Taras last blog post..iTunesLibraryEdit v1

@Gornek: I don’t know about your tanks, but all of mine sit around or over 35k, that’s DK, Druid, Paladin and Warrior. Again it was just to point out that it can be useful.

@Zusterke: Having done the two healer Sapph fight, chain heal is one of the spells you’re not going to be using very much. Here I will be a large supporter of Riptide and LHW. The tank also should have enough avoidance that if you’re doing it with 2 healers you can let them go for a couple seconds while you remove curses and heal up the raid, especially with an ES up on them. I agree with mekias that the paladin would probably be better served on the tank while your primary focus is the raid.

Keep in mind this post was just highlighting the different tools in the arsenal. There is no right or wrong answer, Just find a way that works for you and roll with it =D

Tank healing is much more manageable for us now but we still can run into mana problems if our crit % is lacking. With enough crit, you can regen a decent amount of mana via Imp Water Shield. Resto shaman are back to being primarily raid healers but we can now adequately substitute in for tank healing when necessary. It’s not a question of can we do it. It’s more a question of what we’re best at.

As for tank healing on Sapphiron, the Chain Heal won’t really jump from the tank much, if at all. There’s too much distance between him and everyone else. Raid healing is also difficult because of the same reason (although there’s usually a few people in each area). With 2 healers, the only way you can do well on Sapph is for the dps to avoid blizzards. The pally is the better tank healer in this situation and maybe slightly better at raid healing if people are spreading out a bit. I’d keep the pally on tank healing and hope he can help out on the raid and try to keep the raid grouped up in small groups for chain heal to work (i.e. group up melee and ranged as much as possible and tell them to move away from blizzard with their group). But if your dps can’t avoid the blizzard, you don’t have much chance.

I do have a tricky question. One of our shamans got stuck in Saph 10m, trying to dual heal it with a paladin. They put the pala on tank healing and him on raidhealing. He felt severely restricted since Chainheal worked rather poorly as the dps scrambled about to avoid the blizzards etc.
Some of our officers, including me, reasoned that perhaps in this odd setup they would have been better off with the shaman on tank healing where his (odd) chainheal would heal tank, melee dps and himself while keeping a list of tools ready to put more healing on the tank. The pally could then grease the tank with his bacon for support and play extreme wack a mole on the raid (which should be doable with spamz).

Would you feel this is a proper approach and/or reasoning? Is this a viable strategy for the Shaman?

The new healing way sounds good on paper, but either in heroics or raid environment the benefit of glyphed LHW cannot be underestimated. The health pool of tanks isn’t just high enough to justify 20k crits. With the exception of very good geared druids perhaps, if your tank just lust 20k worth of health points heal him up as fast as humanly possible. And that would be Riptide / LHW.

And last but not least: you didn’t point out that Ancestral Healing is damn awesome for tank healing. With 3 talent points you’ll have a near 100% uptime.

My main problem with full tank healing is/was either mana or that he died because I didn’t heal fast enough.
So get your glyph of LHW, Water Master and talent for IWS and you’re good to go. and don’t dare to spec out of Ancestral Healing

My biggest quibble, however, is taking Elemental Weapons over either Thundering Stikes or Tidal mastery. This decision is exactly the same as choosing a piece of gear, that has 15 more spell power but 45 less crit rating. This is a bad decision for both HPS and HPM.

Also there is the added inconstancy in the third spec. If you take Healing Way and Ancestral Healing, you probably plan on casting a lot of riptides and Healing Waves. Even if you only cast two riptides and two Healing Waves every 15 seconds, and you only have 20% crit, 3/3 improved shields is worth 127 mp5. Or, to make it consistent with the gear comparison method above, 1 talent point in Imp. Water Shield is like 42 mp5.

So, when making a decision between EW, TS/TM, and IWS, it breaks down to whether you would want a piece of gear to have 15 sp, 45 crit, or 42 mp5.

Folding in Healing Way adds another wrinkle, but if you are going to be tank healing, your decision should still be weather you want to either have the increased AA and AH procs from more crit or the increased efficiency of IWS. Taking EW would be the last priority for a tank healer.

Glyph of healing wave is not terribly useful. If, as you suggest, there’s a ton of aoe damage floating around, earthshield on the tank will be all the additional healing he should require as you spam chain heal. You probably won’t be casting healing wave at this point.

I swapped my glyph of healing stream totem (which will probably need to be looked at when they merge healing and mana streams together…) out for a chain heal glyph. I look at the chain heal glyph less as a free 1k heal (the average on that 4th target) than a chance to proc earthliving on another target… which makes it slightly superior to the earthliving glyph, especially when you get that auto application from talents on targets below (20%?) health. Making chain heal an even more valuable aoe healing spell… considering the new competition we have from wild growth and coh.

There’s a huge argument going on over lesser healing wave vs. healing wave. You mention 20k crit heals. How much of that is over healing? Considering the passive nature of shammy mana regen, and earthliving applications… and the uberness of the lesser wave glyph… the “spam lesser heal” strat might make more sense, at least until you get enough crit and the tier 7 4piece bonus… I’m making the painful transition from a lhw spam monkey to someone that breaks out the healing wave when the boss hits an enrage timer…

And last, no discussion on shammy healing is compete without a few musings on the proper role of ancestoral awakening…

Dagashais last blog post..don’t think cause i’m easy, i’m naive

It still makes sense to me to keep them as raid healers if we have tanks covered with paladins or disc priests, but now I have an answer from a good source I’ll definitely be giving them a try on the MT on some fights and allowing CoH priests a little more freedom to raid heal.