[WOTLK] Shaman: New Point Healer?

[leberle]

Hello everyone

I am leveling a shaman at the moment, level 67, and i am resto speced to obviously heal whenever i can.
At the moment, healing is mostly earthshield on tank, and than sometimes klick chainheal oooor healing wave, only in realy rare situations lhw is needed.

I looked now at the new shaman talents and thought a bit about it, but some people here with their better knowledge about shaman healers and especialy also the experience of raiding with them could help me with my thoughts.

At the moment raiding looks like Shamans are mostly used for chainhealing melee groups + tanks, druids hot everything, paladins are perfekt for pointhealing and priests are a good mix of all of that.

Could shamans also get into the row of good fast point healers COMPERABLE (not the same, just to make it clear) with paladins?
I worked on a leveling/soon endgame spec for people who enjoy healing but also whant to kill some things solo, and it might even be good for raiding, but here i miss the experience of healing in raids:

Level:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

soon endgame:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

As small explanation: As you mention, elemental focus now also works on heals, and with the resto tallents you also get 14% crit on your healing spells alone from talents. +Inteligent extra heal on crits + Armor on crits.
That + an verry strong earthshield and the capability of still doing chainheal if needed, could make lhw spam on a specific target much more efficient in wotlk.

My question now is: What do more expirienced Shaman Players or Theoriecraft specialists think of that?

[leberle]

realy no shaman pro around who can have a look?

[Kduruh]

Helllo my friend, i am a lvl 70 resto shaman, i've raided up to last part of BT, havn't got further yet because most of the people in my guild are on summer holidays and whatnot, i considered myself an experienced and skilled player, and the talent tree you posted is not a good raiding tree at all but first let's go through your healing. In raids a lot of things change, things happen way faster and healing wave is what becomes less used, and yes as you said chain heal is used a lot though, you see most of the shamans just using it to much and most of the times when they shouldn't, the new talents are a huge buff for lesser healing wave but that's a spell which shamans are supposed to use a lot nowadays already. Most of the times downranking with lesser healing wave is just better than chain heal for several reasons. chain heal requires proximity between members and even with a good amount of haste (20% is what i use) is a somewhat long cast and sometimes while you're casting it you just might take a few fractions of a second too long and your target will be dead. in my opinion chain heal nowadays is mostly for chaotic situations when the raid takes a huge ammount of damage overall, actually as soon as SSC i confirmed that my healing was actually a lot more effective most of the times by using lesser healing wave in several ranks than chain heal, so actually i don't think the new talents are exactly going to make us have a new role in healing in raids i just think it's going to improve our healing. Even if you get about 40% crit with lesser healing wave on WotLK the ancestral awakening talent is still going to be sort of a "proc" so when your raid is taking a lot of damage i belive chain heal will still be the key to healing through because it's certain you'll be healing 3 players if in proximity range while lesser healing wave will be a bit luck based.

Personally i use 3 ranks of lesser healing wave, max rank of chain heal and max rank of healing wave but mostly just with nature's swiftness and i believe the main resto spec for WotLK will be the following:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

as you can see no points are even spent on healing way as healing wave isn't a spell that you use much, it's a 1 person healing spell which is very powerfull but also very long and as shamans are mainly raid healers, that sort of spell isn't something you will be using constantly just ocassionaly making that talent mostly useless because you wouldn't use it enough for it to stack up.

[thunderdome]

Its hard to theorycraft without being able to actually test the new stuff. However I agree with the mana return from elemental focus and the new crit based and hw/lhw based talents it does look like shaman could be very good MT raid healers

[Kamachi]

From a Resto Shaman that is clearing Sunwell:

Just to clarify some things. As of now LHW is a spell you might use from time to time but nothing major. I'd say on encounters like M'uru and pretty much the entirity of Sunwell you are almost forced to use chain heal. It provides you with a lot more HPS than LHW does ,scales waaaaaay better with haste and is even more mana efficient than LHW.

