Shaman Healing v.6.0

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, I will fear no evil: For Merinna art with me.

Merinna got to go on her first real raid in a long time. And you know what? She sucked.

The problem was that HPS was in the dumps. The raid itself, a normal jaunt into Highmaul, wasn't altogether unsuccessful, but I don't feel that I contributed a great deal towards it. Blizzard has acknowledged that "shaman" as a class is having trouble in their metrics, and that deserves some examination. The bigger problem is that I didn't know how to heal very well anymore.

In my defense, it's been four years since I did any raid healing. Long-time readers will know why that was. Raiding in Warcraft was one of the first things to go, and as the Cataclysm unwound and it became clear that LFRs and LFDs were awful places to try and make friends...or even just be civil... I gave up healing and have been casually blasting things with lightning ever since.

But here I am, four years later, hoping to restart my raid career and it's not starting well. One can moan and complain about the bad balance that Blizzard has created, or one can expect that to be addressed sooner or later and try to come to terms with the new mechanics.

Which do you think I should do?

Healing: Back Then
Shamans were designated raid healers as recently as Wrath of the Lich King. Chain Heal was the tool for topping up large batches of raid members. Shamans almost completely lacked any heal over time mechanic and had a big, slow heal and a small, fast heal to use on individuals. There were healing totems, but back then, you were more likely to place your mana stream totem instead and bolster the entire raid's mana regeneration. Earth Shield is the one shaman healing spell that hasn't changed significantly in all that time, and tanks would remark on how special they felt to get to wear it.

Shaman Class Feedback

Merinna visiting the Maelstrom back in beta- still blissfully
unaware of how developers  were going to screw up her class.

Recently, developers posted requests for specific feedback about how the classes are working that included a specific list of questions for each class. I rather wish that somebody would publish a sort of digest for these things. I think it would be very interesting to see what a bulk of thoughtful people had to say about these sorts of things. Though, I can't bring myself to slog through the pages and pages of "MAGES NEED MOAR DPS!" kinds of comments to find them.

Taking a look at some of the guide questions got me to thinking Shaman thoughts though:

What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? For instance, no longer requiring ammo could be considered a quality-of-life improvement for hunters.


We have three spells requiring reagents (Water Walk, Water Breathing and Reincarnation) and realistically, I can't use up all three of my minor glyph slots to opt out of carrying those reagents. Most other classes have been losing more and more of their reagents. I would be happy to lose the need to farm naga for "shiny fish scales" and/or "fish oil" at the earliest opportunity. I still kinda like carrying ankhs though, though it would be nice if I could make more than a stack of 10.

How to Resto, Post - Patch 4.1

Wait! Where's mah mace?

It's been several months now since I really evaluated what I wanted to do with my specc for Cataclysm, and the fact is that so much has changed in these months. Co-efficients have been rejiggered, new abilities designed, other abilities redesigned. So, it's time to take another look at stuff.

A few quick points that will have more detail below:

• Deep Healing mastery was pretty lackluster for resto in its initial design but the numbers for Deep Healing have been significantly increased and now also include indirect healing effects.  This makes it worth another look.
• Focused Insight has fallen out of favor for PvE.
• Telluric Currents remains contentiously debated. 
• Wind Shear no longer misses, making us lean, mean, interrupting machines. Make no mistakes about this: wind shear is the best interrupt in the game. Best. In. Game. Suck on that, rogues.
• Spirit Link Totem would be great if other players would stop running away from it.

It's the Little Things...

DIE DIE DIE DIE!

Just a brief note to say how much I want to scream and throw myself out a window when I'm doing a major edit on an article, using Blogpress for iPad, and the app crashes. This is like a PC in late 80s when it could really blink off with all your work. These things aren't supposed to happen anymore!

But hey, make lemonade. I've been wishing for a way to issue brief bursts of cursing when the blog gets affected by things like this, and BP inspired me to go make the shoutbox over on the left. Um. No actual cursing please, unless it's "Rassle-frassing long-eared varmint" or the ever-popular "$%@#!"

**********

Healing Changes: Netharea posted today about some immediate hotfixes to healing priests and my beloved Shaman.

Power Word: Shield is nerfed with a substantial mana-cost increase. The reasons given were largely cited as the PvE Disc. Priests getting too reliant on their one spell. But indeterminate PvP reasons were also cited. But I think I know what they were: The other night, I went to Tol Barad very very late in server time. There were only seven people in the raid group. But up at Warden's Vigil, there was this one stinking disc priest who had all his insta-cast defense and healing spells lined up and a line-o'-sight breaking pattern to run that kept four of us tied up for forever. I'll be honest, it was good playing on his part, and kinda irritating that not one of us had a reasonable stun. But I swear that smacked heavily of OP.

Pets: To Heal or Not to Heal?

It's not pinin' for the Howling Fjords, it's passed on! This pet is no more! It has ceased to be!
It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late pet! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in
peace! If you hadn't sent it to try and tank those adds, it wouldn't be pushing up the daisies!
It's metabolic processes are of interest only to historians! it's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off
this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This... is an EX-PET!

Yup, that is the question.

