Yes in my testing it was about 30%. My numbers have always factored this in. That is nothing new. Check your math again I am guessing you made some mistakes.

As of last night, CH was the same range as it is on live. There has been no range increase as of yet and it looks to be 10 yards on live as well as the PTR.

If you care to deal with the propaganda and opinions, there is a thread going right now on the WoW healing forums with videos of live and PTR.

It's still at least 2 read operations and 2 add operation extra on every jump, given how often CH is cast I'd say it's a pretty obvious place to optimise. However, it's clearly OT and largely irrelevant to this thread.

Chain Heal: Jump distance increased by 25% to 12.5 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.

Wow - could that be taken as a backdoor admission by Blizzard that Chain Heal was indeed 10 years on live?

The math would certainly seem to indicate that. I'm curious now to hear from folks on the PTR as to whether that jump is enough to allow us to chain heal the tank and hit melee (on boss-sized mobs).

Boss size varies so much. I can use CH to heal tank and melee already on some bosses, but how nice would that be for the big guys, like General Vez!

Indeed. On XT it's quite unlikely you'll be able to find a reasonable way to bounce off the tank to melee (even after the buff) because his hit box is just way too large. Yet, compare that with the current live Algalon where I can comfortably bounce chains off the tank in to melee if needed as they're all relatively close due to his smaller hitbox and the fact there's no penalty for them clumping so long as they move when needed. The buffs will help, there’s no doubt about that, but ultimately encounter design have the final say in deciding whether the new CH is worth pressing.

Blizzard dodged the problem with CH entirely. Yes, the range was a problem but there's a much more glaring problem with CH. You could make CH bounce 100 yards, but it still has a cast. The cast time and drop off are what makes CH inferior to the counterparts it must compete with. Even so, 12.5 yards is still not enough. It's the weakest AoE heal in the game already and needs major work.

Really, I don't see Shaman being better in 3.2 at all. Pallies have realised the severity of the Illumination nerf isn't that bad, and the change to Beacon is quite huge. Shaman on the other hand will be spot healing with a lousy 1.2-1.3~ second cast that has a 70%-80% chance to crit. All in all, I'd be suprised if Resto Shaman even get raid spots in 3.2. Druids and Priests are better raid healers, Disc Priests and Pallies are better tank healers and now - for spot healing - Pallies overtake that role with the SS, Beacon and FoL HoT change.

The only time I can see Resto Shaman being 'useful', or having a 'useful' role in raids, is in the next content patch (Icecrown) or the next expansion. Blizzard wont buff Resto Shaman because they're still stuck in this notion that Sunwell Shaman were Gods due to CH - this really needs to go, yes, CH was powerful in Sunwell but BL and Totems were even more powerful.

I disagree to a point, and I don't feel that we can really make these kinds of statements until we see the actual PVE testing occur in the new instances.

To throw my own opinion out there, while Paladins will certainly be capable of spot healing(primarily due to the Beacon changes), a Shaman with as much crit as we will be playing with will be an incredible raid healer/damage mitigator. Previously, we had no true ability to mitigate damage, depending on the next round of content a properly geared Shaman may very well be able to maintain Ancestral Healing on multiple raid targets. While that change is a slight nerf to tank mitigation it offers up a lot of possibility for raid damage mitigation while also being maintained on the tank simply due to that crit rate we'll have as Shamans.

Secondly, it seems obvious to me that Crit/Haste gear over Crit/m5 or Haste/m5 will be incredibly strong(this once again is assuming that the content allows us to wear this kind of gear) which will allow Chain Heal to be a very strong mitigation tool, especially because the 4 piece set bonus from t9 increases the critical strike chance of Chain Heal.

To put it in simple terms, the way that Shamans play will continue to be determined by what kind of content we are seeing, has it really been any different in the past?

I have never been that disappointed with Chain Heal except in the complete lack of fights where I can take good advantage of it, it's certainly capable of 6k+ HP/S in the right situation, but those situations don't rise up very often and when they do they are set up with predictable damage on strict timers which is exactly the kind of damage that Priests/Druids excel at dealing with.

