Resto - 6.0 latest patch notes discussion

[Tiberria]

Doesn't seem too bad, only ~15% or 23% nerf to HR and Chain Heal seems to be buffed when taking High Tide - talent. Only things I'm concerned of are mana cost of HW and CH, mana return of Resurgence and the uptime of HR with Conductivity without a filler like the current HW. I'm happy they nerfed HST over other abilities.

I can't judge the smart heal change yet as we don't know how big window there is to heal people to safe levels with the higher health pools.

Not changing spec/class yet.

It is up to a 30% nerf to Healing Rain, depending on how often you recast it on CD vs waited to line it up with ULE. In the first tier of an expansion, where mana regen is at a premium, you would probably have lined it up the majority of the time, meaning it's close to a 30% nerf. It also hugely nerfs the Conductivity talent, making it even less attractive than it currently is.

As far as the argument that the Chain Heal nerf is compensated for by taking the High Tide talent - that also consumes our level 100 talent, which is something that every other healer will be getting a major buff/new mechanic from. It doesn't feel good to have the only new talent we are getting in the expansion consumed just to get something back (no degradation CH jumps) that we had to fight for for years and was taken from us. On top of that, the L100 talents have all the signs of being similar to the L90 talents in that High Tide will be the only viable option for Resto. Storm Elemental Totem is going to have to be AMAZING throughput to ever be able to justify taking with a 5 minute cooldown. Unless it's the level of another HTT, it's not going to be viable. I can't see Condensation Totem being anything but a clunky mess.

[Deleted]

One more thing about High Tide is the synergy between it, and Riptide glyph. I am really, really worried one of the 2 gets nerfed/reworked. Just think about it: blanketing with Riptide before a window of high damage, then 2-3-4 Chainheals for TONS of healing. Pair it with Elemental Mastery to squeeze more of them within the timeframe and we all know, it isn't happening.

[Deleted]

It's 23% nerf for buffed HR with Conductivity, unless "Improved Healing Rain - Increases healing done to targets in your Healing Rain by 10%." works for the Healing Rain itself, which then would make it be only 15.4% nerf.

High Tide buffs future CH to 226% with 3 riptides, and is 175% of the current CH when not counting in "Improved Chain Heal - Increases the healing on the primary target of your Chain Heal spell by 50%..".

[Rafal]

Things I am OK with:

-Removing the interaction between UW(unleashed weapon) and HR(healing rain)
It always felt...dunno clucky?

-Nerfing the potency of smart heals for all healers. (additional thoughts healing rain)
Smart heals are boring and Resto shaman currently has too many smart heals.
HOWEVER, HR should be reverted to a ground coverage heal again and no longer be a smart heal. If resto shaman are to lose spell effects to reduce input lag, I say, why not something like the earth living HOT? A low potency chance to HOT isn't exactly on my list of things to keep. It literally has 0 effect on my game play.

-Getting rid of "healing wave"
It was always redundant. Frees up a keybind for me! woopie!

Things I question:

Air Elemental CD
Resto shaman already have a full arsenal of raid CD. o_o another seems pretty extreme. This talent will rather end up being totally redundant or a must have like HTT(healing tide totem).

No changes to lvl 90 talents (for resto)
I have had primal elemental (most of MoP) and I don't always use it on every fight. Even on heroics... Lazy gameplay yeah, but sometimes its really annoying to cast the elemental, then wait for it to be active, THEN press its empower button. Just seems clunky. Since the elementals always have brain farts when they come out, maybe it would be easier to have them summoned with empowered on as resto? o_o that would be such a quality of life change for me.

Anyways, elemental blast is and will always be useless to resto in its current state. Why has this still not been addressed?

Condensation Totem
Lame. Its basically another conductivity talent waiting to happen. Lets try and make an environment where we don't have much over healing, then make a talent FOR over healing. Granted, this spell could be the answer to times when absorbs are stealing all the glory?

[godofslack]

I'm a little scared, I mean with the new dumb healing Shamans need some serious buffs in other areas to remain competitive, especially considering the huge problems resto had in the start of Cata and MoP. But, maybe it will go to a more chain heal focused healing spec with high tide, and that seems like it's closer to the Wrath style resto shaman which is the most popular iteration.

[Tiberria]

It's 23% nerf for buffed HR with Conductivity, unless "Improved Healing Rain - Increases healing done to targets in your Healing Rain by 10%." works for the Healing Rain itself, which then would make it be only 15.4% nerf.

High Tide buffs future CH to 226% with 3 riptides, and is 175% of the current CH when not counting in "Improved Chain Heal - Increases the healing on the primary target of your Chain Heal spell by 50%..".

