Tips & Help for our two Shamans

[Wengel]

Again, you're underestimating it. Looking at the logs for this week's heroic farm, my average initial Riptide heal did 20,246 effective healing (at ilvl 682). On yesterday's progression wipes, the average initial Riptide heal did 23,260 effective healing. It gets even higher on fights where the raid is hovering at lower health and overhealing is less of a concern - the average was 24,745 on our first Kromog kill. That's averaged over the entire raid/encounter, so with no particular stars aligning. On someone who is actually low enough on health to need an emergency heal, it should be doing another 15-20% from mastery.

Could be i'm underestimating it but it still means messing up the high-tide preparations if you use it to 'save' extremely low health people.
Even if stars doesn't align and you can get an extra 15-20% on top of your average mentioned here on your Kromog kill, that'll bump it to 30k almost to the digit.
Personally i'd say a surge would be better at this point, it also averages much higher and will immediately bring the person out of the danger zone (regardless of a crit or not).
As mentioned before, it's probably a playstyle choice since both for sure are viable.
Having multiple 'real' choices in terms of talents is actually a good thing so there's no 'one size fits all'.

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One thing is, damage isn't nearly as bursty as it used to be. It used to be that heals had to bring you from near death to full health in order to be good (Wrath, for instance). Players now can sit around 60-80% and not be in imminent danger. Therefore, 20-25k healing from the initial blast of riptide helps a ton.

Being a healer who used to glyph riptide, and was running high percentage logs with it, I'm running better percentage logs with EotE and unglyphed tide. Again, I do not feel like Glyphed Riptide is bad, I just don't like it is as useful, and your healing will be an entirely different style than without it.

Out of curiousity, which other glyphs are actually of any 'real' gamechanging quality to replace it with? Chaining seems counterproductive with larger raid groups and 2/4 set bonus, healing wave is also of really tiny use simply because with larger groups your main bulk of healing comes from CH, HST or HTT.
Not that many cases where there's "only" steady tank damage and nobody else is healing the tank (MT's are DK and Bear, so they tend to be spikey when something bit hits)... i tend to focus on setting up high-tide preparations, EB etc or simply toss a LB or two out when there's a gap where you got zip to do, ain't many of them though.
HST glyph is pretty much mandatory, then there's the SWG glyphs, both of which to me at least isn't of that great use. Rarely do i need to use it every minute, most large movement phases seems to be more of a 2-minute thing anyway. extending the duration is nice but again you barely use the full 15 seconds as it is.

[The Yeti]

Could be i'm underestimating it but it still means messing up the high-tide preparations if you use it to 'save' extremely low health people.
Even if stars doesn't align and you can get an extra 15-20% on top of your average mentioned here on your Kromog kill, that'll bump it to 30k almost to the digit.
Personally i'd say a surge would be better at this point, it also averages much higher and will immediately bring the person out of the danger zone (regardless of a crit or not).
As mentioned before, it's probably a playstyle choice since both for sure are viable.
Having multiple 'real' choices in terms of talents is actually a good thing so there's no 'one size fits all'.

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Out of curiousity, which other glyphs are actually of any 'real' gamechanging quality to replace it with? .

Glyphs do not necessarily need to be "game changing". They just need to be helpful.

Personally, I run Spiritwalker's Focus to lower my CD to 1 minute and duration to 7 seconds. There is enough situations of small movement that I find having the extra time when you have no fox CDs to rely on to avoid gaps in your heals.

Next, Healing Stream Totem, because it really is our only "game changer".

Lastly, I run Healing Wave typically. It provides a small increase to our overall output and our personal survival, although I find this to be the glyph I substitute the most (for Chaining on some fights, Cleansing Waters on others, things of this nature).

The Glyph of Riptide takes away that initial heal which is so important.

Could be i'm underestimating it but it still means messing up the high-tide preparations if you use it to 'save' extremely low health people.
Even if stars doesn't align and you can get an extra 15-20% on top of your average mentioned here on your Kromog kill, that'll bump it to 30k almost to the digit.
Personally i'd say a surge would be better at this point, it also averages much higher and will immediately bring the person out of the danger zone (regardless of a crit or not).

