I've been trying this spec out now and then during our Naxx25 clears and I've had a pretty fun time attempting to see if the spec is worth it, I've got a WWS if you're still interested in gathering numbers. I'm thinking that in order to really see numbers out of this spec you may have to wait for a higher AoE damage fight, that's my personal opinion tho.

Wow Web Stats

The above link is this weeks clear, I don't have any other links to provide at this moment but there's a few things to note, I was only in for Anub'Rekhan, Patchwerk, Grobbulus, Gluth, Thaddius, Noth, Heigan, Sapph and Kel'thuzad. Another thing to note is that we were healing heavy so there were a lot of heals that just nullified my Earthliving HoTs, I also just did some DPS on random non-heal intensive fights since we were heavy on healers.

here is the WWS :Wow Web Stats Full Naxx run + Malygos

As you can see by tcheking the wws, EL count for 8% of my total heal.

45% overheal total

48% overheal on chain heal

9% overheal on EL

Lets say that i spammed the CH button a lot and I could have done less overhealing, but mostly less healing too.

It definitively give a good output, but the fact that CH is slow to cast it tend to simply goes in overhealing in situation where a fast LHW, HL or even a riptide could have done the job.

I think that this build is viable only on very specific fight where you simply need an amazing output to keep the raid up. Sarth 3D, Eradar twins (for exemple).

For all other fights, you loose a lot of flexibility and a lot of "i saved his life talent" Ex: Fast LHW + riptide, riptide while in need of moving, ES... always good to have one up, Fast HW when there is an "oh shit" on a tank, etc.

Considering that the choice for the off hand is extremely limited, that it just will not scale with upcoming gears and that Blizz may just "fix" those 2 weapons so that this build will no longer be viable anymore... I dont recommend it and dont think its viable on the long run.

This is a common misunderstanding. There was a 9% overheal on HoT ticks, without taking into account ticks that did not happen because the target was topped off. Therefore, without going through an intensive hand parse (I'm not aware of any reliable mod/logparser that handles this) to find how much missed healing there was on Earthliving, this is a useless statistic. I would recommend ignoring that completely and just focusing on the throughput that was attained.

On my last hand-parse (Riptide spec) I found a 52.20% ELW overheal when WWS reported 1%.

True but you forgot that: 1) chain jump is only 50% and have less overheal; 2) overheal can be avoided if raid is using same tools (Grid or X-Perl); 3) haste is most important stat for this build.

True but ES can be compensated by second resto shaman in raid.

What do you meant by "not scale with upcoming gears"?
I think we should not serously consider "upcoming" changes in future since we know about nothing about it. As for now, this build gives great benefit from CURRENT t7 set.

This build is for massive raid heal by CH so it is useful for any encounters when "raid takes heavy damage" and "raid stays relatively together". As for WOLtK content, these encounters are:
Arkavon-25, Naxx: trash, Noth, Loatheb, Faerlina, Razvuvius, Taddius; Maligos, Sartr with drakes. It is quite more simplу to tell where this build is not useful: it's only Arkavon-10, Patchwerk, Kel'Tuzad. However this build is still applicable for this encounters due to high spell power.

My experience shows that this build increases your effectiveness by 10-15% even through full Naxx and and even more effective through Naxx+Ark+Maligos (if you assigned to raid heal, surely).
Please also remember that the most difficult fights are Maligos and Sartr+D - both of them is great for DW spec.

You need to be fourth resto shaman in raid for satharion 3d if you say.
+10-15% output is joke. It's just 184spell power and about 20% more earthliving tics. 5% is more likely.

Yes, the result impressed me as well. I don't actually understand why my performance was boosted from 25% to 30% (+20%) after DW spec.

However, 184 sp of a total 2500 is 7%. ELW usually gives 5% of my heal, so second weapon would give about another 5. Combined together, theoretically it can give 12% heal increase.

I was wondering...

How would Corrupted Scythes value against the two daggers posted on the first topic?

