By bad. POH is pretty superior. But as you said, it's not a smart heal and it's more expensive. I still like CH for melee healing in 25's. And having a consistent Resto shammy is something every guild needs bc of buffs and versatility. Can't tell you the number of times when only 1 holy pally or 1 holy priest shows up to the raid, and a resto shaman can fill in where needed, switching roles from tank healing to aoe heaing on every other fight. I still feel like Blizzard has succeeded in "bring the player not the class" philosophy with us healers.

What buffs does a Resto provide that isn't provided better by an Ele or Enhancement? Mana Tide, Mana Spring and Healing Stream. Mana Tide is generally being used by the Shaman when he is in need of it, so basing selection on that is not entirely awesome. Mana Spring gets trumped by BoW, so it is circumstantial. Healing Stream is actually good, but I would be surprised to see any raid grab a Resto Shaman because of Healing Stream healing 5 people.

So as long as there is another Shaman spec, a Resto isn't needed if others can perform better healing.

But it is true that there is a certain amount of versatility that a Paladin doesn't have, an a Druid struggles to compete with. But Holy Priests are better there by far (Discs I don't dare to comment on as I haven't seen them on a dedicated raidhealing duty). And as noted many times in this game, "jack of all trade, master of none" is a very weak position.

So is the Shaman weaker in healing? I hope not for you.

PoH isn't consistently spammable with a 1.8K Mana Cost. The priest will go OOM very quickly.

It's 1.4k mana if you talent for it. And one of the five heals is likely to crit, giving a free FL, saving another 600 mana.

GC has responded about our concerns. Not very promising.

We're not convinced there is a Resto or Chain Heal problem in PvE.

Part of what we wanted to do was give shamans other spells to cast besides CH. Riptide is an awesome spell and seems to be fun for a lot of shamans. People are still casting CH, and probably a lot more often than priests are using PoH and druids WG (depending on the fight of course). We would want to make sure that any change to CH didn't send shamans back to the Sunwell world of just using that one spell.

Yes it is iconic, and it's fine if shamans use it a lot. If they only use one button, shaman players are likely to mush their brains.
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> It is time to address Chain Heal

He is probably looking at WWS

As I have not seen it posted here, resto shaman should be aware that WWS has a bug that is artificially inflating resto shaman to look better than they really are. The "Heals" tab is supposed to be effective healing, but it is including all healing done by Healing Stream Totem including overhealing. So to correctly compare resto shaman on the "Heals" tab in WWS you need to look at what the overhealing of Healing Stream Totem was (The amount listed times the overhealing percent) and subtract that from the total listed for resto shaman on the "Heals" tab. This bug can be confirmed by adding up the effective healing for a resto shaman for each spell (and to get the number they have use the total instead of effective for Healing Stream Totem).

So in reality you were at 8,615,002 instead of the 12,080,764 WWS shows on the Heals tab and came in second instead of first.

I have a question regarding my meta trinket.

I've been using the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond for quite awhile now, but with the healing style changes and the use of AA procs, would Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond have a greater benefit then the Insightful? I couldn't find anything regarding the meta's after Ulduar came out.

The blue post says it all. GC is really not seeing any proplems with shaman healing.
How the **** he can say somethig like that. I would like to see his material or backround information that make him say that resto shaman healing is fine as it is. I have studied alot of logs and wws (bored at work) and only thing that im seeing in large scale is druid and priest dominance in pve healing. COH,POH,POM,reju,WG and druids t8 bonus is killing restos change to play this game.
The thing that is bothering me is that hes saying that riptide is great spell... But for 51 talent point spell it pites ass.
Im thing that if hes trying to stop spam healing why not do something like: 2 LHW cast loweres ch cast by 1,5s or something like that.
In some ulduar hard modes i have hoped to be a druid or priest so i could pop raid up instatly after hadmode tantrum or Tremor in fraya.
But really it is our turn to suffer GC really poor class mechanig design. In tbc it was us who shined not druids or priests.

It would take atleast 3 Chain Heals to contend with 1 PoH, costing ~2400 Mana (without T6 and Totem) and requiring ~6 seconds of hard casting.

