Kortar

I think you are getting too excited over nothing... at the moment Chain Heal and CoH are totally dominant in end game raid healing to a rediculous level. Blizzard have clearly acknowledged this fact which is why chain heal is not seeing any new talents to (directly) buff it further, and CoH is getting a pretty serious nerf.

When it comes to raid healing come WotLK I fully expect to see Shamen and Priests will retain their posistion as the raid healers of choice, without totally dominating the role as much as they do now.



Also am I the only one who thinks that Healing Stream Totem has suddenly become rather desirable?

I hope totemic mastery will be reworked. Make 30yad radius to baseline and put Totemic Re-call place of mastery. This is just ridiculous that when you put totem to ground it can kill tank at Brutallus. And you have to take that risk five time per two minute. (searing *2 and others)

Not that I would mind, but I doubt this will occur. Even on Brut you can cycle your totem refreshes to occur between slashes and ourside the stomp window. Its a PITA but its doable.

I just wanted top post a thought on specs after reading the (entire) thread.

What about a HW spec'd resto who gives the raid buffs for melee (instead of enh).

War Tools :: Talent tree WotLK - Test

Sure your missing UR, which is significant, but with this spec you have a resto who can MT heal (Im not going to get into it with you Kotar, your posts are becoming borderline trollish/fanatical) and who can buff the raid with the appropriate totems. In might even make the 5th spot in the melee group viable for a rogue or fury war over the enh shaman.

Im not saying this is a good thing, just wondering if anyone has given it any thought.


Also, regarding AA-

I dont think some people are seeing this as what it is. this is a 1 jump chain heal with more healing potential, but less reliability. Its give use a secondary raid healing function even when we are MT healing. If it does allow you to hit the same taregt twice...wow, just wow. Frankly I doubt it will allow this though (just like CH cant chain back to someone on the 3rd jump). And unlike CH it has a 40 yard range. So it is effectvely you are getting a crit + a noncrit (90%) HW at the same time


3rd note
Wondering if anyone can say with any degree of certainty how SL will handle the situation if the taget it selects becomes immune (bubble, cyclone, etc). I am guessing SL will use a CH mechanic, which means it will select the 2ndary targets when the blow lands. If thats the case, will it skip such targets or just land the dmg for no effect?



Lastly, ha couple of PVP notes:

Restating what someone pointed out earlier that SL could be used to clear CC, esp in 3v3 where it would be reliable
On the down side Im sure its purgable/SSable, so that advantage could be used against you if the mage was smart and stole it at the right time.

1. If we're not bringing an Enhancement Shaman, there really isn't much reason to have a specific 'melee dps' group. The only other two buffs that are really of interest are LotP and Battle Shout, and you can get those off your tanks just as easily as you can get them off dps variants. So in the scenario you're envisioning, you'd probably just have two tank/melee groups rather than stacking tanks in one and melee dps in the other.

2. As it currently stands, part of the reason you bring an Enhancement Shaman over simply tossing a Resto Shaman into the melee group is that the Resto Shaman's buffs are wasted on one of the five members of the group (themselves). Add in Unleashed Rage and the superior weapon totems, and it justifies bringing the Enhancement Shaman rather than simply using a Resto Shaman to fill the role.

If you allow for raid-wide Windfury/Grace of Air, then the rationale for bringing an Enhancement Shaman diminishes a great deal and the Enhancement Shaman's personal dps, augmented solely by Unleashed Rage as a group buff, needs to be sufficient to justify their presence (Stormstrike is unlikely to be a significant factor since no pure dps class focuses on nature damage). On the other hand, Enhancement Shaman do seem to be getting a significant boost in personal dps via the synergy between casting/melee in the WotLK talents.

3. Elemental Focus. With 20% spell critical, Elemental Focus constitutes a 14.4% cost reduction on direct single target heals. Couple that with the 2% critical and 10% empowerment on healing you're throwing away from the Resto tree, and I'm not sure that the relatively trivial benefit of Improved Weapons Totems is worth it.

Improved weapon talents is just bad talent. It's about 10-20dps to raid. Resto who get that only gimp himself too bad. Spec pure resto and use one flame shock per 2minute and you improve your raid dps more.

It actually translates into 25% more physical damage mitigation (assuming you don't hit the cap). The reason you see people saying that it provides less is they're combining up-time and the 25% mitigation into a single figure for mitigation-over-time.