Don't agree that we are becoming relatively worse in 3.2, it is quite the opposite, in fact. Shaman are currently effective tank and raid healers in the majority of raids. We are the weakest healers currently, but not by a large magnitude.

We are receiving a buff to every aspect of our healing (except ES but that's already very good).

HW is getting 7% buff and all ramp up is being removed.
LHW is receiving ~12% throughput buff.(complain about the cast time but it is a throughput buff after all is said and done)
Chain heal is receiving a ~15% throughput buff(not factoring range increase)
Our mana regen is receiving a relative buff to other healers.

We are getting buffed in all aspects, and preists and druids are getting nerfs. Pally is getting a considerable buff, but the illumination nerf is larger than I think you give it credit for. Pallies right now cannot run out of mana period. They couldn't cast themselves out of mana if they tried. It wont be like that after replenishment and illumination nerfs.

This all adds up to Shaman being in a stronger relative position than we are now, it seems pretty clear to me.

For chain heal to be comparable to other classes the drop-off penalty needs to be 30%. Currently at 50% drop off I'm better off not even using chain heal unless I know there's not going to be any overheal, because lhw is simply faster and more effective. Changing the drop-off to 40% and nerfing the haste we get on lhw basically means we can't use either very effectively unless none of the chain heal will be overheal. LHW will most likely land too late now unless you're stacking haste up near 800+. The problem shamans are facing is that our heals aren't quick enough in aoe situations and these newest ptr changes won't help anything. On live, I've finally gotten to a point where I can consistently beat druids and priests, but I'm pretty sure these changes will put them back ahead of me by even more than they are supposed to be now.

A nice fix would be something like adding a new talent to let LHW give you a 30% chance to have an instant cast chain heal. I think this would still keep LHW viable and still have a niche for chain heal as well. All things aside chain heal is a great spell, but relative to the other classes' healing spells it's currently not.

Stating that our buffs are solely in the form of throughput does not consider gear in class balance.


Haste per Tier Piece:

Tier	Total	Head	Shoulders	Chest	Gloves	Legs
Tier 7-25	176	58	0	59	0	59
Tier 8-25	173	59	57	0	57	0
Tier 9-25N	176	0	52	72	52	0
Tier 9-25H	230	0	68	94	68	0

The Tier pieces all give a roughly equal amount of haste per tier (with the exception of the T9 Hard modes); however, this does not account for the other haste you gain from gear. As an example, I currently run with 321 static haste from non tier slots (562 total); assuming a similar iLvL -> haste allocation increase for the new tier of gear, we could potentially see an increase of ~106 or more haste with iLvL 245 gear - for my example, this would result in a net gain of ~220 haste rating (to ~782). Really, it's far too early to declare that we've lost our spell casting speed until we see more gear from the new instance.

The throughput buffs are nice; however, it appears that the min/max shaman will have to continue to turn to PvP for the gladiator totem for PvE purposes. Philosophically, I would prefer if PvE min/max gear did not come from PvP; realistically, with the buff to ghost wolf, it should be much easier to attain the required rating for the current season's totem.

Titanx, would you be willing to provide information as to how you've reached this conclusion?

Oh this wasn't an exact calculated number, just a very close educated guess based on experience, but I'll do the actual calculation in a bit.

EDIT: Looking at a recent WWS of mine (Wow Web Stats), my average chain heal hit is 4345. Assuming no overheal this would mean the average total of 3 chain heal hits would be 13035. This number of course would mean that every chain heal bounced to three targets and had 0 overheal, which is obviously not the case. Look at the average prayer of healing that a priest does and its often over 20-24k not including the overheal. This is 54-85% stronger than chain heal with a cast time of .5 seconds longer. Circle of Healing is usually around 16-17k between all hits and is INSTANT. That's a increase of 23-31%. So decreasing the penalty of chain heal to 40% instead of 50% simply will not make up the difference. Yes, it makes it better, but even lowering the penalty of chain heal to 30% wouldn't make up the difference over prayer of healing, which is acceptable, but just putting things into perspective.

