Heroics is hard, mkay?

I hit 85 about a week ago, and I've run about 3 heroics successfully. Most of it is definitely a lack of gear on my part, which becomes somewhat of a circular problem. I have very few upgrades in normal dungeons, and I don't feel super comfortable running pugs for heroics. I could farm rep, but again, most of that happens in dungeons. Going back to zones for odd quests I've missed for extra rep is a possibility, but with 2 healing specs, soloing quests is a pain in the ass.

I did pick up a disc spec, and have noticed way better mana management techniques for healing 5-mans over holy. In fact, I always thought holy had more tools available, but really I find disc to be more versatile right now in a 5-mans, at least at my gear level. I actually am thinking of switching my holy spec to be my pvp spec. I'm all over the place right now.

So yeah, until some more tanks level to 85 in my guild (ahem, hopefully including a tank reading this right now), I think I'm going to avoid heroics, level my pally and maybe tank some crap, and just farm pvp points and tol barad rep. I'm not in a huge rush to get into raiding content, and for the first time in a few years, I'm not even sure I'd want to do it in a healing role right now. I got the prot pally to 83, and it's been pretty fun so far...

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other one behind
It's not often easy, and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Haven't been posting yet, because I've been busy leveling, duh!

Cata Impressions

So I am really enjoying cataclysm so far! The new zones are all really fresh- the phasing is a little awkward when group questing, but it does give the zones a more narrative feel than in past expansions. Love love love the Harrison Jones questchain in Uldum.
The dungeons themselves... so far I've been a little on the fence about them. When I do them with guild groups, they go great, but I've gotten into some sketchy PUGs with entitled tanks who seem to think that mana is some sort of healer myth. Actually in general I'm finding healing to be a little crazy right now.

Class selection at 85

So I was kind of on the fence about which of my toons I was going to level first. I ended up leveling the priest first because I was having a lot of fun playing holy at 80 and thought it would be pretty fun to level shadow too.
The unexpected thing for me at least, is that the leveling grind from 80 to 85 was really quick! On top of that, I have an incentive to level my alts, because the questing will contribute to guild xp. So, I think my plan now is to continue leveling my alts and then decide on my main. So here are my general thoughts on the classes so far.

Priest

I leveled shadow for the last two levels, but I did a fair bit of questing in my holy spec, mostly if I was waiting in the dungeon queue and didn't want to bother switching out. Most mobs were pretty squishy, and any spec where I was glyphed for Spirit Tap was pretty easy to level with. I ended up ditching my disc spec after the first dungeon- I had some bad luck with Atonement- I don't think it's practical for a 5-man. It might be good in a raiding environment, but overall I found the holy spec to be really fun and versatile.
At 85 though, I've only run 2 heroics, and I've had severe mana problems. I have to drink after every pull and I and up oom on several bossfights, even when I feel like I'm being pretty conservative with my spell selection. I'm not that enamored with the priest after all. I might try a non-smite disc build to see if the mana efficiency is a little better...

Shaman

So originally when I was picking a toon to level, I was comparing priest and shaman, and looking at all the shiny new toys priests were getting, while shaman seemed a little boring. Now at 85, as my priest, I find myself pretty much healing like I would on a shaman. Sure, I have all these other fancy buttons, but if I actually use any of them (looking at you, Holy Word: Sanctuary), I'll go oom in about 30 seconds and just sit there watching my party members die.
So I'm going to start leveling the shaman in parallel. It's pretty easy to level to 85, and it is all contributing to guild xp, so it's gravy.

Paladin

The dark horse in this race is my paladin- I had this tank alt on another server, and cause my guild there folded I decided to transfer him to BT and start leveling him just to get some mining/ore for jewelcrafting. I am actually still leveling prot, and I really like it! I also am going to look at a holy spec for him as well, but tanks are so in demand I doubt I'll get much use out of it.

I have time to choose, cause my guild isn't really going to start raiding for at least another two weeks.
And then you bet you'd better finally decide...

So, anyone have any initial impressions of healing in cataclysm?

First, Do Some Harm

Gone are the days of the pacifist healer sitting in the back row patching up the dpsers doing the dirty work. Come Cataclysm, with the new mechanics, abilities, and talents showing up in beta, it's prety clear that Blizzard wants us healers to get down off our high horses and get our hands a little bloody. So healers? Let's get ready to rumble.

Pre-Cata

Prior to cataclysm, most healers really only did damage when they were super bored. A healer spending mana on a dps ability would be pretty much unthinkable on a progression encounter, much less talent points, with only a few exceptions.

• Holy Paladins in Wrath got Judgements of the Pure, which, combined with Enlightened Judgements, allowed holydins to judge from a distance, and in fact, were encouraged to do so at least once every minute to optimize their healing.
• Holy Priests have frequently found themselves using their Shadow Word: Death backlash to force a stuck Prayer of Mending to bounce to another raid member.
• Holy Priests have Surge of Light, which prior to WOTLK could only proc a free smite, instead of a Flash Heal like it does today. This was generally regarded as a poor talent prior to being changed.

Other than those, most healers had no real incentive or reason to dps while filling a healing role. Even dead time was better spent regenning mana out of combat.

New Talents/Skills for Healing Classes in Cataclysm

In cataclysm, across the board, we're seeing dps talents showing up in previously healing exclusive trees.

