3.2. going live/back to raiding

Steelbreaker, chosen by Unnamed

Dear reader, welcome to the first real resto shaman post in a long time.

First of all, I’m happy to be back and raiding. Yesterday I joined the first raid since mid-June and I had pretty good fun. While I was on my vacation my guild was busy and managed to keep a decent Hard Mode raiding pace. Yesterday we achieved our first Iron Council Hard Mode Kill. The kill seemed really easy, but this might be a false assumption as I didn’t participate in the hours of practicing this kill. Of course I lack a ton of gear, still sporting T7.25 and the horrible badge shield (shields are always the items I never get decent upgrades, since Karazhan).

Other than that, I rewarded myself with a new UI compilation to once again spice up my raiding experience. My choice of the moment is QuseUI. I love how it is arranged with every vital information right in the center of my screen. Also it is the first time since forever I didn’t raid with oUF unit frames. Stuf is a very decent alternative. I really got used to tweaking my unit frames through .lua, but having a config menu is just so much faster.

Sporting the beautiful QuseUI

While you US guys are probably already enjoying patch 3.2, I’m still waiting for our realms to get updated tonight. Everything you might want or might not want to know about 3.2 can be found on MMO Champion, as always.

A quick overview on shaman related changes including some comments:

Shamans

• A customizable totem bar will now be available for shamans allowing the storing of 4 different totems. These totems can be placed on the ground at once in one global cooldown for the combined mana cost of all 4 totems. The naming scheme of the spells to summon the different totem sets has been changed to make it less confusing for players:
• • Call of Fire (Totem Bar 1, the first one gained at level 30) is now named Call of the Elements.
  • Call of Water (Totem Bar 2) is now named Call of the Ancestors.
  • Call of Air (Totem Bar 3) is now named Call of the Spirits.
  • Call of Earth (the spell to recall all summoned totems) is now named Totemic Recall.

  Finally! Not only do we get a great implementation of our totems into the default UI, also we can drop 4 Totems in ONE global cooldown. Thank you blizzard, thank you. How the technical solution actual feels in game I have yet to see. But what I have read from people on the PTR sounds most promising.

• All Shocks now have a default range of 25 yards, up from 20 yards.
• Base health increased by approximately 7% to correct for shamans having lower health than other classes.
• Chain Heal: Jump distance increased by 25% to 12.5 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%

Tweaking Chain Heal is somewhat admitting that our good old lazer beams just don’t pull their weight in WotLK. The problem is mainly how strong other group healers are and how much healing can be done by instant group healing spells with a huge range. I don’t complain though, CH should remain the strong group heal with the very long cast time as the other solution would be to just give us a CoH/WG spell as well. I really prefer the unique yet clumsy CH mechanic over streamlining all healing classes. The range buff and the additional healing we get is really nice and will surely make CH more competitive.

• Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting, but rather reduces melee attack speed by 10% for 8 seconds (exclusive with similar effects such as Thunder Clap).
• Ghost Wolf: Can now be learned at level 16. While in this form, snaring effects may not bring the shaman below base normal run speed.
• Wind Shock: Has been renamed Wind Shear and no longer shares a cooldown with Flame, Frost or Earth Shock.
• Talents
  • Enhancement
    • Maelstrom Weapon: Now also has a chance to reduce the cast time of Hex.
    • Shamanistic Rage: Cooldown is now 1 minute, down from 2 minutes. Successful melee attacks now have a chance to generate mana equal to 15% of the shaman’s attack power, down from 30%.
  • Restoration
    • Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.

    This is a very strong buff for tank healing resto shamans. Also, it is just a lot easier to understand the damage reduction of the new AH over the old armor buff, which wasn’t really easy to put into concrete numbers.

    • Cure Poison and Cure Disease: Combined into a single spell, Cure Toxins.
    • Earth Shield: Dispel effects will now remove charges of Earth Shield rather than the entire aura.
    • Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman’s Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.

    A huge buff for HW. No more silly buff-on-target-system but just a plain huge buff for healing way.

    • Mana Tide Totem: Totem health now equal to 10% of the shaman’s health.
    • Nature’s Guardian: Redesigned. Now has a fixed 100% proc rate, has a 30-second internal cooldown and increases the shaman’s maximum health by 3/6/9/12/15% for 10 seconds.
    • Nature’s Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.

    You just can’t say no to instant heals.

    • Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.

    Let’s get it over with the bad news first. Say goodbye to ultra fast LHWs. Then again, those changes are good news in terms of making all our healing spells viable options. LHW and HW are now a  lot closer in terms of speed. Combined with the new Healing Way, HW now provides ultra high HPS at the cost of high MPS. LHW on the other hand now will have a huge crit percentage, thus having higher throughput, more WS and AA procs and AH uptime while being a lot more mana efficient than HW.
    

    • Improved Water Shield: This talent now has a 10/20/30% chance to be triggered by Chain Heal, and the charges of Water Shield are no longer consumed by this talent.

    This change was long time due. CH being somewhat of the “iconic” spell of the resto shaman, I always thought it lacked synergy with all the new shiny WotLK talents. Casting CH is now a lot more attractive, not only in terms of throughput and range, but in terms of mana conservation as well. Even better: the talent stops consuming water orbs. This is just lovely, not only was it annoying to loose some base mana regen after a heavy chain of crit heals, but it also makes healing feel a lot safer. No more locking yourself into GCD just because you felt it was safe to refresh a 1-3 orbs watershield.

Items

Glyph of Healing Wave: The amount of healing the shaman receives is now based on the entire healing amount, including over-healing.

A situational Glyph stays situational but still gets better. When picking up a tank assignment with heavy raid and tank damage, this glyph can really shine.

Items – General

Mana Regeneration: All items that provide “X mana per five seconds” have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.

A slight buff for all mp5 gear. Also a little compensation for the replenishment nerf.

Classes – General

Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

A little nerf to replenishment comes as no surprise. Replenishment gets stronger and stronger the better gear we get, so this might be justified.

The last time I looked at resto shamans in general I wasn’t to happy. A lot of main points where I felt shaman deserved a buff should be fixed in 3.2. Mobility and providing buffs should be a lot easier with the new totem system. GCD management should be more fun without refreshing WS all the time and being able to drop all four totems in one cooldown. Chain heal will be a viable spell in more situations and we will see jumps over a bigger distance, even an implementation into the IWS mechanic is now a fact.

I would have loved a clear sign if blizzard wants us to be strong group healers or strong single target healers. This didn’t come true. We should be both now, stronger group healers and stronger tank healers but most probably still inferior to the classes which excel at those two assignments. I can live with that. We’re extremely versatile healers now, chain heal is better and will be better and better the more haste we get. Our single target healing with both LHW and HW sounds incredibly strong on the paper, tanks will love the high AH uptime we provide.

The only thing where we still just can’t pull our weight is burst AoE healing. This isn’t something I expected to be fixed in 3.2, maybe it isn’t something that should be fixed at all. After all we’re in the same boat as paladins and we can’t expect to do a great job at just everything. But then again, having group healed through all of BC it’s nonetheless a bit frustrating to see how much AoE healing a priest can deliver before our first chain heal hits.

Additional reading: Phix from I say LOL IRL has a look at 3.2 as well, Kadomi looks at both resto shaman and prot warrior changes as well as UI changes which will make some addons redundant, even thedoctor seems to have an opinion on 3.2 changes.

Please do comment how patch day is going for you and if you like the changes/buffs to the resto shaman. May all your addons still work in 3.2.