With Invoker suffix it provides "+19 Intellect, +22 Spell Power, +19 Critical Strike Rating"...

I'm wondering about your source on this. From the coefficients/talents/glyphs that I reviewed, I'm seeing Paladin's Flash of Light as having less scaling. Also looking at WWS for current content and gear levels, FoL isn't hitting as hard as LHW is. If you have data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.

Was wrong about that I had been looking at a spell coefficient chart that was incorrect.

I've been watching this particular thread for some time and was extremely curious to see how this spec would work out. Last week I was able to go with our raid team to Sarth3D with this spec, and my numbers went from mediocre to out of this world. Both my raid leader and I were astonished at the increase. I ran fully buffed at roughly these numbers, (they are all rounded down by the way): 2600 SP / 1050 INT / 550 Haste / 24% Crit / 485 MP5

Not having ES and RT, and being the only resto shaman in the raid, was really not as detrimental as I thought. However, if I had to recommend to anyone about this subject, I would definitely recommend having a 2nd resto shaman in the raid that was specced normally, simply for the cushion of having those two abilities available.

I had a parse for the night I raided with this spec, but it has gotten lost somewhere in translation. But the overall change that I noticed was my overall healing/overhealing done. Overall Healing before was roughly around 8%, and my overhealing averaged around 45-50%. For that night my numbers were 14% and 68% respectively. I had the highest overall healing done, next to 2 druids, 3 priests and a paladin. My Raid leader was so impressed with the increase that he agreed to let me keep this spec for raiding, if I wanted to.

I intend on making sure I get a parse for tomorrow night when we will be doing 3D again and then Malygos. My expectation is that I will again see the same dramatic increase in overall healing done for Malygos as we did for Sarth.

NOTE: I didn't use any different gear or change any gems/enchants for use with the DW spec, I used the exact same everything that I would normally use except for my flask/food. I used the Flask of the Frost Wyrm and the 46 sp food (forget the name?). All of our healers are incredibly talented, so I know that they worked just the same as they always do, not allowing me any cushion to buff my numbers.

Lazeenja: All that means is that you were using way too little chain heal before. Chain Heal is usually around 60-70% of my healing with a normal specc. If you would have casted the exact same spells before and after the respecc, you could get at most a 10-15% increase. Any more than that means you were using the wrong spells before, trying to cast LHW, HW or Riptide when a chain heal would have been better and thus losing healing done.

Also, 68% overhealing seems kind of extreme, and especially that you win healing meters at the same time. Are you sure that your meters are looking at "Effective Healing" and not counting overheals in the total number. If you have such a meter it's quite easy to massively win healing done by spamming heals into a full hp raid at the beginning and end of fight when few is taking damage. I know for a fact that many in my guild are still using an outdated version of recount that counts overheals in "Healing Done".

Well, that parse is from the entire instance including trash. You can find a custom parse for just the boss fight at Wow Web Stats

Also, were you entering portals? Once you are inside the twilight realm, your combat log will not show heals from people outside it (and the opposite). Unless you get data from two different people of which one stayed outside and one entered, the data is going to be skewed

Ah I see what you mean now, and I do in fact have another parse from a person not going into portals, I was the only one taking portals that night, least that's how it was directed. I don't recall seeing anyone else in there with me healing. WWS I have to admit that I don't know how to do the custom split the way you did it, or maybe I do and just don't realize it.

Basically the url ends with aaaaa-bbbbb for the first one and ccccc-ddddd for the second one, and if you manually enter aaaaa-ddddd you will get the correct period. Anyway, if you usually don't enter portals but did this week, it's the reason for a part of the relative increase.

With a primarily haste-oriented spec, I find that Chain Heal is slowly becoming less and less useful, especially in fights where damage is coming in higher, 7K chunks than Naxx rarely puts out. To be honest, Naxx is a joke, and discussing your performance in Naxx is really not an indicator of the true usefulness of the spec.