• Shaman
  Resto shaman playing with a cataclysm talent calculator will find that it's nearly impossible to build a pve restoration build without being forced to take one of the new "hybrid" talents that encourage resto shaman to dps during periods of light healing.
  • Focused Insight allows you to get a cheaper and more effective heal after any shock spell (this does not include Wind Shear).
  • Telluric Currents gives you a portion of your mana back from casting Lightning Bolt relative to the amount of damage done. Interestingly enough, on beta, many shaman were able to get to spellpower levels that would actually cause lightning bolt to be a net gain in mana, although Blizz has since clarified that this is not the intended purpose and presumably the talent will be rebalanced as needed.
  I'm not crazy about either of these mechanics. For Focused Insight, I feel that Shaman have many other ways to "charge up" their next heal, including Tidal Waves and the new Unleash Life ability. Telluric Currents confuses me, because we're constantly being told by Blizzard developers that we've had it too easy in the past and they want mana conservation to be an issue going forward. Even if they're cheap, I can't see how encouraging Resto Shaman to waste mana on lightning bolts is part of this overall strategy.
• Priest
  Disc priests have always had the schizophrenic Penance which contextually heals or damages based on who the spell's target is. Now Holy is getting a somewhat similar spell called Holy Word: Chastise that is an instant damage ability by default, but can convert into either Aspire, Serenity, or Sanctuary, based on the Chakra state that you are in. The mechanic sounds confusing, and potentially a nightmare for keybindings/macros, but the abilities themselves look really cool, so it's definitely something I'm looking forward to playing with. Beyond that, priests of both healing trees are getting a lot of talents that encourage smiting.
  • In the second tier of the Disc tree, priests get a talent Evangelism which looks like a pure dps talent until you see it's dependent Archangel which restores mana and gives you a short healing boost. This definitely fits in with the "dps during dead time" model nicely, and gives you another nice mana regen and healing boost cooldown.
  • The disc-only talent Atonement is probably one of my favorites of the new hybrid talents; you heal low health allies near you when you smite. Simple and kind of fun. Dovetails nicely with Evangelism.
  • I'm not as excited about the Holy tree's Trinity because it is useless unless you have enough downtime to smite three times in a row, and your haste boost is only good for the next 12 seconds. You really need to time this effect right to make it useful, whereas Archangel is much more adaptive. Still, this talent is a prereq for the new Surge of Light, which most people will probably want.
• Paladin
  The aforementioned long range of Enlightened Judgements is now actually becoming baseline for all Paladins, which is kind of a nice treat. In addition, they get some new and somewhat confusing new dps/healing hybrid talents.
  • Denounce looks basically like the old pre-wotlk Surge of Light. At 2 points it reduces the cost of exorcism by 75% at its base, and gives your holy shock the ability to proc fee exorcisms. Additionally, the free Exorcisms can crit, allowing you to proc other talents like Conviction for free.
  • As I said before, the old Enlightened Judgements range became baseline, and the new one causes your judgements to heal yourself. Healing yourself is pretty boring, but it's not a bad filler talent, given that you have to judge at least once a minute.
  I gotta be honest, a lot of these changes confuse me, because I've never really raid healed on my holy paladin. I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut.
• Druid
  Druids, most dramatically, actually could only cast restoration spells in tree form in the past. Now not only can they cast all their Balance spells in tree form, but they even get a bonus to Wrath while in Tree form. Additionally, there is a new talent that encourages dps.
  • Fury of Stormrage makes Wrath FREE and allows Wrath to proc instant Starfires. While this seems like a strange mechanic for healing, any free spells are awesome. Not only does your mana regen continue as in out of combat, but I would assume that these free spells can still proc talents and abilities like Omen of Clarity. Anyway, this talent is a prereq for Malfurion's Gift, so I think all Resto druids will be picking this up anyways. Enjoy it you guys.

So as a whole, I'm intrigued by the hybrid aspect of these talents, and there are some of them that I think work really well without interfering in the primary role that healers signed up for. Obviously these will all be tweaked and edited and modified before cata goes live, but it's definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.

Cataclysm Class Preview: Shaman

Saw these notes on MMO Champ today. Just going to break down the resto changes:

• Healing Wave will be split into two direct heals, a larger nuke heal called "Greater Healing Wave", and a medium heal with the current name.
  Not sure how I feel about this. I really am skeptical that they'll be able to make 3 levels of heals individually viable, but we'll see. With the larger health pools they've promised in Cataclysm, I can see how finer granularity could potentially be necessary
• Unleash Weapon Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable. Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman's next healing spell by 20%.
  Umm, cool ability on a short cooldown, gives us another instant heal
• Healing Rain An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it. There is no limit to the number of players who can potentially be affected; however, there are diminishing returns when healing a large number of targets, much like the diminishing returns associated with AoE damage spells. This should give Restoration shaman another healing tool that improves their group-healing and heal-over-time capabilities. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.
  VERY NICE. Kind of like a wild growth/tranquility spell. As the only heal with no limit of targets Could be crazy OP in 25 man situations. Gotta wait on numbers to see this one
• Spiritwalker's Grace When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.
  A really nice buff that will give us some great mobility on a cooldown.
• Dispeling Shaman will be able to remove magic defensively and offensively, and remove curses. Cleansing totem will be removed from the game.
  I'm a little disappointed with the dispel changes, but they are so closely tied to encounter mechanics, we'll have to see how those look
• Spirit Link The idea is that you will be able to link targets together so they share damage. When we had previously tried to implement Spirit Link, it was hard to balance and a little confusing. However, we really liked the concept -- and so did players -- so we are trying to bring it back.
  This could be very interesting, but I do remember when they tried it at 70 and couldn't get it to balance right
• Mastery Our passive talent tree bonuses are Healing, Meditation, and Deep Healing (increased healing to players at low health).
  No surprises here- I think these are going to be the boilerplate masteries for all healers

Looks like some really exciting changes coming up for Shaman. It looks like devs are addressing our issues with mobility and group healing, and have some good ideas for new mechanics to make cataclysm interesting. Can't wait to hear more!

First dance with the Lich King!

So, just yesterday I was fretting on another shaman blog that I feared we had hit a wall with Sindragosa. I don't know if it was the new 10% ICC buff, or just improved raid coordination, but we got her down in just 3 tries last night!

We got to take a peek at the Lich King encounter, which incorporates some unique encounter mechanics, feels dynamic and fun, and has an epic feel to it. I like that his fight seems to incorporate little elements of other WOTLK fights: his Necrotic Plague ability is kind of similar to Rotface's Mutated Infection; healing up a raid after an Infest is similar to healing a target of Lord Jaraxxus's Incinerate Flesh (In fact, I'm thinking of trying to fix up my broken GridStatusRaidDebuff so I can actually make sure the raid is getting Infest taken off).

We got in about 10 attempts last night, and were comfortably getting him into phase 2. Though we're not going to have any more raids this week due to the Easter break, I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get a hang of those Defiles down, and I'm hoping to see Phase 3 next time I'm in there.

From a resto shaman perspective, I found the healing intense. It's not constant AOE like BQL or Sindragosa, but instead it's sudden bursts of intense raid healing. Maybe it's because it was my first night on the encounter, and maybe I was a little paranoid, and overhealing a bit, but I found myself burning through mana like crazy. I am gonna try to set up my shaman_hep parse for my log to just look at the LK encounter, but as it's such an intense fight, and so much longer than the other ICC encounters, I am thinking I'm going to have to rethink my stat weights and trinket choices for that fight, and I may go back to the mana restore meta gem.

So excited to finally get a crack at this guy!

Is mp5 irrelevant on progression fights?

I've run into some very strange gearing issues lately. The main problem for me is that the value of mp5 fluctuates wildly from fight to fight. The main reason is that for most of the progression fights, there is either so much raid damage that our Water Shield makes gearing for mp5 on these fights completely inefficient (Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa), or there are mechanics that make mp5 irrelevant (Valithria).

To give you an idea, Water Shield procs every 2 seconds on Blood Queen, which combined with Improved Water Shield gave me about 540 mp5. On Sindragosa, Frost Aura causes Water Shield to proc every 3 seconds, and combined with the forced throttling of Unchained Magic, I never need my mana tide on either of these fights unless I die unexpectedly. Some shaman will carry multiple sets for different fights, and for these fights would opt out of mp5 entirely; I'm too lazy to gem and balance multiple sets myself, but I have to figure that if I'm going to min-max for any fight, it should be the hard progression fights, right?

