Anaram

Those times when you can get passive regen can in some encounters also serve as perfect time slots to refresh water shield depending on how far apart they are, of course.

This said I don't think being able to last through KJ fight means much currently unless you were running with 4-5 healers - top end gear against a nerfed encounter just doesn't give a very good reading of the reality.

 

hvidgaard

I love the idea for sustainability, but I doubt Blizzard will let Imp WS proc of CH. It would encourage even more CH spamming and they don't want that. It would however be a very welcome addition for Riptide to apply WS as well, as that would take my mind away from constantly watching if I have WS up or not - and god forbid it, enjoy the fight more.

 

Grital

Riptide refreshing water shield (even by just 1 charge) sounds amazing, I don't think IWS needs to proc off chain heal though. AE healing will always be mana intensive, but I think Blizz will make it "phased" like Huhu in AQ40. Trivial to heal till 30, amazingly intense after that.

 

superpink

Hey,

I haven't been playing my Shaman long, but I've been reading these forums and appreciate the great input!

It seems like Blizz are stearing Shamans into a more crit build - not just purely a haste and mp5 build.

So at level 80, I was thinking of using this spec:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...00000000000000


Since Intellect seems to be the way to go, Shamans would be looking at higher %s of crit.. so wouldn't a build including Clearcasting be the way to go?

 

• Philondra

As per the tooltip, the elemental tree's clearcasting only procs off fire, frost, or nature damage spells. You would have to be shocking or casting LB/LvB to trigger the heal reduction. In most serious raiding situations you won't be doing this enough to justify taking 11 points out of restoration or enhancement.

 

Torsha

We have all made the mistake of not reading the tooltips/spell descriptions properly

As far as going for crit builds as opposed to haste goes well I did that and went the whole +int route and fell way behind other healers in effective healing done. I then went back to haste gear and my healing increased substantially and I was comparable to the lesser CoH priests, though still about 20% behind the top CoH priests (still, better than 50% behind ).

Of course mana become a problem but this can be worked around by stacking shaman for MST, ensuring you have replenishment classes in the raid and perhaps more importantly by being aware of when spells need to be cast as opposed to mindlessly spamming. There are still shaman spamming CH like crazy in phase 1 of Illidan and wonder why they go oom when phase 2 starts Honestly, if you don't need to cast heals then don't cast anything, if a Riptide is better than a CH then use Riptide, if CH is not going to save someone then use LHW/Riptide.

Anyway regarding the talents in the other trees that a resto shaman should look at. People tend to read selectively so when they see "decreases mana cost of all spells" they tend to not really read the rest. Here is a list of non-resto talents that are worth at least a cursory glance (unless you're going for some weird hybrid build)

Elemental
1. Elemental Warding . Not a healing talent but it can be handy to have depending on encounters
2. Unrelenting Storm. You need to invest 25 points in elemental to have this talent

Enhancement
1. Ancestral Knowledge
2. Thundering Strikes
3. Improved Shields
4. Improved Ghost Wolf (its more an honorable mention but its pretty darn good if you need fillers or if you have points to spare)
5. Elemental Weapons
6. Enhancing Totems
7. Guardian Totems
8. Improved Windfury Totems
9. Anticipation: PvP only
10. Toughness: PvP only
11. Shamanistic Focus. Not onyl for PvP since there are occasions that we use Frost, Flame and Wind Shocks in raids
12. Dual Wield. There have been one or two spellpower weapons seen that can be used in the offhand in wotlk. If there
are a couple of worthwhile end-game spellpower weapons that can be used in your off-hand then this becomes viable but only because of the fantastic number of potential enhancement talents (note: this is not for hybrids but for non-Riptide based chain healing/buffing builds, something along the lines of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft). Of course if there are no spellpower off-hands at end-game then no DW

Basically elemental is a dead end in terms of speccing into whereas enhancement truly "enhances" however I fully expect to see a minimum of 51 points in resto for end-game healers. Personally I am looking at a very unimaginative build of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

Jessamy

A dual-wield caster? I can't see the benefit outweighing the loss of earth shield, but just for fun, a wowhead search yields 5 one-hand weapons with spell power in the game:

Weapons - Items - World of Warcraft

2 of these are from Northrend; both are of green quality. A weapon enchant is more powerful than a shield enchant, and even the level 70 green Earthspike provides more spell power than the level 80 epic shields. However, note this line from the latest patch notes: "Some one-hand spell power weapons are now main hand only." We'll see how that plays out. Any weapon can be enchanted with a caster enchantment, and spell crit and haste are the same as melee crit and haste. Bidding on Knife of Incision for my healing set would make me laugh, certainly.

resto shaman glyph overview

 

Krypt0s

[Librarian's Paper Cutter] looks like a candidate for "best weapon likely to survive another pass at removing one-hand status from caster weapons".

