Resto Glyphs
Glyphs have been around for a while and we all had time to test them out. I’ll once again list all Resto Shaman Glyphs and tell you what I think about them. Most of my comments are based on my playstyle and my opinion is biased. I was motivated to do this post because after some months of raiding we are all getting more and more shiny loot and it might be time to adapt your glyphs to your level of gear.
Major Glyphs
Glyph of Chain Heal: In 25 man raiding there is no way around this glyph. Even if the fourth jump of your chainheal might be a little on the weak side, it’s still a good chunk of healing AND an additional chance to proc Earthliving on the target. The big downside of the glyph comes in 5 or 10 man dungeons where chainheal might often not find a fourth target and you might use chainheal less than in 25 man raids. And I find it hard to do math with this glyph because it’s so unpredictable how often you’re chainheal will jump.
Glyph of Earthliving Weapon: Sounds nice, but on second glance I find this glyph rather weak. Instead of a 20% chance to proc Earthliving you’ll get a 25% chance. The synergy between the Glyph of Earthliving Weapon and the Glyph of Chainheal is great though: Without Earthliving glyph you’ll get an average of 0.6 Procs per CH cast, add the chainheal glyph you’re up to 0.8 procs per CH and both glyphs boost you up to 1 proc per Chainheal. Sounds good? Yes, but Earthliving is just not that strong. On a normal raiding night if I filter WWS logs for bosses and with myself chainheal glyphed, Earthliving does only around 3% of my healing. 5% more procs won’t make a huge difference. Maybe I might switch in the glyph for min-max reasons but I guess not.
Glyph of Healing Stream Totem: To be honest, I very very rarely use Healing stream. Especially now with Mana Spring Totems stacking I’m often forget about my healing totem. But my Healing Stream Totem ticks for around 210 health/2 seconds self buffed. The glyph would push that up to 250 health per tick. I absolutely have to get myself to drop Healing Stream in every fight I don’t fear running oom. I’ll write in the comments how much healing I’ll get out of Healing Stream Totem.
Glyph of Healing Wave: This glyph sounds intriguing but I’d have to change my playstyle completely. Healing way at this point I only use with Tidal Force/NS-macro. If I see solid numbers I might have to switch to HW spamming/precasting for single target healing duties, but I just got so fond of the healing pace with LHW. Especially because shamans do NOT profit from stopcasting. We have NO reason sneak outside the 5SR. Nonetheless, if HPS and HPM of HW just beat LHW I might have to adapt my single target healing. But even then I might not take this glyph, because I have no problem with watching my health and not dying. I do see a place for this glyph in 10 man raiding where healers often tank and group heal at the same time and some self healing would be very welcome.
Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave: This was my favorite glyph when WotLK came out. The single target throughput is excellent and together with improved water shield the mana regen was OK, almost paladin like. With the nerf to improved water shield we now only consume a WS orb on 60% of our crits. I still think this was a bad move by blizzard. I didn’t see any LHW abuse by resto shamans: The additional healing of glyphed LHW is bound to the ES AND the mana regen via improved water shield forced us to waste GCD on WS recasting. Those two factors and the fact that no resto shaman outhealed any of the other healing classes on single target healing duties don’t let me understand why LHW had to take the nerf hammer. Anyway, LHW just suits my single target healing playstyle much more than HW, if I want to heal with a large heal I log onto a priest with spirit based mana regen. My final decision if this glyph will stay for good will come with Ulduar and hopefully real boss encounters.
Glyph of Mana Tide Totem: Solid glyph that waits on my bank for some raid time. The good thing about this glyph is that you can provide more mana for the whole group when the group needs it and it scales with mana pool. A group of 5 healers with 20k mana will get 800 additional mana per mana tide totem, that’s 4000 mana you hand out to your group. The downside at this point: If you run with priests/druids they might not have any mana problems and nearly all fights are too short for dropping mana tide twice. Try it out now if your raid struggles with mana sometimes, if not maybe this glyph will shine in Ulduar.
