It was said a couple of weeks ago that the developers don't think there is a Shaman or Chain Heal problem in PvE. As we haven't gotten any updates to the contrary, i'm going to assume the answer is yes.

You say you designed our class, yet you state that we use Chain Heal as our dominant spell in Ulduar, when that simply is not the case. No good shaman in a quality guild is using Chain Heal the majority of the time. Most fights have a mechanic requiring people to spread out, making Chain Heal all but useless.

Without Chain Heal, Shamans are both inefficient and ineffective because we only have one other remotely viable healing ability--Lesser Healing Wave.

Even when we can use Chain Heal, it is still inferior to the healing abilities Priests and Druids have(not any single one, but all of them working together because priests and druids(to a lesser extent have synergy).

Chain Heal has no synergy. None of our abilities directly benefit our "iconic" spell. In fact, we only have two talents that benefit it at all--and one of them just causes an immense amount of overhealing. Our other abilities get benefits from Chain Heal, but none of them benefit Chain Heal in a significant way.

But that's irrelevant. We can't even use Chain Heal. We're forced into using Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide--which is an awful ability with a low healing amount and a high mana cost by comparison. It costs more mana than Circle of Healing and Wild Growth, yet it's a worse version of Rejuvenation. We wouldn't even cast it if it didn't give us Tidal Waves.

I don't know how to fix Shamans, but that's not my job. I don't know how else we can prove it to the developers that a problem exists. We've provided evidence. We've had the top players in the world say the same thing. We've made comparisons to other healers. I don't care if there is no solution planned soon. I want to know that the developers acknowledge a problem exists, and that we have a solution coming "in the future".

Right now, all we've heard is that there is apparently no problem, and that either we're all vastly undergeared compared to our other raid members(other way around, at least for me), we're all terrible, we're all spamming 1 button(which is true, but it's not the 1 button they think we are spamming), or we don't have a valid complaint.

All I want is some acknowledgment. I love playing this class. But if you honestly don't see that there is a problem, then I don't know what else to do.

How can we prove to you that there is a problem beyond what we have already done?


Edit:

I want to clarify two things.

The first is that WWS does not parse Healing Stream Totem correctly. It does not account for overhealing and displays it as if it did 100% effective healing.


The second is that shaman problems do not become clear until you start doing:

Heroic Hard Modes
Harder Normal Hard Modes such as Firefighter

where healing actually needs to be done. When you reach these fights, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a huge discrepancy in the output between druids, priests and shamans, with shamans falling far behind both druids and priests in this respect.

I don't believe our input on this subject has a great deal of impact. No sense beating your head against a wall; keep healing as long as your guild permits and spec DPS beyond that.

I think the main problem seems to be Blizzard's testing methods. They test encounters and abilities under ideal conditions.

Just because GC doesn't reply to every thread doesn't mean that they are sitting idle.

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Q u o t e:
Just because GC doesn't reply to every thread doesn't mean that they are sitting idle.

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That's fine. But he hasn't responded to any thread. We've had one comment--that they think Resto Shamans are fine in PvE.

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Just because GC doesn't reply to every thread doesn't mean that they are sitting idle.

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I have to disagree. If you remember what priest went through after the CoH nerf the devs were very active in talking to the priest community and hearing their concerns. Shaman now are facing similar problems yet we get one word responses that they think we are fine. I seriously doubt any work at all is being done on shaman, more then likely it is very low on their list of things to do. All shaman really want right now is an acknowledgement on the issues we see.

Prior to Uldaur coming out you did not see many shaman post relating to PvE. That should be telling enough that something is wrong. I was one of the shaman that saw this happening, I noticed how lackluster CH was compared to other AoE healing spells while testing Uldaur. I also remember a lot of shaman telling me I was crazy and we were fine including the OP of this post. Now the people who thought we were fine see the problems magnified by Uldaur. Things aren't going to change for shaman. We will remain untouched and eventually you will see less and less resto shaman. Only when there is definitive evidence the shaman population is dropping will anything be done for us. The bad thing is that could take months to show an impact. So for now if you are playing a shaman you have to just suffer.

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Q u o t e:
Just because GC doesn't reply to every thread doesn't mean that they are sitting idle.

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Might just be me, but seeing this coming from a druid is just beyond hilarious.

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Chain Heal has no synergy. None of our abilities directly benefit our "iconic" spell. In fact, we only have two talents that benefit it at all--and one of them just causes an immense amount of overhealing. Our other abilities get benefits from Chain Heal, but none of them benefit Chain Heal in a significant way.

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I'm pleased you brought this up. I wish there was some crit synergy. Anything that makes having crit gear and crit talents more valuable. Haste is valuable for upping chain heal hps, but does little to benefit the other spells.

