• Philondra

I'll keep this first post updated with any new information that comes down the pipeline as the weeks pass and we get new information that either was left out of the patch notes or has otherwise changed throughout the course of the PTR. Let's use this thread as a central location for discussing anything that may have changed for Resto Shaman on the PTR.

PTR notes and other official communication
Ancestral Awakening: This talent now accounts for your ineffective healing, rather than effective.
Cleanse Spirit now has a new icon.
Riptide: This spell has a new icon.
* Glyph of Earth Shield -- Increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%. This glyph functions as expected, providing a +20% boost to Earth Shield after all talents and spellpower bonuses have been factored in.
* Mana Spring Totem to be changed to be raid wide and will no longer stack with itself or Blessing of Wisdom.
* Restorative Totems reduced to a 3-point talent that increases the effect of Mana Spring by 7/12/20% and the amount healed by Healing Stream by 15/30/45%. Still a prerequisite for Mana Tide.
* Ancestral Healing and Healing Grace have switched places in the Restoration tree.
* Mana Tide Totem no longer costs mana.
* 2T8 set bonus: Reduces the cooldown on Riptide by 1 sec.
* 4T8 set bonus: Reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 0.2 sec.
* T8 Restoration Relic -- Increases the base amount healed by your chain heal by 243.

The obvious winners of the Ancestral Awakening change are Healing Wave and Healing Way; it is now more consistent at healing the raid while putting out high throughput on a single target.


Undocumented changes and other anomalies/inconsistencies
* Water Shield Rank 9 no longer gives additional mana back when it triggers from damage or other enviornmental triggers. (i.e. with 3/3 Improved Shields and 2 piece Tier 7 set bonus, both WS and IWS procs return 535 mana.)
* Ancestral Awakening is based off the total heal (effective + overheal), not only overheal as implied by the patch notes.
* Ancestral Awakening still returns 33% of the original heal for shaman with 5/5 purification.
* Both Mana Spring and Blessing of Wisdom will show up in the buff bar if present, even though they no longer stack. However, only the stronger of the two will take effect. This prevents the shorter duration Mana Spring from overwriting BoW and potentially leaving raid members without the regen effect should the shaman die or forget to refresh her totems.
* NEW (Apr. 3) Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is additive with Restorative Totems, not multiplicative.
* NEW (Apr. 3) Glyph of Earth Shield is multiplicative with talents that effect Earth Shield.


Things to test/discuss:
* Two talent points have been freed up due to the restorative totems change. What are some optimal ways to use them?
* New glyph builds: is Glyph of Earth Shield worth a slot?
* General testing to determine/confirm any changes not listed above.

 

Nebukadnezzar

Can someone explain to me, what that means in detail? And how Philondra comes to the conclusion that it "improves" HW and Healing Way?

Thx

@Post below: I got the point, thank you

 

Kruk

I think it means AA will now heal a percentage of all healing including overhealing. It doesnt improves HW or LHW. It improves AA big time when using HW since most of HW or LHW is normally overhealing (at least for me)
From the other side if
means AA is % of overhealing only then it lower AA for me.

 

• Philondra

EDIT: Testing has shown that AA is in fact based off total healing, not effective healing (as in 3.0.9) or on overhealing only (as implied by the 3.1 notes.)

My assumption was that it now includes overhealing and effective healing, which we will have to test on the PTR to be sure. The wording is rather awkward as it stands, and the possibility that it was changed to ignore effective healing and only count overhealing never occurred to me because it seems like such an awkward change.

If my assumption is correct (I will hope to get some preliminary results this evening), then the reason it benefits HW more is because most data parses I have seen show that HW produces a higher overheal percent than LHW. Therefore, the AA change increases the relative value of HW as compared to LHW because HW crits have a higher percent of overheal to benefit from than LHW crits.

 

Arkandel

The question is (and I don't want to QQ over it, I'm actually asking) do we still have the tools, given the information available to us right now -- i.e. excluding any future additions to the PTR -- to compete with equally skilled, equally geared members of other healing classes?

As a pretty well geared shaman I'm already having a hell of a time currently competing with good druids. And with the buffs priests are receiving their already extensive arsenal will be enhanced with some very strong additional AoE healing. Instead, we get an okay change with AA and... some new icons? And an overall nerf to heroism if you count long fights (although that's balanced with more frequent heroisms being castable if you have only one shaman in the raid).

As for PvP, there was no change over our already very limited survival options. But I won't go into that here.

Am I mistaken or too pessimistic about our spec's future? At least, at this phase of the PTR.

 

Andrast

It really depends on the nature of the fights in Ulduar and future instances. If they throw at us a Sunwell twins style fight with massive amounts of raid damage then shaman will be mandatory and will dominate meters purely through chain heal spam. In Sunwell we saw shaman stacking not just because of the dps buffs but also due to the massive amounts of raid damage.

Basically once the level of aoe in a particular fight exceeds the ability for druids and priests to cover with their aoe healing spells then shaman will shine.

 

Kegsta

Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem
Your Stoneclaw Totem also places a damage absorb shield on you, equal to 4 times the strength of the shield it places on your totems.