Glyph of Water Mastery: Every resto shaman should start healing at level 80 with this glyph. 30 mp5 is very nice to have when starting out your healing journey. The problem with this glyph: it doesn’t scale with anything, it is 30 mp5 no matter how good or bad your gear is. If you get some tier gear I’d suggest you switch this glyph out. If you know there’s a fight ahead that might let you run oom, just switch in some mp5 heavy gear/flask/buff food and get a glyph that scales with your gear.
Minor Glyphs
Glyph of Astral Recall: If you really have to jump between cities like crazy grab this glyph. For me it’s pointless.
Glyph of Ghost Wolf: I just don’t spend enough time in Ghost Wolf form to get any use out of this glyph.
Glyph of Renewd Life: Frees up some bag space and saves you some gold, that’s OK.
Glyph of Water Breathing: If you enjoy being under water, here’s your fix.
Glyph of Water Shield: If you don’t know why every resto shaman should have this glyph I might have to write a post about the very basics of shaman healing.
Glyph of Water Walking: This glyph won’t change how you heal but it might help very much if you do fishing.
Please do tell me which 6 glyphs you’re running with right now and why. And please do tell me if your doing mainly 5, 10 or 25 man content to put your glyph choices into context.
A Coin of Ancestry
Looking For Multitudes
Toravon the Ice Watcher (25 player)
1500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems
My current glypsh are
Major: LHW, Water Mastery, Earthliving
Minor: Water Walking, Water Breathing, Water Shield
I obviously like getting rid of reagents. I wanted to switch to Chain Heal and replace Earthliving with it, once I raid more often.
I didn’t know Mana Spring stacks now. :O As I usually run with an ele shaman, she has dropped Mana Spring and I have dropped Healing Stream. Based on our WWS my Healing Stream Totem has done more healing than I have done total on trash. Of course, most of it was crazy overheal. Go figure.
I’d switch out Earthliving asap. At this point the only place I see for this glyph is really heavy min/max thinking in 25 chainheal spamming situations.
Oh, and how’s your warrior btw?
My warrior is just fine. Running tons of heroics, and I was OT in VoA, which I thought was the most non-epic raid boss ever. I just got the T7 chest for my warrior. Tanking is getting easier and easier again, and the only complaint I have is for the DPS output of most people in PUGs. 700 DPS in a heroic just won’t cut it. It drives me mad.
But from reading your blog I think your warrior is probably more accomplished than mine these days.
As I tank more often, I have healed less, and I miss it a bit.
tryin to figure out if I should go with the healing stream instead of the chain heal or LHW glyph. Like the option for 4 heals but honestly running 10 man won’t have enough people that are close that will need the heals right then. Question is do we need the mana more or the heals more. Since I won’t be doin much mt healing maybe replace the LHW glyph and keep the chain glyph. what a conundrum.
I’m currently running heroics and 10s.
I love the LHW glyph. It seems like just enough to make LHW go from just a bit too weak to comfortably strong. I just can’t quite get into the HW spam. It’s good on 10-man bosses, but on anything else I’m just using LHW too much. I should recalculate the mana cost with the change in water shield though.
I also run with Glyph of Chain Heal as well and I love it. I’m very often able to get four people together and have it bounce for full effect. I don’t get heartbroken when I miss that last bounce though. I think it’s actually strongest in heroics because there are many bosses with some AE where you can instruct the group to simply stack up and spam chain heal to great effect.
The Earthliving I took because I couldn’t figure out what to do for my last one and it seemed like it would contribute most to my healing.
The minor Glyph of Water Shield is great. I couldn’t not take it.
I also have Glyph of Water Walking just because it’s fun, especially in AN.
I actually don’t have a third minor glyph because I haven’t bothered.
