paladins, diseases by priests and paladins, curses by druids and mages, so we don't gain any advantages there. You're argument for survivability is applicable to all classes, not just shaman, and is the characteristic of a good player, not a good class. So now we have to be better players than the other healing classes in order to be as useful?

Yes, healing meters aren't the end-all be-all, but if you're struggling to down an encounter because your healers can't keep up, the ones you replace are going to be the less efficient ones, and that's most easily gleaned from meters. If a shaman is raid healing along with a druid and priest, and his hps is 25% lower, replacing the shaman, no matter how good of a player he is, for a slightly less skilled priest will still help the raid.

• Philondra · 11/04/08, 9:47 PM

Originally Posted by Talaus-Mok'Nathal

But Blizzard has moved heavily away from the "niches" in the game. We used to be raid healers, it was our "niche". Now CoH and even WG can easily out perform us. The last 3-4 pages are showing that we're also pretty heavily out performed in single target healing as well. What other usefullness do we have? Poisons can be cleansed by druids and paladins, diseases by priests and paladins, curses by druids and mages, so we don't gain any advantages there. You're argument for survivability is applicable to all classes, not just shaman, and is the characteristic of a good player, not a good class. So now we have to be better players than the other healing classes in order to be as useful?

Yes, healing meters aren't the end-all be-all, but if you're struggling to down an encounter because your healers can't keep up, the ones you replace are going to be the less efficient ones, and that's most easily gleaned from meters. If a shaman is raid healing along with a druid and priest, and his hps is 25% lower, replacing the shaman, no matter how good of a player he is, for a slightly less skilled priest will still help the raid.

This is a little heavy on the doom and gloom, especially since Ghostcrawler has mentioned that they are aware that CoH and WG are probably too good right now. I wouldn't come to the conclusion that we are going to be replaced because all of our heals are subpar, as in two different threads GC strongly implies that Blizzard is looking at adjusting CoH and WG by either removing their smart targetting or giving them a moderate cooldown:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Are CoH and WG better than Chain Heal?
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Shaman designed around chain heal? Then...

With regard to the cleansing discussion, I think you're wrong to dismiss our superior cleansing abilities out of hand. First, there is no evidence that Blizzard is trying to use our utility as an excuse to lower our healing throughput, particularly in light of Ghostcrawler's recent posts. Second, it's pretty clear that resto shaman (and to a lesser extent, holy paladins) are positioned as the strongest PvE cleansers. Both Cleanse and Cleanse Spirit can dispel a total of three effects per cast (note the tooltip wording). We can also do offensive dispelling via purge, leaving magic debuffs as the one category we cannot get rid of. Of course other classes can remove debuffs, but we have the most wide-reaching toolset.

Mushin · 11/05/08, 2:58 AM

What about our cleansing abilities are actually superior?
Cleanse Spirit is identical to the Paladin's Cleanse - except it does a curse effect instead of a magic effect, and costs more mana. Our totems have seen no change, and poisons/diseases have always been very niche raid effects compared to magic/curse.

The only part of our 'wide-reaching toolset' that is actually improved by speccing Restoration is being able to cleanse curses. Every other tool can be provided - often better - by a dps specced shaman.

Ribs · 11/05/08, 5:19 AM

I'm trying to think of encounters in which the raid will have poison, disease and curses on them, thus making Cleanse Spirit superior to other decursers. Can't think of anything in tbc except maybe some trash, but this could of course change in wotlk. As it is right now Cleanse Spirit is just a lazier form of Cure Poison/Disease with an added Curse flavor. It has the same mana cost and in most of the times you will use it to remove 1 effect, not 3. Purges and interrupts are truly better left to dps shamans with +hit or other classes (spriests and rogues for ex).

Furthermore, stating we are lesser healers, but bring more to the table, would be in direct contradiction to what Blizzard has been stating many times. All hybrids have been increased in their relative d/h/t per second to be able to match (or get very close to) 'pure' classes. It would be more than odd to see this rule be made an exception for the resto shaman build.

