I use chain heal only when it'll jump 3 times. Otherwise, LHW/RT spam.



Is a Sartharion kill and a fairly typical breakdown for me.

I'm interested to know what sort of raid compositions you are running.

Do you have any issues with the other classes moaning about you "stealing" their role as MT healer? And who is doing the raid healing if you have shaman on the tanks?

Don't forget that when (if?) we see CoH and Wild Growth on 6 second cooldowns that shaman will be required as raid healers on heavy damage fights like Malygos 25.

Please forgive if these are obvious answers, I rerolled tank -> healer for WotLK and am still learning the class/role.

1. For spamming LHW single target on Patchwerk, are you also using Riptide in the rotation for hasted LHW?

2. For maximum tank healing using Riptide -> HW -> HW -> CH -> HW -> HW. The transition from HW -> Riptide to start the next rotation is what I'm curious about, if the tank were still in dire straights would it be worth using a GCD on Riptide to start the next rotation or toss some glyphed LHWs for more immediate healing?

3. Is there a recommended crit minimum for this build?

Are you talking about the 10 man or 25 man Patchwerk? (because it is a huge difference)

10 Man: You can cast/cancel healing waves and/or use a lot of chain heal to heal both tanks. LHW obviously works just as well here, but you can do just about whatever floats your boat.
25 Man: If you are healing the first HS tank, I'd say mixing in riptide will be somewhat difficult until your tanks have a good bit of gear, but if you see an opening for one it's certainly worth it for the TW procs. Your experiences may differ here based on your raid group.

@ Razuvious
My log file was somehow corrupted which was upsetting because it is indeed an extremely chain heal friendly fight. I was basically just casting chains through the current tanking MC'd add and was getting 4 jumps consistently with 12-14k effective totals.

Edit: Other than Raz, my healing distribution looks like the recount above, but with more chain heals and a little less Riptide.

The paladins in my group are thrilled to raid heal. They put their beacon on the MT and help me that way while spamming FoL as raid. And they do it well.

Priests as far as I can tell are not viable for tank healing (they barely were in TBC), and druids should be raid healers these days.

As for the nerf to CoH/WG....druids and priests will still be the main raid healers I suspect, with one shaman chain healing. You won't need to stack shamans like the hyper paranoid masses believe on the main WoW forums. One CH shaman will do. And really, one LHW shaman is all you can probably do as well...remember the viability of the LHW spam only works for one shaman per tank, and you probably will have extra paladins to do the other tanks.

I normally heal with a Holy Priest or a Pally. When you're 2 healing, it's more "you watch X tank" than it is healing assignments. I normally take care of the MT when I'm with the preist and leave it to the pally otherwise. I actually think holy priests make better raid healers than Shaman with their CoH+SoL flash combo.

As far as the rest of the raid, 2 pally tanks (they hit 80 first so they're best geared), 1-2 warriors, and the rest usually casters. Composition is more determined by who's 80 and reasonably heroic geared than it is by being optimal.

It depends on your other sources of mp5. I had to pot on a fairly regular basis (1 every other heroic run or so) up to about 23-24% crit on the character sheet. I was running with a moonkin the entire time and without replenishment so that might color my impression (healing is annoyingly imprecise for thresholds). I've never had a problem if I get replenishment.


As you stack haste, the GCD reduces along with the cast time. HW won't have an issue unless you have enough haste to get TW HW below the 1.0 second GCD cap.

I actually use RT quite a bit. When the tank is on an avoidance streak, I'll RT when he gets hit. This is fairly safe because an ES goes off at the same time and I have a fast LHW following. If the boss hits particularly hard and the tank is on an avoidance streak, I'll RT just for the buff+hot and be ready for the hit. I use it just before I refresh my water shield since it gives me a fast LHW to catch up from the missed GCD. Finally, it heals for more than a non-crit LHW does, so I use it on slightly more damaged raid members when I'm raid healing and let the hot+AA take care of them. For pure throughput it's not that useful and I normally won't hit it just for the haste when I'm tank healing.

Qualifying note: I tend more towards a balanced int/mp5/crit build than you do, so my numnber looks very different. Ill try to get some tonight to post.

Some things I noticed in your numbers:

You avg 4449 per LHW, and 1250 per AA proc. Thats actually quite good from an AA overheal standpoint (about 7%). What do your LHW overheal % numbers looking? (obviously that is fight dependant but what kind of average do you get?

You use RT ALOT. More than LHW. That seems like a huge mana drain. Why do you do this? Sarth is not eactly a huge movement fight. The only fight I find myself using RT so much is Gluth when I am the kite healer and end up runnign around alot myself. Using RT so much would seem to hurt your HPS significantly.

I would love to see a balanced mp5 build doing the same job on that fight to see different numbers. Especially for HPS.



Mostly I think that the content is so easy that any reasonable build can do the job, and that unless Uldar is a huge bump in difficulty that no one NEEDS to min/max any more.

Wow Web Stats

This is just a comparative parse to the ones above using pretty much only chain heal and HW. I had 497 haste + egg of immortal essence. Unfortunately razuvious was a horrible mess with the mc's not going very well from the start so didnt have a chance to get into a steady rhythm and get a trouble free parse.

I ran out of mana with about 10 seconds to go is also worth noting. Will try to keep the same haste numbers for next week or if i do it 10 man this week.

I'm currently running around with this build. Done Malygos 10 tonight with me on MT healing and a priest on OT healing.

This is a recount for the fight, no WWS unfortunately. I'll have WWS for the Sarth we're doing right now, hopefully. My crit is hovering around tooltip which is strange.

So far my feelings are that it's worth further investigation, but it has severe limitations. I haven't been attempting to gear for haste particularly, and my gear has generally been replacing haste with crit and mana/5, and I've been hitting 1s GCD with just heroism and no WoA or whatnot.

I find the spec is kind of a mishmash in some ways. LHW loses a lot of HP/s because you're spending 1 GCD every 9-10 refreshing watershield and I'm not sure that it's really worth the bother once people start getting better gear.

[edit]

Looking at it now that recount is all kind of strange. I'll see what happens in Malygos 25.

Now that my gear is majority tier 7 with 4 piece, I'm noticing myself going back to Healing Wave more since I don't really worry about going OOM on anything (not to mention all the haste that's on T7.10/25). It's just easier to guarantee the tank is topped off with a riptide-hw-hw setup (very useful when landing after Vortex and prepping for a breath/melee hit combo).

That being said I still use LHW as my primary raid sniping heal, and I don't see that changing just because it's fast, is often free* and is enough to heal RSTS damage.

*Glyph, Meta Proc, and/or Trinket Proc

It is disheartening to finally have a second viable style of healing (that wasn't abusive or broken in any way, shape or form), only to see them specifically target it for a nerf.

Would be interested to know what the numbers are on the nerf, and if it ends up killing this playstyle. Seems like a bizarre change considering the whole point of the glyph system was to "promote different styles of play by altering spells and abilities."

They did exactly that very successfully with resto shamans and LHW... why make this change now?