You’re in the position many shamans are in. Most love 1-2 glyphs but don’t find a third one that’s really appealing. But I’m happy to hear someone seems to do fine without the Water Mastery glyph in 10 man content. I struggle much more with mana if I heal 10 man Nax with two healers than in all 25 man content (except sarth3d). If I just knew what else to squeeze in that third major glyph slot…
Major: LHW, Water Mastery, Chain Heal
Minor: Water Walking, Water Breathing, Water Shield
I used HW for a while. I liked it a lot in heroics. I’d only cast it with the Tidal Waves buff up, so it was always quick (1.6s). It is our best HPS spell. But in 10s HW got less and less use. In 25s, HW is almost never used.
I have plans to swap out Water Mastery with ELW. 30mp5 is just not noticeable at my gear level. ELW is 4-6% of my healing now, so it will get a small boost.
I still couldn’t get to switch Water Mastery out. But I guess I’ll go with the earthliving glyph as well. Even if I still don’t like how minor to contribution to my healing is.
Major: Water Mastery, Chain Heal, Lesser Healing Wave
Minor: Water Walking, Water Shield and Reincarnation (I’ll likely change the last now that its no longer more useful than either of the others. I might even go for the AR one as I do tend to like being lazy and porting myself about the place quite often!)
Personally I love my lesser healing wave glyph and couldn’t be without it. Although since the patch I’ve been shunted more heavily towards raid healing I still find the LHW glyph to be worthwhile for spot-healing the tank when needed or on fights where there is not too much raid damage. Also an earthshield-LHW combo on a squishy being eaten by a loose mob is often pretty effective – the earthshield stopping them being smooshed even if the mob continues to chew on them and the LHW giving them back a great deal of their health pool.
I was very tempted by the HW glyph and more so now that you’ve pointed out the relative lack of scaleability on the water mastery glyph – I’m growing out of needing the mana regen so I might try running a few raids with the HW glyph as with the t7 4pc I’m finding HW is a little more useful – especially on bosses like Malygos and Sartharion with predictable, but large hits of damage on both the tank and raid. I don’t like the feel of HW so much but making it more useful would make it more comfortable to use, maybe.
Context: I’m mainly doing 25’s and run with a (usually) 7-man priest-heavy healing group (3-4 priests, 1-2 druids, 1-2 paladins and myself usually). I’m always keen to try any role and so have had turns main tank, offtank and heavy raid healing.
/hug
One of the big advantages of LHW glyph I didn’t mention is: it’s the most interactive healing glyphs a shaman can get. All other glyphs really don’t affect how you heal very much, apart from forcing you to shift a bit more towards the spell/ability you have glyphed.
The LHW glyph on the other hand and it’s synergy with earth shield on the other hand really change how you use earthshield, you have to careful on who you put it to max out LHW HPS, your much more careful to have a high ES uptime on your tanks etc.
I’d love to see more glyphs that can affect your playstyle somehow, But I do understand that blizzard doesn’t want to have them a too big impact, as they should be in line with other professions.
Major: Chain Heal, LHW (my main heal spell), Water Mastery
Minor: Not using at this moment (lool :O)
But I will think about Water Mastery… I usually play offhealer-raid so I like very much Chain Heal. And LHW is my main spell in heroics =)
I wind up flipping specs a lot, so I’m not running with “Full Resto” Glyphs. Presently, using Chain Heal, Water Mastery and Flametongue Weapon as Majors, and Water Shield, Water Walking and Water Breathing for minors. I think if I were to run as full-time Resto, I’d sub out the Ele glyph for Mana Tide Totem. My rationale on that is, I just don’t cast HW or LHW enough to make it matter, and I never use Healing Stream Totem either. Mana Tide is more from a “Raid Support” perspecive in this case, as I don’t usually OOM myself until ~6 minutes of nonstop chain casting anyhow. I’m hoping that there is some sort of Earth Shield or Riptide glyph in our future, as those are abilities that I use a lot and buffing them would make more sense.