You can effectively ignore the L90-L100 perks; every other healer is getting nearly identical ones. Plus, they are going to balance all spells at L100 around having those perks, so none of the "increase X spell by Y%" are really an actual buff.

Chain Heal in 6.0:
1st jump - 100%
2nd jump - 85%
3rd jump - 72%
4th jump - 61%
Total - 318% - a 21% nerf over how it is on live.

Chain Heal with "Improved Chain Heal"
1st jump - 150%
2nd jump - 85%
3rd jump - 72%
4th jump - 61%
Total - 368% - an 8% nerf over how it is on live.
This is assuming that the 50% buff doesn't also carry through to the other 3 jumps, which isn't 100% clear, but I doubt.

Chain Heal with Improved Chain Heal and 3 Riptides/High Tide
1st Jump - 150%
2nd jump - 100%
3rd jump - 100%
4th jump - 100%
Jump to 2nd Riptide - 100%
Jump to 3rd Riptide - 100%
Total - 650% - a 62% buff over how it is on live

You can't assume it will jump to 3 Riptides, because you are going to want to cast the actual spell on a target with Riptide on it (otherwise all jumps reduce by 25% - a net loss). You also can't assume that the random target selection won't jump to targets that already have RT on them, resulting in as few as 4 jumps even with the talent.

I would be shocked if glyphed Riptide spam is able to interact with High Tide and give (virtually) unlimited CH jumps. Either the glyph will get removed/nerfed, Riptide will be too expensive to sustain with more than 3-4 of them active or (most likely) the number of CH jumps with the High Tide talent will be capped.

[Koor]

If I understand correctly, high tide doesn't prevent the degradation of each CH jump, rather it adds more jumps to those who have riptide.

Since CH is degraded on each jump, the first additional jump enabled by high tide would already be 48% weaker than the first, and continue to decrease in power on each jump. In addition since the targets of CH are now selected randomly, it could happen that the first targets picked by the "normal" CH would already contain those who had the riptide, and then it won't find many others with riptide to jump to.

For example if we had riptide on four people, CH can heal eight if the "original" targets didn't have riptide, or just four if the baseline CH happened to pick those with the riptide.

[Deleted]

How do you guys feel about the removal of ancestral awakening?

[Deleted]

If I understand correctly, high tide doesn't prevent the degradation of each CH jump, rather it adds more jumps to those who have riptide.

"High Tide (Restoration) - Your Chain Heal also bounces to all targets affected by your Riptide, and no longer diminishes in power with each bounce."

It stops the degrading. The wording doesn't suggest a cap. I am expecting a rework/nerf/removal of the Riptide glyph.

[Koor]

"High Tide (Restoration) - Your Chain Heal also bounces to all targets affected by your Riptide, and no longer diminishes in power with each bounce."

It stops the degrading. The wording doesn't suggest a cap. I am expecting a rework/nerf/removal of the Riptide glyph.

You're right, they changed it. I was looking at an older version that didn't have that second part.

[Shockeye]

So far I'm ok with the proposed changes. Everything is "nerfed" because of stat squish, but that nerfing is really just bringing spells and abilities into line with the new numbers. All classes are seeing this, so realistically, there's no significant nerfing.
I'm not going to fret too much about percentages and such as it's a long time between now and December, these things will all change.

In regards to Healing Rain and the dumbed-down smart healing and RNG, that is a concern but we don't know how HR may get redesigned yet; it is entirely possible that the spell will heal everyone standing in it. I kind of like it not being a mandatory spell though, it's more something to be used on stack phases rather than on CD and I'm very glad to see single-target heals being more prominent for Resto Shaman.

The removal of Ancestral Awakening is sad but fits with the new design guidelines, so I'm not surprised we're saying goodbye to our ghost friend.

I will say though that the one thing which does worry me is Intellect no longer contributing to Crit, and that healers do not get the extra Crit ability that Agility and Strength classes are being given, especially if Resurgence is staying as a regen mechanic. Right now, a strong Crit rate is advantageous to mana regen as well as mana efficiency, and in the tighter WoD healing model, a weakened Crit will hurt.

[Tiberria]

If I understand correctly, high tide doesn't prevent the degradation of each CH jump, rather it adds more jumps to those who have riptide.

Since CH is degraded on each jump, the first additional jump enabled by high tide would already be 48% weaker than the first, and continue to decrease in power on each jump. In addition since the targets of CH are now selected randomly, it could happen that the first targets picked by the "normal" CH would already contain those who had the riptide, and then it won't find many others with riptide to jump to.