If you're going by pure numbers, I generally can average just under 10K on Healing Wave, 15K crits are common. With a 40% crit rate on it, approximately, you come up with an average at or around 12K. Keep in mind that those are more or less estimates. Frankly, I don't pay that much attention to meters, because meter watching as a healer is a waste of time. I have gotten 20K crits out of my Healing Wave with Healing Way up, so these are more or less low estimates.

Given that, your first Chain Heal would have to hit for over 5K to match. One can easily assume that it does, so at that point, you might call things equal.

The problem is that a lot more is going on here. Ancestral Awakening generates a significant amount of healing. Some recent Malygos 10-man 6m runs have resulted in AA procs of 4892. While a 4-crit Chain Heal (uncommon even with abnormally high crit rates) can equal a HW crit, it doesn't generate the AA proc. The AA proc is every bit as intelligent as Chain Heal, and so results in useful healing a majority of the time, approximately the same as a Chain Heal target hit.

Healing Wave also procs Improved Water Shield, making it vastly more mana efficient. With a high crit rate, Healing Wave can average out to recoup 30% of your Healing Wave casts, dramatically increasing your efficiency. If you add in a regen trinket like Soul of the Dead, you can drop your mana consumption to ridiculously low levels.

And if that's not enough, let's discuss casting speed. Without any buffs that I can't self-manufacture and no consumables, my Chain Heal casts in 2.02s. Healing Wave casts at 1.42s with Tidal Waves up.

So, in the end, Chain Heal will end up costing you significantly more mana, heal for significantly less, and do it slower than Healing Wave does. Why would I give up three very vital portions of this particular strategy (Riptide, Tidal Waves, and Ancestral Awakening) for even a 10% increase in Chain Heal effectiveness? Or ELW procs of any variety? Especially when you consider that, by and large, you can run the exact same healing strategy with a pure Restoration spec, and generate similar (albeit weaker) effect, and keep the reflexive healing that comes from having Tidal Waves up.

I still tend to end up with a significantly higher percentage of Chain Heal than Healing Wave, but that's primarily due to trash pulls and recovery from things like Vortex where Chain Heal obviously shines. But all that Chain Heal also happens to reinforce the Healing Waves to come. Running a Disc Priest with a Resto Shaman in 10-mans means you almost have to have this utility available. The sheer healing output is absolutely ridiculous. If you're averaging out around 15K healing per cast with HW (including AA), you're looking at approximately 10K HPS, and that healing is landing more frequently, and as such, keeping more people alive. And you also have a ton more longevity. As most people here have stated, the Dual Wield Chain Heal spec is a mana hog. Also consider that with all that haste, especially with both the Scarab trinkets, you're overhealing very little. I went through some Sarth 10-man 3D attempts with a 12% overheal on the night. And I haven't even mentioned Earth Shield.

You can quote Recount and WWS all you like, but what it comes down to is that healing is not a factor of pure output. Druids frequently top healing meters because Wild Growth will heal up the massive amount of random little 1K-3K hits that exist in the game. Does that mean that Druids are dramatically overpowered and need to be toned down? No. Earthliving and Chain Heal in this build benefit from the same factor. Until they come out with a "useful healing" stat, it'll be difficult to parse out just how much of Chain Heal healing is worthwhile, but I'd wager a guess that the last two bounces, and occasionally the first, just aren't helping the raid much. And they're especially not helping if they're healing up an amount that some HoT would heal anyway a second or so later. And they're also not helping if you're out of mana late in the fight.

As I stated earlier, I think making a dual-wield healing spec would be terrific and interesting, but it's just not viable right now.

At various points in your post you are discussing the efficiency of Healing Wave. I'd like to address some of the issues involved that are left out of your assessment.