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler

Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn't me) asked why was there so much CH hate. Yes, shamans used it a lot, but you know, it is a pretty distinctive, inconic spell. We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we'd just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you'll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it's not 100%).

I am a bit puzzled by their way of thinking. If it is understood by Blizzard that we'll be using CH 90% of the time, then why put 6 places in the talent tree to buff non chain healing if that is 'just' 10% of what we'll be doing? Whereas Chain Heal has just 1 dedicated place in which we can put 2 points. Surely this is the opposite of logical thinking. Why spend a max of 21 points to buff spells you may use 10% of the time?

Shamans have such a unique look and feel, that it feels odd they want to push us into using single target healing just cause they simply feel we should use those spells (let alone considering their mana usages). From the top of my head I could come up with several ideas to add to the unique way of shaman healing instead of falling back to single target healing. This can be done using more shields (fire shield?), unique temporary totem procs per target healed, totem animals as HoTs or guardians, elementals, etc. The cultural idea of a shaman has such a vast and rich base to draw ideas from.

• Philondra · 11/05/08, 5:50 AM

Originally Posted by Mushin

What about our cleansing abilities are actually superior?
Cleanse Spirit is identical to the Paladin's Cleanse - except it does a curse effect instead of a magic effect, and costs more mana. Our totems have seen no change, and poisons/diseases have always been very niche raid effects compared to magic/curse.

The only part of our 'wide-reaching toolset' that is actually improved by speccing Restoration is being able to cleanse curses. Every other tool can be provided - often better - by a dps specced shaman.

Elemental Shaman suffer the same problem from decursing that we do -- a complete lack of ability to do anything else -- and enhancement shaman have actually seen decursing become even more of a tradeoff, as they no longer have unused GCDs floating around and suffer from greatly increased mana consumption compared with pre-3.0. If we were still in patch 2.x, I would agree that enhancement shaman and retribution paladins were stronger decursers, but once JoW is fixed these specs will be struggling to keep their heads above water mana-wise as it is, and cleansing is much more of a mana hog when you are only sitting at ~6-7k mana raid buffed.

Our advantage compared with holy paladins is that they must stop all healing throughput to cleanse (unless they have the much-maligned FoL glyph), whereas we have the option of group-based, preemptive poison/disease removal, and in situations where we hardcast dispels, we are much more likely to have lingering earthliving or riptide hots on key targets as well as earth shield on the tank. The surrounding environment, with enhancement being mana hogs, retribution barely remaining mana-neutral, and restoration receiving a boost to HOT capabilities, has given us a competitive advantage in decursing.

Trifle · 11/05/08, 8:23 AM

Druids and priests both have much better heal over time abilities they can use while they cleanse. Heck, priests can even dispel magic and heal with the same spell (if glyphed) !

Really all I'm hearing is "resto shamans are better curers because the other classes are busy being useful in their primary roles." Thats not really a very constructive position to take.

sovelis41 · 11/05/08, 12:31 PM

Originally Posted by Trifle

Really all I'm hearing is "resto shamans are better curers because the other classes are busy being useful in their primary roles." Thats not really a very constructive position to take.

I think you misunderstood the point the above posters are making. If a paladin has to cleanse his group, he needs 5 GCDs, a shaman can use 1 (short) GCD to drop a totem, and then continue healing on the next. Compared with paladins, we definitely have the advantage as they have little to offer when they stop casting heals.

This situation changes (and is probably more significant) the smaller the group is.

Karede · 11/05/08, 4:09 PM

Originally Posted by sovelis41

I think you misunderstood the point the above posters are making. If a paladin has to cleanse his group, he needs 5 GCDs, a shaman can use 1 (short) GCD to drop a totem, and then continue healing on the next. Compared with paladins, we definitely have the advantage as they have little to offer when they stop casting heals.

This situation changes (and is probably more significant) the smaller the group is.