As a personal opinion I'd really like to see the Imp Chain Heal talent take .2s per rank off CH's cast time and the effect of Tidal Focus (if not mana regen by some other means, 1/2 MTT CD perhaps) buffed to 3x its current value and RT's mana cost cut by half.

My reasoning for thinking on these terms is simply that there is nothing wrong with Shaman throughput. I frequent the top of the meters in 7-healer Mimiron's simply because I can co-ordinate my max through-put and regen time efficiently with other healers. The problem is that while I'm pressuring other healers to stack CD's (Tripple Hymn + Double MTT) I'm usually under 2k mana by the end of P2 (from 25-26k raid buffed).

One other issue I've noticed is CH causing people to die. To elaborate, I'm well past seeing CH as a stand-alone heal, I run CH as a buffer and HW when needed. The challenge is that when I need a HW fast, with no RT up I have to wait for a 1.9 second CH to finish before dropping a 1.4 HW. On things like P1 Mimiron this is liable to get a tank or 2 killed.

A few behavioral changes can make all the difference in throughput but mana regeneration really needs to be looked at AGAIN for all classes. Our biggest problem right now is that our regen mechanics lack intricacy, leaving us at the mercy of MP5. Since Replenishment made its way into the game the value of MP5 has diminished staggeringly, and is in need of a drastic adjustment at the stat-value level in order to maintain viability.

TL;DR Shaman throughput really isn't that desperate for a buff, but as THE mp5 class mp5's recent shortcomings with the advent of replenishment are showing.

Chain Heal definitely needs some kind of tweaking.
A few ideas have already been mentioned: enhanced range for each jump, lowering the healing penalty on the further jumps, some sort of haste buff - stacked up by LHW/HW.
I personally like the current playstyle and don't want to be forced in chainheal spamming.

Since the new Shaman representative has promised (?) buffs to the PvP aspect of resto shaman's arsenal, perhaps they will figure something out that helps our PvE as well.

Of course given the track record (over the last few years I've read so many 'we'll fix shamans this time!' blue posts...) it might not be as good as some would like, but it'd still be better than nothing.

I would personally settle for not having to be really good just to compete with people who don't have to, and are already outhealing you. I can normally hold my own in most raids and am rarely out of the top 1-2 healer slots, but it's just impossible to outheal a druid or priest who knows what they are doing.

Alot of you guys are staring yourselves blind at numbers. Yes PoH is potentially the most powerful heal in the game glyphed, on the other hand a druid can potentially have the highest HPS in the game by just spamming rejuvs with the odd WG in between and it's sustainable for a rather long time. A paladin can conjure pretty sick healing numbers spamming HL glyphed with a beacon up.

Healing however isn't all about the numbers. Mana tide does count for alot, if not for healing atleast for DPS. There are many situations in the game where you want extremely reactive healing to actually save someone, please remember that healing is all about saving someone from dying and you do that by landing the heal on time. For this specific situation a resto shaman is king. Riptide -> 0.7s LHW is a lifesaver at many hard modes and so is the ability to offtank/maintank heal while smart healing the melee at the same time and keeping 25% armor buff on the tanks.

CH is a very fast and spammable AoE heal with smart targetting, it sure has it's uses but I agree that it has it's limitations too. You should definitely be able to glyph it so the initial heal gets nerfed but the following jumps get buffed and the range between jumps should maybe be buffed. But this is just wishful thinking. Try focusing on where you can max your use as shamans instead of just crying is my tip.

edit: Kaubel beat me to it, with less elegant words

Have to agree with the 2 above me, somewhere the goal of this topic got lost O_o

Recently I've been asked to go resto a bit more often instead of enhancement (first time since TBC) so had to read up on everything again. (I've got some naxx 25 gear for offspec, it's not perfect but not terrible either)

I've been reading allot lately and found a few things in here that definitely helped me out with my healing. I'll just summarize them here since some of these are a couple of pages back.

To start with, the talent spec I went for after some reading: 0/16/55 (no glyphs added)

I figured this spec would help me out the most, I barely use Healing Wave and when I do it's with a nuke macro. In addition I've seen allot of people with either the same spec or maybe just a few talents moved around.

