I’ve been looking over the current talents, and noticed that cloudburst totem now has a 45 second recharge time, up from 30 seconds. Healing stream totem, however, still has a 30 second recharge time. Healing stream totem also has a buff for 10% more healed per tick.
I understand there is still tuning that will happen, but given the current numbers will this make healing stream totem competitive with cloudburst totem in Dragon Flight? Anyone play around with this on PTR or beta and have insights?
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I’ve been wondering this too. I’d guess not, since Cloud can be more “on demand” burst healing even if the numbers are equal. I’ve always disliked Cloud though, so I’d love to find out if Healing Stream is truly competitive.
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Is it really supposed to be competitive with CBT for raids? HST is MUCH easier to use than CBT. It’s a hot that always targets someone that’s wounded, it starts healing right away to smooth out damage, and it’s extremely mana efficient. You really don’t have to think about it apart from creating a weak aura to remind you to drop it on cooldown.
Meanwhile CBT is a lot more finicky. You have to plan for damage ~15 seconds in advance, you have to be intentional about healing while it’s up so it collects more, and it’s a bunch of burst healing later (which is often less valuable than a hot that starts ticking now).
I would expect that if the situation is right and CBT is used correctly, it should heal more than HST, but a poorly used CBT will be much worse than just using HST instead. This is all just imagining how it should work - I supposed HST could be tuned high and will always be used or vise versa. It kinda depends on the tuning of that CBT / Living Stream node.
There will still be plenty of situations to use HST I’m sure - such as pvp and 5 mans. But my completely uninformed guess is that CBT will still be optimal for raids.
Completely agree with your conclusion here. CBT seems to provide higher potential healing, and can be optimized more heavily by blowing cooldowns during a CBT window.
That being said, I exclusively do M+, and after testing it out for a bit I think HST with the buff is more effective given the changes in Dragon Flight. My CBT usage simply doesn’t come near the potential given that it’s rare I’m doing 15 seconds of solid healing and it’s also rare that CBT healing doesn’t end up over-healing.
The one thing that I have yet to see is whether there are healing checks in DF M+ where CBT becomes mandatory. I’m thinking of things like poison rain on Stradama in SL season 3. Barring that, I think HST becomes a compelling option, and since we can “double stack” it may be able to handle those healing checks as well.
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CBT probably better no matter what but I was liking HST as a set it and forget it thing.
In a 25 Junkyard I did today it did around 11% of my healing, not too bad, also probably saved people a handful of times because of my disgustingly low Haste as Resto.
I’ve been using HST while leveling my 2nd Shaman in dungeons because I don’t feel like I get good value out of CBT on fights that end as quickly as leveling dungeon fights end, but CBT is always going to have higher healing potential.
I hadn’t realized they automatically give you a ‘starter build’ after reset and played a 16 with HST on this Shaman. It did surprisingly decent healing (like the poster above mentioned) but it’s still not going to bang out the numbers CBT will once you’re running hard content again, at least IMO.