In my combat log parse last night, my Insightful Earthsiege Diamond got a distressingly low HEP value of about 40 HEP. While most shaman agree that The Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond is the best choice when you have double solace, I'm thinking of switching to this even though I don't even have those. In addition to gaining the crit heal effect, I will be gaining a little haste by replacing the one mp5 gem I have to meet my blue gem requirement with a yellow haste gem.

So I think I'm going to start moving away from mp5 entirely, starting with my meta gem, and then replacing my boot enchant with Tuskarr's Vitality (which I should have done a long time ago). I'm hoping it's not going to be super painful when my guild gets to heroic modes, for fights that won't have these contstant damage mechanics, but I guess we'll see.

Back to the Chain of Healing Bloggers

Jessabelle is revisiting the meme that riveted the healing blog world, and asking past participants to revisit their answers with a few questions, to see how our opinions of our class have changed, both with experience, and with the content that has been released since then.

My original answers are here, for reference.

1. Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringeworthiness.

Hmm, I think when I look back on past-Zigi, I think "geez, you and Chain Heal should get a room already". Sure it's a great spell still, and probably still class-defining, but it was also made nearly unusable in many of the fights of the first wing of ICC. Spreading out on fights like Saurfang meant that your CH would often hit only one target, making it useless. In general, you're going to be spread out on other fights like Blood Princes, Failboat, and Marrowgar too. It's useless on Valithria of course, who isn't in your raid so won't get hit by it. It's still amazing on fights like Festergut and Blood Queen, but it certainly has struck out on a lot of ICC fights for me. This is especially painful as my totem and glyph are just wasted on these fights by association, but I'm too cheap to replace them for just those fights.

2. Has your class's healing improved in the area you identified as its weakest?
I identified mana usage as the biggest weakness, and when we were just beginning TOC I was living on my mana tide and potions. My gear has gotten a lot better since then, and there is a lot more raid damage (HELLOOO Blood Queen) giving me nearly limitless mana from my water shield.

What I would identify as our biggest weakness now is our lack of mobile healing. We have one spell to cast while moving (and don't get me wrong, I want to have Riptide's babies\), so when Riptide is on cooldown and you need to run off a nasty debuff, then you're kinda not doing anything for 6 seconds, eh?

3. Have you changed your "least favoured class to heal with"?
I selfishly said holy priests, because they don't offer any buffs for me personally that a disc priest doesn't provide. I like holy priests a lot more since a lot of them now take the Glyph of Guardian Spirit, which is an amazing talent. I have set foot in a few more 25 man raids, and I do realize now that it is a headache to have more than one disc priest, as they're constantly weakened-soul-blocking each other, without careful coordination.

4. Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?
I thought they were really informative. I didn't know a lot about druid healers, to be honest, and the thoughtfulness and complexitiy of their decision making processes for raid healing go into way more depth than resto shamans do.

As for my class, Resto Shammies had the lowest participation out of all the healing classes :(, which is unsurprising as resto shammies are the lowest represented healing class on the armory. I like the perspective of the other resto shammies, although most of them are 25 man healers, for which I'm not there. My favorite was probably Chayah, who if you're a shammy you're probably already familiar with from their amazing ZAP! spreadsheet.

5. If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?
Like I mentioned, Chayah has an interesting perspective. Maybe it's cause of his dps background, but I liked his idea that mana at the end of a fight is useless. I don't really switch up my gear from fight to fight, but recently I have considered building different sets for different fights.

6. What tools/resources or information do you think you would need to improve as a healer and how could that help the community at large?
I'm going to echo Miss, and mention the lack of resto shammy healing blogs. I'd like to give a shout out to Rul, who I've recently added to my blogroll, who not only has great shaman healing ideas, but ALSO is in a 10-man strict guild, adding a little extra flavor.

7. What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?
I complained that I probably refreshed Riptide too early, but now with my Tier 10 2-piece set bonus, that's a FEATURE, not a BUG!

8. What did you list as your favorite healing spell and your least used healing spell for your class? Are these answers still true? If they have changed, what caused the change (i.e. patch fix, different healing environment, etc)?
Hmm, I did say Chain Heal back then, but like I said earlier, that has become much more situational in ICC. I gotta say with the new nummy set bonus, it's Riptide hands down. I've never been a fan of 6 second cooldowns; in fact I think I really stopped playing my Holy Priest over one, but with Riptide, it makes sense to me, somehow. Just a juicy spell with all sorts of awesome things that happen after you cast it.

Updating Solarian Macros on Deathwhisper for the Lazy Shaman?

So back in my day when we had to walk up the hills in outlands both ways to get to school or something there was a boss in Tempest Keep called High Astromancer Solarian. During one of her phases, the only unavoidable damage came from a randomly targeted arcane missles. Healers that were assigned to that damage would target her and use a macro like

/cast [help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Lesser Healing Wave

Now, Lady Deathwhisper is not a hard healing fight, and the majority of damage probably comes from the empowered adds and the Death and Decay. Still, I think tonight when my guild does her, I'm going to try using a macro like the Solarian macro to heal the random damage (when there's no other major death and decay or add damage to heal). I think I'm going to try:

/castsequence [help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Riptide, Lesser Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave

So I don't think it's that big a deal actually (and I'll probably have to insert some filler heals to get over the riptide cooldown), but that fight is so boring to heal in the first phase I feel like tweaking my macro mid fight may give me something to do tonight ;). I'll let you know how it works out.

Is this melee trinket Best-In-Slot for my resto shaman?

Two posts on ElitistJerks recently about the Herkuml War Token made me do a doubletake. Because of the 153 passive haste rating on the trinket (despite the completely wasted attack power proc), this trinket is still a really good throughput trinket for a resto shaman-- due to our voracious hunger for haste. In fact, a quick glance at my lootrank would actually indicate that for the content I am doing (non-25 man), this trinket is actually Best-in-slot for my HEP calculations! (Note that lootrank will show Muradin's Spyglass higher because it can't distinguish between healing and dmg procs). Is this correct? Should I really be spending Emblems of Frost on a melee trinket instead of a healing one? Perhaps.

Up until patch 3.1, melee and casting haste ratings were completely different. When they merged them at first, it seemed like a nice way to simplify stats. However, .2 patches later, I think we are seeing that this stat is scaling so differently for melee and casters that we are seeing odd phenomena like this trinket. Consider that for a melee cast (combat rogue) for example, haste is maybe 4th or 5th in their stat priorities. For a caster, including both my resto and elemental specs, haste is far and away the best stat I can stack, and only reaches diminishing returns for a resto shaman at ludicrously high numbers.