Up-time on the armor buff is less a factor of spell critical than it is spell frequency. You can calculate the up-time as: 1 - (1 - c) ^ (15 / t), where c is your spell critical and t is the casting time of the spell.

So let's say you have a 30% critical and are casting Healing Wave. You'd have 88.3% up-time. To get the same up-time with Lesser Healing Wave, you'd only need about 20% critical.

The reason Shaman and Priests don't currently gear for spell critical is in recognition of the fact that it's an inefficient way to increase the armor buff up-time.

And in terms of gearing under the assumption of a 25% armor buff, this would cause damage to be very streaky and difficult to heal. Instead of a steady 60% damage reduction, you'd occaisionally drop to 50% damage reduction and your Druid would be taking huge hits.

Even assuming triple-stack Healing Way, Healing Wave is still inferior to both Holy Light and Greater Heal. It's certainly a useable large heal, but Shaman are generally the last choice for tank healing.

Since the amount of armor vs damage reduction is not linear, in most cases it would not translate into anything close to 25% more mitigation.

I think the reason we don't gear for crit is more along the lines of its a lousey way to increase HPS or HPM vs pure +healing (HPM and HPS) or haste(HPS) not to mention unreliable.

I find myself coming to this same build every time, only 3/3 Healing Focus instead of 3/3 Healing Grace.

A 25% increase in armor does not mean that the tank will take 25% less physical damage. Thus why I said it equates to several % mitigation. I believe you know this but you misunderstood me so I will not go into more detail.

Yes uptime is very important so I would not recommend a druid gear for it but it should be fairly easy attain nearly 100% uptime through the combination of LHW, HW and downranked HWs alone not to mention raid buffs and the extreme ease with which your crit can be pushed well over 30%. You get 14% from talents 8-10% from intellect (estimated as this is gear/gem dependent) putting you at 22-24% before +crit or raid buffs. An ele sham giving a raid wide totem = 3% or a boomkin gives 5% (I say "or" because the ele sham should go into the boomers group before you, thus not having both) as well as 1-2% from the combination of Kings and AI. I believe that 25% is a BARE minimum crit total with 30% being likely if you even give minimal consideration to crit while gearing. Ele shaman can push 40% crit with only 10% from talents and resto shaman would be no different.

As for HW's strength don't forget to factor in Nature's Blessing and Tidal Waves. Nature's Blessing is incredible if it stands the way it is because spells are getting an increased coefficient. Tidal Waves increases that coefficient by another 25% making for what I believe will be a strong base heal with exellent scaling. Although crit heals are not traditionally taken into account when comparing heals, this build would crit consistantly enough that crits would help to close the gap between HW and Greater Heal or Holy Light.

The necessity of spamming heals in order to maintain the buff is detrimental but Elemental Focus will take a huge chunk out the the mana cost of doing so.

I do see one hole in the build. Pallies have no AoE heals but great tank heals. Meaning that a palladin would still be first choice for tank healing. The strength of chain heal may actually make gearing/specing for it more important than the versatility of being able to tank heal better.

On another note, Is it just me or is Spirit Link the strangest thing ever. Its current wording "You link the friendly target with two nearby targets, causing 50% of the damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. After 2200 damage, the link will sever." is ambiguous. The main target is labeled as "friendly target" however the secondary targets are "nearby targets" with no "friendly" tag line. Could it be that this is a mitigation/damage spell causing part of the damage recieved by the main target to hurt nearby enemy targets? It would be an original mechanic....but it just sounds like poor wording to me since the "After 2200 damage" part is rather ambiguous too.

It seems all of the analysis has been focused on pve implications. One obvious application in pvp is a shaman-like version of blessing of sacrifice, except you make two players immune to most forms of cc.


Hmm. Having read the rest of the replies I see this has been addressed. I can see a scenario where you cast this on yourself where along with improved earthshield you become an even better pvp tank than currently.

Or waiting until a player is dotted and then casting SL on him to make your 3v3 immune to CC.

I think spirit link is an extremely powerful ability. In warcraft 3 it was a way to stop the opponent from focusing down your expensive units, which is even more useful considering that orc healing was mostly AoE. I can easily see it being used in exactly the same way. In situations of concentrated single target damage, spirit link in combination with PWS, can allow people to consistently survive damage that would one shot them. Just like war3 spirit its not spirit link on its own that makes the difference but spirit link in combination with other spells.

