GC, you posted this in the Pally thread:

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The paladin has been designed around Flash of Light, just like the shaman was designed around Chain Heal. We didn't want to completely change what these classes were all about, in part because a lot of players like them as they are.

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I'm not trying to be 'gotcha' or snide here, because I LIKE being based around chain heal. Chain heal is a good spell, it's unique and has a lot of flavor, and can really shine when a smart player is behind it.

But if I'm based around chain heal, why do so many of my new talents forsake chain heal completely? Why can't Imp. Watershield and Ancestral Awakening proc off chain heal? Ancestral Awakening in particular seems to have fallen into 'useless' territory, when it was initially one of my most anticipated talents with a really fun and unique effect.

Hundreds of other shaman are just as curious as I am about this, please, we just want to be able to utilize our talents with the spells we cast most.

(also Healing Way is bad, because no one target needs 4 max rank healing waves within 15 seconds of each other in either PVP or PVE in any realistic sceneario.)

If shamans are designed around chain heal, then we're going to be pretty much useless at 80 once they realize how good our single target healing is.

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(also Healing Way is bad, because no one target needs 4 max rank healing waves within 15 seconds of each other in either PVP or PVE in any realistic sceneario.)

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Both healing way and light's grace got wrecked by the downranking nerfs. Are there any other talents like these?

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(also Healing Way is bad, because no one target needs 4 max rank healing waves within 15 seconds of each other in either PVP or PVE in any realistic sceneario.)

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I can understand not using the Healing Wave in PvP due to the long cast time, but if you are healing a 5 man or a 10 man do you really not cast a healing wave within 15 seconds of the last one? As a holy priest, I'm dropping a new Greater Heal every 7 to 11 seconds, depending on the incoming damage rate. This is why I find it so odd that shaman (or paladins) don't.

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Both healing way and light's grace got wrecked by the downranking nerfs. Are there any other talents like these?

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I'd say the addition of Bacon was at least the other half of Light's Grace becoming lame.

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I can understand not using the Healing Wave in PvP due to the long cast time, but if you are healing a 5 man or a 10 man do you really not cast a healing wave within 15 seconds of the last one? As a holy priest, I'm dropping a new Greater Heal every 7 to 11 seconds, depending on the incoming damage rate. This is why I find it so odd that shaman (or paladins) don't.

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Before the removal of downranking, I would use a rank 7 Healing Wave as my main single target heal. With a full stack of Healing Way, I would pump out heals close to max rank Healing Wave (with out Healing Way) with the mana cost of a Lesser Healing Wave. I could spam until pigs learned to fly. Now that downranking is no more, I can not spam HW for a long period of time. If I'm tank healing, I have to practice stop casting, only letting the heal go through when he'll recive the full benefit. Otherwise, I'll have wasted a big chunk of healing on overheal; which I can not affored to do with a spell that costs 25% of my base mana. Because of that, I'll rarely get a full stack of Healing Way, and am better off using those talent points in places that provide more benefit.

Edit: Fixed some spelling.

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Q u o t e:
Hundreds of other shaman are just as curious as I am about this, please, we just want to be able to utilize our talents with the spells we cast most.

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Chain heal spamming is boring. I'm personally glad no new talent improves chain heal, because not only am I just using Chain heal, but now I'm also using LHW and riptide just as much, which is much more fun than pressing one button.

I have to agree I'm curious about this chain heal comment, as I have noticed that almost nothing new has added to chain heal at all. In fact every change to shamans has made me use chain heal less (from 99% of the time to maybe 50% ;-) ).

With that said, though, I have to disagree to the comment that ancestral awakening is useless. Far from it. In 25 mans, most shamans will be using chain heal to buff their healing meters, but ancestral awakening is so smart and really makes our single target healing shine, while not removing the "chain heal" feel.

My biggest complaint really is the number of water shield procs and how often we have to refresh it to maintain mana efficiency. Adding charges to water shield with improved watershield like static shock would be really helpful in allowing me to not waste a GCD every 15-20 seconds on a watershield. Crits are great, but our "illumination" wannabe is quite a bit more irritating than a paladin's.

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When we sat down to design Resto for LK, tops on everyone's list was to get them to CAST ANOTHER SPELL SOMETHING ANYTHING!

A lot of the talents were designed to do just that. We even considered some draconian measures to discourage CH spamming, like cooldowns and the like.

Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn't me) asked why was there so much CH hate. Yes, shamans used it a lot, but you know, it is a pretty distinctive, inconic spell. We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we'd just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you'll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it's not 100%).

