Taste My Tears!!!! Resto Shaman Woes

Cards on the table.  This is a straight up QQ entry.  However I am going to endeavor to make this a well organized and well thought out QQ that lays out what I perceive to be the weaknesses and neccessary changes to our class and spec.  I assure you my tears are delicious!

Resto Shaman are in a bit of pickle this tier when it comes to keeping up with the Jones’s.  Especially in 10 man!  We curl in a fetal position after each 10man raid praying for comfort from our loved ones.  But our loved ones are in bed cuz the raid went late.  A cursory look at WoL shows that R-Sham are taking a wolloping from pretty much everyone at the moment when it comes to HPS.  Let me go ahead and get the counter argument out of the way.  You’ll say “Luvbacon, you blubbering infant, there’s more to keeping a raid alive than HPS” and I’ll say “I may well be a blubbering infant, but rest assured, there is candy I’m being denied here!!! also, what pray tell is the concrete empirical measure you would instead have me use?”.  The answer is, there is none.  Those who would poopoo the QQ of the moistened faced masses of Resto Shaman constantly painting the Healing forums with sob post after sob post, are left with an argument that can roughly be translated “sure, the only measure with which we can assess healing shows your class is sadly lacking but suck it up you wusspants kitten and eat my healing dust.   I’m sure you’ll get used to the taste of turd eventually.”

I am not going to bother making the argument here that we are lagging behind.  We all have access to a web browser and World of Logs is a public site.  The logs do not lie.  They clearly show our position.  Instead I’d like to discuss what I believe to be the primary reasons for our difficulty and also to propose some solutions.

I observe two primary weaknesses in our spec that need to be addressed.  The first is somewhat minor:

Deep Healing (Resto Shaman Mastery)- This mastery is seen often with some mythical reverence by other healers who see us smash an astronomical crit on that one occasional low health raider.  I cannot deny the usefulness of a mastery that makes us heal the most exactly when it’s needed most.  However, consider the current healing climate.  Absorbs are at their strongest level ever!  By their very nature, they prevent damage from occuring, actively fighting against our mastery or even just negating it in many normal mode encounters.  In Heroic Raids (or PvP) our mastery truly has a chance to shine because targets spend considerably more time below 60% health, the point where our mastery starts to do something useful.  But look at completion numbers for Tier 15.  The average raider is not 12/12 normal yet.  So the average Resto Shaman is getting little effective use out of their mastery.  The next normal mode raid you run, take a glance at health bars every here and there, being sure to notice when they’re above 60% health.  It’s a huge majority of the time!!  Our mastery does nothing at that health level.

/2 WTB Mastery that works 100% of the time PST.

The next issue is the big one:
Spread Healing –  While working on Heroic Jin’rohk 10 man yesterday, this weakness  became corner-of-table-in-funnybone apparent while I was observing my Resto Druid counterpart heal the lightning phase.  The phase requires basically 100% movement.  This means my useable healing tools are

• Riptide – A small instant heal with a very small HoT on a 6 second CD.  I have the option to glyph this (if I happen to be a moron) so that the CD is removed but the instant heal portion is also removed.
• Spirit Walker’s Grace – This is useable every other Lightning Phase and allows me to cast on the move.  But it only opens my useful spells up to single target heals.  I can’t use Chain Heal because the jump range is so pitifully small that I’ll never get anywhere near max targets unless we’re stacked.  I have the option to glyph Chain Heal (if I happen to be a moron) to increase the jump range to something better in exchange for a CD added to a spell that already has several conditions for it to function at full power (limited jump range, riptide on initial target).  Not to mention, if I do jump through each of these hoops, it still heals for less HPS than GHW or HS and for less HPM than HW.  So I am stuck single target healing a spread raid and falling painfully behind on HPS.
• HST – Our smart heal totem plop.  Ironically, they call it a smart heal but what they really mean is “You guys are too dumb to use an actual healing ability well.  We’ll artificially pad your numbers”.  This provides a bit of spot healing to the raid, but again, only heals one target at a time.
• HTT – Our I-Win button.  useable every other lightning phase.  Nevermind that we MUST talent into this thing, effectively removing a tier of talents  in order for us to get an ability we are clearly being balanced around.  Every healer but Paladins now have an I-Win button on par with this.  Not to worry Holy Paladins, your Mastery is your I-Win button that last through the entire encounter.

