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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Just to clarify, AA does indeed heal for 30% of the entire heal for Riptide, Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave. Now, do we spend 3 points on Healing Way? I personally think not, the Glyphed Lesser Healing Wave will still heal for roughly the same amount as Healing Wave before Healing Wave thus I think spending 3 talent points for a larger heal that takes longer to cast is redundant.

From my interpretations of Ulduar I believe there will be a lot of 'healer stressing' fights as Blizzard wants healers to be casting 100% of the time (well, that's what I gathered from their FSR nerf). With this in mind I think the best 3 glyphs in Ulduar will be: Glyph of Earth Shield, Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave, Glyph of Chain Heal. For me, at least, mana is no longer a problem - granted this is speaking from current content; 6 min Maly's, Sarth 3 drakes, Naxx... Not the most challenging of encounters.

I guess though it's too early to make speculations as none of the PTR EU testers (not entirely sure about the NA testers) have been granted access to Ulduar. Hmm, a few thoughts on the patch I guess.

Sorry if AA has already been clarified, when casual skimming the thread I couldn't see any 'screenshot proof' so decided to do it myself.

To give you some AA numbers:

patchwerk 3.1 fight

lesser healing wave
Wow Web Stats

healing wave
Wow Web Stats

1 point in healing way
We used bloodlust right after exposed armor was on patchwerk.

The only one that caught my eye was the ES one, which will become standard issue. For me, ES is currently 2585/3877 healing per charge at a 41% crit rate* and the glyph bumps it to 3102/4653. That'd be a 210 hps increase if the charges are used on cooldown but more importantly, that bumps it up to ~55% of a glyphed LHW, which is a pretty nice reactive heal for any class. It'll be a guaranteed glyph for me since I currently only really use the LHW glyph and keep my other two glyphs FS/LB for the regular ele swapping I do.

* Every time I've checked the crit rate on ES, it seems to be 5% below the crit rate on my other heals. Not sure if this is just selective observation or what.

The Riptide glyph is worthless. IF you could Riptide every cooldown AND your RTs ticked all the way out, the maximum possible benefit would be an extra 833 healing (one tick for me) every 6 seconds. So an extremely situational extra 200 healing half as often when compared to the ES glyph and normally nothing. Meh. I really wanted it to apply Healing Way.

If you're tank healing and nobody else is taking damage, the recipient of AA is almost always the tank. With a normal boss swing timer, hitting a LHW as soon as you see the tank take damage will causes the heal to land before the next swing and the AA to land after. I don't do CH because I run with a druid that basically rejuvs every GCD, so it's much more efficient for me to keep people from dying and let him do the bulk healing. Haven't done a fight so far (up to 5 healing Sarth+2, we're fairly casual) that I feel his mass rejuvs haven't been keeping up with the incoming damage.

Are you just guessing how the glyph works or did you test this in game? It might work like that but my conservative estimate would be it bumping it from 2500ish to 2900ish if it added to the other talent modifiers. You might be right since I haven't been able to get the gylph yet I just wanted to make sure before we start throwing around numbers.