Overhealing needs to be taken into consideration. 15k Chain Heals are not viable on the majority of your raid. Effective Healing is what you actually heal out of that 15k crit. On my last raid, I parsed an overheal of 45% on HW, leaving only 55% as effective healing. Ancestral Awakening is a great talent that gives us another smart heal and another reason to like Crit Rating. However, it is calculated from Effective Healing.

Chain Heal is a smart heal and will naturally have a higher percentage of Effective Healing (lower Overhealing). Once you take increased Earthliving procs on Chain Heal into effect, it takes a low level of gear to see Chain Heal efficiency pull ahead of Healing Wave.

When it comes to the Dual-Wield-Chain-Heal-Spam spec, I'm still a little skeptical myself. I don't think your points hold enough water to fairly judge the spec, especially in the face of some of the parses we've seen. On that note, your bit on Recount and WWS doesn't connect. Padding one stat on the meter is garbage, but ignoring it as a useful tool is ridiculous.

I was able to do Sarth3D again last night, same healer setup as before, only difference is that the other resto shaman took the portal instead of me. I won't link the parse here, simply because it provides no real difference in numbers from the other parse I linked above. Only differences were marginal and mostly circumstantial. The parse I reviewed for last night was taken by my raid leader, same as before, and both times he was in the portal. So his calculations would have buffered MY results before, and then the other shaman's results this week. One would assume that the other resto shaman's numbers would've possibly rivaled mine but they do not. I still had a much higher overall effective healing amount.

One thing I did notice however was that my Chain Heals weren't "bouncing" as frequently as they did before, this I believe is mostly in part to my own poor decision-making regarding which person to start the cast on, or simply too much sudden last minute moving. So because of this not only did my ELW % of healing done was slightly lower than before, a difference of roughly 1.5% and only being on a max of four targets at any time. This leads me to believe that it is unreliable to depend on this spec since you can't control where the hot goes, same as you can't control where the CH itself will go. Perhaps if the EL hot itself were a more substantial hot, or even scaled with crit/bonus heals the way that ES/RT does, then maybe I could see it being a more useful spec for even the encounters with the heavy raid damage.

I did rather enjoy (at first anyways) being able to relax again while I healed, and not have to put so much thought into which heal I would cast, and just letting my CH do all the work. But I have to admit, even with being able to divert my attention more frequently from watching HP bars in my raidui, it became incredibly boring and almost mind-numbing after about an hour of wiping. (curse you flame walls!) Being able to use my head trumps all else at this point.

I was almost considering keeping this spec for raiding, tho' I must say, solo'ing became incredibly easier at the same time. Throw up double FTW imbues on a couple of enhanced weapons, and soloing mobs becomes a much less painful experience than doing so as a full resto spec. For someone such as myself who spends a great deal of time out in the world farming, it can be a VERY useful ability to pretend to be enhanced. My consideration right now tho' is to give the DW spec another week to look at numbers, and get a feel for it, but I am pretty sure that once dual-specs become available, that this will be my 2nd spec, and the traditional resto spec will be my primary.

I still stand firm tho' that any person who is interested in trying out the spec to do so for themselves and not take another person's opinions of it as golden. It may be that raid groups with a less balanced healer-class makeup could benefit more from it than my team. Also this spec could suit another person's playstyle better than it suits mine. I would urge any person to do their OWN testing and see how they like it. Numbers can't always be trusted. And every encounter is different from the next.

Your assumption of spam is somwhat irrelevant, because it's not a spam spec. Also, it's interesting that you reference Chain Heal with totem cost reduction, and HW without. The Chain Heal spec all but requires you to be constantly spamming Chain Heals, often to no effect.

The point was not to sit and tell everyone that they should all spam HW. Healing is not so simple an activity. The point was to prove that you're giving up a lot to get a slightly better Chain Heal (counting Earthliving as a part of those Chain Heals). It's just not worth it, especially with the number of encounters that require a more diverse skill set than spamming Chain Heal.

