The Ironsong Tribe

After seeing Shaman healing in action last night I just wanted to crawl into a corner and die. But it did give me some new insights.

1) We need more int, and even more int. For survival, we need to have replenishment(which I was conveniently missing a lot) and since replen. scales off int yeah..

2) We need to find a way to over come the reactionary problems even more. I was looking at the WWS from BT last night and all shamans and druids got overhealed by the RET PALLY. You know what 75% of that healing was? JUDGEMENT OF LIGHT! So yes, something has to break there. What dunno but we can continue as we are.

3) I hate RNG weapon procs. I hate RNG healing procs even more.

4) See number 3

5) With so many totems it is hard to decide who drops what. I think finally every shaman will drop every totem. But it will be hard having more then 2 or 3 as after that every shaman starts to drop out on what totems they can drop

6) As butt hurt as I am from my hps beeing so low, the dps shaman have it just as bad or worse.

I think today I am cleaning up my spec further. I am keeping a few points in tidal waves because I was not 100% convinced it was useless...though it was getting pretty bad. Also, I noticed something that snuck by my gaze. Thundering weapons, increases critical strike of all melee AND SPELLS. This makes it a bit superior then our tidal mastery. So I moved more points into enh to get that. I oculd have just as easily filled up tidal mastery as well, but decided instead to put the 3 remaining points I had into Tidal waves

My build as of this morning

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxhZxceuVboxkrhRh">http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxhZxceuVboxkrhRh</a><!-- m -->

Can you link the WWS report? I kept a log last night, but could not upload it because it said it was not 2.4.

I guess I am not as pessimistic. It is true that we had tons of healing last night, but I did have some observations:

1. I never ran out of mana and I was trying to spam heals as fast as I could at several points.
2. I think tidal wave will be more useful in 5-mans when the healing zerg we had last night is gone. I thought I was able to use it to effect on several occasions. I had 1.7s Healing waves and 0.9 LHW with it.
3. I did the whole instance in DPS gear just to check out crit and int. I will try my haste gear next week.
4. I took Rip Tide and was not displeased with it. Having another instant heal is not bad.
5. I agree the totems were confusing, but we did have a lot of Shaman last night. We just need to get used to coordinating a bit more.
6. I agree with what you said, Zeengo, about Bloodlust. The change there kind of makes us redundant in many situations.
7. At one point, I was third on healing charts, ahead of Mahiah, which is not bad. I did not run a meter because of addon issues after the patch. I was also critting a lot and putting up the various buffs that come with it. Overall, I felt that there was some potential in the new stuff and that it is a matter of working out the kinks.

Also, Circle of Healing is overpowered.

-Jaba

Yeah, that zerg was just horrifying >.< Trying to get the link up but it is giving me errors like mad. This is odd though, if mahiah was third I think that my meters maybe off. What is causing most of my pessimism is that the top two were COH priests (not a surprise) but according to this, third place overal was palora. This while he was also 5th on dps charts. That there alone is enough to want to /wrist. But if you had different results mine may have very well been borked. I do believe if I had replenishment constantly it would have been better from a mana perspective. I found myself bouncing up and down a lot mostly when replenishment was not hitting me(which I am thinking there is something where it can only hit 10 people) I just wish there was another raid coming up I could test this current build on. I want to see how much of a difference it will make.

As for riptide, I am still not sold on it. I played with it a lil bit and found that the healing of it was way less then what I would desire to see. The only thing that boosted it in my eye was that it was instant. I doubt I will get it until I seem more concrete evidence that it is functional. Everything I still see about it just puts me out >.<

I do agree with the tidal waves, I am currently running a love hate relationship with it. I am still in the mind set of chain heal and toss singles on the tanks. Which is why I am still debating it. I think come monday if I am not sold on it I will switch again. Really the only thing that I think lived up to my expectations out of the whole build was the watershield. HOw sad is that...

But yeah, redundancy is going to become a big problem for us I see. Totem redundancy, bloodlust redundancy and generic buff redundancy. I do not like these new raid wide and stacking rules at all. While yes, it means you can take anyone and still be alright, it also means if you have a lot of one class you are going to be overstacking overwriting and generally speaking squelching a lot of those peoples function. At least our mana springs stack...

Now to trail into something else, how do you guys feel about the description of what I heard we were supposed to be today? Resto shaman not as healers, but as back up healers. How do you feel about being completely dependent on others to function to our fullest?

I'm waiting a bit to see how things balance out. Looks like retadins got a bit of nerf this morning already.

I was a bit stunned by my DPS while wearing my "healing" set last night but that's probably because I'm not used to the new big numbers yet. I am very pleased by raid-wide totems; I rolled Oryx because I wanted to play a group buffer and I feel like I can finally fulfill his destiny there.

I'll post more thoughts after Friday's run.

*pops head in*
I think all healers are sad at this point . The apocaplyptic wow players call it the extinction of the healers. We just have to deal with things set to level 8- instead of 70 . Just do your best!
*runs away from the shaman forums*

One thought is if all the healers and DPS are so overpowered now, does that mean that Wrath is going to be wickedly difficult?

Shaman were always kind of marginal as main healers. We were best in raid situations where chain heal could shine. What they seem to be trying to do is to remove the distinctions between healers. For example, Pallies have an AOE heal now, and Shaman have a HoT with talents.

Personally, I had fun with the new abilities. I got some wickedly large chain heals after a riptide.

I reminds me very much of healing in Age of Conan or Warhammer Online. In those games, it is all about the synergy between different combinations of abilities. I think maybe Blizz is trying to compete directly with those games.

I have a priest and a druid in my pocket to turn to, but Jaba is my main and probably always will be. Can anyone say enhancement?

-Jaba