Over the past few weeks, much to my dismay, I've been a consistent restoration shaman. I've come across 2 points during this time:
Haste is soooo ungodly amazing, and our spells are pretty much set up so we can have a full on healing rotation that, if we stick to it, will make us even more amazing.
How to be a good shaman healer?
Bind every button on your keyboard to chain heal, and face roll. No joke. I can keep up with most everyone this way.
How to be a GREAT shaman healer?
Riptide and chain heal one other person. Then for the next two casts,
thanks to this talent, your healing wave(long heal) is made shorter in cast time, and 4% more powerful than our lesser healing wave(short heal), or increases the crit chance of lesser healing wave by 25%.
Resto shamans have a rotation.
Granted, yes, healing is situational. But seeing this in full light, its hard to ignore the utility of it.
Right now with my totems my chain heal is at a 1.85 second cast, along with my healing wave. I pop a chain heal out, and the healing wave goes down to 1.28 second cast, with my lesser healing wave leading at somewhere around 1 second.
Tell me, healers... Would you rather spam 1 button every GCD, or would you like to hit 3 targets, then quickly hit 2 targets who really need it?
Now take that, combine it with
this talent and you get 30% of what you healed on the raid member with the lowest health, which cannot proc off of chain heal. Not only are you A) pumping out more heals quicker, but you're B) healing multiple targets for more.
And to top it all off?
Improved Water Shield gives a 100% chance to consume a orb off of
Water Shield using healing wave and riptide crits, 60% from lesser healing wave, and 30% from chain heal crits. That means casting a 1.28 second cast versus a 1.85 second cast for 400 mana back on a crit 100% versus 30% of the time? I say healing wave because more heals done with lower cast time.
So yes, chain heal spam works, but really... are you going to ignore everything that I just said so you can faceroll?
All things considered? Ehancement is far superior than Restoration. Resto shamans are horrible, they suck for heals, they have no tactics, awkward to play, nobody likes them, and nobody should be one if enhancement is an option. *spits on restoration in his talent trees*
Ok, since gems were brought into question, I'll bring in a little bit of the numbers so you can kinda judge and make a call for yourself.
The numbers I am pulling from
this thread on mmo-champion, I'll put my commentary in
bold.
You first want to achieve a basic level of spell power, int and crit before you can stack any other stats.
Before you stack haste (or any other stat), a good balance is around 2000-2500 spell power, 30% crit, 18k mana and 250mp5 (including water shield).
These numbers are great benchmarks, and easily attainable by welfare epics. With the gear given to you from the get go, you should be going straight into endgame gemming.Crit
Crit is very important as it is our main source of mana through Improved Water Shield. It also provides the 10% physical damage reduction, which priests can also bring and it also procs Ancestral Awakening. If you are tank healing Ancestral Awakening is a great for a boost in HPS.
Crit is nice, but my personal playstyle leaves little(if any) room for gemming crit. I tend to think of it as a second because with the coming of Valrathia Dreamwalker and alot of the fights in ICC, you NEED to pump out more heals faster, as opposed to counting on crits to give you a boost in healing.Haste
Since tidal wave changes haste now affects all your spells greatly. Haste helps chain heal (you should be looking at a 1.8 chain heal with t8 set bonus). As lesser healing wave won’t be going under 1second cast, haste is allot more effective than in 3.1. It also shortens Healing Wave due to its long cast time. You should be stacking haste as far as you can until you start going oom in fights or unbalance your stats.
Haste is our bread and butter, so to speak. Our spells are amazing spells, at the cost of time. Chain heal and Healing wave are the same base cast time(2.5 seconds with no haste) and that is relativly long for our main heals. With Tidal Waves, you're looking at about 1.23 second cast time on Healing Wave, and around 1.8 second cast for CH all around. I strongly reccomend you figuring what you find more important, and gemming that way, and I would reccomend even stronger to go with haste.Haste soft cap
Now we are near the end of WOTLK many restoration shamans are nearing (or passed) the haste soft cap. The haste soft cap is 1269, this means that the GCD is at 1 second and all 1.5 second spells are now have a 1 second cast. After you have reached the haste soft cap you may want to start looking into gemming for other stats. This purely depends on how you currently heal. If you use chain heal more often than LHW it is probably worth continuing to stack haste. If you find that you are not using chain heal as often then you might wish to replace haste gems with spell power instead.
Mp5
Mp5 and improved water shield is the only source we have to regan our mana. Therefore Mp5 is a very important stat. In 3.2 it was buffed on gear so you should not have to gem for it as it comes in bucket loads from gear.
Intellect
This stat is great for shamans as we get spell power from it from Nature's blessing and Mana tide and replishment scales with intellect as well as giving additional Crit. It is not reconmended to gem for this stat unless you are really struggling with mana.But with improved water shield changes in 3.2 and buffed Mp5 you should be finding it very hard to go oom.
Spell power
There is plenty of spell power on gear so you should not be gemming this stat. In 3.1 we was mostly using instants and very short casts, therefore spell power was the best stat to max hps. As it is on every piece of gear you should be using and haste being very beneficial to our heals, it is not worth gemming.