For example if we had riptide on four people, CH can heal eight if the "original" targets didn't have riptide, or just four if the baseline CH happened to pick those with the riptide.

Nope - it removes the CH degradation.

High Tide (Restoration) - Your Chain Heal also bounces to all targets affected by your Riptide, and no longer diminishes in power with each bounce.

We are also only ever going to have Riptide on a maximum of 3 people unless the current glyph stays in and we use it.

[Deleted]

I'm pretty sure the glyph is gone. High tide is my light of hope tbh. It kinda reminds me of the Monk class where RM& uplift create a synergy except with a lot more control and viability. And i really wann se the visual effect when it hits 8+ targets!

Take the dark shamans heroic 25m encounter as an example. Let's say you're doing it with 3 tanks and you as a healer heal the upper land. You can't stand within melee range of the bosses cause you'll spawn a tomb on ppl. You're forced to stay away, there is 1 ranged with you and 1 healer, 3 people in melee. Normally you would want healing rain in melee and chain heal off of casters or the other way around. As for healing rain it will stay in it's clunkyness i presume, but chain heal can now heal EVERYONE there. awesome.

[Deleted]

You can't assume Chain Heal won't jump on the targets with riptide even after hitting them within the first 4 hits.

- - - Updated - - -

How do you guys feel about the removal of ancestral awakening?

Not a huge deal, does under 3% of my healing in raids, but still it makes crit less valuable which makes me sad.

[shammypie]

The concerning thing is - Shaman were already being heavily nerfed by the smart heal algorithm changes to begin with (targeting random players instead of lowest HP) because Shaman are the most smart heal dependent healer. Putting those changes through and then gutting Chain Heal, HST, and HR (through the ULE buff removal) on top of that is over the top. We are getting no real new abilities or mechanics, and while they have promised to "buff us in other areas" to compensate and keep us competitive, you have to be concerned about what they actually can buff. The only thing left is Healing Surge, Healing Wave and Riptide, and they would need to buff those to an extreme level that they blow every other healer's single target out of the water to justify the other changes. It's also incredibly disappointing to see the L90 talents being ignored when they haven't been a decision (outside of take Primal Elementalist and ignore it) for Resto the entire expansion.
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I also wanted to add in that they are removing ancestral awakening. So you are going to see a reduction AA procing spells including all single target spell and i think (dont quote me on this) chain heal.

The only thing i would point out is that the chain heal changes aren't as impactful since the lvl 100 talents look to be a lot like the 75 tier talents. I would imagine that the chain heal talent will dominate and the wind elemental will be situational.

With the reduction in value for crit and the supposed new healing model i see mastery dominating after haste breakpoints. Depending on whether the glyph of riptide survives I think we will be blanketing the raid with riptide in low healing and using chain heal similar to a monk's uplift.

I am interested in how the perks interact with talents however

[Deleted]

With the reduction in value for crit and the supposed new healing model i see mastery dominating after haste breakpoints.

First of all, haste breakpoints are supposed to be gone alltogether. Secondly, mastery will still be behind. It wasn't good in the early Cata supposed triage days. Why would it be good now? And last but not least, you will not have control over your secondary stats anymore with reforging gone and gemming impact reduced.

[Jester Joe]

I don't understand why the point of the ability pruning was to clear up action bars, yet they removed mostly passives or things that wouldn't be on your bar anyway for Resto shamans.
It could of been worse, but I don't get why they'd removed Ancestral Awakening.
Also I think they overkilled Mana Tide totem, wouldn't 100% of sufficed? Heck, even 75%, but 50%? Not sure if anyone will be regenerating anything at that point...

To me it seems like the buffs they gave us because we were struggling in the beginning of MoP are just being yanked away.

[Rarch]

I don't understand why the point of the ability pruning was to clear up action bars, yet they removed mostly passives or things that wouldn't be on your bar anyway for Resto shamans.
It could of been worse, but I don't get why they'd removed Ancestral Awakening.
Also I think they overkilled Mana Tide totem, wouldn't 100% of sufficed? Heck, even 75%, but 50%? Not sure if anyone will be regenerating anything at that point...

To me it seems like the buffs they gave us because we were struggling in the beginning of MoP are just being yanked away.

I agree with the ability pruning bafflement. Hunters got their promised button bloat reduction, we got... nothing. All the spells they consolidated to specific specs, I either left in my spell book or had macros to combine them with the other versions already anyway.

I have two questions I tried to ask Celestalon, but didn't receive an answer:

1. With the HST nerf, does anyone know if they plan to buff Rushing Streams? If not, doesn't that talent become basically useless for all specs?
2. What do you guys see the use of Unleash Life being without the interaction to HR? It seems like button bloat reduction by way of making the spell so bad we don't have it on our bar? I thought UL > HR was the only interesting parts of the Resto "rotation."

