Somewhat regarding the poster above me... I've just recently broken my 2pc T8 bonus for an offset 245 chest and I can say that I'm starting to feel the loss of the set bonus, actually automatically trying to fire off my RT at it's old 5sec cooldown rate only to get hit by the nasty 'Spell not ready yet'. Now, even though the new offset chest is sweeter purely statwise, I'm wondering how valuable are you guys finding the above mentioned set bonus. Having a hard time to figure out it's 'worth'. Cheers up front

edit : not the post above me, but the one before, I'm a slowpoke at posting replies

Well, I both agree and disagree with you. Yes, I'm likeminded when it comes to 'healing rotations' as I believe there are none. But on the other hand, for one, I'm not talking about healing rotations at all, but looking into how useful do other people find a 1 less second on RT cooldown. And regarding the matter of it always being up, of course I don't throw them around on full hp people just for the sake of it, but the fact is that I can't think of a fight right now when there are no people taking damage at any given moment, there's always someone that can benefit from a rolling HoT, be it even just preHoTing a tank for an AF proc / over time healing.

And yes, if there's a group of melee geniouses not letting standing in fire disrupt their dps, I'm certainly not gonna waste a GCD on a RT before throwing a CH on them only cause it looks like a good 'rotation' in theory.

Zulwak - I recently broke 2T8 myself. I had it so long that it's really messed with my healing style on certain fights. I generally use RT as my first "go-to" heal when, say, a fire pops up under someone or a tank drops low (when it's not my job to heal them, and I'm just helping out). Some fights I don't use it more often than it takes to keep the HoT up on the tank, but for the fights where I do, I find myself hitting the button with < 1 sec left on the CD now a lot, thanks to an innate sense of what the CDs are on my spells. You're not the only one!

To actually answer your question, though, once you get re-used to the original CD on Riptide and adjust your reaction to raid damage accordingly, dropping the set bonus is fine. You'll get more out of the stats (that affect all your spells) from significantly higher item level gear than you will from a lower CD on a fairly situational spell. On a related note, the only non-set 245 chests I know of are [Chestguard of Flowing Elements] and [Ensorcelled Nerubian Breastplate], so I'm assuming you're referring to one of these. If you have a steady income of Triumph from doing the daily and as many as you can of the 10 and 25 man raids that drop Triumph, you'll probably get more out of even the ilvl 232 T9 chest, simply because it's so much better itemized, as the only piece of the set with no mp5. (Unless you're having mana problems, in which case I'm confused. )

If you're willing to wear cloth, [Merlin's Robe] is perfectly itemized. If you step outside the idea that it's "for" an elemental shaman, [Nobundo's Helm of Triumph] is an amazing off set resto helm -- certainly far better stats than the resto tier 9 equivalent.

Cheers for the replies.
On the offset chests, I'm using the Flowing Elements one, nonheroic version, while waiting to grab a hold of the ilvl245 T9 one. As for rolling riptides, I've never done that and I've never used the RT glyph, I've always used ES, LHW and CH ones and those have served me more than well so far.

As someone has also mentioned passive mp5 on gear and it's current use to us, I'm also puzzled for how much of it should I aim for really. I'm currently sitting on something like 320mp5 while casting self-buffed (WS only). While I'm not having mana issues, I don't know how my mana will act up on some more challenging fights my guild is only starting nowadays (Algalon10 and ToC25 heroic mostly). So if someone has some numbers on how much mana during an average duration fight we actually get from passive mp5 from gear in comparison to other sources, would be much obliged.

Shaman_Hep makes an attempt at telling you how often you are actually using your 2pc T8 bonus though I've never been able to really confirm that it is correct (no reason to believe it isn't except the number is so low). What I found was that I actually was using it FAR less than I thought I was, even with PowerAuras notifying me that Riptide was available and 5 seconds ticking off in my head. It was something on the order of 1% of my Riptide casts that took advantage of it. Note: this parse was post 3.2, before that I was using it a lot more with the RT/LHW/LHW casting style. Perhaps it is just my play style, but post 3.2 a 5-second cooldown just doesn't seem to work well with the cast time of my other spells, especially the longer cast times of LHW and Chain Heal (which is now used much more).

