Resto Shaman.

[Totemmonkey]

Me being one of the more experienced shamans (started my shaman the day wow came out and specced resto @ lvl 40 and stayed that way) I've seen the shamans develop back and forth.

I used to be the main raid healer back in 40 man raids due to chain heal and the fact that back in vanilla a raid consisted of 10-15 people knowing what was going on and 25-30 people running around confused and standing around in the fire, being perfect subjects for my chain heal spamming.

In Wotlk however we (shamans) felt a serious change... suddenly chain heal wasn't the only way to win at everything forever... druids got enough spell power to top people up with rejuv and the same thing went for disc priests so we had to adapt... or just be the laughing stock of all the other healers (except for paladins who at that time was just a tool to make sure the tank stayed alive) What happened was that most shamans would either use LHW and "snipe" targets, quickly topping them off or staying on the tank giving them ancestral-something-something to reduce the effective healing done by the paladins.

Then the day finally came when ulduar got opened and with that a new tier, with a new set bonus, I'm talking about the 0.2 sec cast time off of CH and finally we could go back to hammering our heads into whatever key(s) bound to chain heal.

Enough ranting... Shamans are useless as hell on low damage fights, I've cried my way through naxxramas doing 40% of what our druids were doing (we have 2 active resto druids who pretty much runs the show) However, on fights where the raid takes more damage than a couple of rejuvs and wildgrowths can handle i start to shine... In many cases doing massive HPS thats OVER 9000!! (for some reason Iron Council turns me into a healing beast, almost pulling agro off our tanks cause i think speccing in healing threat reduction = faillure)

So in conclussion... apapt your playstyle to your gear and learn to live with druids and holy priests trampling all over you until the raid starts taking some serious beating and you can unleash your spiritual f'ing rage and blast yellow laser all over the room with your jaw-dropping hps

Ps. my advise - stick to sniping with riptide + lhw along with int/sp gems until you get the sexy tier 8 bonus, then go all out haste and live with the fact that more often than not you will be auto attacking or tossing out some crappy dps, while waiting for some serious raid damage to take place. =)

[Gintoku]

In many cases doing massive HPS thats OVER 9000!! (for some reason Iron Council turns me into a healing beast, almost pulling agro off our tanks cause i think speccing in healing threat reduction = faillure)

WWS/World of Logs?

Its not possible to do 9k HPS on iron council hardmode, that would either mean the 2 resto druids you are claiming carried you through naxx are actually really shit and lazy, or your lying...

[Deleted]

Since 3.2 we can easily be at the top or very near the top of the healing meters.
Just make sure you are doing everything to the best of your ability and check the FAQ i recently wrote to make sure you are doing it right :P:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=101029.0