Actually, I think that you've misunderstood the point. People aren't talking the poison and disease cleansing totems. They are talking about the new spell Cleanse Spirit, which removes poison, disease and curse at the same time. However, as others have rightly pointed out, to say that just because we can cast a spell that will cleanse three things at the same time (how often do you have more than one type on you at the same time in PvE?) that it's acceptable for our healing to be sub-par in compare to priests and druids is really quite insulting. Yes, we bring more utility than we did before, but all things being equal the goal that Blizzard has stated they have is that classes be balanced to the point that you don't need to bring one over the other because of class, rather, you bring the best player. With our primary healing "niche" being raid healing now being filled more effectively by both druids and priests, we are left wondering where you put a resto shaman in a raid now. Both elemental and enhance provide better raid utility through things like UR and ToW. You can argue for mana tide, but that is still only a group wide totem.

bewmheels · 11/05/08, 6:01 PM

Theres still scope for multiple resto shamans, mana spring/mana tide. I just cant see why if your going to pick 8 healers for instance your not going to have 2-3 shaman still. Having 2 shamans and 3 priests in 1 group means a majority of ur raid/tank healing is going to have more mana than they'll need for almost any fight. Pallys/druids seem to be quite self sufficient these days.

Tell me why you'd have more than 1 enhance/ele shaman in a raid?

Grizlor · 11/05/08, 6:50 PM

Mana tide isn't really even useful anywhere in Naxx other than Sapphiron. I never got a chance to do Sartharion on 'hard' mode, so I can't speak for that, but I certainly never got it when I specced resto for heroics/malygos/vault/etc.

jlavarj · 11/05/08, 8:18 PM

Evocate and Innervate have both been moved out of talent trees and into skills. It's long overdue that mana tide receive the same treatment. In my MC days, that was the main reason to have a resto shaman, mana tide totem was a game changer. Now it's an afterthought.

• Philondra · 11/05/08, 8:41 PM

Originally Posted by Karede

Actually, I think that you've misunderstood the point. People aren't talking the poison and disease cleansing totems. They are talking about the new spell Cleanse Spirit, which removes poison, disease and curse at the same time. However, as others have rightly pointed out, to say that just because we can cast a spell that will cleanse three things at the same time (how often do you have more than one type on you at the same time in PvE?) that it's acceptable for our healing to be sub-par in compare to priests and druids is really quite insulting. Yes, we bring more utility than we did before, but all things being equal the goal that Blizzard has stated they have is that classes be balanced to the point that you don't need to bring one over the other because of class, rather, you bring the best player. With our primary healing "niche" being raid healing now being filled more effectively by both druids and priests, we are left wondering where you put a resto shaman in a raid now. Both elemental and enhance provide better raid utility through things like UR and ToW. You can argue for mana tide, but that is still only a group wide totem.

Although I cannot speak for others in this thread, I pointed to Ghostcrawler's posts about chain heal being outclassed by CoH and WG in two different threads in which he mentioned that it was something they are concerned about. I don't think anyone is arguing that our cleansing abilities justify having less healing capacity. Continuing this discussion as if CH's current situation as a third-rate raid heal is as Blizzard intended is disingenuous; we just have to wait and see what Blizzard's approach to the situation is, and Ghostcrawler implies that it will be in the form of nerfs to WG and CoH rather than buffs to CH.

With regard to the mana tide totem discussion, I'm not sure of the need for it to become a baseline ability anymore. Evocation became baseline because all mage specs had to be built around it, the mage class ended up being balanced around it, and its presence in the arcane tree precluded fire/frost specs. It was a huge non-decision for the vast majority of mages, regardless of whether they were frost, fire, or arcane. Mana Tide totem does not warp the shaman class at all. Enhancement and elemental have their own mana convservation/regeneration abilities, the two specs have more than their fair share of utility already, and removing mana tide doesn't open up any new or interesting specs that weren't available already. Back in 2.x the argument for giving elemental more utility via mana tide made some sense, but at this point it's just "me too!" syndrome.

Mushin · 11/05/08, 10:09 PM

Originally Posted by Philondra

Elemental Shaman suffer the same problem from decursing that we do -- a complete lack of ability to do anything else -- and enhancement shaman have actually seen decursing become even more of a tradeoff, as they no longer have unused GCDs floating around and suffer from greatly increased mana consumption compared with pre-3.0.

