The place to look at is Enhancing Totems. Elemental Weapons amounts to almost an insignificant SP increase (like, 50-ish), and thus, is generally just adding to your overhealing. Enhancing Totems is useless if you always have an Enhance Shaman around, but in 10-mans or Heroics, it’s certainly more useful to your group overall than the small SP boost to yourself.

As for Healing Way, the question is where the points would go. I’d take the big increase on Healing Way over the near uselessness of Elemental Weapons and the complete uselessness of Healing Focus anyday. I’d drop Tidal Focus (well, down from 5/5) too if I thought I’d get some better benefit elsewhere, since it’s an insignificant talent as well.

Thanks for an idea of what some other folks are running drug

That being said, I think it will be more valuable in 3.3 – I’d expect blizzard to make it a little tougher.

As for Improved Rein, agree 100%
Vok´s last blog ..A short history of Serevok

note. On HTwins its probably best to drop healing way for healing focus.

Anyways, Thanks for the blog!

What’s the problem? A lot of talent trees are absolutely bloated with mandatory talents. Every tier of talents has a nice option to boost your healing/damage output or tanking stats. The talents you don’t take on the other hand, are often fun and would lead to us doing additional stuff during raids.

Examples:

-Safeguard (Warrior Tank, would give a warrior a nice little role where he could help with damage mitigation)

-Body and Sould (Priest, tactical speed boosts are very handy and add another tactical layer to priest healing)

-Power Infusion (Ok this isn’t something a disc priest would leave out, but I think it’s a good example of a talent, which needs you to know the encounter and place this buff on the right person at the right time)

-Imp. Reincarnation (If we take this talent, we use the ability a lot more often)

That’s just some examples. There are a lot of talents, who offer some damage mitigation, speed boost, little temporary buffs on other players etc. I think there should be more talents like this. And there should be less mandatory throughput talents. Most of the time all we do is put our talent into stuff that goes like this: additional 10% to YYY, reduces mana cost of XXX by 5%. If we don’t take those talents, we reduce the output we need in the raiding game.

I think it would be very easy to add more fun, “gimmicky” talents to our trees and let us have the possibility to take them, just by reducing the pure throughput talent points per talent Tier.

Glyphing as well isn’t doing what I want. It’s a nice cheap way to shift where our strengths lies, but it doesn’t change my play style at all (or only very slightly). I drop HST no matter if I have the glyph or not. I often RT, with or without RT glyph. I shield my tank with ES no matter if I’m glyphed for it or not. I like the glyph idea, but nonetheless, nearly all glyphs are just another, rather boring stat modifier.

As for Healing Wave, I am strongly for the idea of Shamans being hybrid healers – both tank and raid healers. So I do want to have that talent as well. Arguably, HW is long cast spell, but once you get into the tankhealing routine, you will learn to use it when needed and you will do it so naturaly and squeeze the most of it.

I can’t really have two healing specs – most of the time one of the three healers on starting raid setup “should” go dps in favour of speeding the encounter up, as well having three skilled healers on some of 10M encounters pretty much mean they got slightly bored – so I need to put all these points into Healing Focus and Healing Way.

I strangely never considered Elemental Weapons as viable option, even if I had those points spare, I’d prolly put them to one of the Totem enhancing talents.

Drug wrote:
“At this point, talent builds come down to personal preferences. No matter how you spend your talent points, it won’t have a big impact on your play style, healing output or survivability. Which is in fact, a pity, I’d love to see more variety in resto shaman builds.”
I actually like it, as we discussed on PlusHeal the diversity comes from glyphing your shammling, which again for me, is great. Just 4 slots in inventory for full-spectre healing effectivity. I don’t think we need more diversity in Restoration tree. I think more interesting talents that wouldn’t be simple to choose between outside the tree would be interesting. You know, something that could actually compete with Focus or Way or Weapons.

The only time I have ever found it to be a problem for me is in fights with a bunch of tiny little adds, and Faction Champs.

Haven’t made it to 25m ToGC though so maybe things would change there.

But as I already said, I think we should read to much into this statistics and we shouldn’t talk the differences between the specs bigger than they are. In fact, the differences are really marginal.