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On that note, can we expect some tweaks coming to Chain Heal soon? As of now it seems it's under preforming compared to CoH and doesn't benefit at all from Imp. Water shield (which I guess is supposed to be a staple talent for mana efficiency?).

Well it's good to know we have a lot of buffs to spells we'll still almost never use :/

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When we sat down to design Resto for LK, tops on everyone's list was to get them to CAST ANOTHER SPELL SOMETHING ANYTHING!

A lot of the talents were designed to do just that. We even considered some draconian measures to discourage CH spamming, like cooldowns and the like.

Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn't me) asked why was there so much CH hate. Yes, shamans used it a lot, but you know, it is a pretty distinctive, inconic spell. We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we'd just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you'll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it's not 100%).

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I have to agree with the other people here that designing a class to largely use just one spell over and over and over 90% of the time is a bad, bad thing. What if warriors were designed around using Slam 90% of the time and rarely anything else? That would be bad even if it was just one spec of warriors. Right now healers have to fight the UI because it is poorly designed with regards to the current healing spells. If you change the UI so it isn't so poorly designed, then healers are rapidly going to find out how boring their skill 'rotations' are. I know it is a lot of work, but you might want to consider only small changes to the UI (such as visual full-screen indicators when you are hurt and how hurt you are, and other indicators for the general health of the raid), and make more significant changes to healing so it is engaging.

There's a reason why a lot of people want to DPS and a lot of people want to main tank, afterall. It's a lot of fun, especially with the changes in 3.0 to tanking. Healers are hard to find even for 5 mans however, because most people don't like fighting the UI or sitting still spamming one spell 90% of the time on the tank. This needs to be fixed. Treat healing like DPS and Tanking (the numbers are just of the opposite polarity) and things will get a lot better, imho.

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The difference is we think you'll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it's not 100%)

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I understand where you're coming from, and I like the direction that shaman are heading (more diversity in healing), but I fear that all these fancy toys will go to wasts as we progress in raiding. I find that the only real change in healing was the addition of riptide. It fills a nitch that sorely needed filling, and I am greatfull for it, but beside that I still use chain heal almost exclusively. I don't feel the new talents add much of an incenfive to use something else beside chain heal, and because of that, people will not pick them up.

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Would you still be complaining if they essentially made you remove all other heals from your hotbar?

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To be fair, I use LHW in arathi basin.

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When we sat down to design Resto for LK, tops on everyone's list was to get them to CAST ANOTHER SPELL SOMETHING ANYTHING!

A lot of the talents were designed to do just that. We even considered some draconian measures to discourage CH spamming, like cooldowns and the like.

Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn't me) asked why was there so much CH hate. Yes, shamans used it a lot, but you know, it is a pretty distinctive, inconic spell. We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we'd just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you'll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it's not 100%).

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Where was that smart designer when Lifebloom was destroyed?

=]

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Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn't me) asked why was there so much CH hate.

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You should put this guy in charge of class design. Instead of ruining something you felt was op or used a lot you left it alone and made other aspects of our class better. Your other designers could learn a lot from him.

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On that note, can we expect some tweaks coming to Chain Heal soon? As of now it seems it's under preforming compared to CoH and doesn't benefit at all from Imp. Water shield (which I guess is supposed to be a staple talent for mana efficiency?).

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The problem that I see, and don't get me wrong, I love the idea of nearly infinite mana, is that glyphed, chain heal would have 4 chances to proc Imp. Water Shield. Assuming even if only one charge was expended per cast regardless of the number of crits performed, and even with an internal CD of say 3 seconds. A shaman could then stack incredible amounts of +crit, and very little +mp5 due to proccing water shield every 3 seconds for 500ish mana a pop, just adding a water shield recast to the rotation of Chain Heal x4, Water Shield x1, would in theory never run out of mana.

As far as getting bored with spamming one heal... sure, I can see that. Personally, I have been skipping all the talents that effect the newer heals, and playing around with putting points into enhancement to bump up my +crit and +healing spellpower. I have no problems with the use of Chain Heal as my staple cast 90% and more of the time. Its more of a play style choice than anything.. I prefer to raid heal, as opposed to single target.

And I have also played around with the talents to improve single target healing, and they are great, really good stuff, but again, you really need to put more into +crit, which currently at this level there isn't much available to shamans.

Overall, mana efficiency is an issue with all healers. When to heal, when not to, and that is where shamans should have no complaint. Chain heal is one of the most mana efficient heals and will be in months to come. Even at the end of BC raiding shamans were spamming max rank CH and rarely having to drink pots (assuming a person put time into proper gearing and payed attention).

I really like the changes that have been made, it gives us a choice on play style that we never really had before. However the choice comes at a cost of a respec... that is something I'm willing to live with