Also.. even with 2pc T9 I've been trying to get out of the (endless 5-man for badges) habit of using RT as my "emergency heal" when NS is on cooldown. It just doesn't hit hard enough to eat a GCD for. If tidal waves is up, HW will hit before the next swing timer and hit for ~4x as much. If not, LHW will also hit before the next swing timer and hit for 2x as much AND can be followed with an instant riptide if you are very worried. If I'm using Riptide it is normally to keep the HOT effect up on a tank, to pop a small quick heal on a DPS that shouldn't be taking damage (in which case the HOT effect may actually be useful for them and I can go back to something else), or to prep for a huge Chain Heal.

This is the same situation I've run into; I've never been one to attempt to spam Riptide every cooldown, even when going heavy LHW I had enough Haste to keep the LHW cast time very low. I've found that around 5% of my casts come between the 5 and 6 second mark, as religiously as anyone could possibly spam Riptide, I just don't see that number being higher than around 50%. 2pc t9, is far superior to 2pc t8, and in terms of double set bonuses - you're better off using 2pc t9 + various 245+ offpieces than going 2pc t9 and 2pc t8 like I see some people setting up for.

Looking at wowhead using the following HEP values:
Haste rating = 1.2
Crit rating =0.64
Int = 0.67
Spell power = 1
Mp5 = 1

Looking only at 245 items
MH + shield
[Heartsmasher] + [Bastion of Purity]
172HEP +48HEP = 220HEP combined
enchant: 63 spell + 25 int = 63 + (.67)*25 = 63 + 16.75 = 79.75
total: 220 + 79.75 = 299.75
2 hander:
[Enlightenment]
218 HEP
enchant: 81 spell
total = 218+ 81 = 299HEP

So I'd say staves are pretty equal

I am currently sitting at about 3/4 245 gear and our guild is working on downing 25 TOC Heroic NRBs. In saying that I am the #2 healer we have to a resto druid that just hots every person in the raid basically so how can you compete with that. My question is what stats are you all seeing benefit tank healers the most? Currently we have a holy paladin (w/beacon), a disc priest, and myself healing the 2 tanks were using. I know that the MP5 is a slight issue but with Tide and a innervate I can get to phase 3 reliably without going OOM so I took almost all my MP5 gear off and have a current crit rate of 35%, i'm at 880 haste, and raid buffed I'm sitting right around 3800SP.

All that said the reason why I ask what stats I should be going for is that one of our tanks is a warrior and he dies 90% of the time if its a tank that dies. I know he cant bubble out of the impales but still I feel like I should be able to do more. I'm right behind the resto druid on the charts at right around 5500 HPS on NRBs but if you have any suggestions please let me know, either gear, stats, rotations whatever.

-Swam

First of all you aren't competing with your druid. Healing is a team effort and usually involves different roles. Druids are most likely the strongest healers in the game (from a pure effective hps standpoint) stop worrying about trying to win meters.

NRB is very dependent on the tank rotation and the tank's use of cooldowns. You can BOP the tank to remove the debuff however. Basically I switch between chain heal (if the tanks have less than 3 debuffs) then spam RT HW HW HW/LHW when 3 or more. Basically I just try to keep ancestral fort up and if they have 3-4 debuffs don't stop healing for any reason. I literally had the tank die because I refreshed water shield. This is the fight that made me decide I needed to stack more haste for HW. 800ish seems like a good amount so I think your gear is fine. In my experience Pallys and Druids seem far less likely to die so its really up to your war to manage his cooldowns effectively (and if you aren't bopping him that has also worked well for our guild).

Just a note, the Heroic shield is iLvl258, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison either.

The note about losing the armor/mitigation is a fair point. Again, I don't know if you can say you're getting less overall HEP- everyone's HEP is a little different. If you are at the point where intellect is not serving you very well, the benefit of the shield diminishes relative to the fixed spellpower on the staff. Beyond that, I think that Daidalos' shows that the healer-stat itemization for both choices are fairly even.