I've also seen posts about a few macro's, after a little altering to make them work with Clique they look like this for me. Credit should go to the persons posting this earlier somewhere in this thread, sorry for forgetting your name but thanks these helped me out allot

This one basically casts riptide, a few lesser healing waves in between the riptide cd and then riptide again. Add / remove LHW's to match it to your haste etc. For me this amount works best.

This macro basically is a WTF button, works out pretty nicely, adding trinkets to further boost it is also possible with /use 13 or /use 14 (13 is your upper trinket, 14 your lower)

(have the same macro with Chain Heal as well)

Up to here I'm pretty satisfied with the healing though so far I've only healed in 10 man Ulduar (first 6 bosses). For allot of parts it was more then enough to spam Riptide + LHW + use the nuke macro for chain heal when needed.

First thing I'm a bit confused about is the Glyph choice. Right now I have these equipped:

- [Glyph of Earth Shield]
- [Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave]
- [Glyph of Riptide]

For the above situation, spamming Riptide and LHW these seem to be working rather well but I've found that in a couple of fights Chain Heal really is needed to top up a raid, LHW simply won't cut it there. So I'm looking at taking in the [Glyph of Chain Heal] instead of the Riptide glyph but I'm not entirely sure about it. Another option would be getting the [Glyph of Healing Stream Totem].

When it comes to glyphs it's kinda between those for me. But, I also lack experience in the bigger fights for Ulduar 10 man and even any experience in 25 man Ulduar would probably help me out a bit upon making a choice.

This is also where I couldn't find much info about inside these threads, allot seems to be personal preference (some go for MP5, others go for Chain Heal, others for Healing Stream, others for Healing Wave, it's hard to tell really ^_^).

My gut feeling says to go with this setup:

- [Glyph of Earth Shield]
- [Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave]
- [Glyph of Chain Heal]

Another thing I've been thinking of is edit the castsequence above towards something like this:

This actually is within the Riptide CD. 2 LHW's with the Tidal Wave buff and 1 Chain Heal. Adding 2 more LHW's to also use the 2 Tidal Wave buffs from the Chain Heal cast is possible but means you'll go about 2 seconds passed the Riptide CD which is a waste imho since I want that one to be used all the time when it's off CD.

Might be worth something but I'm not sure how such a macro would workout since some situations simply don't need Chain Heals and others only need Chain Heals (I think at least :P).

Anyways, some insight on this from the more experienced would be nice. I enjoy pushing Enhancement to it's maximum and it's kinda the same for me when it comes to healing, every small improvement is welcome

Thanks in advance.

I have a hard time justifying the use of a cast sequence macro for healing. We're not DPS and can predict (in most circumstances) what sequence of spells we should be using to maximize our throughput. Although this may theoretically be the highest HPS rotation, it's not applicable in a real life situation were you have to react to the situation at hand.

I decided to do some limited testing on this today to see if Blizzard changed this glyph to 20%->25% (from 20%->21%) without mentioning it in recent patches.

	LHW Casts	ELW procs + refreshes	Percentage
No ELW glyph	423	91	21.5
ELW glyph	414	80	19.3

The RNG was apparently laughing in my face and a larger sample size is obviously needed in order to get good results, but it doesn't really look like this glyph has been buffed.

@sixthy

Was just wondering why you chose glyph of riptide? Obviously, with your gear, you're not in need of the water shield/mana tide one, but why not choose healing stream or healing wave (since I read above, or in another thread, that you use healing wave from time to time)?

I use glyph of riptide as well.

I'm doing a lot of raid healing vs. being a tank healer. So I spam RT as soon as it's off cooldown.

I too originally thought that this glyph was a useless pile of junk, but if you've used shaman_hep here's some results from analysis of combat logs.

When i switched to RTglyph
Glyph of Chain Heal:HEP: 48.0019
Glyph of Earth Shield:HEP: 123.0529
Glyph of Riptide:HEP: 76.0135

The prior week with LHW glyph
Glyph of Chain Heal:HEP: 104.9552
Glyph of Earth Shield:HEP: 120.8240
Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave:HEP: 5.8565

These are numbers from Sixthy
Glyph of Earth Shield:HEP: 147.3872
Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave:HEP: 26.5934
Glyph of Riptide:HEP: 158.9255

The often undervalued (and tough to mathmatize) part of the Glyph of Riptide is that you can have four Riptides "primed" in the raid ready for use via CH, not only three..