As overhealing goes, I guess your mileage may vary. With a high haste setup, I usually ride 30% overhealing in most fights. There are some, like Patchwerk, where that naturally skews higher, though I'll remain confident that the Chain Heal spec doesn't function well on Patchwerk at all anyway. It is my opinion that the majority of Shaman healers out there are still locked into a pre-3.0 mode of Chain Heal being the beast of the Shaman, which it no longer is. It is not useless, and it is still often the best heal for the job. But Shamans are no longer roll-face-on-Chain-Heal.

As for meters, they're misleading in almost every way. I use them to keep track of overhealing and compare spell usage. Using meters as a means of comparing specs is useless.

My post was not meant to push people into spamming any heal. It was a reply to your statement that Healing Wave is a more mana efficient spell due to Improved Water Shield. This simply is not true. The MPS (whether you are spamming or not) is much higher than it is with Chain Heal. The note about spamming was simply as the casting time you noted can only be reached with Tidal Wave up fully.

I agree with you that there seems to be two camps forming, some hold on to the old believe of Chain Heal being the best spell, the others see Chain Heal as a support spell for raidhealing and mostly to keep Tidal Wave up. The problem in debating this however is that the CH=support camp says meters are not valid and one has to rely on versatility over output. The CH=spam camp however points at meters and says the HPS and output is that much higher.

Who is right here? Both are I suppose. The trick to healing is keeping people up throughout a fight. As long as you're doing that it doesn't really matter how you do it. However, such a claim leaves little to no room for theorycraft or discussion as basically you imply specs or usage of skills does not matter as long as you get the job done. This forum is about efficiency and theorycraft, in which numbers DO mean something. As such we can run the numbers and we can see 2 situations appear:

1. Tidal Waved HW cycle is best potential HPS output but will have a lot of overhealing due to crits and AA procs. It is also a very mana inefficient spec when you have to heal constantly.

2. Chain Heal Spam has a slightly lower potential HPS but due to its mana management one can keep healing during most of the fights, making the total output usually higher than a Tidal Waved cycle. Chain Heal usually has less overhealing.

If I look at my CH-spam parses I can tell I am often healing the most out of all the healers present with very little overhealing. If I look at the times where I used a Tidal Wave HW cycle, I saw my HPS as lower due to mana management and my overhealing higher. This is purely based on my own parses. As such, for me, Chain Heal is still more efficient. The claim that it 'is no longer the beat of the Shaman' is something I hear a lot, but fail to see any evidence for other than 'numbers don't mean anything', which the theorycrafter in me just does not get

Most people tend to see a low cast time and assume that it means that you're casting constantly. I view the lowered cast time on Healing Wave as both a means of increasing emergency healing capability, something that is a necessity in some fights, and a means of protecting from overhealing, as my heals tend to land quickly and reduce everyones overhealing because of that. In any case, MPS is really an insignificant means of referencing the efficiency of a spell. It doesn't matter how many casts or even how many seconds it takes you to go out of mana. What matters is the amount of effective healing you can put out in relation to your mana pool. While you can talk about Chain Heal bounces being intelligent, if you're spamming it and getting Earthliving procs accordingly, you're going to run out of mana faster than someone who is simply spending less time to heal a target to full. You might cast two Chain Heals and heal 4 targets to full, but two of those targets weren't in danger of dying. I can spend a full second less capping those two targets, and get AA procs to handle the rest.

There is an assumption out there that Chain Heal is going to output these intelligent bounces which keep people alive and rarely overheal, which I think is false. A majority of the time, you're not getting the full number of bounces out of Chain Heal, and even in situations where you are, and Chain Heal is the best spell for the job, some of that healing is worthless, regardless of whether or not it overheals. A third or fourth bounce on a target who has caught Wild Growth will pad your meters and make you feel good, but it won't do anything to help your raid.

