So what is the deal with Healing Rain now?

[Elios]

Hmm i was thinking maybe conductivity will be good in 25 with 4 shamans on thok ? ...

But out of that i dont see another situation ...i tried in norushen a few minutes ago... it sucked. hard.

[Endus]

except the fact that the initial tick of HR is way more powerful than anything else in our arsenal that its worth recasting HR for that initial tick even with the talent. You get the extra tick on HR with conduct. when you are casting another HR, which would otherwise be faded already, so it pretty much is how much value do you get from the extra tick compared to AG or RS.

Let me repeat the first phrase in the post you quoted; "Not to defend Conductivity . . . "

I don't especially like the talent, I'm just pointing out that if you critique it, critique it on its actual merits (or lack thereof), not on qualities it wasn't supposed to bring. It was never meant to significantly bump HR's value, it was meant to reduce how much you cast it.

[Tiberria]

Neither Conductivity nor AG are going to be particularly strong on Thok, because both talents require that you are able to free cast to get the most out of them. I don't understand why you wouldn't use RS on that fight, because it is the one option that gives you additional passive/instant cast healing without any requirement to be able to chain cast. RS + Glyph of Riptide and hard casting nothing but HR after the first few roars is what seems to be the best setup.

- - - Updated - - -

Let me repeat the first phrase in the post you quoted; "Not to defend Conductivity . . . "

I don't especially like the talent, I'm just pointing out that if you critique it, critique it on its actual merits (or lack thereof), not on qualities it wasn't supposed to bring. It was never meant to significantly bump HR's value, it was meant to reduce how much you cast it.

The reality is, the buff to HR's uptime is by far the biggest gain from taking Conductivity, not extra cast time (and it's a cast time spell, not a GCD) every ~10 seconds. The big benefit is that you can have 100% uptime on ULE buffed HR. HR has a maximum uptime of about 85% and ULE-HR has a max uptime of about 55%. In most cases, you are going to cast ULE before every second HR, giving you about 82% theoretical HR uptime, half of which is ULE buffed. The net result is, having HR up permanently through Conductivity is a ~28% buff to the output of the spell.

That buff approaches a 10% output gain on fights where people stay stacked enough to use Conductivity, and is far, far more significant than the gain you get from ~1.5 GCDs every 10 seconds. Even buffed CH doesn't approach HR in output potential, and getting one more CH every 10 seconds isn't going to be nearly as powerful as a 28% buff to HR. That is the real reason to take Conductivity, not the extra casting time

[ThePlanckEnergy]

Here is the current number of appearances in the top 10 HPS of fights by class for 25N

Shaman - 45
Druid - 29
Monk - 11
Paladin - 8
Priest - 34

One of the things that is concerning - like I said it was going to be is stacked AoE healing performance. Shaman should be dominating that like Monks are dominating Malkorok. However, look at Thok - about as "Shaman niche" of a fight that you will ever see. In the top 10, you have 6 Priests, 2 Druids, and 2 Shaman. On Sha of Pride and Norushen, Druids appear as often as Shaman. Again, I ask. Where is our stacked healing niche performance?

- - - Updated - - -



Because using ReM on cooldown and casting Uplift when you have the Chi to do so this entire expansion requires so much skill? Your argument about a class being easy meaning they shouldn't be competitive is also the height of stupidity - even for you. If a class is faceroll to play but can not pull competitive numbers at the high end raiding level, guess what happens to it?

Did you REALLY just whine about your class performance after posting top 10 logs showing Shaman equalling the amount of the next 3 combined?

LOL. You should probably be quiet.

Also be glad you're NOT actually stuck in your niche. If your healing was terrible outside of stacking how could you be dominating the top logs like that?

[Lei]

Neither Conductivity nor AG are going to be particularly strong on Thok, because both talents require that you are able to free cast to get the most out of them. I don't understand why you wouldn't use RS on that fight, because it is the one option that gives you additional passive/instant cast healing without any requirement to be able to chain cast. RS + Glyph of Riptide and hard casting nothing but HR after the first few roars is what seems to be the best setup.

I tried Conductivity on Thok on our first pulls aswell, thinking 1 HR/40 sec, trying to cast 1-1 chain heal in the meantime to maintain the duration = gg. Didn't work for me. We didn't have many pulls, we killed it before I could work out my spread phase healing strategy to be happy with it, but I ended up with having AG on our kill. Next week I will try RS. But we had Devo aura, so I could use AG. Well, more or less... I have more personal concerns with the frenzy phase.