I doubt spirit link would be used that much on the tank. It is going to be a raid saving tool. Putting it into level 70 terms of HP. Lets say you have a boss that targets someone in the raid randomly with a debuff that hits for 12k damage every 10 seconds or so. Priest hits PWS, shaman hits spirit link everytime the debuff appears. Your 8k health DPS is saved. Without this everyone in the raid would have to have 12k HP, nerfing their other stats a lot.

Consider the use of spirit link with PoM. Casting a PoM and a spirit link when a player takes a DoT, can be a very cheap and effective way of healing them.


Even on the tank, if you see a tank about to die, taking 2-3k off the next hit, can easily mean the difference between life and death.

Also think of it like this: Blessing of sacrifice+spirit link+PWS+guardian angel+last stand+shield wall. This can effectively make your tank invulnerable for a few critical seconds. Just combining shield wall with spirit link can easy mean a very large increase in incoming damage mitigation. Under shield wall spirit link can be used to absorb 4 times its normal damage. If say a tank has to survive a predictable 120k hit, shield wall will reduce that to 30k, lets say 4k out of that by spirit link and another 3k from PWS make it 23k. It represents a very big drop in incoming damage that can easily be the difference between the tank living through this damage or dying from it. If the tank has to survive 2x 120k hits, last stand, spirit link, shield wall and PWS can save the first hit and guardian angel can save the 2nd.

I expect to see a lot of use for damage mitigation talents in WotlK based on the the talents we are getting. I suspect there will be a lot of encounters where you have to use damage mitigation instead of raw healing to save DPS. I also have a nagging suspicion paladins will be the masters of this.

I dont think spirit link is an accident. The fact that it may be a gimmick does not change the possibilities that this spell has.

Two questions I still have not seen anyone answer, number one, does anyone know if Spirit Link links the friendly target to hostile targets? I could see this being both good and bad. Number two, does anyone know if the Earthliving Weapon proc can proc off of Earth Shield heals?

I'm 100% certain your first question has been addressed multiple times. To the 2nd, Earth Shield is not considered your heal. It's considered a heal that the target casts, much like Prayer of Mending and the final tick of Lifebloom. An Earth Shield proc on yourself should proc it, though.

Aight I have seen that the Spirit Link question has been asked before but I was curious to see if anyone knew an answer, so far all I have seen is that it is assumed that it will only effect friendlies. If it has been answered could you please point me in the right direction to see where it has, thanks.

So far as I know no one knows the answer, because the spell has only been datamined and the alpha is under an NDA (so we have no testing data).

Logically, however, I expect it to link to friendly targets only, both because that was how the WC3 spell of the same name and functionality worked, and because that makes more intuitive sense to me. The spell would also be considerably more powerful if it linked to hostiles (especially in PvP), which doesn't seem intended, although it may be, who knows.

Sorry if this has been written before - and perhaps a bit off topic- but I read the first two pages and this question pretty much kept hitting me constantly:

Is it just me or Healadins - in their present state - no longer hold the monopoly of spammers with Clearcasting? By increasing Shammie's versitality, Healadins pretty much are nerfed again and become relegated to an optional buffing class?

Don´t compare present-state-Paladins to WotLK-Shamans, it was stated by Blizzard that Paladins will get the biggest changes of all classes, so you should not worry about becoming an optional buffing class.

Source

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it linearily translates into lifetime gained, right? Not into damage reduced, but lifetime gained.

So if 1000 armor were a 50% reduction, the first would give 50% reduction (+100% lifetime), the second would give another 25% reduction (75% total, again +100% lifetime), the third would only give 12.5% reduction (87.5% reduction, yet again +100% lifetime compared to the last step).

And so on and so on until cap, right?

Yes. Mitigation M goes like A/(A+C) for C constant. So, "effective HP" goes like 1/(1-M) = (A+C)/C, which is linear in A.

"Lifetime," literally, is not all that useful as a measure of anything, but no realistic raid situation is framed by "the raid will wipe after the tank has taken X total points of damage because that's all we can heal off before we run out of mana."

Very importantly, however, this also means that the pre-mitigation spike size required to instantaneously kill a tank with fixed HP goes linearly with armor value.

I'm rather curious about what people are thinking for the patch 3.0 healing build at Level 70?

I was thinking along the lines of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I happen to be a big fan of improved reincarnation, so those points can be moved elsewhere obviously. Any thoughts?

I doubt it frankly. When an Earth Shield you cast on yourself crits it does not give you the 25% armor buff, I assume they will use a similar mechanic to resolve the new hot from Earthliving weapon.(I wish it did, would be exceptionally handy in pvp)