Lots of my concerns have been addressed already, so I won't duplicate anything. I mostly agree with Tiberria's points. My biggest concern is HR being put in the "efficient" category, which suggests they may already have a plan to nerf the healing on it, and then they also remove UL > HR. It's going to be very difficult to balance Shamans correctly if HR is intended to be 40% or less of our healing throughput, which is kind of where it seems like they're going with it.

I will say that, although Condensation Totem seems underwhelming (poor man's Druid Shroom?), it does seem like the most appealing from a game play standpoint. Especially with the removal of UL > HR, we could actually use that totem to change our game play completely, maybe making things more interesting. Unfortunately it looks like High Tide is going to be mandatory, but we'll see.

One thing I really don't understand is the removal of Lightning Bolt increasing Conductivity. With the UL nerf, Conductivity becomes a pretty horrible talent, but the one use I thought I could get out of it was as the Resto version of Atonement, actually allowing us to DPS a little while still healing the party/raid. They already said they wanted us not spamming heals the entire time, and even went to far as to suggest Shamans may be casting LB in down time, but they remove the thing that has synergy with that? I'm so confused with what they want for Resto, I'm not even sure they know.

[Tiberria]

We got some clarification this morning on Twitter about how High Tide works.

1. Glyph of Riptide stays in, but CH/High Tide will only bounce to a maximum of 3 extra Riptide targets. Therefore, it has a built in cap of 7 targets and no real synergy with the Riptide glyph
2. The baseline 4 CH bounces will not ignore Riptided targets, nor will they bounce to them multiple times. That means that even with 3 Riptides out, you could get as few as 0 extra bounces if you're unlucky and the spell bounces to 3 targets with RT on them in the first 4 bounces. I guess you could somewhat control that by gaming spreading your RT targets out of jump range of each other.
3. The extra RT jumps will have a 30-40 yard jump radius from the chain (Celestalon doesn't remember if it's from the initial target or 4th jump).
4. The 25% buff from casting off a RT target is staying in.

So, first of all, you will never get more than 6 CH jumps with High Tide, because the 25% buff means you will still want to cast off a RT target, because it's more output than a possible 7th jump. Second, the entire effect is going to be extremely RNG driven, because there is no protection/prevention from the baseline bounces going off existing RT targets. It sounds like it's going to be a pretty aggravating talent (but still sounds clearly better than the other 2) that will make you want to punch your desk multiple times a fight.

- - - Updated - - -

I agree with the ability pruning bafflement. Hunters got their promised button bloat reduction, we got... nothing. All the spells they consolidated to specific specs, I either left in my spell book or had macros to combine them with the other versions already anyway.

I have two questions I tried to ask Celestalon, but didn't receive an answer:

1. With the HST nerf, does anyone know if they plan to buff Rushing Streams? If not, doesn't that talent become basically useless for all specs?
2. What do you guys see the use of Unleash Life being without the interaction to HR? It seems like button bloat reduction by way of making the spell so bad we don't have it on our bar? I thought UL > HR was the only interesting parts of the Resto "rotation."

I don't necessarily think it will make RS useless for Resto (it obviously will be even more terribad than it is now for Ele/Enhance). On most fights now, RS is probably double or more of the theoretical output of AG because there is such a prevalence of raid CDs and AG usually overheals for so much unless you have a specific spot to fit it into a CD rotation. It will probably be a good balance, because AG will be higher theoretical output if it's used effectively, whereas RS will be a decent amount of passive/no effort HPS. People rarely take AG now, because the effort to results ratio isn't generally there, and this will revert that. It's a good thing for the more difficult to use talent to have a higher risk/reward than the passive one.

I don't think good Resto Shaman will stop using ULE altogether or remove it from our bars. For one thing, single target heals are supposed to be a lot more prominent than they are now (and people are supposed to not be 100% topped within seconds), so doing a ULE-HS or ULE-HW combination might actually be effective in WoD (as opposed to too slow and always getting sniped like today). For another, we are getting a 90-100 perk that increases the baseline ULE buff by 50%. That means that without Unleashed Fury, ULE + direct heal will be 195% of the power of the regular heal (130%x150%). With Unleashed Fury, it will be 293% of the power. If people really are at low health for more than 2 seconds, that also has a lot of synergy with our mastery, so it has the potential to at least be somewhat strong. On top of that, ULE is an extra button we can use while moving if Riptide is on CD.

[Volitar]

Really dislike the removal of Magma totem and ancestral awakening.