It's still very early into Icecrown Citadel- so far, the devs have not made mana regen a priority stat for healers like they had claimed to. Perhaps later wings will prove more challenging, mana management wise. For now though, mana regen trinkets like the Purified Lunar Dust are just going to pale in comparison to throughput trinkets for cutting-edge content.

So which troll shaman has two thumbs and may be sporting a melee trinket in a few weeks? This guy.

Updated Emblem of Frost Pull List

So yesterday I explained why I'm only going for 2 pieces of T10 at this time, and that I generally value the bonus around 150 HEP.

Looking at the actual itemization, I'm going to go for the shoulders and the head. Basically, the handguards and the legguards, having 0 haste on them, are actually overall downgrades for me from my current gear. The chest is a nice upgrade, but not nearly as nice as the cloth chestpiece purchasable from Emblem of Frost as well.

So I'm going to plug in the 2 pieces of tier that I want to buy, plus the craftable leatherworking patterns (Frozen Saronite can be bought for 23 Emblems of Frost each), and update the pull list I made about a week ago. In the meantime I've run new HEP numbers based on a night of ICC healing. You can see the new rankings here.
The tier pieces are augmented by half of the projected HEP bonus from the set, so 62 each. In addition, because the trinket and the totem are so hard to model, and I'm not really that excited about either, I'm probably going to hold off on even attempting to acquire them until I see some real numbers on them. I've also left on the non Emblem gear that is available in Lower Spire before the next content expansion (which is only in like 3 weeks, so it's not really that long).

>

Updated Emblem of Frost Pull List

Best Upgrade	HEP	Acquired by?	Cost	HEP per Badge	Current	HEP
Frost Witch's Spaulders	123.3	Emblem of Frost	60	1.067666667	Pauldrons of the Spirit Walker	59.24
Frost Witch's Headpiece	142.18	Emblem of Frost	95	0.758315789	Helm of the Spirit Shock	70.14
Waistband of Despair	70.31	Emblem of Frost	60	0.391166667	Darkspear Ritual Binding	46.84
Drape of the Violet Tower	42.42	Emblem of Frost	50	0.2622	Shawl of the Caretaker	29.31
Meteor Chaser's Raiment	96.12	Emblem of Frost	95	0.259052632	Thrall's Tunic of Conquest	71.51
Earthsoul Boots	72.99	Leatherworking	115	0.250956522	Sabatons of Tortured Space	44.13
Blizzard Keeper's Mitts	70.01	Emblem of Frost	60	0.242833333	Thrall's Handguards of Triumph	55.44
Lightning-Infused Leggings	96.64	Leatherworking	184	0.121467391	Leggings of Concealed Hatred	74.29
Purified Lunar Dust		Emblem of Frost	60	N/A
Totem of Surging Seas		Emblem of Frost	30	N/A	Totem of Calming Tides
Hammer of Purified Flame	127.23	ICC5 Drop/Quest
Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom	51.21	Rep			Ashen Band of Wisdom	41.13
Pride of the Kor'kron	48.09	TOGC10			Pulsing Spellshield	43.01
Soulcleave Pendant	45.68	10N Drop			Arcane Loops of Anger	36.31
Coldwraith Bracers	44.22	Marrowgar-10N Drop			Cuffs of the Shadow Ascendant	29.29
Signet of Putrefaction	41.13	Marrowgar-10N Drop			Band of the Invoker	34.7
Sliver of Pure Ice		Marrowgar-10N Drop

So that's why I'm getting the pretty deer shoulders first. MATHS MADE ME!

[Update: Thanks, Gritz! Yeah I meant T10, and I messed up on my spreadsheet and used an old HEP value I had from older haste valuations, of 125 for the HEP bonus.]

Patch 3.3 after 1 week

Here's a big bag of my impressions of patch 3.3 after the first week.

Shaman changes

Not many changes for Resto, but the hot sexiness for Elemental came in the form of Fire Nova. Even when I'm healing instances, I find myself watching this cooldown and hitting it on big trash packs if no one is really in need of a heal. LOTS of fun. It's like when I spam Holy Nova for easy 5 mans on my priest. I can see it being a headache to keep up on big aoe raid pulls, as you actually have to get right into the cleave zone and drop a fire totem to get to use it, but so far I find it to be a really nice addition to the shaman arsenal. I haven't had time to tweak my elemental gear/spec (and I should, because I end up 5-manning as dps a lot), but I think my new spec may include the talent and glyph for fire nova, just because it's fun.

LFM/Random

So I think everyone is probably in agreement that the darling of patch 3.3 is not actually Icecrown Citadel, but the entirely revamped cross-realm LFG system. It is really refreshing to be able to sit down at your computer, and within 5 minutes of logging in and checking auctions, you're suddenly good to go for exactly the instance you need, or the random heroic, with pretty much no hassle.

• Nobody talks! You just zone in and start thwacking bosses and it's all good. Once or twice on the new instances I've stopped the tank and made sure that they knew a boss strat before charging in all crazy-like, but for the most part, silence is golden. And that's actually fine.


• People are surprisingly nice! I hope this lasts. The other nice our tank accidentally hit need on a boe green, and then fell over himself apologizing and made me take it.


• The one or two bad apples don't ruin it. I've had the odd unenchanted, ungemmed ret pally pulling 400 dps and generally being a noob, but the Luck of the Draw buff goes a ways in letting the other people compensate for it. When you're well geared guildie warlock is raking down 6k dps on trash packs, you can ignore the non-dpsing pally noob.


• Versatility is key! After the first day of waiting around for a while for a LFM random, a guildie switched his fury warrior to fury/prot so he could get in pugs faster, and discovered that he LOVED tanking. Similarly, I was surprised to find that I'm getting into a surprising number of groups as dps when i select heal/dps on my shaman, and given the recent ele changes, I'm having a blast!

New Instances

The new 5-mans are really well done! They are visually striking, as is all of icecrown citadel. They're actually kind of challenging; you can't just faceroll and expect to collect loot. Like I said last time, I still find that first boss of Halls of Reflection to be a little too punishing as a healer who can't dispel magic, but it's nice to have a challenging 5-man for a change!

Loot

A new instance always brings new casually and hardcorely acquireable loot and this was no exception.

4 of my guildies already have Quel'Delar, or some derivative of it. I'll get there eventually...

I was surprised to see people are already selling Primordial Saronite, some for as low as 3500 gold!

So some people on my server farmed trash in ICC for the Ashen Verdict Rings and supposedly some of them already have the improved versions. It's pretty easy to acquire; Marrowgar's trash can be AOE'd down really easily. Maybe if I get some free time... we'll see.