Do we know how dual Earthliving imbues work? Are they each rolled separately? So we'd have (glyphed) a 1 - (.75^2) = 43.75% chance to apply per target? Would that, in addition to the gains in spellpower / haste / crit from double Earthliving, double weapon enchants, and whatever stats you can score on an offhand adequately compensate you for the loss of Earth Shield, Riptide, and Tidal Waves? The idea of a substantial increase in the output of Earthliving is, at least, interesting.

 

Jessamy

After my knee-jerk mid-raid reaction last night, I ran the numbers this morning.920 / 65 * 5 = 70.8

So with both of the water shield glyphs and with improved shields, if I can refresh my shield within 70 seconds of the last orb being consumed I come out ahead. I don't need to stress over watching my orbs to maintain 100% uptime, but can cast water shield when my focus isn't required elsewhere.

Edit:
Incidentally, I highly recommend the ShieldsUp addon.

resto shaman glyph overview

 

grayrest

I ran pre-nerf farm raids specced 30/0/31* and never really missed it. It's a bigger loss in 5 mans and the extra 32% on earth shield charges makes it harder to give up, but it's not as required as most people make it out to be. Missing imp. chain heal is a much bigger deal.

Kryptos: That'll survive because it's a rogue offhand and not "supposed" to be a caster offhand.

I'm curious enough about this to drop the money for the respec. I'll try to report back soon.

* 30 ele is the sweet spot for offtree speccing. The only major damage boost left in the tree is Lightning Overload. Everything else is group buffs and minor damage boosts for raid viability.

 

Mengus

Does anyone know if earthliving weapon stacks when it's on 2 weapons?

Servers are down so I can't try it, and really, with dual spec I can't imagine healing as enhance like I do now, but it's something interesting at any rate. A crappy green with a +spellpower enchant on it in addition to 2x earthliving weapon could provide some serious oompf.

 

Daidalos

It stacked last time I tried. That was 1-2 months ago in the beta. It also increased the chance to proc maing it in the ~36/40%. range (didn't test long enough to get exact figures)

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Raiste

Given the mechanics of Lavaburst (100% crit chance when flame shock is on the target) and the new flame shock glyph, I think a spec like:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

could work out nicely, especially for MT healing. With the glyph flame shock DoT lasts 18 secs. Lava Burst is a 2.0 sec cast time spell. So if you can find a free 2.0 sec in the 16 secs after putting up the flame shock DoT, your next two heals cost 40% less mana.

Costs :

Flame shock cost: 4396 (base mana value) * 0.17 (flame shock cost) * 0.55 (45% reduced costs on shocks) * 0.9% (10% reduced costs on shocks) = 369

Lava Burst cost = 395.6

Assuming 25% crit rate for flame shock. You need to spend avg of 665 mana to get two charges of clear casting.

Savings :

If used on HW: 1983 (cost of casting two talented HWs) * 0.4 = 793.4 mana saved
If used on CH: 1587 * 0.4 = 635 mana saved

Drawbacks are obvious in that it is hard to have a required spell cycle (although the flameshock -> lavaburst "cycle" is extremely flexible timing wise) to gain maximum benefit as a healer since healing is by definition not 100% predictable. However, the spec loses little to nothing in healing ability compared to riptide specs for 95% of all PvE situations. This just gives the additional option of using extra GCDs to do some added DPS without any real mana cost. More than anything though it could add a little more flavor to shaman healing than /cast Chain Heal whack a mole that most of us are extremely tired of by now. Would be fun to try to squeeze out a bit more dps when there is a GCD or two free in healing without any real mana cost.

 

Bundin

What would it look like if you calc in our (generally low) hitrating and the resist percentage on damage spells for raidbosses though? I've always considered myself unfit to rely on for interrupting through earthshock because of that. Another problem is flameshock limiting positioning. In order to land a shock I'd need to close in, often into harms way.

 

Joulakil

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

all the way for level 80 pve

the talent is 0/17/54
with improve shields and improve earthshield. If they stack that means 25% heal + 2 more orbs for the earthshield.
elemental weapons is pretty nice, both for farming (flametongue) and healing
i don't know why many people don't take ancestral awakening.. its pretty good isn't it? like mini light-beacon.
one point in shamanistic focus is a left over.. i just thought it is the best to put one last point

 

Raiste

that's the obvious cookie cutter resto Joulakil. Just seems so boring to go back to another expansion worth of CH spam though. Sure they made other spells more viable but our niche just seems to be always stuck at primarily using CH. I'm probably thinking too hard trying to make things more challenging / interesting i guess. Bring on the expansion, we'll see what kind of encounters they have in mind past the easy mode Naxx 10 / 25.

 

Grizlor

Even on a fight where I do nothing but spam LHW (council, archimonde), Ancestral Awakening is at best, 3-4% of my healing done. It really needs to count overhealing, and needs some sort of secondary bonus or something.

