Hi,

first post for me here..
U guys here are awesome! Alot of stuff/hard core number crunching goes over my head, but I've still learned tons on this site

First of all, I dont have any experience besides b/c content.
With the current nerfed content, there isn't really a need for mana tide for the raid/party
I wud drop a Mtide maybe twice clearing sunwell.. (more for myself than for the other caster)
Even though I sacrificed mp5 for haste, I only use 1 or 2 pots the whole nite. In the past I can go thru 20+ pots

I went from being 1st or 2nd to last on the meter since the expansion.
I dont mindlessly just spam CH either. At times CH only accounts for 50% of my heals.
I'm doing what I think Blizz want resto shamans to do.. but I have to be honest, if I were the raid leader..I would not bring me to a raid.. I dont really have that much to offer (beside totems)
With the current content my guild can stack 5 COH and not bring resto shammies just fine

So, what does Blizz mean when they said they dont want the raid to be dependent on 1 class?

Please take a moment to visit the first page of this thead. I have posted a very rough draft of the new wiki for Resto Shaman. It draws heavily on posts made in this thread, especially by Pitbuller, Philondra and Durnitol. Daidalos is also a prime contributor. This version is probably riddled with mistakes and omissions (which I know you guys will catch).

Real life has limited my time on the forums. However, I would like to provide an updated guide to healing as a shaman. And I figure I better start working on it before the expansion hits and I spend every free moment leveling to 80.

I think all AoE heals should have a cooldown. Spamming AoE heals every GCD because it is the most efficient spell is boring. Make them have a 6-12 second cooldown. Adjust raid damage accordingly.

Are you asking for a 6 second cooldown on Chain Heal ?

I think simply reducing the range of CoH will do little - it actually might even encourage raid leaders to bring even more priests to have a better "coverage". However I do agree that a CD might not be the final solution. Another possibility could be to limit the number of people that profit from this to 4 (5 glyphed), increase mana cost to around 23% base and add a 1.5s cast-time.

I've been trying to polish up my resto calcs in preparation for Lich. I think my calcs are are solid now for the most part. I do need to add in all the glyph effects and verify healing stream totem coef (I think it changed but I haven't gotten around to testing). Currently I only include the max rank of each heal since downranking is now pointless. I will replace top ranks when Lich actually launches.

Initial thoughts (refinement needed)
Earth Living Weapon
Earth Living weapon is treated in a similar manner to the riptide HoT portion. Basically that since it only procs on heals it is calculated a secondary effect giving it a .5(12/15) coef(after the 1.88 multiplier adjustment for spell power).
ELW especially helps with the heal/mana ratios of LHW since its a static amount healed it adds ~15% to the average heal of a LHW (assuming the entire hot portion takes effect)

One thing that needs confirmation is that if each jump of CH has a chance to proc ELW and if ELW can proc on all 3 (or 4) jumps

I realize this is a resto shaman thread, and don't mean to clutter it up with a discussion of priest mechanics, but since the last few pages have been talking about CoH I wanted to point out that priests won't just be CoH spamming at 80. There are huge changes to the spirit/int -> regen formula at 80 that cuts Mp5 from spirit/int by almost half. There are extensive discussions on this in the priest threads if you're curious, but basically at 80 CoH/WG spam is not sustainable for any length of time. Since paladins/shaman don't use this formula for their regen they won't be hit as hard and things should come a bit more into balance.

On the reverse side Mav, we don't get the spirit/int mp5 regen and are forced to stack mp5 of gear meaning our out of 5 second regen is significantly less. On fights like, say VR, there's intense aoe damage for a couple seconds while he's pounding, then no AoE damage. During this time, priests will regen a heck of a lot more mana than a shaman will. Yes, I think the higher mana cost may prove to be an issue in 80 raids, but more than likely it'll just lead to priests demanding even more innervates in order to keep their mana up.

Bunni, a .5 second increase would be almost negligible. They'd still be able to get 4 consecutive CoH casts off before the cast time is longer than the GCD, and then just renew spam or PoM until the debuff goes away. A mana increasing debuff like arcane mages have would be interesting, although again just leads to priests wanting more innervates.

Torsha, what about a 3 second cd? We in essence have almost that on CH as it has a 2.5 cast time. 3 seconds fits in nicely with gcd's as it means you CoH, then use any other instant or 1.5 second cast (Renew, PW:S, Flasj heal, PoM, Binding) then another CoH. It still maintains a decent throughput and pushes priests into the broader away of heals that Blizz has given them, while allow shaman to get off a CH before you've CoH'd everyone back up to full health. It's at the point right now where I'm trying to pick the person with the 11th lowest health after an AoE for my CH because I know the 10 lowest are getting hit with a CoH before my heal gets off...

Sure. I don't think anyone likes spamming CH 90% of the time. But we do it because our other spells suck so bad. Put CH, CoH, WG on CDs. But we'd need LHW and HW boosted to be on par with the other classes.