Contrast this with Resto Druids for this fight.  Their available tools are

• Rejuv – A much stronger instant HoT than Riptide, even when factoring in Riptide’s up-front heal.  This also benefits from their mastery and each target they lay this on becomes a potential Swiftmend target.
• Swiftmend – An instant heal they can pop on any target they have a HoT on.
• Swiftmend Puddle – This gets dropped on the floor every time they they use Swiftmend.  It’s sort of like a really weak Healing Rain.
• Mushroom – Once the joke of jokes in their repertoire, now buffed to Jesus mode.  As long as these are laid before the phase, they can be ‘sploded instantly to give an aoe heal.
• Wild Growth – Instantly applies a Hot to 6 raid members on a 6 second (off the top of my head) CD.
• Tranc + Spirit Walker’s Grace (w/ Symbiosis) –  Every other lightning phase this can be used.  it’s the Druid I-Win button.  On par with HTT.

It becomes apparent that Druids are in a much better position than Shaman when it comes to spread/movement healing.

Let me take a quick detour and answer what I know will be your next objection.  You’ll say “Luvbacon, you simpering but barrel chested brute of a scholar, you are using the absolute best of the best spread heal/movement healing class to compare yourself to.  Of course you’ll come up lacking” to which I’ll answer “Put on some pants!!!! What would possess you to leave the house that way?!!!! Look, none of the other classes are much worse off than druids!”  Priests have as many on-the-move heal options as Druids and Disc’s absorbs allow them to frontload the phase so less healing is even needed.  Same deal for Pallies.  Eternal Flame Blanket + giggle at the Shaman.

Blizzard asserts that Stacked healing is meant to be the Shaman’s niche and we’re supposed to be terrible at spread/movement healing.  This would suggest that we should be handing the other healers their butts on stacked fights like Megaera.  Is this the case?  Check World of Logs for your answer and get back to me on that >.>  But assuming this were actually the case, consider how many stacked encounters there are in T15.  I count 2 of 12/13.  2………    Spread healing is not something that can be a niche strength anymore! The game has changed and most fights now require near constant movement and most actively have mechanics in place to discourage if not forbid stacking.   No, that ship has sailed and the days of tank and spank are long gone.  Now it’s either give every healer the neccessary tools to do the job, or live with a gimped class.  Thus far Blizzard is going with the ‘live with a gimped class’ option.

So, now that I’ve thoroughly moistened your monitor with my tears, let’s have the Luvbacon prescription for a better Resto Shaman tomorrow.

1. Create a new ability that shares a Cooldown with Healing rain.  This ability would provide solid spread healing on the raid and could not be used with Healing Rain (to avoid making Shaman the must-have go-to Jesus class).  Something like this;

Scattered Showers  

Shares Cooldown with Healing Rain

Applies Scattered Showers of Healing rain to 6 low health raid members, following the player and healing them for xx health every xx seconds.

2. Remove the Cooldown from Riptide baseline.  The mana cost should be plenty to regulate it’s use.  This seems to work fine for Priests and Druids equivilent abilities.

3.  Fix Chain Heal.  This ability is so very clunky to use.  In order to get a full power Chain Heal currently you need to find a target clustered with max number of targets in need of healing.  Cast riptide on a target.  Wait out the GCD.  Begin casting Chain Heal on that Riptided target.  Wait out the (long) cast time.  Pray to God earnestly that the intial target doesn’t get healed to full, that no one else in the cluster gets healed to full, that no one moves out of range breaking the chain and negating all of this effort.  Blizzard can buff this ability as much as they like and it still will not effectively help our spread heal issues until they fix it’s many shortcomings.

•  Give it the glyphed jump range baseline.  The party line used to be “We don’t have the technical ability to imcrease the jump range”.  So they added a glyph, illustrating that they do now have that technology but want us to gimp the ability further with a long CD in order to benefit from it.  Weak.
•  Remove it’s dependance on Riptide completely.  Was a bad idea to begin with imo.
• Make it instant and give it a cooldown equal to it’s cast time.

That would do it.

Now let me end my tearful Tammy Faye/Swaggert diatribe with a concession.  If my proposed changes were made, it is very likely that with Healing Rain at it’s current power level Resto Shaman would userp the seat of our Current Healing Overlords; Disc Priests and Holy Paladins.  Far be it from me to injure the fragile egos of these paragons of the mending arts.  No, no, not at all.  I would be more than willing to see Healing Rain nerfed down to an acceptable level, if it meant that I would now be of use during the 90% of the raid when my raid team is running around like their butts are on fire.

One clarification: I am in no way advocating nerfs to Resto Druids (God knows they’ve eaten their share of dirt this expac) or any other healer.  I would merely find more enjoyment in this class with the same tools other classes have available.  We Resto Shaman are tired of being a liability.

These are my thoughts. What are yours?

>luvbacon<