As far as Glyphs are concerned, the Chain Heal one seems to be a 'must have' and same goes for the Earth Shield one (as +20% effectiveness on a automatic/reactive heal that we don't have to cast, as it acts by itself, is an heavenly gift).

So only the third Glyph ask for some discution. At the moment the two looked at are ELW against HST Glyph. But what about the Water Mastery one ? Even if we are clearly the class that should suffer the less from it, Blizzard wants to put some stress upon our mana in Ulduar. So maybe that Glyph should become a necessary one, even if it direct healing output is egal to zero ?
Or did some of you found that their mana wasn't a matter at all during their Ulduar raid tests, even in T7 gear ?

If I'm not mistaken, the Water Mastery Glyph equals 30MP5. Compared to itemisation in Ulduar - in contrast to entry-raid-level - this is quite a marginal amount and not really worth a major glyph slot.

In my own PTR runs, I did find mana to be somewhat of an issue in Ulduar, mainly because of the Mana Spring Totem = Blessing of Wisdom change. However, I prefer the Mana Tide glyph over the Water Mastery, as it provides more mana to the raid than otherwise.

If you don't want to use a mana glyph, ELW glyph is a poor choice unless you are using the (highly experimental) dw ch build. Because of the "ELW Execute" effect, granted through the Blessing of the Eternals talent, you are guaranteed to proc ELW on those who need it most.

Earth Shield is really nice, but is it practical to maintain it on anyone other than a Tank? Maybe on something causes pushback (Council Hard, which is being hotfixed) it would be worth it to keep on someone.

That said, while the glyph is probably the best one we have, you really only need one in the raid for most scenarios.

Mana Tide glyph is pretty big as well, especially if you are feeding it to Mages. It's already more regen than 30mp5, and it spreads it around to 4 other people that most likely need it more than you do.

As others have noted, GoMT scales, but in terms of personal benefit it's still worse than GoWM in entry-level gear unless you are a hardcore int-stacker. GoMT's practical use is directly related to whether your group members are aware of the extra mana and how effectively they adjust their rotations to take this into account. I imagine that as your guild approaches bleeding edge the mana tide glyph becomes more effective.

That being said, GoMT can be still superior to GoWM in terms of personal regen alone, but this depends on how you have chosen to gear. Let's look at the math. Note that come 3.1, for most standard raid compositions you don't have to factor out the mana lost from missing mana spring totem for ~12s, so I'm ignoring that in this calculation. Additionally, I am assuming that Water Shield will have 100% uptime, which in practice it may not.

Let x = raid buffed mana needed to make GoMT equal to GoWM in terms of personal regen alone. For any given 5 minute time span:

.04x / 60 = 30
.04x = 1,800
x= 45,000

45,000 mana is unattainable in any circumstance, but this is a worst-case scenario for GoMT. If we increase fight time to 7 minutes and assume two mana tides:

.08x / 84 = 30
.08x = 2,520
x = 31,500

31,500 mana is attainable today in Naxx-25 gear, provided that you are stacking int and using mana tide during a [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] proc. Let's set aside the int/sp/haste gemming debate and recognize that a non-int stacking resto shaman in full Naxx-25 gear is reaching ~22/23k raid buffed mana and will reach ~24/25k (or more?) in full Ulduar-25 gear. At that point, the difference between GoWM and GoMT is small enough that the group benefit of GoMT outweighs the personal benefit of GoWM*.

*Provided that, if you are Draenei, your raid leader doesn't place you with the rogues/warriors/DKs for the 1% hit aura. This comment is only partially sardonic.

I personally switched to GoMT - it's working out pretty well. It may be *slightly* inferior for personal regen, but when there aren't any personal regen problems to worry about, the overall benefit outweighs the single con.

Good post by the way.

If a given encounter has raid-wide damage that procs earth shield and you have shaman to spare, at the very minimum ES should be put on a non-tank before the fight starts. Whether or not this it can be maintained probably depends on frequency of the AOE and how much GCD lock is a concern. I'll post the math for ES if people really want to see that unless people are in danger of dying within the next couple seconds, refreshing ES when it has expired is the best use of a GCD in terms of throughput, provided that you are reasonably sure that the charges will be used before the fight is over.

Due to my time zone I haven't had many opportunities to test the Ulduar content, but my understanding is that (as an example) Kologarn's AOE triggers earth shield. With the glyph and raid buffed, Earth Shield starts reaching over 3k per heal and ~6k crit with current gear, provided you have the appropriate ES-boosting talents. That's a lot of hands-off healing for the cost of one lesser healing wave, especially when it reliably gets one person out of the danger zone every time the AOE hits. This lets CHs, WGs, and CoHs choose different targets and thus directly contribute to the entire raid getting out of danger quicker. Obviously, if a (non-shaman) has less than 100% pushback resistance, that person makes the best target for your raid's spare ES; for most guilds, this is probably your holy or disc priest.

I'm not trying to suggest that we start forsaking our tanks, but if they are covered then there's no reason for an ES to sit around unused when the raid is getting pelted for ~10k damage.

Has anyone who has tested Vezax determined if Mana Tide is still effective during the fight? From the information available, it does seem that Mana Spring will not function in that fight.

I see Vezax potentially being one of the more difficult fights for R Shammys, especially on hard mode.

Mana Spring and Mana tide don't work on this fight (Mana Pot and Water Shield don't work too). You should get specific glyph and template for this hard mode.