I was reading a column WoW Insider about what hunters would like other classes to know about what they do. And well... I got a big case of indignation worked up over it.

(Indignation is a lot like indigestion, only it's all in your head).

The author certainly has some good points to cover. His comments on CC management are right on and something I would like to address in a larger scale sometime soon. But, um... in my mind, much of this column tries to justify some of the skuzzier things bad hunters do in many dungeons. (For cripe's sake, just turn off Growl when you are in a dungeon).

But let's drop in and debate what is to be said under "Our Pets Are Important:"

And sometimes, our pet needs heals.

Yes, we have Mend Pet, which can heal our pet a little bit, pretty slowly, and we have some other tools to help protect them. And you know what? About 90% of the time, our pet is going to be just fine -- they're pretty self-sufficient, and we can fill most of the gaps. But sometimes when they get tons of spike damage, they need heals, and any time the pet is taking so much damage that it's in danger of death, our Mend Pet is not going to be enough to save them.

Let me stipulate that there are no absolutes. Any time somebody tells you that they "ALWAYS DO THIS ONE THING," then they better start listing exceptions. I acknowledge that there are exceptions, but I choose not to address them at this time.

How Hard is Healing? And is It Any Fun?

I think I realized: Merinna's healing is lacking because I don't have any maracas.

We don’t want healers to be able to make up for all of the mistakes on the part of the other players

Healers seem like they largely understand that Heroics are challenging, and sometimes get penalized when the rest of the group doesn’t understand that. If you feel like you can’t cast anything but your efficient heal or you’ll run out of mana, then something is going wrong with the fight. Likewise, if you feel like you must spam your inefficient heals to the exclusion of all else, then your group is ignoring key mechanics or is just undergeared.

The game could do a better job of telling a group why they failed so that so much blame doesn’t fall at the feet of the healer.

We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up. That is sad and unfortunate. But the degree to which it's happening, at least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums.

The Ghostcrawler

I have heard it said that Ghostcrawler's main is a healing priest, so maybe that explains the level of empathy coming from him recently towards the healer's plight in heroic dungeon groups. I swear, it's like he's just telling us that all the death and carnage in the average heroic run really isn't our fault.

Healing Fallacies

You know it's true

This will be the first part of a brief series to address some of the bigger mistakes I'm seeing in dungeon groups these days. And rather than get raging on dps or tanks (oh, but you know that's coming) I first turn my eye on myself and my chosen WoW profession: healing.

I have written on some of the difficulties of healing in Cataclysm before, and whether that is insightful observation or else self-serving QQ, I leave up to you, gentle readers. This article is not intended to be a bunch of whining, merely a list of what I see as player shortcomings that could use some work.

The Healer's Priorities:

1. Stay Alive
2. Keep the Tank alive
3. Keep the DPS alive
4. Maintain your Mana
5. Assist with Other Utility as Called For
6. Top off the health of players
7. Communicate issues or observations
8. Hurt the mobs/boss

Let me present a very broad overview of what healers are facing right now in early heroic dungeon runs: Incoming damage to tanks is generally slow and reasonable. Health pools for all characters has jumped dramatically, as much as 400% greater than where they were towards the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Mana pools however, have only increased about 100% (give or take a bit). The cost of healing spells has also risen around 500% from what they were in Lich King.

Where's the Mana at?

Three Faces of Merinna: Hardcore, Hardcorer, Hardcorest

Well, gentle readers, we are but three weeks away from The Cataclysm. And I have been confused about mana. Like, "Why am I not running out of it?"

Individual heals still seem slower and somewhat weaker, but those "mana problems" I've been writing about did not materialize in 4.0.1. I played like I will on day one of Cataclysm and was healing more conservatively than was necessary and, ahem, not getting the job done.

But really, I've been reading Elitist Jerks and other blogs about these problems and I'm not the only one who has come to see our Healing Surge as too expensive to use on anything less than an emergency. Nevertheless, one can spam it for all it's worth in heroic ICC fights today and still come up smelling like roses. Telluric Currents is fooling people into thinking it's useful because it actually returns mana. Why? How is this happening?

Shaman Heals: T-minus Two Months and Counting

Well, we are getting really close now. A date has been announced and even more jarringly, Patch 4.0 is probably just around the corner ("around the corner" = "next week") How is Shaman Healing coming along?

Overall
Healing feels sluggish. Heals are smaller than on live, and they have overall longer cast times. Characters also have much larger health pools than they did before, so it's fairly common to drop around a 15k heal on someone and it barely seems to make their health bar move. The fact that most of my recent experience has been in ICC with a 30% buff probably makes all this feel worse than it really is.

Focused Insight
Sigh. There's no avoiding this talent. A 30% buff to a heal is just too large to ignore. But I don't think it is going to be featured in standard rotation. The logistics of it are just too unwieldy. Shamans also have no lack of spells we can cast that have buff effects on the next spell. Unleashed Elements buffs 20%. Tidal Waves leaves behind haste buffs. Riptide creates all sorts of bonus goodness when used next to a chain heal. So, keeping all these short-CD, augmentation effects in constant play is probably going to be an overwhelming juggling experience.