I've seen several lvl 80 Naxx raid WWS parses from ~2 weeks ago where Priests dominating the healing by using CoH 70-80% of the time. I don't know why these logs differ from priest theory. Maybe the fights are so short in Naxx that mana doesn't become an issue.

My concern is that CoH costs less mana than CH (when both are talented), and that Priests have more mana abilities than Shaman. If priests cannot spam CoH, then how are shaman going to spam CH? And Shaman have nothing else to do if CH (our most efficient spell) will run us out of mana. We don't have a cheap heal to fill in to conserve mana.

Spamming Chain Heal:
Just calculating the numbers to show Shaman cannot spam CH constantly.

Chain Heal cost 793 mana talented, every 2.5 seconds

We get back:
Water Shield 65 mp2.5
Replenishment buff 125 mp2.5
Mana Spring 53.125 mp2.5
Gear mp5 ~100 mp2.5

Therefore the net mana loss after every CH is 450 (every 2.5 seconds) Assume we start with 20,000 mana. Somewhere in the middle, we use Mana tide for 4800 mana, and Runic Mana Potion for 4300. That gives us an effective mana pool of 29,100.

64 Chain Heals will net cost us 28800 mana, running us out of mana in 2 minutes 40 seconds.

Just a few corrections for you.

Circle of Healing is 21% base mana and Priest base mana at 80 is 3863 (according to wowhead and wowwiki). That makes CoH 811 untalented. Healing Prayers doesn't affect CoH. So Mental Agility makes it 730 mana.

I've done some work on the whole T6 and how long to hold on to it for. It really pays off to keep the 2 set bonus just because its still a lot of pseudomp5 so to speak.
Assume you cast a chain heal once every 5 seconds which would be the absolute minimum cast frequency....

19% of 4396 = 835mana thus the bonus @ 80 is worth 83.5 mp5. Correct me if i've missed something.
Basically gemming every piece of T6 for INT brings it on par with Rep purples/dungeon blues however it lacks a lot in terms of spell spower, crit and stam. Obviously if you cast more than once every 5 seconds or have a good amount of haste this scales.

The way i see shaman healing atm i've put highest priorty on mp5/int wen deciding what gear to get and when to swap out my T6. T7 from 25-naxx is unreal and the amount of int/sp/haste makes it too good to not take over t6. However bracers belt and boots would be the way to go if you're aiming to keep T6 2set. Hell the ele set is also worth getting if your going to be healing on your way to 80 (limited use of all totems while questing)

If you're also interested Skyhoof i have compiled a spreadsheet of all Reputation and lvl 80 dungeon loot. I havent bothered with heroics because i dont plan on touching them and going straight into naxx but might get around to it once i get to 80 and some better loot tables come in. The spreadsheet also allows you to put in stat weights to determine what's what.

Edit: I've also got a good amount of info on all things on my guilds forums. Let me know and ill make it available for you to look at.

With regard to the second part of this question, I tested this in 3.0.2, and ELW can only ever proc once from any given cast of CH. This can easily be tested by rezzing people after a wipe and casting chain heal while their health is still very low. With 2/2 Blessing of the Eternals, ELW should have a 100% proc chance on all three newly-rezzed targets. It's anyone's guess as to whether this is a bug or intentional.

I am fairly sure that ELW can proc off any jump of chain heal (will test some more tonight) but it is limited to once per cast.

This seems to fit in with my anectodal evidence from raid healing but always hard to tell when you busy healing in a raid. I'm trying to decide if I should include ELW into the healing cals of the other heals. While it makes sense to do so it seems quite probable alot of the Hot will never really take place so it may make things look far better than it turns out to be in practice (I would keep the numbers seperatte I'm just debating if its worth adding at all).

It's a little more complicated than that, due to the different bounce behaviors. Wild Growth and CoH bounce radially from the first target to 4 or 5 secondary targets which also gain the benefit. This means they can move 15 yards in any and all directions simultaneously, which gives them an effective range of 30 yards from edge to edge.

CH can jump 10 yards from one target to a second target, and then can jump 10 yards again to a third target, and then 10 yards again to a fourth target, glyphed. This means its maximum possible range is again 30 yards, if these targets are arranged in a perfect line spaced 10 yards apart (effectively impossible). In most cases these jumps will be shorter and if at any point a 10 yard jump to a NEW target is unavailable, the spell fails. In almost all cases the chain will fold in on itself and its effective range is limited to a very small space, eg. the melee group.

True, but it all depends on what you consider your main source of mana return to be. As soon as 3.02 went live I immediately regemmed stacking intellect due to the larger returns from replenishment and mana tide, only keeping a few mp5 gems, and that's the direction I'm intending to head in the expansion too.