Saw this on AJ, will be very nice to use when silenced if it goes live.

edit:
The following are now on MMO-Champion

Glyph of Thunderstorm *new* -- Reduces the cooldown on Thunderstorm by 7 sec.
Glyph of Feral Spirit *new* -- Your spirit wolves gain an additional 30% of your attack power.
Glyph of Riptide *new* -- Increases the duration of Riptide by 3 sec.
Glyph of Earth Shield *new* -- Increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%.
Glyph of Totem of Wrath *new* -- When you cast Totem of Wrath, you gain 30% of the totem's bonus spell power for .
Glyph of Hex *new* -- Increases the damage your Hex target can take before the Hex effect is removed by 20%.
Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem *new* -- Your Stoneclaw Totem also places a damage absorb shield on you, equal to 4 times the strength of the shield it places on your totems.

 

• Philondra

While these are unconfirmed for the time being, a quick search of new Glyphs reveals the following data. Keep in mind that this is only datamined information, so we have no idea if any of these have been changed, scrapped, or can be taken at face value:


Glyph of Earth Shield - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%.

Glyph of Hex - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Increases the damage your Hex target can take before the Hex effect is removed by 20%.

Glyph of Riptide - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Increases the duration of Riptide by 3 sec.

 

Gun

@Arkandel

I think you are a bit pessimistic, since the change of AA is looking really good. Anyway i think you missed the totemchanges, wich will increase our output too. A BiS geared shaman will get ticks about 340 for now. I guess we will hit easy 400 in ulduar. 400*5 every 3 second on a heavy AoE fight will provide 666 additional hps.

But we will see....

 

Vuldunobetra

Holy priests got numerous AOE buffs. CoH increased by 40%. PoH is now party targetable. Holy Nova got a mana reduction. We'll see where the numbers come out on the PTR. But I don't see priests falling behind shaman in AoE healing.

Currently we are missing the combined Mana/Healing totem that was preannounced. I hope this is still coming later in the PTR.

 

MissnL1nK

If we can get the Mana/Healing totem merge that would help greatly, even if it is a small amount of healing at a time. Still no sign of it on the PTR as of yet. They did mention they were going to add it so maybe it will be in a future PTR patch. However, they may not add it due to PvP circumstances. Who knows. =\

My better smells like french toast.

 

Daidalos

While an extra tick of riptide would be nice the extra 800-900 healing is the most likely to be clipped by another heal so the only new glyph I am tempted to use in pve is the earth shield glyph . With 2000 spell power assuming the .2 is added to the earth shield modifiers this adds about 300 additional healing per es charge.

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

 

◊ quiddity

As our gear gets better I could see cutting out the Glyph of Water Mastery, when mana regen is even less of an issue, for the ES glyph, but even now I'm always in a "EEEP! MANA!" mindset.

 

shabbaz

I'm reading some of these changes as adding some single target healing to the mix. If you glyph for the new ES bonus and Riptide, combined with LHW glyph you have a very good single target healing setup. Dual spec'ed Resto Shamans could have these glyphs in place for encounters that require single target healing.

Now you have 20% more heals from ES, rolling riptide, and perhaps a LHW-HW-LHW rotation on single target that could rival a pally.

 

Daidalos

For single target healing (e.g. tank) it seems to me that you would be riptiding alot more than every 18 s making the extra tick rather worthless or if u are single target raid healing it seems likely that they would be topped off in less than 18s. I'm just not seeing alot of practical use for this right now. There will be situations where it could be useful. I'm just guessing its going to be the minority of the time.

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

 

Vuldunobetra

I don't see how the RT glyph is useful. If you need HPS, you are recasting RT frequently to speed up your HW/LHW. If you need mana efficiency, then use LFW/ES. Burning a major glyph slot on a 1k extra tick that's likely overheal is a waste.

 

doogless

Is an extra tick on Riptide good? Sure, of course it is, it's more healing for the same amount of mana if you don't overwrite it. Is it better than the other glyphs that are available? No, not really. I've definitely never thought to myself "dang, if only that Riptide HoT had lasted another 3 seconds so and so wouldn't have died."

 

Pond

Currently I am tank healing using RT LHW, LHW, LHW, LHW, LHW LHW rotation on tanks and loving the results. The changes to AA are making me strongly consider going RT HW HW LHW LHW LHW as long as my mana can support it. I'm going to be very intrigued to see what numbers I can get raid healing with AA. I'm fully expecting to have 20-30% of my healing coming from AA since I fully expect to be 40%+ raid buffed in crit for ulduar. I see our role being you put one shammy on a tank and he gets the 40 yard bounced from AA for raid healing. Anyone else see this as an overpowering strategy?

 

Pond

I see the glyph of riptide to be almost worthless unless you're doing CH spam in which case I'd favor the dual wield spec which doesn't have the spell riptide. Reason is if I'm casting riptide on a target odds are I'll be focused on that target for a fair bit. Mana is much more of an issue so I'd rather have the extra tick from my mana tide to give a lot more mana back for my group.


