Hello, I’m writing a post to give my feedback on the resto shaman PTR changes from the perspective of a mythic raid healer. I raid on two rshams at a high level (https ://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/87401143 and https ://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/90164587), and am one of the only players who has been consistently using a Primordial Wave/Riptide focused build (You can the talent build overview among top 10 US shamans here. (https ://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/38?metric=hps&partition=3&class=Shaman&spec=Restoration®ion=1&subregion=1)
My interpretation of the PTR notes is that the class design team wants to buff builds like mine (“adding support to Riptide focused builds.”), but I think the current changes do not accomplish that. I’m assuming that Primordial Wave for resto is being reworked along the same lines as it is for DPS, which should result in roughly a 4-5% buff and roughly counteract the removal of Ancestral Guidance in terms of overall throughput.
My core issue is that the new Healing Wave talent (Whispering Waves – 10% of Healing Wave’s healing is duplicated onto each of your targets with Riptide.) isn’t good enough to make Healing Wave viable to cast, so the old Chain Heal builds will continue to dominate.
Math is below:
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Primordial Wave currently grants 1 extra riptide cast every 30 seconds, for a total of 20% more riptide casts overall. With this removed, we must spend an extra talent point on Wavespeaker’s Blessing to achieve the same uptime, or two extra talent points to receive an 11% boost to Riptide uptime.
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Current Chain Heal/Riptide weaving builds are already maximizing Riptide Casts, so we can use them as a model for the new talent’s performance. Across three fights (logs at end) with no wasted Prim Wave buffs or extra Healing Wave casts, I had 34 casts of Healing Wave and 155 hits, for an average of 4.55 hits (so ~3.55 targets with Riptide per Healing Wave). This goes up to ~4 targets per Healing Wave with the duration talent.
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The new Healing Wave talent “duplicates” 10% of the healing, not “hits” with with the healing, so I’m assuming Resurgence won’t be procced off the bonus hits. This has a large impact on the mana efficiency of Healing Wave.
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The initial Healing Wave hits averaged about 750k healing, so a ~40% boost to them (with the new talent) would result in about 1.05mil healing average, and with 40% crit that equates to about 66k mana spent, or 15.9 Healing per Mana (HPM) and 420k HPCT. If we drop Unleash Life and pick up Undulation to maximally boost Healing Wave, these numbers go up to 18.5 HPM and 490k HPCT
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If we contrast this to my Chain Heal casts, they did 377.5 mil healing for 183 casts, costing 20.9mil mana, so a total of 18.0HPM and 825k HPCT. When we also account for the Riptide buff from Coalescing Water (~300k/cast), these numbers improve to ~20.7HPM and 945k HPCT. The cast speed buff from Tidebringer also further boosts HPCT for Chain Heal without any equivalent boost for Healing Wave.
TL;DR Even with more talent point investment and the new Whispering Waves talent, Healing Wave will be a worse filler than Chain Heal in terms of both mana efficiency and HPS output.
Additionally, other talents (i.e. Tidewaters, Primal Tide Core, and Deeply Rooted Elements) also receive a 20% nerf from Primordial Wave’s removal, further hurting the Riptide build. This can be compensated for by investing more talent points (at least for Tidewaters and Primal Tide Core - Deeply Rooted Elements is based on Riptide casts, not uptime, so will be nerfed 20% regardless), but will likely still be noncompetitive compared a Chain Heal focused build.
- Log for fight 1: https ://wowanalyzer.com/report/v8JmyaTz2V7PC91M/39-Mythic+The+Silken+Court±+Kill+(7:57)/Vashezzoo/standard/statistics
- Log for fight 2: https ://wowanalyzer.com/report/gCmVGFaDN7fXy8Z3/12-Mythic+Nexus-Princess+Ky’veza±+Kill+(6:25)/Vashezzo/standard/statistics
- Logs for fight 3: https ://wowanalyzer.com/report/DZ9xdMBg2qyGHNn3/34-Mythic+Rasha’nan±+Kill+(4:35)/Vashezzo/standard/statistics