In your case, these two facts may likely be true, but I think it comes from a different mindset and playstyle than the one I use. People look at "overheal" and assume that every single non-overheal point of healing is useful, when it's not. Those last two bounces of Chain Heal, in a fight where Chain Heal is that useful, will never overheal. 2K over two heals is unlikely to fill anyone up. But when you're spamming it, adding up those particular bounces over the course of 30 or so casts, you'll get 60K healing that never overheals, and only very rarely impacts the fight in any manner. In a very loose sense, it's Riptide, and Riptide's healing component is almost worthless.

Theorycrafting a healer doesn't mean that you put out bigger numbers than anyone else. I can top any healing meter I want, and always have been able to. If I start an evening out with the intent of being that #1, I can, because I can read and react to situations well enough to use the right heal for the job. That has nothing to do with my spec. I've topped healing meters with Maelstrom Weapon before.

This is not DPS. Even a healer with an abysmally low healing output can be a terrific healer with a terrific spec. When I'm spamming HW's I tend not to top the meters because I'm not wasting a Tidal Wave proc and a 15K HW on a target who's down 2K health. In many fights right now, that healing can be used as a means of both increasing your meter as well as reducing your Overhealing, and in those same fights, that 2K health is almost irrelevant.

The proper use of Chain Heal is when you need to top off the raid in two or three casts. That's pretty much it. Those situations don't happen enough to warrant a spec based solely on Chain Heal. They are frequent, and when they happen, I can spam a few Chain Heals, and get the same results as the Dual Wield spec. The difference is that when someone is holding a Fire Elemental add on Sarth longer than he should, I can keep him alive long enough to get our add tank over to peel.

It's because of that factor that you can't Theorycraft healing in such stagnant terms. I've had 3D 10-man parses where I cast maybe 3 or 4 Chain Heals per fight, and end up with 10% overhealing. Usually what happens is I giggle and move on. You're dealing with a fight in which targets which take damage tend to take them in 8K-10K chunks, and I change my healing accordingly. The dual wield spec doesn't give you that option.

Bringing along a healer who can only do one thing isn't a viable option in the difficult fights that exist in the game right now. You can't reduce yourself to a glorified Wild Growth when you've only got two healers on a fight. You need both of those healers to be able to read and react to the damage coming in. The <1.5s Healing Wave option allows a Shaman to perform that role better than most, and losing that utility means more than any increase you might get on the damage meters.

Starting with the last comment, what is very little overhealing? Every time I've tried to CH this expansion, I wind up with 30-35% overheal. By comparison, I'm generally around 15% overheal +- 3% on LHW/HW style healing and produce roughly the same amount of effective healing. This could very well be healing makeup. I heal with an extremely attentive druid and we've pretty much worked out that his job is bulk heals (with the holy priests) and mine is saving people from dying. The last run I healed I managed 4/6 on saving our enh shaman when he pulls aggro on trash, which I was pretty happy with.

Secondly, MPS is not a valid metric for healing sustainability. HPS tells you how much healing you can put out, HPM tells you how efficiently you can do it. If two spells have roughly the same HPM, the one with higher MPS is actually the better spell because you simply cast it less frequently to the same effect, leaving more time for doing other things.

There are certainly two major styles of Resto Shaman healing. I'm firmly in the single target heals camp. I find that while my theoretical and raw HPS tends to be lower, my effective HPS winds up being roughly the same, my overheal lower, sustainability at about the same and the reaction time is faster. You can see my calculations on my spreadsheet, which I stole from daidalos when I was writing my LHW spam post and keep updated with my own stats. The most significant feature is that I do count crits and roll the AA proc into the crit bonus.