Glyph of Earth Shield
Odds are I'm going to replace my passive mana regen from water shield with this glyph further enhancing my ability on a tank. I'm fully expecting most guilds to have a shammy on each tank due to the 3-4K heals from ES and the glyphed LHW combined with the large increase in AA healing while healing a tank which has a high percentage of over heal if you're spamming and critting.

 

Pond

Taking from the thread in HEP for resto shammys what do you guys think about [Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond] for healing single target with AA. That 3% would translate into an extra 3% on the main target and a 1% on the AA proc target. this would be about an extra 40-100 healing on the AA procs depending on the heal and its meta requirements are the easiest for a well geared healer to fulfill. Only downside I see is the fact that it is not nearly as kind on your mana as the IED.

edited for more realistic increased healing numbers

 

Rhaegal

Not really. And 20-30% of effective healing coming from AA is still going to be way overestimated. The change is absolutely a buff to AA, and I'm happy with it, but AA suffers from most of the same limitations it always has: for it to actually contribute to effective healing, someone else has to have taken damage. Fights where it's primarily tank healing, AA still won't heal anyone. Fights where there's massive raid damage, it's still going to be more efficient to spam Chain Heal. In both types of fights, it will be a very minor buff at best. It certainly won't be 30% of your healing--for that to be the case, you'd have to either never use Earth Shield or Chain Heal and have AA procs used in full every time with nearly 100% spell crit rate, or be massively overhealing with LHW and HW on a regular basis specifically with the intention of getting AA procs. If you're doing the latter, you're better off just healing the person unless there's a chance the tank will go from 100% to dead otherwise.

However, this will definitely be a very welcome change for random secondary target damage fights.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Pond

I generally don't cast CH for the reason of its cast time, its just too darn slow and the fact that I'm usually on a tank. With the RT/LHW and possibly mixing in a HW I'm casting most of my spells at GCD and CH is almost a 2 second cast making it 50-100% longer cast time. Keeping ES up on a MT has generally shown to be about 10% of my healing. On a fight like saph where there is massive raid damage I do see myself dropping off the MT to snipe some raid heals with LHW so I see the % dropping lower, however while healing a tank often on crits you'll have the top part of your heal be over the tank's HP cap. Odds are in any fight there are more than one person taking damage and in fights like patchwerk when you aren't over geared and it is necessitated to spam a tank I see your AA healing possibly climbing higher. I do see shammys as a spamming class with LHW and as long as you have high crit, in the area of 40%, that there will be a large number of AA procs.



As I look at it 40% of my heals will have a 5K smart heal if HW and a 2.5K smart heal on a LHW. heals of that size when given to a low health target I don't see to be over healing much on fights where you aren't over geared. I would love to see someone's numbers on the PTR about this and what their over healing % is on AA.

added second section

 

• Philondra

Priests definitely got some buffs to their AoE healing, and they will once again be able to compete on that front. That being said, I really don't see resto shaman being sidelined because of it for several reasons:

1.) Prayer of Healing will still be much worse than Chain Heal at healing RSTS damage that hits multiple people in different groups.
2.) Even with 2/2 Healing Prayers, PoH still costs more than twice as much as CH (~1485 Mana for PoH with 2/2 Healing Prayers; 716 for CH with relic). It will not be as highly spammable for priests as Chain Heal is for us.
3.) Priests took significant nerfs to their mana regen, whereas the only hit we took was the fixing of the Water Shield bug. This makes issue #2 above even more noticeable.

Although it's hard to say without actually getting into a raid situation and seeing the changes first hand, on paper it seems the new priest AoE healing style greatly complements ours: CH is still extremely strong and efficient in any fight that doesn't require the raid to spread out, while holy priests will be able to spot raid heal with Serendipity-hasted PoHs (but are unable to sustain PoH spam due to the high mana cost) and are better able to handle raid damage on the move with CoH.

It's way too early to call doom-and-gloom.

EDIT: Re: Daidalos and Earth Shield Glyph -- while we won't be able to tell until the Glyph is actually available in game, the wording implies that it increases total healing done, not the spell power coefficient (which would be much stronger). Either way, it looks like a strong candidate for replacing the 3rd glyph slot.

 

Daidalos

I wasn't adding it to the spell power coef I was adding it to the talent modifiers (e.g. imp earth shield and imp shields) the way they currently add together. Obviously won't know till I or others can start posting some data. The nice thing about earth shield is there is no healing range making it very easy to reverse engineer.

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

 

Vuldunobetra

Agreed, Priests won't be able to spam PoH. But they don't have to. CoH has around double the HPS as CH. So to maintain similar HPS as a chain-casting shaman, the priest only needs to PoH once every ~6 seconds. This makes mana consumption roughly similar. If an encounter requires more AOE healing than that, the shaman cannot heal it, and the priest may run out of mana.

Using some rough numbers with ~2000 SP.
CH: 11,000 - 15.4 HPM - 4400 HPS
PoH: 23,000 - 15.5 HPM - 7666 HPS
PoH: 27,600 - 18.6 HPM - 9200 HPS (with glyph)

Priests also get some mana synergy when PoH crits, which procs free Flash Heal. As to your point #1, when random raid members need healing. Priests still have CoH in a 6 second CD, which gets a small boost in 3.1. We'll see how things work out in the PTR.