When I talk about our 'toolbox' I'm not talking about making dpsers decurse - I'm talking about cleansing totems as an advantage over manual decursing. I'm talking about dispelling. I'm talking about buffs.

Ele/Enh can provide cleansing totems on exactly the same footing as a Resto shaman.
Ele/Enh can dispel better because their roles require them to have hit rating.
Ele/Enh can provide exactly the same buffs that Resto does, except minus an almost negligible amount of mp5 from Mana Spring.

The only reason to bring a Resto specced shaman in addition to any dps-specced one you have is Mana Tide. Everything else we can offer is provided as a baseline ability of the class, or done by another class for less mana.

missbehaves · 11/06/08, 1:51 AM

I searched this forum but didn't see any comments on the problem with tidal waves (tidal waves buff does not increase the amount healed .. it in fact appears to decrease it slightly). Has anyone see anything about when/if this bug will be corrected? I saw that many of the suggested builds/worksheets included this talent.

• Philondra · 11/06/08, 2:08 AM

Originally Posted by missbehaves

I searched this forum but didn't see any comments on the problem with tidal waves (tidal waves buff does not increase the amount healed .. it in fact appears to decrease it slightly). Has anyone see anything about when/if this bug will be corrected? I saw that many of the suggested builds/worksheets included this talent.

Tidal waves has two effects: the casting time reduction proc and a static bonus to to HW and LHW. The latter affects LHW and HW regardless of whether or not the cast time proc is active. It's not a bug, and you should be seeing no change in amount healed when the TW proc is active.

missbehaves · 11/06/08, 5:26 AM

Originally Posted by Philondra

Tidal waves has two effects: the casting time reduction proc and a static bonus to to HW and LHW. The latter affects LHW and HW regardless of whether or not the cast time proc is active. It's not a bug, and you should be seeing no change in amount healed when the TW proc is active.

Thanks, I read the tool tip incorrectly. I wish Blizzard had said that on the bug forum.. they just said it was a noted bug.

healmuth · 11/06/08, 6:46 AM

In my opinion, the CoH problem could be solved with a simple cooldown of i.e. 5 or 6 seconds. It would definitely reduce the pure output a priest could get from simply doing one-button-healing. So far, I personally haven't seen rediculous numbers from WG so I can't really comment on that. Compared with CoH, the "problem" seems to be rather small.

A very good point I believe is the manatide issue. Either it needs to scale a lot better or if they choose to keep it the same way in terms of value, they should move it into skills. But then they will have a bit of a problem with the talent trees again. An option here would perhaps be to have the option to have an "improved manatide". I see four options there:

a) Make it raid-wide. I think that would be nearly too strong
b) Increase it to 9% mana restoration
c) Increase the uptime to 18secs
d) Decrease cooldown to 3m

Engyu · 11/06/08, 8:07 AM

Originally Posted by healmuth

In my opinion, the CoH problem could be solved with a simple cooldown of i.e. 5 or 6 seconds. It would definitely reduce the pure output a priest could get from simply doing one-button-healing. So far, I personally haven't seen rediculous numbers from WG so I can't really comment on that. Compared with CoH, the "problem" seems to be rather small.

A very good point I believe is the manatide issue. Either it needs to scale a lot better or if they choose to keep it the same way in terms of value, they should move it into skills. But then they will have a bit of a problem with the talent trees again. An option here would perhaps be to have the option to have an "improved manatide". I see four options there:

a) Make it raid-wide. I think that would be nearly too strong
b) Increase it to 9% mana restoration
c) Increase the uptime to 18secs
d) Decrease cooldown to 3m

If Blizard follows up on: "ok we will get fight more mana dependent". Such a "buff" of the mana-tide would turn Restau Sham damn interesting in raid setups.

selwonk · 11/06/08, 9:53 AM

Tidal Force works properly in macros now.

François · 11/06/08, 10:27 AM

Originally Posted by healmuth

In my opinion, the CoH problem could be solved with a simple cooldown of i.e. 5 or 6 seconds. It would definitely reduce the pure output a priest could get from simply doing one-button-healing. So far, I personally haven't seen rediculous numbers from WG so I can't really comment on that. Compared with CoH, the "problem" seems to be rather small.