I think part of the disagreement is that the two camps don't understand each other's healing style completely. I, for example, have no clue how you get 'very little overhealing' out of CH. I did plenty of CH in BC but outside the melee, I can't get my CH to reliably jump more than 2 times and I generate a ton of overheal due to WG+2xCoH on the same targets. Conversely, I don't think the CH crowd understands that I (and I assume most LHWers) heal assuming that my spells are going to crit. This goes against the standard thinking, but as you approach 50% (I'm 46% normally) you either have to do this or overheal a ton. It's not that bad for shaman healers (as opposed to pallys), since we get very good granularity on single target heals:
* RT: Hits 3k, crits 4.5k
* LHW: hits 4.5, crits 6.5k
* LHW (glyph): Hits 5.5k, crits 8.3k
* HW: Hits 8.8, crits 13k (without HW)

When my target is down 4k, I RT. When down 11k or so and I have TW up, I HW. In between, I LHW. A non crit HW can easily be compensated by a RT if it matters. Otherwise, I trust that my AA procs will top off everybody in the 2-3k down range.

Well, being someone who has been firmly in both camps, I can understand the other side. I was extremely disappointed at the lack of Chain Heal reinforcement in 3.0, but I have been pleasantly surprised with the utility you get otherwise. Also, I don't think there's a "single target" camp and a "multi target" camp, as most Shamans end up raid healing regardless, so you're going to cast Chain Heal a lot regardless.

Chain Heal tends to generate more overheals than people think it does, primarily due to those "intelligent" extra bounces. As the above poster states, getting four hits out of a Chain Heal is harder than it looks, though it's probably easier than that poster makes it out to be. I almost always get 3 hits out of mine, probably 4 more often than I think because I gloss over that last hit as a Riptide or Earthliving tick. From there, one can contend that bounces that don't happen equal overhealing, in so much as they're wasted healing on full targets.

Now, I know that's an awkward statement, and I'll get called on it. The point is not to state that Chain Heal is less efficient than overhealing shows, but that it demonstrates the situations in which Chain Heal is the correct decision. If I'm even mildly uncertain of getting that third bounce, I don't use Chain Heal, because it's not worth the time. It might be more mana efficient if two targets are slightly low, but more likely, I'm going to hit the higher with Riptide, then fire a Healing Wave. This is functionally similar to a Chain Heal in that situation, the mana costs are similar, and it offers me a much better safety net in case damage comes in mid-cast, as the Healing Wave will heal the extra damage, and the Riptide's HoT can take care of some miniscule amount.

We can sit and postulate situations all day, because there's a right time and a wrong time to use every heal. The problem is that if you only Chain Heal or gain some sort of tunnel vision that blocks out your single target tools, the result is that you will use the wrong heal a large portion of the time. And it's not the efficiency of the spell which is killing your mana, but the application of your spells.

Depending on the fight, my overheals can range from 10-15% (usually in 10-mans) to around 40% (usually in fights with a lot of AOE damage). I think my last Patchwerk parse ended with me having an 80% overheal, because we managed to plant enough healing on a single offtank that he took every Hateful, so I just constantly HW'ed, without respect for Tidal Waves. An ideal goal to shoot for is 30-35% overhealing, but it's very important not to focus too much on it. If you're holding off heals out of concern for your overhealing meter, then you're failing. Hard. Ideally, you check the meters after the raid. If you notice 40%+ on most boss fights, then you think about switching your rotation.

It's also important to point out that the rest of the healers in your raid impact this greatly. In a raid with 2+ Resto Druids, Chain Heal's value declines sharply, as HoT's will make up a lot of the healing you could do via Chain Heal. It's important to recognize that fact. If another poster in this thread rarely groups with a Resto Druid, and they only have one Holy Priest around, the majority of their healing coming from a Disc Priest or a group of Holy Paladins, or even another Shaman who loves his Healing Wave, then their Chain Heals become overvalued due to the lack of constant raid healing.

As I've said, there are situations that call for lots of Chain Heal, just as there are situations that call for Healing Wave. I'm not speccing to make myself slightly better at the former with the expense of the majority of my power in the latter.

Finally, as for LHW, I never cast it. My haste is set up so that it generally casts below the GCD at 0.8s. Now, granted, I could regear to bring that to hover around 1.0s, which I think is ideal, but with my HW casting at 1.4s, I can generally get similar speed with HW and heal a lot more when it lands.