LHW is more or less the "damn,that stupid warlock ran into the void sphere and is going to die ,but I got NS on cooldown" - Spell

What Blizzard is trying to do ,is to buff our single target healing to make us more viable in 10 mans where you can only select a limited amount of healers (remember, every Raid will have a 10 Man version) , so that you ain't screwed if you for example don't have a pally but the boss is hitting like a truck on a Tank. At least that's what I presume.

As long as our role as a Raid healer in 25 mans isn't scratched , I'm not that bothered about those changes. If so,I'm rerolling Resto Druid because their new COH-like spell looks very promising.

[Ger9nG]

I don't agree with the manareturn from elemental focus. If it was all healing spells it would be viable, but it's not.
Going 10 points in the elemental tree to get clearcasting on one healing spell is not worth it imo.

I do like the resistance talent in the elemental tree, however I don't think I'll go for it before I've been raiding for a bit and seen how much dmg I'm taking from those sources.

The spec I would go for if I was taking on the resistance talent:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000
This would suffer in 5 mans before reaching a high +heal though as I skipped improving HW cast time.

The spec I'm most likely starting out with for 5 mans and early raid content.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000
I skipped all points in elemental and moved them to improve HW.

I would not by any way remove my 3 points in elemental shields in any resto spec.

I also do believe the changes in the resto tree will improve shamans in 5 mans with less +healing.

[Kduruh]

well i havn't been in sunwell so i can't really say anything about that but what i was saying is just that the choice of using chain heal or single targetting lesser healing wave just depends on the damage the whole raid is taking, if it's a litle damage here and a litle damage there, then LHW is probably the way to go, but as i said if it's really chaotic and the whole raid is taking a huge ammount of damage then of course chain heal is the way to go, the thing is that in WotLK with the gear changes and specially with the huge buff LHW is getting, a lot of people are saying CH is becoming useless, i think that's not really the point as if the whole raid is taking damage, chain heal will still be the way to go, because you can't just count on having crits when it's not certain you'll have them.

about the elemental focus, yes it might also be a good idea, some resto shamans are already using a similar spec in raids with a few points in the elemental tree, and as someone said, it's hard to theorycraft, nowadays i really don't think shamans have mana issues, let's wait for WotLK and see who things will go, might be a good idea to have that talent for the early raids, might not be needed for the end raids, might even be the other way arround, let's wait and see

[Kduruh]

oh and 1 thing... if you look at the elemental focus talent closely you'll se that it's for healing spells also... but that's the thing, just some healing spells, for a fight with lots of raid damage where you spamm chain heal mostly, that talent won't have much use

[Kduruh]

sorry about the spamm :P but this is another possible good spec, again, depending on how things are going to be and what spells we'll be mostly using.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

you keep elemental shields, you lose less 0.5 seconds cast time on healing wave which once again i believe to be in 95% of the cases nowadays useless and you lose a bit of mana and your totems are not as cheap but if you use LHW a lot your mana will actually last way longer

[Repairbill]

In my opinion blizzard is getting rid of chain heal. We get no new talents for it, and from 70 to 80 currently we get no new ranks. I do believe shamans will be single target/main tank healers after the expansion.

[leberle]

In my opinion blizzard is getting rid of chain heal. We get no new talents for it, and from 70 to 80 currently we get no new ranks. I do believe shamans will be single target/main tank healers after the expansion.

naaa, i don't think so. We will improve with single point healing, but since the old talents of chainheal already scale verry good with gear, it looks fine from my perspective. We will just gain more single point features.

[Unpredictable]

In my opinion blizzard is getting rid of chain heal. We get no new talents for it, and from 70 to 80 currently we get no new ranks. I do believe shamans will be single target/main tank healers after the expansion.

