I used to gem for haste and was at nearly 700 Haste.. however your mana regen will not carry you through fights if you are casting a heal every global cooldown. I have found that gemming int and bumping my mana pook to around 29-30k raid buffed allows me to use the Riptide sling shot to get off blazing fast (sub 1 sec) lHW’s with Major healing from the AA Crits as a bonus. I also have much less mana issues and my over healing has skyrocketed. chain heal is a nice spell and situationaly your best call but with other classes having much more mana efficient ways to heal mutiple targets (and faster) its not viable as a primary option past Naxx 25.

Trucks last blog post..What the hell have you done for the server latly?

As for the 4set change, I am all for this change. I’m not overly concerned about the loss in spell power that we recieved from the t7 bonus. As it stand in a fully raid buffed setting, I’m pushing 2900 healing. This is more than enough currently. Considering the better stats on gear in Ulduar, our healing will be higher or at the worst scenario equalize out to the bonus we received from T7 4set and on top of that we’ll now have more haste which adds to our most effective heal. Not considering any buffs, my shaman is at 641 haste; I get a lot of inquiry asking if that’s too much but personally I wish I had more. I don’t itemize for crit as I feel I can get so much more healing output thanks to haste. Raid buffed my chain heal is 2 seconds with my current gear, I will be itemizing the same as I am now so I can’t expect my haste rating to go down (up if anything), add on the t8 4set bonus and raid buffs and I think I’ll have my chain heal down to 1.8 seconds without BL, that is huge! This of course is considering that chain heal will remain our most effective heal come Ulduar and as long as there is raid healing that needs to be done I don’t see that changing.

I know there are those out there that will disagree with me and you are totally entitled to your opinion. The other shaman in my guild itemizes for Crit over Haste and while I am always ahead on the meters by quite a bit there is still plenty of occasions that his large crit heals have saved us in more than one occasion.

Ordieth The Immortal – Resto Shaman of Artifice on Boulderfist Horde US server

Tough the new relic is Sexy!

Why is this bad: As Lodus said: an excellent bonus should scale with gear. Don’t get me wrong, riptide is an excellent tool for us shamans and even our only one if on the move (except earthshield, kinda). So this 1 sec reduction is ok-ish for 5 mans or 10 mans, a 25 man raider won’t care much. Just saying that Ulduar is movement heavy doesn’t justify this bonus. Nearly all encounters will leave you with tons of room to stand still an cast, otherwise mages would be pretty useless dps classes. And optimizing the time to stand still and cast chainheal will often be the key to pump out some good healing, not running in circles and waiting for riptide to come off the cooldown.

Because let’s not forget: HPM and HPS of riptide is not extremly good. And the HoT is rather weak, especially compared to what other HoTs are flying around in a 25 man raid. So Riptide is a good spell, but not at all a spell worth casting every second it comes available!

In addition to that: while those additional second we win might somewhen save a person if all other healers are dead and NS + HW is on cooldown and you have to move, riptide will get a lot of competition comes 3.1:

-improved renew
-4pcT8 resto druid

So while riptide once felt kinda unique, those two changes devalue it somehow and will make sure that more than enough little insta heals will be flying around in 25 man raids. And this makes me think even more that the 2pcT8 is pretty bad, I’d rather have a bonus that would affect the spells I use because I want and not the one I use just because I’m running around.

4pcT8 is ok but non-scaling as well.

drugs last blog post..Achievements and guild climate

Most other classes are getting ‘on spellcast gain haste or SP’ and, honestly, I’d rather have something like that so that I could choose to utilise it with my other spells.

Seeing priests get something like 250 sp on casting their shield, and we get what is, effectively, a pile of haste rating in an environment where spamming hasted chain heals (with all mana changes) could run us out of mana.

2pc I could take or leave – I use riptide quite a lot in multi-tank situations but I don’t really want to drop my LHW glyph for the riptide one as (again) I’d be losing flexibility in my heals.

So…not impressed – I would have liked to see something which made, say, Earthliving more effective or split HW / CH like t7 4pc. I guess it also doesn’t help that I prefer the looks of t7

/hug

Auriks last blog post..Twilight Vanquisher Avarix

http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2008/12/23/chain-heal-rises-as-circle-of-healing-falls/

the math works out to a cast time of 2.03 seconds before additional haste such as Wrath of Air or player buffs. Either way you slice it this is going to help you push sub 2.0 seconds on your chain heal cast if you really want it.

I’m not real happy with the 2 piece bonus. It’s not going to improve my healing much at all. There’s maybe one or two times a fight that I hit riptide and it’s still on CD. Maybe that accounts for 1/10 of 1% increase in healing. Very nice for PvP if I ever had to wear PvE gear in a PvP setting. Basically the only time this set bonus is good is when there’s a lot of movement required (i.e. Heigan).