Whether that is amazing for you or near-useless ofc depends largely on raid composition, and again this is sadly a part which is tough to put into anything but "blind feeling", if even possible - but it can be an important consideration.

That being said, I don't use it because I need Water Mastery :$


Interestingly though, the numbers support Glyph of Riptide being powerful even on a healing level. I'll see whether I can't find room to try it out, Sixthy do you use it mostly while tankhealing, random into the raid, or while raidhealing to chain into CHs?

One thing to remember about my healing style is that I'm extremely active in terms of the sheer amount that I cast in a given encounter. I'm not the type to sit around and wait for stuff to happen. I run more than 50% crit fully buffed throughout raids and really rely on Imp WS procs to return mana. There aren't too many situations where I need to 'slow down' for my mana to catch up if I fear I won't make it to the end of a fight. There have only been a couple fights that have pushed my mana to the limit so far.

With that being said, I'm not rolling my riptides to throw chain at them - I neglect chain almost entirely while raid healing unless I feel that certain clumps are just falling behind (such as melee since that's the most consistent clump of players to really get your CH off on).

The reason I get such good riptide HEP values is because I simply RT on cool down (for the most part) regardless of if it's needed or not. I'll throw it on the lowest target, on someone I know will eventually take damage or keep it active on a tank - the tank RT serves two purposes, though: a hot on said tank and a chance for AF to proc (although I spam LHW so much on tanks that AF should have an amazing uptime in my raids at least).

So a riptide is hitting the raid every 5 seconds for the most part with 2 TW'd LHW's and 1 regular LHW in between each cast. Obviously there are gaps on occasion but for the most part I'm casting in that fashion from the beginning of a fight until the end. It's rare that I fall back to CH if I even CH at all. I've done plenty of hard modes without casting a single CH at this point - I assume the role of topping off the lowest targets at any given time in the raid. I rely a lot on AA procs for a secondary healing source, but I've actually seen AA heal for 250k - 300k healing on some fights for me just due to the sheer amount of RT / LHW crits I get.

Just out of curiosity, if you're running so heavy on crit, running few-to-no CHs and using IWS for mana regen why not run Gloves/Shoulders T7? Maybe I'm just a little too caught up on having extra mana regen.

I'm not exactly having mana issues - what I was stating is that I rely on replenishment and Imp WS procs for mana returns rather than raw mp5. Most of my gearing is haste/crit/sp with a few crit/mp5 items in there just because they're better overall and because my guild sucks at getting pennant cloaks (although I like my cloak better).

In the odd case that I would need to get off a few CH's, I'll take the .2 cast reduction over the 10% water shield + the better stats from the higher ilvl t8 any day.

While I don't say resto shaman in general are in a terrible position, I don't think we are as strong as we should be. I think this stems more from our limitation of buffs (totems). Resto brings one unique totem, and in most situations it is lack luster at best when compared to druids innervate. Yes I realize that mana tide hits your entire group, but I am normally using it when I need to. This is normally too early in the fight for anybody else to benefit. This is so I can get the cooldown ticking, and use it again towards the end of the fight. Innervate and the higher raw output of druids makes them a logical choice over a shaman for raid healing.

That being said, we can respond to burst damage better then they can. Swiftmend can save one quite handily. But its cooldown limits it. Riptide and LHW, combined with AA can compensate faster. Sif's AOE frostbolt is a good example of the type of damage we are best for countering. Being able to switch from that to tank healing directly afterwards is something I believe shaman can do better then any other right now. Priests are ok with Flash, COH, and POH, but not as responsive. As much crying as I hear about it, POH is situational, and cannot be spammed on most fights (save a haste gimmick such as on Hodir).

Yes. Changes like that would make MP5 more meaningful without removing potentially fun mechanics like Illumination or DP.

This change to Replenish has serious shaman implications. We seem to be pretty weak when it comes to mana longevity already. I don't see this as a good change for us. I realize it was a poster giving ideas. But if it went forward in its current form, it would be fairly devastating.