Raiding

Only got one real night of progression raiding in, though I did get to go back and kill Maly on both my shaman and priest for emblems. On the one night we did in ICC, we got Marrowgar down after a little struggling on positioning issues and dps. Though our raid probably slightly undergeared for ICC, I think we'll be fine. We got in about 2 attempts on Deathwhisper, but then we had to cancel our other raiding night due to holiday party complications.

Blue reactions?

One of the most interesting meta-games that wow-enthusiasts like to play is reading too much into blue hotfixes and posts immediately following the patch. The ones that made me think a bit were:

Quote from Crygil

Recent In-Game Fixes - Decmeber 2009 - 12

• The chance for epic items to drop off trash mobs in the Frozen Halls 5 player dungeons has been reduced.


• The Ephemeral Snowflake trinket now has a very short cooldown to prevent it from restoring inappropriately large amounts of mana.

(Source)

I suppose this explains why I saw 3 Battered Hilts drop in the first 5-man I ran, and then I have only seen one since then. Le sigh.

The "inappropriately large amounts of mana" is what I had refered to a few posts back. Some druids were theorycrafting the mp5 value of this trinket to be over 400 mp5. Hehe, good stuff.

Quote from Bornakk

Recent In-Game Fixes - Decmeber 2009 - 12/14
Lord Marrowgar will now do significantly less melee damage in both the 10 player normal and 10 player heroic difficulty. (Source)

Given that we ended up going in with mostly iLvl 232 loot and we downed him after one serious night, and other bloggers were posting that they facerolled him, I was a little surprised to see this nerf so quickly. This certainly will make farming him easier, but I actually thought he was pretty decently tuned, and it was cool to have a tiny bit of a challenge on the first boss there.

Who gets your innervates?

Back when Innervate was spirit-based, you had basically 2 choices. You could give your innervate to a holy priest and let them go nutty with circle of healing (pre-nerf), or you could give it to an arcane mage and let them rack up the deeps. Now that innervate is based on the casting druid's base mana pool, any mana user (probably a healer) will benefit from it.

We got our first boss down in ICC10 last night, and I found myself getting all the innervates (from a resto and feral tank druid). Now, the funny thing is, I actually think my mana regen is pretty great right now compared to a while back. I got a usable mana regen trinket, and the new 3.3 gear has been mostly itemized for haste/mp5, so I've been able to pick up mp5 along with my delicious delicious haste.

Compared to the other healers, though, shaman have the fewest mana regen tricks. Other than mana tide totem (which affects all healers really), we live and die by our own mp5 and the mana we get back from critting a Improved Water Shield bubble. Pallies have Divine Plea/Divine Illumination, Priests have Shadowfiend/Hymn of Hope/Inner Focus, Druids just don't seem to have that bad mana usage, and our resto druid is glyphed so that her innervate gives her mana back too. Right now our mage is trying out a frost spec to see how the 3.3 changes affected him, so that's not really a valid option either.

So this shaman is sitting on mountains of mana, chain healing his ass off. Woo!

Playing with the new 5-man Healer Trinket!

When I finally got on to Borean Tundra last night, some guildies and I blew through the 3 new heroic 5-mans, and I got 3 upgrades! Also, 3 Battered Hilts dropped, but I didn't roll on them because I had already gotten some phat loots, and since they were dropping so readily I figure I'll get mine soon enough.

One very interesting upgrade I got was the new trinket, the Ephemeral Snowflake. In addition to a kickass on-use haste proc, it also gives you back 11 mana every time one of your healing spells heals someone. This is incredibly interesting to me. What I've found from half an instance of testing is:

• It procs off heals from hots and directly applied spells. For shaman, this is Lesser Healing Wave, Healing Wave, Riptide (including its hots), Chain Heal (including jumps)


• It does not proc from passive heals, like Healing Stream Totem, Earth Shield, Ancestral Awakening, or Earthliving Weapon.


• The proc is maximized for multi-target spells and hots. Riptide can return up to 66 mana (88 if glyphed). Chain Heal can return 44 if glyphed.


• The proc does NOT happen on overhealing, so it will only shine in heavy raid damage situations where hots are not overhealing and your AOE heals are actively healing all of their targets.

On Elitist Jerks, they've modeled it to be about 147 mp5 in ideal Chain Heal spam situations, assuming 2 riptides rolling. Obviously this would only be sustained by constant damage to be healed, and assumes perfect Chain Heal jumps and Riptide target selection. It's still not as good as either of the Solace of the Fallen trinkets from TOTGC, but it is very easy to acquire, and a lot of fun. And I just love weird trinkets.

I am dying to get it on my priest, to see if it procs on every target of CoH, every target of PoH, AND the PoH glyph hot? I can't imagine it does for that last one because that would be insane, but it's not like I really have mana probs on my priest anyway?

Speaking of which, the new 5-mans were really fun, but also REALLY healing intensive. Even with a pure guild run, we had some wipes on some bosses in there. The hardest one for me was the first boss in the Halls of Reflection, Falric. He has a really nasty AOE horrify that will do 10,000 shadow damage to all party members, and can be amplified by various debuffs he puts on you; he also has a magic debuff that can stun you if not removed in time. Like Violet Hold, if you wipe on this boss, you have to reclear the waves of trash up to him, which is non-trivial. The packs spawn all around the room and have a lot of caster mobs that have to be LoS'd to stick to your tank.

Anyway, despite some server trouble, yesterday night was great fun. I didn't get to play with the random heroic tool yet, but my guildies all said it was pleasant and easy to use. So far, 3.3 wins!

The fight where HPS is DPS

Hehe... Right after I soft-whined that healing becomes less fun as the raid gets more gear, I read about this new fight that just got tested on the PTR: Valithria Dreamwalker. This fight is backwards, in that you find an NPC that is at 50%, and your raid's healers have to heal that NPC before adds can take her down. They do a lot of nasty healing mortal-strike stacking debuffs too, so the adds have to be managed carefully.

Basically, they turn the tables- in normal fights, the dpsers do the measurable work while healers support them by keeping damage off them and healing them through the unavoidable damage. In this fight it's now up to the healers to get an NPC from 50% to 100% health, while the dpsers take on a support role, and manage the adds to let you do your job.

And the achievement for killing her quickly? Healbot.

I love blizz sometimes. Cannot WAIT to see this fight on live! I think I'll make a macro "/ra cna some1 link healing meterz plz?". Yep, I'm gonna be THAT GUY.

-Zigi

Healing is most fun when everyone around you is dying

OK, this is going to start off a little unfocused, but I kind of want to make a big generalization based on some somewhat unrelated items I've been thinking about lately

• One thing I love about the healing blogs is there is a real sense of dialogue and community between them; Jessabelle's questionaire being a recent example (and not a meme). The topic of "making healing fun" has come up a lot recently, and I've said in general that I enjoy healing and would probably be bored dpsing in endgame.
  