Maybe I will use Ascendance or AG with Auras, and keep tide for the spread phase, don't know yet. Or maybe getting the Chain heal glyph, because we are limited anyways, but on the spread phase it can be handy. Will think on it. (This was my very first experience on Thok, besides watching the tactic movies, I didn't do ptr tests)

[Deleted]

The reality is, the buff to HR's uptime is by far the biggest gain from taking Conductivity, not extra cast time (and it's a cast time spell, not a GCD) every ~10 seconds. The big benefit is that you can have 100% uptime on ULE buffed HR. HR has a maximum uptime of about 85% and ULE-HR has a max uptime of about 55%. In most cases, you are going to cast ULE before every second HR, giving you about 82% theoretical HR uptime, half of which is ULE buffed. The net result is, having HR up permanently through Conductivity is a ~28% buff to the output of the spell.

I think the point is that the UE uptime buff is not the only thing that Conductivity brings. I'm fairly certain I'm not seeing a 28% buff to my HR when I look at logs. It 'feels' more like 15-20% or even less. You still save up to 77k mana per minute. That mana gain was enough for me to chain cast CH for a whole 11 minutes and 27 seconds during a flex protectors kill. The free casts may not be as powerful as the HR buff or the mana gain, but 3 CHs per minute should still net you around 500k healing done. That alone is a significant portion of what RS provides. So don't just look at one thing the talent provides, because it comes with a little bit of everything and you need to evaluate the whole package.

[Doash]

Has anyone tried Conductivity out in challenge modes? I'm interested in trying it out, on paper it sounds like a good fit. Having it up for the whole boss fight, or hard trash packs seems like a win.

[Rarch]

I'd prefer to have AG for Challenge Modes. Having 4 Healing CD's is amazing. The hard part of healing CM's is trash, not bosses, and you need burst healing to make it easier. With AG, you could potentially have a healing CD up For every trash pull you need one for.

Just looking at how long the trash lives, you may need to recast HR once per trash pack, which isn't worth taking Conductivity to avoid. You can always use Nature's Swiftness for that recast if you need to, so it barely takes the 2 GCD's (UF and HR, NS isn't on the GCD) to cast and that's it.

[Tiberria]

I can't believe it, but I actually ended up using Conductivity for Heroic Norushen. Using 4 healers and the zerg strat (sending no one down to the test realm), you absolutely needed everyone to push maximum DPS at the start (at 50% corruption) including healers and healers using the DPS legendary cloak, etc. Conductivity with Lightning Bolt spam for the first half of the fight combined with Attonement and Fistweaving healing was enough to keep the raid up while everyone basically DPSed. It also didn't feel like as much of a liability at the healing intensive end of the fight as I thought it would.

- - - Updated - - -

My impression from the initial hard modes is, that while it didn't really show up on normal mode, the priest L90 talents being uncapped are a huge balance problem. Divine Star and the Divine Aegis it applies are severely suppressing Shaman (and every one else too)'s output on stacked fights - to the tune of being 20%+ ahead. This includes fights like H Protectors and H Norushen (on pulls where everyone is maxing healing output). These are fights Shaman should be shining on, and we are really 2nd - 3rd place as best. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the instance, because on spread fights, guess what? Priests get an uncapped Halo while we lose a lot of our output. through the first 3 heroics, Disc looks more over the top overpowered than they were in 5.1.

For all of the whining about Shaman numbers on normal modes, I don't think we are better than middle of the pack in 25H, now that they have decided to let Disc dominate a third consecutive tier.

[ValiumMm]

I can't believe it, but I actually ended up using Conductivity for Heroic Norushen. Using 4 healers and the zerg strat (sending no one down to the test realm), you absolutely needed everyone to push maximum DPS at the start (at 50% corruption) including healers and healers using the DPS legendary cloak, etc. Conductivity with Lightning Bolt spam for the first half of the fight combined with Attonement and Fistweaving healing was enough to keep the raid up while everyone basically DPSed. It also didn't feel like as much of a liability at the healing intensive end of the fight as I thought it would.

- - - Updated - - -

My impression from the initial hard modes is, that while it didn't really show up on normal mode, the priest L90 talents being uncapped are a huge balance problem. Divine Star and the Divine Aegis it applies are severely suppressing Shaman (and every one else too)'s output on stacked fights - to the tune of being 20%+ ahead. This includes fights like H Protectors and H Norushen (on pulls where everyone is maxing healing output). These are fights Shaman should be shining on, and we are really 2nd - 3rd place as best. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the instance, because on spread fights, guess what? Priests get an uncapped Halo while we lose a lot of our output. through the first 3 heroics, Disc looks more over the top overpowered than they were in 5.1.

For all of the whining about Shaman numbers on normal modes, I don't think we are better than middle of the pack in 25H, now that they have decided to let Disc dominate a third consecutive tier.

+1 with Conductivity on Norushen. Although we sent down our 4 healers and the tanks but No DPS. use primal Fire ele and also the legendary cloak helped with DPS and then just spam Lightning bolt.


