[Resto] 3.1 PTR changes and testing
 

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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....

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.

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. =\

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.

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.

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.

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.