  That being said, the raids I'm in are currently on a "farm" state of the instances we can comfortably clear, while we gear up for the achievements and heroics that are slightly out of our grasp.
  
• Blizzard recently announced that the new patch will introduce a debuff in Icecrown Citadel that will reduce your tank's dodge chance. It is basically Sunwell Radiance 2.0.
  
  
  Quote from Blizzard staff

  
  

  Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!
  For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.
  
  Why are we doing this?
  
  The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.
  
  We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again. (Source)
  
  I think in general people are pissed about this because it was considered a hack back in BC, and it's a hack now; Blizzard planned gear itemization wrong, and now tanks overgear content. That being said; I agree that at current levels of tank avoidance, they would basically have to make the mobs deal so much damage that they would 2-shot a tank if it lands, or else the tanking and healing would be super boring.

So where I'm going with this is; when you first encounter new content, tanking and healing is very dynamic and exciting. However, once everyone in the fight knows the encounter really well, is avoiding the predictable damage and interrupting the spells and moving out of fire, healing becomes really easy. Similarly, tanking becomes boring when you have enough stam and avoidance to survive the bosses super power move without needing to use cooldowns.

Better gear for dps means bigger numbers and more procs; better gear for tanks means less need to manage cooldowns efficiently; better gear for healers means more overhealing and standing around. As my raid members have gotten better at avoiding stray damage and my tanks have gotten better at mitigating the boss's damage; I find more and more that I am spending fight time dpsing and arranging my bags.

This is just an observation, I don't really know what the game designers could do to make it so healing and tanking stays interesting as you gear up and have the encounters memorized. Any ideas?

-Zigi

Heal Naked: Healing with the Stock UI?

In a previous post I mentioned casually that NO raiding healer uses the stock UI, and of course that was a complete overstatement, because I'm sure there are plenty that do, and do it well. I even got smacked down in a comment for it.

So I have been playing around a bit on the PTR, and was asked to come try healing some 10 man ICC PTR bosses, and as I was going through the dreaded initial UI set up for my Shaman, I thought I'd itemize what I consider to be the barebones essential healing mods for me, and considered what the alternatives are if you want to just use the stock UI.

• SmartBuff
  
  
  Description: SmartBuff provides a little icon and a text warning if you are missing any buffs, or if people in your party are missing buffs that you can provide. This is highly configurable, and has different configurations based on your talent spec, and whether or not you are soloing, instancing, pvping, or raiding. When you are out of combat, you can automatically apply these buffs by clicking a button, or even have it set to when you scroll in and out.
  Use: This was much more of a necessity when I played a level 70 disc/holy priest and was responsible for applying different buffs to 5 different parties every time we wiped. Now as a shaman, I just use it to make sure my Water Shield is up and my weapon imbue is applied before going into any fight.
  Necessity Level: Low
  Other Mods: I don't really know of other mods that duplicate this functionality.
  Stock UI Alternative: This one isn't so bad for a shaman to do without addons. I can easily monitor my own buffs via the default buff tracking UI. It's much more of a headache for priests, though.
• Grid
  
  
  
  Description: Grid is a compact raid unit frames mod that optimizes space by filtering down to only buffs and status indicators that you care about.
  Use: On my shaman, I have it optimized for notifying me about health and debuffs that I can dispel.
  Necessity Level: High. The default raid frames are not as I claimed "impossible" to fit onto your screen, but in a 25-man raid, it's pretty much going to be a mess.
  Other Mods: Vuhdo, Healbot.
  Stock UI Alternative: Pull your raid frames out from your raid tab onto your screen. In order to fit a lot of these in a 25 man situation, you should scale them down a lot. As for the debuff filtering... it's not pretty.
  
• Clique
  
  
  
  Description: Clique allows you to bind spell casts to chorded mouse-clicks on a unit frame, rather than pressing a keystroke.
  Use: This allows me to fit a number of healing and dispelling spells into mouse click combos. For example, I can bind Cure Toxins to shift-left click.
  Necessity Level: Medium/High.
  Other Mods: Vuhdo, Healbot mentioned earlier have the same functionality, bundled in.
  Stock UI Alternative: Kae from Dreambound swears by "mouseover macros" as an alternative to Clique, which provide the same level of reactiveness, without needing to diverge from the stock UI. So as an alternative to the clique binding I mentioned above, you could make a macro:
  

  /cast [target=mouseover] Cure Toxins
  

  And bind that to a key, like "2". Then instead of shift clicking a unit frame, you can mouseover the unit frame and hit your "2" key to have the same effect. I think this is a very reasonable alternative, but it does take up macro and keybinding space.
  
• ForteXorcist
  
  
  
  Description: ForteXorcist a buff/debuff/cooldown timer mod. This was actually originally a warlock mod (as they have all these DoTs to track), but they've expanded it to be customizable and to work for all buffs and debuffs; I find it to be perfect for my shaman.
  Use: I use this for tracking the duration of my Riptide HoT on multiple targets, as well as my Earth Shield buff's charges on a tank.
  Necessity Level: Medium. Without this mod I would probably be wasting a lot of mana refreshing Riptide unnecessarily, or letting it fall off.
  Other Mods: SpellReminder is what I used for a long time on my priest, and I liked that as well.
  Stock UI Alternative: The default UI is really bad for tracking buff times on multiple targets.
  
• Power Auras
  
  
  
  Description: Power Auras provides a visual indicator based on highly configurable conditions, such as gaining a certain number of stacks of a debuff, or losing an important buff.
  Use: For my shaman, I use this to ensure I have 100% uptime on my Water Shield. In a heated battle where I'm taking damage, it's very easy to let that fall off, and if I don't pay attention, I'll suddenly be out of mana. I have Power Auras to have a giant red bubble pop up when my Water Shield is down to 1 charge or fewer. You can set up even more Power Auras based on other conditions, like missing your weapon imbue, or having full stacks of Tidal Waves. On my priest, I have this pop up when I get to max stacks of Serendipity, for example.
  Necessity Level: Low
  Other Mods: The shaman Mod Shields Up does exactly the case I mention in the Use Case, but it is not as configurable as Power Auras.
  Stock UI Alternative: Uhh, you gotta just watch the buff/debuff indicators in your upper right hand corner like a hawk, I guess.
  

So these are the mods I wouldn't raid without. I'm sure you can do it with the Stock UI, but one of the amazing things about WoW is the UI's expandability, and it's awesome to have such amazing and talented addon developers cranking out these awesome mods with healers in mind.

RE: Jessabelle's Healing Questionnaire

Jessabelle at Miss Medicina posted a Questionnaire with the intent of spreading knowledge between healing classes, and among the healing bloggers. The idea is you answer all the questions, and then "tag" another healing blogger that plays a different class.

