* A customizable totem bar will now be available for shaman allowing the storing of 4 different totems. These totems can be placed on the ground at once in one global cooldown for the combined mana cost of all 4 totems.
* All Shocks now have a default range of 25 yards, up from 20 yards.
* Base health increased by approximately 7% to correct for shamans having lower health than other classes.
* Chain Heal: Jump distance increased to 10 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.
* Ghost Wolf: Can now be learned at level 16. While in this form, snaring effects may not bring the shaman below base normal run speed.

* Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target's armor.
* Cure Poison and Cure Disease: Combined into a single spell, Cure Toxins.
* Earth Shield: Dispel effects will now remove charges of Earth Shield rather than the entire aura.
* Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman's Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.
* Mana Tide Totem: Totem health now equal to 10% of the shaman's health.
* Nature's Guardian: Redesigned. Now has a fixed 100% proc rate, has a 30-second internal cooldown and increases the shaman's maximum health by 3/6/9/12/15% for 10 seconds.
* Nature's Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
* Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.
* Improved Water Shield: This talent now has a 10/20/30% chance to be triggered by Chain Heal, and the charges of Water Shield are no longer consumed by this talent.

General Changes affecting Shaman
* Mana Regeneration: All items that provide "X mana per five seconds" have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.
* Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
* Macros and scripts will no longer be able to target totems by name.

source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - PTR Patch 3.2.0 Notes

The LHW amounts to a 17-20% buff, factoring in AA. The more crit you already have, the less the increase. Not as much throughput as the 30% cast time reduction would have given us had the GCD also been lowered. But the extra crit also helps with Ancestral Healing change. Combine this with current ES glyph for solid MT healing.

Keeping AH procced on tanks will now become mandatory - which is good. I tank heal more than the average shaman regardless. This will push my LHW to around 75% chance to crit or something. Pretty nice! Don't know about the HW changes - with the buffs to LHW don't see too much incentive to start spamming that around. Maybe for heavy tank damage fights / moments, but I still see LHW being the most casted of the two (unless of course this pushes most shaman into a MT healing role, which it could). I don't like the fact that I'm losing a .8 second LHW either, but we'll see how it plays out. The changes to CH just basically means you can toss a few around regardless of your gear setup but for the most part there still won't be a reason to purely spam it. Which is good!

Decent changes so far - hopefully we see a few more.

I was a little disappointed with the LHW change in TW at first, because to me that seems as if we are forced into the Paladin's problem of lots of healing, little effective healing. On the other hand, this could be quite nice in PVP, as with TW up, LHW will have a 60% crit chance with a shaman wearing Mail (fairly common in 3s). This would seem fairly consistent with Blizzard feeling we need help in PVP, not PVE. To be honest, though, it'll still be problematic until Riptide is changed with a lower mana cost (or a different effect). Since Shamans have now moved to spot/snipe raid and tank healing, this is a fairly dramatic change to our gameplay. Basically I see this amounting to more overall healing, but less effective healing.

It's a PvP nerf. We lost our only viable means of mobility, our hasted LHW's were amazing for fast mobile casting in a world full of slows and stuns. By removing the hasted effect LHW recieves we've lost our only mobility and as a result it will be that much easier to interrupt the cast.

I hate relying on critical heals in PvP, you could give a cast 100% crit heals all the time but if you can't get it off it's pointless. I liked the 0.11~ sec cast LHW's (in PvP, this is) because it was hard to interrupt and if you were able, and were able too, juke heals you were fine. This change just makes it harder to juke heals in order to force interrupts.

The change I am most interested in...

# Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

...while it isn't a direct change to Restoration, but I think it's still worth mentioning.

Yeah, missed that part about Replenishment. Didn't really expect that to be nerfed. I wonder if Mana tide or the glyph will be adjusted (the Mana Tide glyph changed to something like the Glyph of Innervate).

But here's something on the flip side:

so a 25% boost to M/5 and a 20% nerf to replenish

I'll have to swap in some mp5 pieces to retain my current level of regen, but it shouldn't be too drastic.

My 28k mana pool currently gives 350 mp5 from replenishment, but will only give 280 mp5 after this change, a loss of 70 mp5. I have 112 mp5 from gear, which will swell to ~140 mp5, gain of 28 mp5. So I'll need to come up with about 42 mp5 from gear to replace what I lost from the replenishment nerf, which is 34 mp5 pre-inflation. I can get that back on two items by swapping out my sp/haste/crit piece for sp/(crit|haste)/mp5. If they do give us another 25 mp5 from WS, that almost entirely mitigates the replenishment nerf.

Not bad changes. I'm a little confused about the Mana Tide replenishment change. In terms of numbers, how much mana return are we looking at?

Another thing to consider is if this mp5 increase will roll into the gems as well. If so, a 16mp5 gem would move up to 20mp5. Going forward flasks and elixirs will have to be looked at too.

You can choose consistency now for pvp if you'd like. Healing Wave specced and geared for mp5 means more consistent healing and regen. Obviously there are drawbacks, but HW with HWay will non-crit for as much as a crit LHW on an ESed target and mp5 will give you the 300-400 mana back every 5 seconds regardless of whether you crit or not. Definately going to try HW/mp5 since I also dislike praying for crits in order to maintain decent throughput/regen.