I kinda agree with this even tho chain heal is op as of right now I don't believe that It could compare with the new healing upgrades we are going to get in the expansion. Even tho blizz will most likely change a few things because they are good bit away from releasing the expac. Hopefully we will get at least 1 new rank of Chain Heal. Hell it crits for 5k+ now and i only have 2152 healing unbuffed. ( only a 4/5, 4/9 shammy)

[leberle]

Many changes have been made to the talent trees:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

The only wrong thing i can see atm is: Improved Shields is now in T2 instead T1, as it is mentioned in the Beta Notes. So i guess, MMO-Champion is not realy up to date her, OR has a newer version.

Either way:
I like the new possibilitys: Crits give you now even more mana, with the mana shield change, and chainheal gives a buff to lhw and hw, so you still can use it wisely all together!

[nunomcm]

As some already said, it looks like they are really making chain heal a "secundary spell" and shamans will be a point healer.

As for the spec, with do you even go get elemental focus, only procs on damage spells so for healing its pretty almost useless. Just use 8 points in enhancement then all in resto as you wish.

I would choose something like this http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZeceuVeoxkrIRt

[Ormus]

I am surprised to see people suggest that resto shamans should primarily cast lesser healing wave. As far as I am concerned the fast cast, small heal is the province of the paladin. The biggest selling feature for resto shamans in raids is chain heal. It is our signature spell, just as Lifebloom is the signature spell of resto druids. I have had nights where 90% or more of my heals have come from chain heal.

Chain heal receives the largest bonus from our +healing, it works amazingly well as a down-ranked heal, receives the largest benefit of +spell crit, procs all kinds of "X happens when your direct heals land", and tends to be very low on over-healing due to the way it seeks out those who need the heals. It is ridiculously overpowered compared to most other healing spells in the game and I can see why other healers envy our ability to heal the crap out of raids with what truly is "EZ mode" multi-target healing. Especially considering after a certain level of raiding, virtually all fights are easier with AoE heals.

With chain heal being our signature heal, it is extremely unlikely Blizzard wants us to stop casting it. At the same time, they have often shown they don't like to put players in the position of literally spamming one single spell for the entirety of a fight. In my opinion, the new talents being added will give us reason to cast lesser healing wave and healing wave to encourage us to mix it up a bit and give us better single target healing. With synergy between talents like like Ancestral Healing, Tidal Mastery and Blessing of the Eternals, chain heal will still be extremely important. It is clear that the benefit of that synergy will be tempered by the boost to healing wave received from Tidal Waves and Ancestral Awakening. I suspect that rather than spamming chain heals for entire fights, we will likely be alternating 1 chain heal for every 1-2 healing wave casts. Restos may end up with a reason to start thinking about their heals.

[shailiha]

At the moment what I'm thinking about is:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

[leberle]

As some already said, it looks like they are really making chain heal a "secundary spell" and shamans will be a point healer.
As for the spec, with do you even go get elemental focus, only procs on damage spells so for healing its pretty almost useless. Just use 8 points in enhancement then all in resto as you wish.
I would choose something like this http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZeceuVeoxkrIRt

Re-Read the Elemental Focus changes in the Beta AND Re-Read the skills on the talent tree on mmo-champ:
Elemental Focus (Restoration): Now also can proc off Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave, and can be used on all healing spells.

I suspect that rather than spamming chain heals for entire fights, we will likely be alternating 1 chain heal for every 1-2 healing wave casts. Restos may end up with a reason to start thinking about their heals.

Totaly agree with that after the new changes are out. We will have a healing rotation! Chainheal, HW, HW, Chainheal, HW, HW, and so on. Looks great!

[Deleted]

possibly, but you never know what blizzard will change from beta to release and in the Patches...

[leberle]

possibly, but you never know what blizzard will change from beta to release and in the Patches...

yea ofc, they also already changed many things, but the plan of what they whant to achiev mostly stays the same.

EDIT:
Thanks adys for moving

[scett]

i think this mean that resto shamans can expect there gear to have a decent amount of spell crit next to or instead of spell haste and/or mp5.
but, will these chances to the resto tree make you socket spell crit > spell haste / mp5?
and what would be a nice limit to a resto shamans raw % spell crit?
if one would take al the resto + healing crit talents.

i think that would be the next question.