You didnt take into account that not all of your CH you see on WWS hit 3 targets. So the real avg heal for 3 Targets should be lower then your 13035

Also, Prayer of Healing is receiving a throughput nerf in the form of a reduced spellpower coefficient.

Note that Prayer of Healing costs 38.4% of Base Mana (talented) while Chain Heal costs only 18% and in 3.2 will have significantly more efficiency through Improved Water Shield.

Chain Heal is a good healing spell and will be great in 3.2, the question is whether there will be many/any boss fights that require a spammable, mana-efficient heal going forward.

I ran numbers on shaman_hep reports for the last 13 weeks of my combatlog data. This included 11949 in combat chain heal casts, with an average of 2.75 hits per cast. My overall numbers as well as those from individual report segments had consistent findings.

The effective healing for second target of a chain heal was close to the same as for the first target, because the first target had higher overhealing. With that in mind, I extrapolated what the healing would have been with 3.2 patch 40% reduction, and again with your suggestion of 30% reduction. I assumed the first and second targets' heals would remain unchanged, and assumed the third and fourth targets' overhealing rate would remain unchanged.

With those assumptions in place, I found that a 40% bounce reduction would be a 15% increase in effective healing from the current 50% bounce reduction mechanic (and a 16% increase in overall healing).

Changing the bounce reduction to 30% made a dramatic difference. The change is a 35% increase in effective healing from the current mechanic (and a 30% increase in overall healing). What's happening is the third and fourth targets are getting big enough heals that all four targets have around the same effective healing.

Healing four targets for the same amount (with differing amounts of overheal) is not what chain heal is; Blizzard is not going to just give the same spell to everyone. While extending the change from 50% to 40% again to 30% may seem a logical next step to you, it is a more fundamental change to the spell than it first appears.

The niche is efficiency. Running 3.2 numbers in my spreadsheet, my effective CH HpM is second only to Earth Shield, if it jumps at least once. It fills the same role it always has, but has a better chance of chaining and is more efficient. That's significant.

I still believe that the niche Shamans will be best at filling will be an AE mitigator + tank healer, Chain Heal + Ancestral Healing's change helps fill this role very well. While you might say that a Priest can do the same thing via Inspiration and Prayer of Healing for them to fill the same role will require much more mana as well as item points forced into spirit due to their lack of an IWS mechanic.

Example: Shamans gearing Crit/Haste and letting m5 slide will be a strong possibility(and one I have plans to test, but have not done so yet); because of this we can pull our Haste/Crit/Spellpower levels higher than a Priest simply because of the fact they will need Spirit likely costing Crit OR Haste, or some of each in comparable gear.

Secondly, the difference in efficiency is incredible. As someone pointed out earlier, PoH costs 38.4% base mana to Chain Heal's 18% base mana. Combine that with gear that will be in the range of 700 Haste, 30% crit(easily, I'll assemble a BiS list as I can for this purpose), then Shamans have a possible niche in the raid mitigation range, the Tidal Waves change makes maintaining an armor buff on a tank much more reliable as well taking our utility to levels we haven't really thought of before.

Shaman + Druid raid healers might be one of the strongest ways to go in the patch(although Priest is certainly substitutable, they won't be quite as strong in the role at least in my initial thoughts).
The synergy of HoT's + 10% less damage spread out to several members in the raid seems interesting to say the least.

Yes as I have mentioned before the efficiency is nearly double what it is on live for a 4 hit ch. 30 heal per mana on a smart targeting heal you can spam is a good niche.

What I worry is that we will still be using t8 in the following tiers of content when we know that we have to spam CH for a given fight. I am assuming that all the calculations and shaman_hep reports in the above is done using 4p t8; my guess is that things are going to look worse without it. Developers (and players) might be looking at how CH is being used now and the results it gives without considering the fact that Ch will be 0.2s slower in the next tier, which i think is significant, even with increased haste levels.

It's only physical damage taken not all.