In typical priest ethnocentrism, she calls it a "Circle of Healing Bloggers", when I'm pretty sure any impartial observer would agree that "Chain of Healing Bloggers" or "Totem of Healing Blogs" would be a far superior name... but I suppose the damage has been done ;)

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
  Zigi, Resto Shaman.


• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
  At the moment, I am primarily healing in 10-man raids.


• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
  Chain Heal, because it's spammable, looks cool, and is a good example of a spell that Blizzard has made useful ever since level 60, and is still a staple of shaman healing today


• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
  Hmm, Shaman really only have 5 healing spells in our arsenal (6 if you count the totem), so there are no spells that I never use, but based on my meters since 3.2, I rarely cast Lesser Healing Wave. With the changes to Tidal Waves and a high level of haste, a Healing Wave cast is usually only 2/10ths of a second slower than a Lesser Healing Wave. The only benefit of that spell is mana efficiency (from the improved crit), which has not been a problem for me recently. I still use it situationally to top off raid members when CH is totally inappropriate, but it is not the go-to spell it was before 3.2.


• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
  Our strength is very high throughput in both aoe and tank healing roles.


• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
  Our weakness is mana management, and scaling to 25 man raids.


• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
  I haven't done a ton of 25-mans, but having read some of the big-boy shaman blogs, and from my experiences in PUGs, I do feel that resto shaman are better suited to tank healing roles, with backup AOE. If a holy priest is not available, then a resto shaman is pretty good at the dedicated aoe role too.


• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
  I'm gonna second Jess here, and go with Disc priests. Their damage prevention buffs, passive talents, and spells, all make healing noticeably easier on everyone.


• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
  I'm going to answer this in an extremely selfish way and say Holy Priests. Keep in mind, that this is JUST in the context of this question. Obviously I love holy priests because I played one for 2 years, and they do amazing throughput healing, but in terms of buffing other people in the raid, holy priests actually provide no raid buffs that a disc priest can't provide as well. Sorry Jess :(


• What is your worst habit as a healer?
  Probably refreshing my HoT, Riptide when I don't have to, or even worse, Riptiding the tank and instantly Chain Healing it off instead of letting it tick a little bit. I definitely have to consciously think about it to get the full value of my Riptide, considering I have the set bonus and the glyph for it!


• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
  I have mentioned this in comments on Jess's blog in the past, but it's gotta be linking/asking for/bragging about healing meters. This is not to say I don't look at healing meters, or feel an irrational swell of pride if I top them, but I am also completely conscious of the fact that healing meters are misleading, incorrect, and can lead to bad healing habits. For one thing, disc priests are horribly represented on healing meters, as Blizz has provided no official way to track absorbs. If this caused all guilds to avoid disc priests, it would be a disaster!


• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
  At my niche yes; in 10 man raids, shaman shine. I do feel like we don't scale as well as any of the other healers into 25 man content, just because our AOE heal hits less than everyone else's; I know a lot of shaman feel like they get shoehorned into tank healing or sidelined, but right now I'm definitely enjoying my niche.


• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
  I think the most important metric for a healer is the ability to follow an assignment and keep those people you're assigned to alive. If there are no assignments, then my success criteria is no one dying.


• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
  I think that people who played WoW prior to WOTLK know shaman as AOE raid healers, and honestly, prior to playing one myself, that's all I thought they were good for too. However I was surprised at 80 to find that we're probably comparatively better at tank healing than raid healing.


• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
  I think mana management can be tough- especially coming from other classes. We only have one "trick" to get back mana, our totem, as opposed to Priests (Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope, Inner Focus). Keeping up 100% uptime on Water Shield is ESSENTIAL. Get a mod for that.


• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
  My overheal is between 20 and 30% usually depending on the spell, which I think is probably a little high, but not the worst I've seen. I'm pretty happy with my healing output. If anything the criticism would be what I mentioned before- I probably use Healing Wave on some occasions that Lesser Healing Wave would be the right spell.


• Haste or Crit and why?
  HASTE! All shaman now live and die for haste; chain heal spam is AGONIZINGLY SLOW if you don't have enough of it. NOM NOM HASTE.


• What healing class do you feel you understand least?
  Well the only class that I have not healed at 80 on is a resto druid, so definitely that. They just have so many spells that seem very similar in function: Lifebloom and Rejuv; Nourish and Healing Touch and Regrowth.


• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
  I use Clique/Grid for healing, ForteExorcist for tracking my hots and buffs, and Power Auras to let me know when my shield or weapon imbue has fallen off.
  
  I use a TON of macros, but mostly just things like binding my two big cooldowns: Nature's Swiftness and Tidal Force into one giant OSHIT button.
  
  The other one I like, and this is just to save space on my bar, is I have a macro that casts Stoneclaw Totem if I'm in combat, or my Resurrection spell if I'm out of combat. The idea is I can't cast Res out of combat, and I'd never need Stoneclaw out of it.


• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
  Right now Shaman are stacking haste to the sky, and I'm not different. I do feel that when newer content comes out in 3.3 I may move back toward a more balanced approach with mana regen, if the fights are long.

So for choosing new bloggers to add to this questionaire, I would normally pick
BobTurkey or Healing Way, but I think Bob is on vacation, and Llyre is a Shaman so I can't pick that, so I'm going to go with a blog that I just discovered recently because of their awesome illustrated boss guides: Kae from Dreambound!

-Zigi

RE: Healing and fun

Llyra from the Healing Way blog is starting a series of posts on Healing and fun from the perspective of WoW development. I thought there were a lot of interesting points which I wanted to give my perspective on.

Can healer's enjoy solo-ing? With dual-spec, does this even matter anymore?
So from 70-80 I actually ended up preferring a holy/disc leveling spec for my Priest rather than Shadow. This is mostly because my spirit levels were so high from my raiding 70 gear, that any build with Spirit Tap would have zero downtime, and my spellpower was high enough that mobs would never live long enough for the very long dots to tick to their full extent. In contrast, holy has a spammable damage-up-front spell, and can spec to actually make this damage totally fine for solo content.

With the advent of dual-specs, Llyra discards the idea that this will make hardcore raiders pick a dps spec as a second spec, as they can now min/max even further. While this is totally true for Priests, and I actually do have 2 healing specs on my priest even though I am not a hardcore raider; I don't think this is very true for the other healing classes. I'm not even sure what talent points I would want that I'm not already getting on my Shaman. Maaybe Healing Focus. I've already told you why I don't like Improved Reincarnation. Other than Priests, who have two very different healing trees, the other healing classes are viable in their cookie cutter specs.

How can Blizzard make healing more fun?
Obviously I don't know if this applies to me- I played a DPS class (Rogue) for about a year and got pretty bored, after which I leveled my Priest and that became my main for the next 2 years. I really don't think I'd ever consider playing as my main any class that doesn't at least have the capacity to heal on it. While I do really enjoy the occasions that I get to DPS in my ele spec for a 5-man or for a specific boss where we scale down our healers, it's more of a vacation than anything else; I don't think I'd be happy dpsing every day. DPSing just doesn't seem dynamic enough for me, while healing forces you to constantly be reacting.