On Protectors I topped (says normal on the logs, but its Heroic). Disc is strong, but Shamans and Druids are just as competitive. It will be towards the end of the tier when disc just smash everyone with absorbs as usual.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=6660&e=7217

[nightfalls]

@Tib: Divine Star and Halo both badly need AoE caps, period. Right now we have Disc priests able to sustain damage on Norushen (more than you) with full healing output. Monks are the second worst offender but even they do suffer a throughput loss (compared to just "healing") with Eminence healing, as intended.

[Floopa]

It's a good thing to know whenever Tiberria calls the sky is falling it's complete bs. Shaman are in an incredibly strong spot, arguably the strongest healer in the game.

[Deleted]

It's a good thing to know whenever Tiberria calls the sky is falling it's complete bs. Shaman are in an incredibly strong spot, arguably the strongest healer in the game.

On 25m, it's

Priest > Shaman > Druid > Pala > Monk

On 10m, it's

Druid > Pala > Monk > Shaman > Priest

If i give P1 5p decreasing, over both raidsizes, i end at:
Druid 8
Pala 6
Priest 6
Shaman 6
Monk 4

I'd say shamans are well balanced. Druids are hps wise too strong, monks too weak.

[Deleted]

Raidbots shows Shamans on top for 25man, no matter how you look at it. The difference is nowhere near as huge as previous imbalances have been this expansion, though, and we aren't really amazing on 10man. MTT loses a lot of it's value in 10man and HR/CH are much less universally useful. IMHO with the exception of Monks who are too weak, healing balance is working out fairly well this tier. Some classes pull ahead in 10man whereas others pull ahead in 25man. While healing classes aren't within 5% of eachother if you only look at 10man or 25man, only monks are consistently doing worse than everyone else in both formats.

Druid's are fine where they are at. They provide very little utility and they aren't stronger than anyone else in 25man. Druid's may be a little too strong on 10man, but I don't see how you could tone that down without destroying them in 25man. They're just really good in any healing situation and don't lose as much power as other healing classes do.

Priests are too weak in 10man, because an uncapped Halo / Divine Star was a really bad idea (similar to how bad the 14 target-cap HR would have been).

tl;dr: monks need a buff, everyone else is more or less fine.

[Tiberria]

WoL doesn't have heroic parses broken out yet, so neither does Raidbots, so what we are seeing is a combination of normal/flex/heroic parses all combined together. One of the things to note is that Shaman are about 17% ahead of every other healer in LFR, but only 5% ahead in normal mode. If that trend continues, I would not be surprised if heroic parses show us middle of the pack (below Druids and definitely below Disc). We will have to see.

[Deleted]

Raidbots shows Shamans on top for 25man, no matter how you look at it. The difference is nowhere near as huge as previous imbalances have been this expansion, though, and we aren't really amazing on 10man.

Good on 25m, bad on 10m. Balanced. Absolutely middle of the pack on both raid sizes.

The shaman tool kit always favors 25m over 10m, while druids always favor 10m over 25m.

Raidbots implies discipline to be the best 25m healer. And just take a look at the 10m curve:

http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Spec_...00000000111011

The trend is not really shaman's friend. Even on 25m.

[Totemtown]

On 25m, it's

Priest > Shaman > Druid > Pala > Monk

On 10m, it's

Druid > Pala > Monk > Shaman > Priest

If i give P1 5p decreasing, over both raidsizes, i end at:
Druid 8
Pala 6
Priest 6
Shaman 6
Monk 4

I'd say shamans are well balanced. Druids are hps wise too strong, monks too weak.

First off dont talk if you have no idea about what the best healers are in 10m.
Overall its Priest > Druid > Shaman > Pally > Monk

[Hursey]

First off dont talk if you have no idea about what the best healers are in 10m.
Overall its Priest > Druid > Shaman > Pally > Monk

WOW first of I would say don't talk if you are going to just straight over generalize. Even the most brief of looks at individual encounters shows that most healing specs have their time in the sun this tier (Barring Holy Priests) and everyone has their turn at the bottom of the pile in both raid sizes.

At this time, I would say balance is almost close enough that overall HPS potential doesn't really matter, so who cares if it's Druid > Pala > Monk > Shaman > Priest or Priest > Druid > Shaman > Pally > Monk, the reality is that you probably aren't going to change to FOTM healer for the little gain that you could get and you would probably be silly too before everthing smooths itself out. Of course this will all change in a few weeks when damage starts to taper off, but lap it up while you can

[nightfalls]

It's a good thing to know whenever Tiberria calls the sky is falling it's complete bs. Shaman are in an incredibly strong spot, arguably the strongest healer in the game.

I'd personally give that honor to Priests (so I think Tiberria was correct with his prediction on Divine Star even if it was a no-brainer for anyone). But shaman are very good right now also.

[Txiv]

As an ele shaman is it worth using on malkorok? Will it help keep shields up or is ag better for building them at pull?