Personally I'm not going to worry until I see what comes to the shaman QQ responses... I mean Q&A

I don't think it's as bad as some shaman make it out to be, Shaman need help in pve healing, their pve dps is middle of the pack, while that isn't amazing, it's better than it was before. Shaman need help all over the place in arena viability, in a BG for the most part shaman do alright, as in world pvp. Shaman take a lot of practice and a whole lot of button pushing to do well in pvp... more button pushing than any other class that I can think of. I think that either needs to be fixed or should be rewarded with being a bit op if all those buttons are used properly.

So again, I sit patiently and wait. I'd like to see what questions blizzard chooses to answer as much as how they answer them... To me, that is far more telling of where their concerns are.

About the only thing shamans have to look forward to is that we're first in line for the Q&A session. Unless they start from the bottom of the list.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17223094467&postId=172212650675&sid=1#0

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I'm pleased you brought this up. I wish there was some crit synergy. Anything that makes having crit gear and crit talents more valuable. Haste is valuable for upping chain heal hps, but does little to benefit the other spells.

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This. Chain heal is our only spell that benefits from haste (unless you're using Healing Wave, lol), whereas it's our only spell that crit sucks for. Granted, Crit isn't great for riptide either, but at least we have 100% chance of getting 500ish mana when we crit it.

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Looking at a 10 minute Ulduar fight with a very competent Resto shaman, I see 100 Chain Heals, 80 Lesser Healing Waves, 36 Riptides, and a couple of NS'd Healing Waves. (Like many heals, HW isn't going to be attractive until hp / mana matters.) I'm not going to out this player for you to Armory him, so you can say he needs to L2P if you want. :)

Different shamans heal differently, but we find the assertion that CH is dead to be a little overblown. There are some improvements we can make to Resto, especially for PvP, and they still seem to need mana (or at least MP5) more than some of the other healers, but we really don't think Chain Heal is in a terrible place. If you're on tank healing duty, you're going to CH less. If the raid damage comes at predictable intervals, then priest and druid AEs may stomp on yours. But when your groups are tight and the damage is coming in constantly (Thorim for instance, though that is not the fight I referenced above) then CH is a great spell. We'd rather see shamans mixing up their heals as above than doing 90% of healing from the one spell.

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WWS?

Is that too impertinent to ask for, please?

I'm fine (happy even) to not be casing the same spell 90%+, but I would like to actually be able to use my aoe heal in aoe situations.

Right now, LHW/Riptide are better in a lot of situations for hitting low health people while Resto druids or Holy priests catch everyone up

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Looking at a 10 minute Ulduar fight with a very competent Resto shaman, I see 100 Chain Heals, 80 Lesser Healing Waves, 36 Riptides, and a couple of NS'd Healing Waves. (Like many heals, HW isn't going to be attractive until hp / mana matters.) I'm not going to out this player for you to Armory him, so you can say he needs to L2P if you want. :)

Different shamans heal differently, but we find the assertion that CH is dead to be a little overblown. There are some improvements we can make to Resto, especially for PvP, and they still seem to need mana (or at least MP5) more than some of the other healers, but we really don't think Chain Heal is in a terrible place. If you're on tank healing duty, you're going to CH less. If the raid damage comes at predictable intervals, then priest and druid AEs may stomp on yours. But when your groups are tight and the damage is coming in constantly (Thorim for instance, though that is not the fight I referenced above) then CH is a great spell. We'd rather see shamans mixing up their heals as above than doing 90% of healing from the one spell.

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Its iron council, I would bet money. A steelbreak second kill If I had to guess. Odd, but what ever.

Your assertions are so off from reality Im really at a loss for words.

You say you dont want anecdotal evidence, yet thats what you give us?

You shamans better hope your PVP buff helps out in PVE too because this Blue post just denied you a PVE buff in the near future. Suggestion? ... Reroll now.

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WWS?

Is that too impertinent to ask for, please?

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that would "out" the shaman, which GC said wasn't gonna happen.


Out of those 100 Chain Heals, how many had 0,1,2,3 bounces? Just casting of the spell isn't what I am worried about. CH is great when it bounces. But can get people killed when it doesn't.

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that would "out" the shaman, which GC said wasn't gonna happen.


Out of those 100 Chain Heals, how many had 0,1,2,3 bounces? Just casting of the spell isn't what I am worried about. CH is great when it bounces. But can get people killed when it does.

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Fix't

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that would "out" the shaman, which GC said wasn't gonna happen.


Out of those 100 Chain Heals, how many had 0,1,2,3 bounces? Just casting of the spell isn't what I am worried about. CH is great when it bounces. But can get people killed when it doesn't.

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/sigh. True.

Then again, he could just change the shaman's name if he wants to. It isn't like he has to pay 15 bucks. ^.^