Cooldown on CoH breaks the spell. Being able to do 3 CoH in a row then switch to single target heal (or oofsr regen) in fights like Malacrass is what makes healing as a priest fun for me. What you propose destroys this gameplay.

I'd much rather have an Arcane Blast like (stackable 3s duration) self debuff on CoH than a cooldown.

Titanx · 11/06/08, 10:51 AM

Originally Posted by Ribs

I'm trying to think of encounters in which the raid will have poison, disease and curses on them, thus making Cleanse Spirit superior to other decursers. Can't think of anything in tbc except maybe some trash, but this could of course change in wotlk. As it is right now Cleanse Spirit is just a lazier form of Cure Poison/Disease with an added Curse flavor. It has the same mana cost and in most of the times you will use it to remove 1 effect, not 3. Purges and interrupts are truly better left to dps shamans with +hit or other classes (spriests and rogues for ex).

Furthermore, stating we are lesser healers, but bring more to the table, would be in direct contradiction to what Blizzard has been stating many times. All hybrids have been increased in their relative d/h/t per second to be able to match (or get very close to) 'pure' classes. It would be more than odd to see this rule be made an exception for the resto shaman build.

I am a bit puzzled by their way of thinking. If it is understood by Blizzard that we'll be using CH 90% of the time, then why put 6 places in the talent tree to buff non chain healing if that is 'just' 10% of what we'll be doing? Whereas Chain Heal has just 1 dedicated place in which we can put 2 points. Surely this is the opposite of logical thinking. Why spend a max of 21 points to buff spells you may use 10% of the time?

Shamans have such a unique look and feel, that it feels odd they want to push us into using single target healing just cause they simply feel we should use those spells (let alone considering their mana usages). From the top of my head I could come up with several ideas to add to the unique way of shaman healing instead of falling back to single target healing. This can be done using more shields (fire shield?), unique temporary totem procs per target healed, totem animals as HoTs or guardians, elementals, etc. The cultural idea of a shaman has such a vast and rich base to draw ideas from.

I agree. Chain heal used to be my favorite spell in early BC, when it was useful sometimes, but not always. Using it 90% of the time (which is very boring and doesn't require much, if any, skill) when we have so many talents at the bottom of the tree for our other skills just doesn't make sense. I still want to be a raid healer, but I want chain heal to be situational. If I'm using chain heal 50% of the time that's absolutely ok, but 90% is just ridiculous and it's similar to warlocks spamming shadow bolt nonstop for the entire fight, which Blizzard has stated is a problem and they have already begun to address it. To me, there's nothing wrong with using riptide, lesser healing wave, and chain heal as raid healing spells, especially when we're getting talents that proc other effects. Lesser healing wave is a quicker heal, riptide is instant, but not as strong as LHW, and chain heal is certainly more powerful when it can hit three people at a time.

The current problem with chain heal, since it's range seems to be ~10 yards, is that when the raid isn't grouped up it's far inferior to circle of healing and wild growth as those spells have a 15 yard range. If chain heal is indeed 15 yards, this obviously isn't a problem, but those other spells do seems to have a greater range.

Torsha · 11/06/08, 10:53 AM

Blizzard are most likely going to be nerfing both CoH and WG but not because of CH competition but because of brainless healing (MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Are CoH and WG better than Chain Heal?)

I don't think a CD is the answer because they still need to be able to be decent AoE healers when shaman are nto aroudn or when you need to have extra Aoe. I think a simpler solution might be to simply reduce the radius of CoH or go back to group-only heals. Reducing the radius to 10 yards instead of 15 would mean a higher chance to over heal and less coverage resulting in more careful thinking about where to drop the next bomb.

Originally Posted by François

Cooldown on CoH breaks the spell. Being able to do 3 CoH in a row then switch to single target heal (or oofsr regen) in fights like Malacrass is what makes healing as a priest fun for me. What you propose destroys this gameplay.

I'd much rather have an Arcane Blast like (stackable 3s duration) self debuff on CoH than a cooldown.