With regards to this, if somebody is in significant danger of taking another immediate hit of damage, surge always wins, absolutely. However, surge is more mana intensive for your returns, even with tidal waves up. I don't think a EotE player will save riptides to "save" players, so much as we will save the riptides in reaction to damage, or even pool them to where you are using three riptides within 3 seconds of each other to give better high tide coverage during periods of high raid damage, which is what I like to use. It keeps the initial heal, and lends to me the extra bounces.

I will definitely agree with you on one thing, it's nice to be able to have these discussions as a shaman, to have choices as to what's optimal and proactive discussion. It's refreshing for a class that is often overlooked.

[Wengel]

Indeed - and these forums often don't see too many discussions that don't evolve into flame wars because of opinion-differences

i think the reason i like the glyph is because i enjoy having the riptide rolling on both tanks as well as two ranged standing outside the melee group, so i can chain through both tanks while still using the full buff, and we all have those 2 ranged that 'always' steps in bad - they tend to be the targets of the ranged-group chain heals. On a fight like Kromog i try to have 1 in ranged (often myself) and 1 on melee and again both tanks covered as the chains on the ranged group almost always jumps to the tanks in the end causing some 'free' healing on them.

Perhaps when our dps gets better at not stepping in bad then it'll be easier to reduce to 3 riptide targets and ditch the glyph.
Gear inflation may also change it when talents like EM or AS becomes less of a boost to output when haste values increases naturally.
But clearly at the moment i treat riptide as a hot, not as a real direct heal and i don't expect it to save anyone.
Perhaps i'm just used to the limitation and thus i don't really miss the direct heal component. Or of course if another glyph that would be very useful came along.

[The Yeti]

Perhaps i'm just used to the limitation and thus i don't really miss the direct heal component. Or of course if another glyph that would be very useful came along.

I would definitely see your point here. They are completely different styles of healing! I know I was used to the glyph for a long time, but I feel like I'm more comfortable now without.

[Alltat]

Even if stars doesn't align and you can get an extra 15-20% on top of your average mentioned here on your Kromog kill, that'll bump it to 30k almost to the digit. Personally i'd say a surge would be better at this point, it also averages much higher and will immediately bring the person out of the danger zone (regardless of a crit or not).

It's 30k average, not 30k critical; those will be around 50k. And using Healing Surge remains an option either way - neither strategy suffers more or less from using HS. The only difference is that if you can use unglyphed Riptide to save someone, you spent a single GCD to both stabilize a person and get a HoT up for High Tide. It also has the situational advantage of being instant - RT heals for less than HS, but that healing is done one second sooner. Using EotE means giving up AS, though, so you've got some kind of instant direct heal either way (unless you run GoRT and EM).

Out of curiousity, which other glyphs are actually of any 'real' gamechanging quality to replace it with?

None of them, really. Healing Stream Totem is free mitigation, but it's minor and unpredictable. Healing Wave is free healing, but not much. The Spiritwalker glyphs are situationally useful but also situationally counterproductive (unglyphed Ascendance + Grace is really nice on some fights). The Purify Spirit glyphs have some potential utility, but there's only one fight with much dispelling. Capacitor Totem is very convenient on add fights, but there are only three of those in BRF. Chaining is extremely situational and works really poorly with the 4 set bonus. Totemic Recall is a useless spell this expansion. Water Shield is worse than an empty slot in PvE.

All the options are underwhelming, so just pick some arbitrary combination of HST, HW and (optionally) RT while switching in stuff like Glyph of Capacitor Totem or Spiritwalker's Focus depending on the needs of the fight. This might change in future tiers if there's more dispelling or something that can actually be reflected with Grounding Totem, but for now the only interesting glyphs are Riptide and Spiritwalker's Focus.

[Last Starfighter]

Hi,

I'm currently leading a Raidgroup and we are doing "fine" I think but our two Shamans are struggling sometimes so I wanted to ask you guys to look over some logs and the Armory and maybe have some tips.

First Enhancer:
eu)battle)net/wow/de/character/ambossar/Kalasina/simple

Second Resto:
eu)battle)net/wow/de/character/der-mithrilorden/Kyat%C3%A9r/simple

Logs: .warcraftlogs.com/reports/LYaXK6ATZVd12pQh/

I don't have that much experience with Shamans so I hope that you guys can help me out Thanks

Enhancement is the same number of syllables as "Enhancer". Enhancer makes no sense.