Here's the issue that's being over looked (and just to preface this, Val is by no means some complicated fight that needs immense theorycrafting - but there are optimal ways to do things):

AA is what allows us to keep up HPS wise in the early stages of the fight. What I mean by that is that typically while the boss is sub 80%, the majority of your AA's will probably end up on the boss and not a random add tank / dps, etc. The scaling of AA on this fight is a little out of whack from its normal mechanic once you start factoring in the healing bonus of the debuff.

With that being said, you want the most opportunity to not only land your biggest heal (HW - 100k+ obviously once your stack starts getting up there), but you also want the opportunity to get the big AA procs (which can be 150k+ themselves).

So the entire point is to fit as many HW's into a 6 second window as possible. Typically with wrath of air totem, ret / moonkin aura, T10 2 piece and our current haste levels (and especially with engineering gloves every minute), you'll get at the very least 3 (usually 4) HW's off in that 6 second window while you're waiting for RT to come off CD. Pulling out of the 'HW spam' rotation to toss out a CH in hopes of hasting a 3rd HW just doesn't make sense - the CH isn't going to proc an AA and it's definitely not going to hit as hard as the HW.

The cast time of HW is the same as CH regardless, so what's the point in casting anything else? The only exception I could really see to the RT -> HW spam till RT off CD rotation would be to maybe toss in a LHW in place of the last HW if it's going to clip into the RT time. Which even still, it works out to more healing to just clip into the 7 second area with an extra HW rather than cast anything else (as the HW can still crit for 100k with 150k AA on top of it).

In my experiences healing val, i generally use the RT > HWx2 > CH > HW repeat method at the beginning when i have very little stacks, then switch to RT > HW as the fight goes on. However, i use haste pots at the start and toward the middle of the fight (before heroism) and with the increased haste, there's almost no reason to use anything but HW's (and riptide to keep up the relic).

My question tho, would it be better to continue to use Haste pots for that fight, or would a wild magic pot used during heroism be a larger benefit? i have tried it out many different ways (2 wild magic, 2 haste, and 1 haste at the beginning + 1 wild magic during heroism) and i have had the highest hps when i used 2 haste pots.

With people mentioning swapping pieces of non-tier10 gear on non-AoE-heavy fights, would it be fair to say that, as a (mainly) tank healer in a 10 man raid guild, I shouldn't be in too much of a hurry to nab that 4 piece set bonus?

I've always thought that bonuses > all, and while I'm in love with the 2pc bonus, I don't really want to waste the Frosts on getting sub-par gear if the non-set Frost gear might be better suited.

If you use chain heal even a little bit 4T10 is almost certainly worth it, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't use chain heal for most fights in 10-man, even just to bounce off the tank (unless you run with no melee).

You probably get under the GCD if you use a haste pot while bloodlust/heroism is active and you are using RT.

I healed her last night and during the bloodlust/heroism phase HW had a cast time of 0.9 seconds. So using a haste pot seems rather useless.

I've had fairly decent luck on Dreamwalker dropping haste for crit/sp and running w/ 2t9 2t10 -> RT + HW HW HW. The obvious considerations for this being Tidal Waves and keeping the RT on yourself for hardmode. I'm questioning the merit however of running 4T10 264 for the stat bonuses and tossing RT HW HW CH as the timing *should* work out fairly similar and the HoT bonus from CH 4p later in the fight may jump ahead of the wasted AA procs, espescially if the HoT double-dips into the stacks as AA does.

I use glyph of healing wave for this fight on heroic and find that I only need to riptide myself while I'm actually in the portal phase.

This is what I do. I'm not sure why everyone bothers with CH on Val. Sure you get to eat the RT but imo if you cast 2 x LHW instead you get the added benefit of more AA procs these can be pretty reliable when you're on >40% crit raid buffed. So my rotation is generally: RT HW HW LH LH repeat. Averaging 23k without guardian spirits (wtb holy priest) in average ilvl264 gear. I notice she does eat stacks of the ES too when a gut spray or blazing skele hits her which is also a nice little bonus. Not sure if it procs in heroic with the her losing health mechanic.

RE: HW Glyph. In 10 man heroic, the occasional self riptide was more than enough inside the portal, coupled with a resto druid for outside I don't see the HW glyph as being that handy. If you want to re-glyph for the fight I'd my call would be ES + RT + LHW.