Like most healers I barely have any mana issues at the moment; the only fight that can bleed me on a sloppy kill is KJ but I'm taking everything until the expansion with a grain of salt as we need to see encounters that are tuned to the new class mechanics.

Being honest though I haven't seen any hard stats yet that have shown mp5 to be a more effective source of mana return than intellect - and that's ignoring the other passive benefits of intellect such as crit and spell power.

Yes, but those are also mana regen that priests get, well except mana tide if the groups aren't done with healer mana in mind, so it's not really a benefit that we get over spirit based healers. Granted we'll probably have slightly higher int but I don't think it'll be as big of a difference as they're spirit regen is.

You've got it slightly backwards, we'll still have to take Healing Focus, the thing that doesn't stack is the reduction in silence or interrupt effects, so we don't have to take Focused Mind. However, with 50% pushback reduction from the aura, we only need to go 2 into Healing Focus to be at 96% reduction, which is negligible. In any case, that gives a nice 18/53 spec that I'll probably end up with here.

I think a cooldown is the way to fix it, 6 seconds it what they originally had in beta and decided they didn't like it. 3 seconds seems reasonable to me, either way it'd be nice if they couldn't spam it 4 times before we get 2 CHs off.

I'll check again when I get home tonight, but at the very least the priests are operating under the assumption that since 3.0.2 and the pushback changes, pushback reduction effects do not stack.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t35208-p...p3/#post959367

Either way, the easiest way to test is to duel a naked rogue with earthshield on and 3/3 healing focus.

I may be interpreting this wrong, but you state that earthliving has a healing power coefficient of 0.5. I've done a couple of hours worth of testing to find a slightly different value.


I began with no healing power besides the +110 granted by Earthliving Weapon Rank 5 itself and was completely untalented.
The average over 3 earthliving hots was 132.75 per tic, which when multiplied by 4 gave 531.
The base healing of earthliving is 456. I proceeded to use this equation:

Base Healing + (+Healing Power)(x) = Total Healing Done -> Where x = Healing Power coefficient
456 + 110x = 531
110x = 75
x = 0.6818

With +225 healing power untalented, the average was 152.5 per tic, which equated to 610 healing done.
456 + 225x = 610
225x = 154
x = 0.6844

With +373 healing power untalented, the average was 177.75 per tic, which equated to 711 healing done.
456 + 373x = 711
373x = 255
x = 0.6836

With +446 healing power untalented, the average was 190.5 per tic, which equated to 762 healing done.
456 + 446x = 762
446x = 306
x = 0.6861


Average of x = (0.6818 + 0.6844 + 0.6836 + 0.6861) / 4 = 0.684

Assuming this is correct, 0.684 is the healing power coefficient of earthliving.

Now I used talents and a lot more healing power to see if the coefficient stays similar. I began with +1322 healing power and Purification (effectiveness of heals increased by 10%). The average healing done per tic was 374, which equated to 1496 healing total.
456 + 1322 x 0.684 = 1360 (where x is replaced by 0.684 as the spellpower coefficient)
1360/10 = 136 (Purification)
1360 + 136 = 1496, which is the value I got from testing.

With +1533 healing power with purification, the average was 413.5 per tic, which equated to 1654 healing done.
456 + 1533 x 0.684 = 1504
1504/10 = 150.4
1504 + 150.4 = 1654 (rounded down), which is the same value I got from testing.

Now, I'm still trying to figure out where this value actually originates from, most HoT's / DoT's coefficient should be (duration)/15 then multiplied by 1.88 if I'm not mistaken. However, for this particular case it doesn't seem to add up. Does anyone have any idea whether or not I'm following the right path?

I just rounded up a bunch of mobs and spam healed myself with Healing Wave to test. I didn't start seeing knockback until the very moment Earth Shield faded, so at the very least ES stacks with Healing Focus.

This is a terrible design philosophy. AoE spells are the most efficient spell in the situations they're used because that's what they're designed for.
CoH definitely needs a mechanism to stop it being spammed, but CH and WG already have mechanisms - CH has a casting time on par with the heavier heals in the game, and WG loses significant mana efficiency when you spam it.

The answer is to make Lesser/Healing Wave better and to give up on gimmicking our mana refund mechanism. I mean, they seemed to realise that Water Shield was very demanding when it was on a minute-long cooldown for regen and changed it to ten minutes - but then they go and essentially force us to opt back into that GCD demand in order to make our single-target heals competitive?

Doomed to spam chain heal whole expansion? Spamming Circle of healing or Wild growth 70-80% of time wasn't ok. Spamming Chain heal 90% of time is ok?
Our talents support use multiple spells but mana and base healing values don't give enoughoutput for any other heal than chain heal. Shaman needed some number tuning and Blizzard fixed two other classes that chain heal look little better. Maybe we should start asking cool down to chain heal too. Then HW/LHW would get par with other spells.

This change make earth living little better.