As to context, I run Naxx 10- and 25-man each week, as well as OS 10- and 25-man plus VoA 10-25. For OS 10 and the VoAs, I usually go Elemental. For Naxx 25 and OS 25, I’m Resto. For Naxx 10, I’m Elemental until Sapphiron, when I go resec Resto to down him and KT.
Major: LHW, Water Mastery, Chain Heal
Minor: Water Walking, Water Breathing, Water Shield
For now might switch water Mastery to Earthliving. Have good mp5 raidbuff and whit shadowpriests, suv hunters, ret pallys in the 25-raids iam almost never oom. some bosses when Healers die i might need to take a mana pot.
Will get the Earthliving i think
Major: Chain Heal, Water Mastery, Earthliving. Minor: Water Walking, Water Mastery, Renewed Life.
I used to have LHW instead of chain heal but I’m only doing raids atm and I almost never use LHW. With +2300 heal I’m just trying to get the most out of spamming CH. I would welcome a more useful minor glyph as the water walking and renewed life don’t really do much even though I do fish a lot.
Btw thank you for all the posts, I’ ‘ve been following your blog since Wotlk hit us
Zabon, Twillight Hammer, EU
Major: Everliving, HW, Chain Heal.
At the moment I’m running heroics, and on reflection should switch the Everliving to Water Mastery. I find I’m either spamming / cancelling HW (on the tank) or using Chain Heal the majority of the time, with Riptide being used more often than LHW. Just my style really, never got into the LHW spam thing, so don’t have to unlearn that
Minor: Water Shield, Water Walking (so nice to be able to use this just any time, and not worry about reagents), Astral Recall (very occasionally you have to city hop a bit, and find this on cooldown).
Thank you for the comment on my own post.
Originally I ran with Earthliving, Water Mastery and Lesser Healing Wave. Then I switched out Earthliving for Healing Wave. Then I switched out Lesser Healing Wave for Earthliving again. With 3.1 I’m thinking of switching out Water Mastery for the Earth Shield glyph.
I run a mix of PVP and PVE, and very little of that is 25-manning. I like my glyphs versatile. Glyph of Chain Heal shines the most in 25-man, and sucks in PVP.
I like Earthliving because it can proc of “anything” other than Earth Shield. In PVE it helps keeping people stable (that is, loosing health at a reduced pace). In PVP it helps immensily when it procs of Riptide while moving, because I often won’t have the luxury of stopping to cast something.
Water Mastery is nice enough, given that I’m the lower end of PVE gear.
I love Healing Wave! Practically never need to heal myself in PVE, and can top myself up free of charge in PVP. With that said, I don’t risk using HW when I’m under fire, just for the circuimstances when I’m healing someone else and I believe they’ll survive until the healing lands.
Ayeba’s last blog post..The glyph shuffle, shamanic version.
Minor glyphs:
* Water shield for obvious reasons
* Water Walking: rocks in wintergrasp when mining or running away. Also very handy because I don’t need to get to land before mounting.
* Ghost Wolf: the only minor glyph that have any effect on PVP… although very minor, it might just save a death or two in the long run.
Ayeba’s last blog post..The glyph shuffle, shamanic version.
Majors:
Chain Heal
Water Mastery
Healing Wave
Minors:
Water Shield
Regeant removed for reincarnate & water walking
I tried LHW & glyph until they nerfed it, then switch to using HW & glyph. The glyph comes in handy during several fights in Naxx, especially Saph & Loatheb & Four Horsemen if you are one of the two people tanking the horses in the back. LHW & glyph is still enticing though. I might switch back to it depending on v3.1 changes.
Major Glyphs: LHW, CH, ES
Minor: Water Walking, Water Breathing, Reincarnate
LHW+ES are great glyphs when im tank healing, and even when im not, but ES+LHW glyph= my LHW will heal for 2k more than it normally does. CH is also great for raid healing… the thing i like about my minor glyph choice is that i NEVER have to carry around reagents… i would rarely use the other 3 glyphs so i think, “eh why not?”