I personally just mash Healing wave with riptide on cooldown. With AA double dips and the 2 set bonus it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to do anything else. As for reglyphing, I'm sure HW glyph would be helpful, but the occasional riptide on myself hasn't failed me yet (other then those times I take a bit of fall damage, a tick, and a lay waste is going off, which hasn't been a problem but once)

As for this, she does eat ES charges, but ES doesn't benefit from the healing buff for some reason (at least every time I've tried it it heals for the same with or without the buff). Generally I stick it on a tank while moving to portals or leave it on her depending on the current situation.

greetings resto shaman community!

long time lurker, infrequent poster...i lead a 25-man hard-mode guild (3/12) and our current healing roster has us stuck at 1 holy paladin for a while now. so, i have been stepping into the role of full-time tank healer to which i find my current theorycraft/gear-choices inadequate for the task. i'm either running low on mana way to early or i am not putting out enough HPS to keep the tanks safe...

i think my choices are (1) swap out my mostly haste gems for intellect and rely on tidal waves and 2pc bonus to keep HS relatively hasted (and cast nothing but healing wave) or (2) swap out my mostly haste gems for spellpower or maybe spellpower/crit gems, use the glyph of lesser healing wave, put earth shield on my current healing target and just spam lesser healing wave (basically, i would either mimic what a holy light paladin does or a flash of light paladin does).

what i was wondering if there were players in a similar position as myself and had already done some testing to see which route is better...i am planning on doing this testing myself starting with this raid reset, but i was looking for some outside info (armory + parses) so I would have a better chance at success and helping my guild finish off some additional hard-modes without too much on-the-job-training so to speak.

i guess a tangential question should be -- is this even possible? can i change around enough gems/gear to make myself into something close to a paladin tank healer? obviously, my third option is to recruit an additional holy paladin and believe me i am working on it. but until then, i need to see if i can fill in for a tank healer.

thanks in advance from those brave souls who have already made some progress in this area.

btw, i am probably going to try stacking spellpower or spw/crit for an LHW build and see how that goes. i fear it might not have the throughput i need but...

There was an interesting theorycraft post on this very topic I believe somewhere in this thread (I can't find it at the moment, but I'm nearly positive I saw it on these forums). Anyway, here is a start on a theorycraft of this:

Chance to NOT proc the HoT on a 4-hit CH cast (w/o ELW Glyph):

0.8*0.8*0.8*0.8 = 0.4096 = 40.96% chance to NOT proc the HoT; Conversely yields a (1-0.4096) = 59.04% chance to Proc HoT

Chance to NOT proc the HoT on a 4-hit CH cast (W ELW Glyph):

0.75*0.75*0.75*0.75 = 0.3164 = 31.64% chance to NOT proc the HoT; Conversely yields a (1-0.3164) = 68.36% chance to Proc

Increased chance to proc HoT on CH cast: 68.36%-59.04% = 9.32% increase.

I'll make a few assumptions here, you can take them as you will:

A. Healing Breakdown:
(1) CH will make up about 45% of our casts
(2) LHW will make up about 30% of our casts
(3) RT will make up about 12.5% of our casts
(4) HW will make up about 7.5% of our casts
(5) ES will make up about 5% of our casts

B. Gearing/SP/Buffs
(1) Raid Buffed SP = 3500
(2) In ICC (+5% healing)
(3) You are spec'd into Purification (+10% healing)
(4) You have ToL aura (+6% healing)
(5) No one in your raid ever goes below 35% (Due to blessing of the eternals altering proc rate).
(6) Your haste rating is at or above the softcap (1269).

If we accept all of this, we can make an intelligent guess at a proc chance increase:

(0.45*0.0932+0.3*0.05+0.125*0.05+0.075*0.05+0.05*0.0)= 0.06694 = 6.694% chance to proc EL HoT*

*I assume here (for the sake of being conservative) that EL HoT can ONLY proc off of the initial heal of RT, not the HoT. If it can proc off of the HoT, the proc chance increase can be calculated using the same methodology as the CH calculation with 5 ticks+ 1 initial heal (6 total heals) to be: 7.119%.

With the Gearing/SP/Buffs assumption, we can calculate additional healing done by the increased procs:

ELW Healing formula (from wowwiki) is: (BHA+(BH*0.8*1.88*0.45)) (to calculate per tick, divide by 4)

Where BHA = Base Heal Amount (692 at lvl 80)
BH = Bonus Healing

For our shaman with the above bonus healing values, the ELW should heal for 3060.8 over 12 seconds. Adding in ToL, Purification, and ICC buff, this number becomes: 3060.8*1.1*1.06*1.05 = 3747.34 over 12 seconds.

For a 5 minute fight with continuous casting and assuming your average cast time will be around 1.33 seconds using the healing distribution above (I tried to factor in 2T10, but it might be a little off; I also factored in WoA totem and 3% haste from ret paladins), this you will have a total of: 225.5 total casts.

Without the glyph, we have a ~21%* chance to proc a HoT, so we could expect about 47 EL procs.

*Factoring in CH casts

With the glyph, we can expect a 20%+6.694% chance to proc a HoT, so we could expect about 60 EL procs.

Additional Healing: Assuming 3747.34 healing done per proc, we would get an additional 13*3747.34 = 48715.42 healing done over 5 minutes, or 162.38 HPS.

Notes and Limitations:
1. This does not factor in T10 4pc bonus procing the HoT.
2. This does not factor in RT ticks procing the HoT
3. This is in an ideal world, assuming 100% casting uptime.