I've tested General Vezax last wednesday (hard mode) and i gained mana from water shield orbs. I didn't get dmg but orbs were consumed and i gained mana of it. If it was the full amount of mana per orb? ...I didn't check. Maybe this mana gain was only a bug.

There's no need to post math on how good of a spell Earth Shield really is, that's more than apparent. My statement wasn't questioning the efficiency of Earth Shield. It questioned the practicality of keeping it up on a non-tank member of the raid for the duration of an encounter, with the exception being something like Shadow Priests on pre-nerf M'uru with pushback. In most scenario's, especially ones with high raid damage, it is not practical to simply "fire and forget" on one member of the raid.

One question I had, not having played in the PTR at all, is how important those who have done so believe MP5 will be.

Currently it's pretty rare I put on my mana intensive gear set, preferring instead more SP/haste and sometimes, crit. I believe a lot of shamans do the same thing since in the current live content it's pretty hard to run out of mana.

However, since we'll have to assign HEP on gear based on the upcoming patch, pick which of the new BoP craftables to make, etc... how important do you feel mana will be overall for resto shamans in most fights?

Mana hasn't been a concern on anything we have tested so far (US encounters with 'hard modes'). That said, I use a heavy SP/haste oriented gear set in comparison to our other shaman who favor int/crit and the returns are more than noticeable.

There has been nothing to indicate that an all-out mana regen set will be needed or beneficial for Ulduar; at least, on the US PTRs. It is, however, still beneficial to reserve a glyph slot for GoMT or GoWM as appropriate for your guild's raid composition and your own gear levels.

There is enough room for different resto play styles that mana regen needs will differ for everyone. Choices such as whether to favor HW or LHW are as much an influence as fight mechanics.

The relative value of regen (MEP, if you will) was discussed in the HEP thread, and stassart rewrote shaman_hep to accomodate the dynamic nature of regen. When an enhancement shaman has a personal gear question, the answer is "run the sim and find out for yourself, your current gear determines your needs." We haven't had shaman_hep as long as enhsim, but it's a great tool and will show you how much regen you need to stack based on the conditions you raid in. Instead of telling you how valuable I expect mp5 to be for myself, I advocate downloading the parser.

I agree with the posts above, mana isn't really a big deal. The only fight I can see mana becoming an issue is Mimiron when attempting his hard mode, or hard mode General Vezax (but regen wouldn't help here). In this case, is it better to gear towards what Elemental Shaman gear for; haste/crit/spellpower instead of the traditional haste/mp/5, crit/mp/5 gear pieces?

With Replenishment I don't think you could ever go OOM given a 100% uptime; and if you do you have Mana Tide, Mana Pot, JC trinket (if you're a JC!) and Water Shield orbs to grant mana back. As said, I use a heavy SP/haste set and don't run into any mana problems: on live or in Ulduar on the PTR.

Yes, water shield orb gives mana despite despair aura. But they can trigger without damage and don't trigger with improved water shield talent.

Looking into the logs, it seems to trigger on all shamans at the same time :

Wow Web Stats

I don't think I would ever use the Earth Shield glyph over the LHW glyph. I have no doubt that it is numerically better (on healing meters, you will pump out more with ES glyph). That's only because you generally aren't tank (or single target) healing but they are both tank healing glyphs. ES is fire and forget while you CH.

When you are tank healing (I frequently heal the sarth tank on 3d, 10 and 25), LHW is far better. I think I would really suffer on 3d10 at least if I gave up LHW for ES.

They're not mutually exclusive, but they compete for my third glyph slot. I'd have no problem using both. Since I don't predict reglyphing frequently based on the boss, though, I don't think I will ever use ES glyph.

It's not a "settled" decision (where one option is hands down better)--that's my only point. I am sure many players will get great use from it, but do consider whether it is what you actually want to get the job done.

Why not? Glyphs are incredibly cheap and will no longer require a Lexicon come 3.1. Provided you have two free bag slots, it's not that difficult to carry around some of each and swap them as needed.

As I've said earlier in this thread, Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave is a bad glyph for 25 man content -- not because it's bad, but because it encourages bad behavior. Since all your wave spells should be under Tidal Waves effect, LHW is limited by gcd and HW is almost at gcd. With two heals that take the same time, the bigger one is better. LHW can be useful as a "downranked" heal to reduce overhealing, but even that will be less relevant with the 3.1 AA overhealing change.

Back to the glyph, though, its effect is only felt on one target out of 25. If you're assigned to tank-heal on that target, Healing Wave is more hpm and more hps, so you shouldn't be using LHW. If you're assigned to raid heal, you're not going to be casting single target heals on your earth shield target enough to make the glyph effective.

Restorative totems talent now correctly is adding the 45% to total healing stream healing and not added onto the base healing like in previous builds.

My current numbers on PTR
Spellpower: 2313

Healing without talent: 238 healing per tick
With Talent: 345 healing per tick
With Talent and glyph: 393 healing per tick.

I am still not certain it will replace any of our major glyphs for 25-man content, but with being able to reglyph whenever, it does seem that for certain aoe heavy fights this would be worth doing.

I hopped on the ptr and verified that glyph of HST totem is additive with restorative totems. It is NOT an additional multiplier. I've updated my spreadsheet to reflect this. Earth shield is an additional modifier as others have reported.