That being said, I think the biggest barrier to entry for healers, is that it really is almost unimaginable to be a raid healer without mods. The default user interface just doesn't cut it. It doesn't normally bother me, but I was trying to make a character on the PTR, and I didn't want to migrate all my mods. I found that I had no problems dpsing things there, but I just didn't want to deal with the default UI when it came to healing. I'm sure I could approximate the functions of Grid/Clique (or Vuhdo or Healbot) with the default unit frames and mouseover macros, but it wouldn't be elegant, and it would be pretty miserable overall.

Blizzard has got to be aware that their default unit frames aren't adequate. This would be fantastic if they addressed it some way. In general, I'm having fun as it is though ;)

-Zigi

Making Gear Choices on a Resto Shaman

Depending on if you're shooting for 10 or 25 man content, or if you are intending to maximize your raid healing or tank healing potential, your spell selection will change, and consequently, your stat priorities should change as well. This can make forum or blog discussion on optimal shaman gearing very difficult, as two different resto shaman could have wildly different stat priorities, and neither would be necessarily incorrect.

Fortunately, the resto shaman community has some amazing tools at their disposal to evaluate and optimize your gear, glyphs, and totems. I'm going to go over how I would use these tools to evaluate a potential gear upgrade. In this case, I am deciding whether or not I should break my Tier 9 set bonus for a shoulder piece that has better stats.

1. Get a combat log
   I suggest the mod LoggerHead, which you can set to automatically toggle logging based on your location.
   
   Then, pick a fight or set of fights you think represents your regular healing rotation pretty well. Obviously I'd avoid General Vezax, or any fight where you change your role. If you DPS on Hodir, for example, turn off logging for that fight.
   
   In this case, I logged our guild's first attempts on Heroic 10-man Northrend Beasts this past Wednesday.
   


2. Download, configure, and run shaman_hep
   shaman_hep is a tool developed by an awesome guy named stassart. He's a frequent poster on ElitistJerks, and keeps up with the latest theorycrafting for resto shaman (you can PM him or give feedback in a dedicated EJ thread here). He developed this tool that parses your combat log, and based on your configuration, it spits out some important information and analysis that you can use to improve your glyph selection, talents, and gear, based on your actual playstyle. In short, it's awesomesauce.
   
   Unlike other WoW tools, it doesn't run as a mod in game, but it's a perl script that you run offline on your combat log. The configuration is fairly straightforward. If you have the cookie cutter resto shaman spec, you can assume that it pretty much works out of the box, you just have to put your name in the configuration (this is important because you could have several shaman in the raid, which would mess up the stat collection). You should also look through the configuration and make sure that the buffs and glyphs match your set up. If you're curious, I've uploaded the config I used here.
   
   After you've done that, you can run it at the command line. It will work on Windows, Mac, or even Linux.
   


3. Interpreting the output
   So the output can be kind of overwhelming- I've posted the output from my Wednesday parse here- but all you care about is the stuff at the end really, so scroll down to the bottom.
   
   What shaman_hep does is it has taken into account every talent, glyph, certain totems, and stats and normalized them in terms of spellpower.
   
   So since I am evaluating a shoulder upgrade relative to a set bonus, the two important parts to me are:
   
   
   Set Bonus Report:
   
   Tier 9 2-piece:
   Effective: 74738 (2.81%), Total: 141278 (3.52%)
   Combat Effective: 74343 (2.84%), Total: 127720 (3.28%)
   Combat EHPS: 104.9594
   HEP: 167.8772
   Tier 9 4-piece:
   Chain Heal:
   Non-crit Effective: 346244, Count: 85
   Crit Effective: 423183, Count: 82
   Number of crits from T9 4-piece: 8
   Increased average effective per crit: 1087
   T9 4-piece Combat Effective: 9079
   Combat EHPS: 12.8179
   HPS HEP: 20.5016
   Combat extra mana: 78
   Combat MP5: 0.5538, Mana HEP: 0.6510
   HEP: 21.1526
   
   
   
   and
   
   
   Stat relationships:
   
   Shaman Healing Equivalency Points:
   1 SP = 1
   1 mp5 = 1.1755 (calculated)
   1 mana = 0.0330
   1 Haste rating = 2.2574
   1 Crit rating = 1.0384
   1 INT = 1.2802 (actual)
   1 INT = 1.1421 (max theoretical)
   
   
   
   To break down these, what it is saying is that 1 point of crit is worth 1.0384 spellpower based on my playstyle. You will notice that the haste value is very high. While this is probably inflated because of the fight I chose, in general it is in line with how most shaman are gearing these days (I believe most shaman are using 1.8 as a benchmark for haste).
   
   In comparison, the tier 9 4-piece set bonus is worth about 21.2 healing. So, if I can find a shoulder that gives me that much healing, or equivalent stats, I should break my set bonus.
   


4. Plug these stats into lootrank
   shaman_hep even gives you a nice pre-made lootrank URL you can use!
   
   
   
   Lootrank:
   Overall:
   http://www.lootrank.com/wr.asp?Cla=64&Art=2&Max=20&Gem=4&mh=2.2574&mp5=1.1755&mcr=1.0384&spd=1&Int=1.2802&Sta=0.1000&Arm=0.0100&Sckm=86.6325&Ver=6
   
   
   
   Once in lootrank, I can enter my own name and server, and then I scroll down to the shoulders section to see if the shoulders I'm looking at (the non-heroic Pauldrons of the Spirit Walker) are worth more than the set bonus.
   
   
   
   At +16.06 points, the shoulders are not quite good enough to break my set bonus yet. Still, I'll hold on to them, and if I get maybe a leg upgrade, I will swap out my set for those.
   

Whew, that was a lot of text.

-Zigi

Healing Vezax makes me nostalgic

So yeah, our guild is backwards and we did TOC before Ulduar. What of it?

Anyway, last night I healed General Vezax for the first time, and even though it was so frustrating I wanted to die, it actually gave me super flashbacks. Not to any other fight in particular, but rather to back when I was an undergeared priest stepping into Karazhan in level 65 blues.

I'm so used to pre-emptively overhealing tanks and not really having mana problems with all my nifty procs and meta gems and totems and potions. Even though Vezax is clunkily designed in terms of how it makes most healers' itemization completely wrong, it does make you think really carefully about what spells you can afford to cast, in a way I haven't thought in a long time, since those days when I was jump-casting downranked greater heals on Curator.

We didn't get Yogg down last night, but it felt so good to be able to heal people frivoulously at that point that I just didn't care.