 

Joulakil

yea its totally just an improvisation of our 70 talent, however chain heal is totally way to go for us though.

by the way, if not Ancestral Awakening (AA), what are those 3 points for? my reasoning of taking AA is that we have around 14-16% crit chance from our talent alone, might hit around 25% with Naxx gear in future. Its not only proc of LHW, but Riptide as well... plus we have Tidal Waves talent, every heal we have will be faster, except chain heal.. how about that?

 

Grizlor

Oh, I get it at 80, for sure. It's nice on fights like patchwerk and some other things, when you're actually running 40% or so crit raidbuffed. It's just worthless at 70 with the current gearset.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft was the build I used for most of my naxx runs at 80.

I used Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft or something like it when I was doing a lot of heroics. You don't really need tide at all for any of the 5 man content, and focused mind helps a lot in places like Ahn'kahet, the Nexus, CoT strath, etc on heroic mode, when undergeared tanks can/will die in the span of an 8-10 second counterspell.

 

Raiste

Tidal waves is nice especially for PvP, but since it doesn't actually lower the GCD on LHW, the haste effect isn't all that fantastic for LHW throughput and max rank HW is just rarely used at the heavy mana cost and the large healing amount for no real gain in efficiency. So we are basically stuck with CH spam with some LHW and Riptide mixed in while keeping ES/totems/WS up.

 

grayrest

Dual Earthliving

* Heal Power bonus stacks, both are affected by elemental weapons (no surprise)
* Earthliving proc does NOT stack. Buff is refreshed.
* When glyphed, procced 179 times in 419 LHW for a 42.72% proc rate


As far as item comparison, it looks like it'll be the [Librarian's Paper Cutter]+63 SP vs [Aegis of Damnation]+25 Int. I don't have resto spreadsheets set up to answer the is it worth it question.

 

Awimbowee

Hi there.

My first post here.

I don't know if it's very interesting, but since the 3.0.2, I use [Flask of Distilled Wisdom] for raids, combined with mixology. You need to be exalted at the Cenarion Expedition to learn it.

With mixology, the duration of this flask has doubled (like all other flasks), but it increases my intellect of around 95, which means more than 1500 mana points with Ancestral Knowledge.

In BC, this was really awesome with all the crits and regen consequences, but I didn't have the chance to try this flask on the beta with a lvl 80 player. I can't tell you if the amount of intel is really interesting for WotLK, but it may be useful to look at this.

Sorry for my bad english, thank you for reading me

 

Daidalos

That pretty much matches what I reported from the beta. I think its something more an enh shaman would be interested in since I don't see resto really being viable with dual wield spec. As far as sp vs int it would depend on if you need the mana from the int or not. IN pure HPS 63 SP is superior. I don't think any HEP can be reached quite yet until we get more raiding in at 80. SP now no longer helps with mana at all so its not a very good comparison until we get a feel for it.

Actually all throughout BC I once I was in sunwell I would use distilled wisdom as my preferred Flask when I went all out. I hope there is a 80 replacement but I haven't heard of one so far.


One thing I've been wondering is what professions are people going for BC? I was LW and alch for the drums and pot mastery but now LW isn't looking all that exciting. The LW leg enchants are for melee/tanking so I'm thinking of switching to something but I can't decide what. Currently I'm thinking BS for the ability to add a socket to bracers and gloves but I'm not sure if thats really best since most all the BS patterns are plate.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Krypt0s

You'd also tack on 195 +healing to the Paper Cutter since you'll get an extra Earthliving imbue, as you mentioned. I think that'll always give an OH weapon an edge over the best caster OH. Your test also seems to reinforce that it's two independent rolls, which will be 43.75% chance to apply per target. The question is: Will nearly doubling our Earthliving application rate ultimately prove more useful than having Earth Shield, Tidal Waves, and Riptide? If we're accepting that our role is 90%+ CH spam, perhaps.

I also noticed that the second point in Blessing of the Eternals loses some value in this build, as with one point the chance to apply Earthliving to a target < 35% health is already 87.75%. Whether the 2% crit is better than the point in Nature's Blessing is something to spreadsheet.

Going one (ridiculously huge) step further, I remembered an old video of an elemental shaman who used Mental Quickness and raid buffs to achieve astronomical spell damage values. We could sacrifice even further in resto and use Mental Dexterity and Mental Quickness to convert Int --> AP --> spellpower. Something like this It's essentially twice the effect of Nature's Blessing, as well as converting all AP buffs (and attack power from offhands) into more spellpower. Yes, the change to buff stacking hurts this in a huge way, but I thought I'd still toss it out there. I'm pretty sure the loss of Improved Chain Heal is a bit too much though.

 

Fuulish

With respect to the DW enh/resto hybrid spec, is there an assumption that this spec is to be combined with caster gear? Or would full enhance gear (with it's much higher ap than sp on healer gear) be a better net choice? Obviously the mana pool of enhance vs caster gear would need to be taken into consideration.