Arguments for Shaman becoming MT healers

1) HW now hits for alot, 11-12k/16-17k for crits. Not as much as pallies but decent
2) AF will be required for all bosses (priests can bring the same buff, but SOMEONE has to bring it)
3) TW + LHW= 10k crits 65-75% of the time....TW+ 1.4s HW for 11k non crit
4) HW crits will return ~50% of the mana. Assumign 40-50% crit rates raid buffed, you are looking at 750-800 mana per cast on avg
5) Depending on the hit box size and fights you may be able to bounce CH off the tanks for 6k hit/9k crits for 600 ish mana avg.
6) With AA procing like crazy off of both HW and LHW in a crit/mp5 or crit/(mixed haste and mp5 pieces) set, you bump overall healing by quite a bit a smart heal which has built in overheal protection. That raises HW to 22k total healing and LHW sits around 13k total healing. The nice part is it can hit the tank if require or someone else if not.

With Ancestral Healing/Inspiration being changed from a +25% armour buff to -10% physical damage, does this really represent much of a change to tank mitigation in pve? From my napkin math, for a high armour tank it looks to me like it will represent a slight reduction in physical damage mitigation, unless the damage ignores armour for whatever reason (i.e. dots, special attack design etc).

When I read the patch notes I personally viewed this as more of an attempt to buff physical mitigation of low armour classes in pvp, especially after Blizzard had expressed concern over physical dps being too powerful in arena.

With the rather large (overly so, IMHO) nerf to paladin mana returns, Shamans might just become the MT/Melee healers of choice. This is a position I do not mind occupying at all, to be honest. The entirety of a Shaman's arsenal seems very well suited to the various tasks there.

for reference:

I think current changes for 3.2 are good, it is blizzards attempt to bring shaman back to aoe healing. CH will be a stronger tool (CH glyph coming back, maybe), and lhw with high +crit will bring a lot of AA procs which supports raid healing, while being very nice on MT, but they might nerf IWS, so it doesn't bring lhw too high Healing per mana wise. It's sad that we loose our .8 sec Lhw which a believe is current (only) advantage over other healers, but might be not too bad in the end.

HW will be very strong heal, with new content it might be a good to use on tanks or other high hp raid members. But probably in every days situation it will serve as spell fallowed after a NS.

Haven't done any math yet, but i believe our favorite stats is going to switch from Int/crit/haste to SP/haste/mp5 a bit more.

Think it 3.2 shaman will be versatile healer with no problem switching from raid to MT and back.

I'm a little bit confused about this "tooltip", because it looks like it could proc of any chainheal regardless if it's a crit or not.

I think you hit on part of it.
I think that perhaps some tanks are getting too close to the armor cap and with 3.2, 3.3 and a possible 3.4 coming blizz would run out of tank gear itemization in terms of armor.

This is exactly what I think. Shaman will become far more flexible. And every of our healing casts gets a acceptable chance to gain Mana back. Therefore it now starts to become intersting investing in some haste. As far as I pre 3.2 always tried to avoid it (with the result of having nethertheless a .8 LHW), I am now happy with that.

Without having done any math yet, it could become an option to haste towards 1.0 LHW and with riptide HW should be somewhere around 1.1/1.2 then. What seems quite a good option. Even if we can only reach 1.1 LHW. Seems like if we get a bit closer to druids then.

Throughput buffs:


Chain Heal buff is ~17% Throughput increase to a 3 jump (glyphed) chain heal at 6k first hit, not factoring any throughput increase by the range increase may account for.


Healing Way buff looks like 7% straight across, however this number is actually higher because you can now use HW at full power on any target on the first cast, making it more versatile, and i suspect a larger buff than the straight 7%.

GCD bonus from WS refreshing.
Taking a rough average of 15 seconds between WS refreshes, and 1.5 sec GCD for estimation purposes gives us a 10% throughput bonus from the extra GCD every 15 seconds. (this is probably horribly wrong mathematically but im just estimating here.

Mana Regen Buffs:

If option B, its approximately 437 MP5 while spamming 2 sec chain heal (rough and dirty math)

If option C, its approximately 150 MP5 while spamming 2 sec chain heal.



General buff to MP5 on gear affects resto shaman a lot, as most of our mail has MP5 on it (traditionally) I know we are wearing "elemental gear" these days, but we all have some MP5 peices and likely more of it in our banks.


Also change to IWS will increase our WS uptime. By how much I do not know. I would guesstimate somewhere between 10 and 20% uptime bonus. thus us relatively small, 10-20 MP5 boost but a buff nonetheless.




In conclusion, these all come together to add up to a very large throughput buff for us. On all of our spells, and at no additional mana cost. Wow. It also amount to a large *relative* mana regen buff to us vs. the other classes (who are getting nerfed uniformly through replenishment nerf, and some other more directly)

I am excited, but fear they may have overcompensated. These buffs seem almost too good to be true.

I'm interested in how the weighting for HEP will adjust given these changes. As other have stated, Haste/Sp Power and MP5 stats will likely increase in relative weight to int/crit

I really hope they mean "Chain Heal Jump distance increased by 10 yards".

I think the range is already 10 yards on live. Tested it with the Deadly Bossmods range check. Anyone can confirm that it is actually 10 yards? It would make no sense to increase the range to 10 yards, even if it is 8 yards on live. In my opionion it wouldn't change anything. But you never know, it's Blizzard.

I really hope resto gets further tweaking on the PTR. I don't like the Tidal Waves changes to LHW, though the rest seems like a nice start.

It is 8 yards on live. It does seem like a very meager increase in jump distance.