So I saw the resto tier set…
What resto shaman was screaming for chain heal to return? Why not give us something fun with a spell we actually use? :’(
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I get the feeling several (though not all) of these set bonuses are designed to foster alternative or out of favor builds or to encourage full use of certain class’ kits. That being said, if Chain Heal is to be the focus, I would have rather seen some additions like the following to shore up some weaknesses:
(2-Set) Chain Heal’s critical hit chance is increased by 30% on all targets it hits when cast on a target affected by your Riptide and its jump radius is increased by 100% when cast on a target in your Healing Rain.
(4-Set) Chain Heal may heal a previously affected ally that is not the previous target and critical hits reduce the remaining cooldown of Spirit Link Totem and Mana Tide Totem by 2 sec.
I was aiming to improve the desire to cast Chain Heal in M+ and 3s, but the cooldown reduction on both totems may be a bit much. Reducing Mana Tide has some synergy with Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem while, on the other hand, Spirit Link Totem obviously creates a situation that favors the use of Chain Heal in the first place so both are nice. Can we have both?
I still like the idea of Healing Wave and Healing Surge granting a separate stacking buff that modifies Chain Heal.
Healing Wave - Chain heal affects 1 additional ally and reduces healing falloff by 7.5% per target (30% base > 22.5% > 15%)
Healing Surge - Chain Heal jump radius increased by 8y and healing falloff reduced by 15% (30% > 15% > 0%)
These buffs could mix and match but you could only have up to 2 at a time. Chain Heal would eat the buff when cast. It would make it useful in the respective niches of HW/HS, raid efficiency with lots of stacked targets or M+ with fewer injured allies but greater distances. As a bonus you could also have the buff affect Healing Rain casts in different ways.
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Both of these buffs would still leave chain heal useless. Number of jumps, healing done, jump range, etc are not the issue with chain heal. It’s the mana cost.
The set bonus is heavily geared toward raiding which is kind of understandable but kind of the exception among several sets. All of them seem to have a specific legendary in mind which is again kind of questionable. However, in this case, the legendary in question is clearly Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem which significantly alleviates the mana cost issues and incentivizes casting chain heal with the reduced cast time as well; you can always request innervate in raids.
Chain Heal IS the best heal in terms of a balance of high throughput, speed, and mana efficiency if not overhealing which is the case with Spirit Link totem down, but those conditions are not always as easy to meet in M+ or PvP as opposed to raiding where you may be playing around set damage patterns in fights that last long enough for the cooldown reduction to matter.
I agree, you won’t see anyone in M+ or PvP, if allowed, really invested in getting the resto set bonus however. The 2 piece set alone is not really enough to change your playstyle, but it’s better than nothing in cases where the heal can jump to all targets and they need it.
This is simply false… I don’t understand how you could possibly think this.
If chain heal is these things, then why on the top healing parses in the world on M sylvanas is there not a single chain heal cast?
Like chain heal is so bad on mana that you will never see a good rsham press it in raid. Not once. Not a single time. And then using a specific legendary to reduce the mana cost of it once every 3 minutes is seriously not the move (btw I’d estimate you’d get 4 casts off with leggo active, which would be a total SLT CD reduction of about 16 seconds). So essentially you’re taking a legendary to reduce the CD of your SLT by 16 seconds. SLT would still be assigned at 3 min intervals. This also means getting rid of your extra riptides from legendary which are FAR more beneficial.
Seriously, this set bonus is god awful, and it’s likely shaman won’t play it in favour of other pieces of gear with better stats in any form of content except maybe RBGs
In terms of spellpower / mana / cost Healing Wave is about 30% more efficient than Chain Heal which trades mana for time and is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Of course you will not be casting chain heal as your default spell all of the time in place of healing wave or healing surge. but it’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. If you have all the time in the world then yes Healing Wave is better, the tooltip itself claims to be the efficient heal of your kit.
If you are time bounded, say to 12 seconds, for a raid heal mechanic you can cast 8 healing waves or 5 healing waves, or 5 chain heals having 248% spellpower, 300%, and 210 * (1 + 0.7 +0.4 +0.1) = 462% spellpower respectively which works out to 1984%, 1500%, and 2310% spellpower worth of healing in a 12 second window for 19,200, 7,500, or 15,000 mana respectively. Of course, all of this is before additional synergy like Tidal Wave, Undulation, conduits, etc. putting it further behind.
That’s the typical use case to couple with a healing cooldown like Spirit Link rather than sustain, but it’s honestly not enough to justify just doing the usual with healing surge instead. Spiritwalkers Tidal totem also reduces the cast time by 50% (basically under the global CD around 1.25s before haste) and mana costs by 40%. You can definetly get more than 4 casts off in a 10 second window under those conditions. You are probably running Necrolord so you can fire off a primordial wave and healing Wave for 30-40% haste as well.
As for Sylvanas, I feel like the damage pattern there is more consistent and does stress healer’s mana towards the end. This use case is probably more for predictable raid wide burst damage.
I agree with you on the set being questionable, but mana cost is not the first thing I’d cite as the issue. I rather like Chooks’ suggestions as they have the same feel of Tidal Waves; the main reason no one uses Chain Heal is because there is no incentive or too much synergy with just HS / HW not to not to mention the heal can jump to poor targets or otherwise make it hard to gauge the best initial target for it. Having a Spirit Link every 1.5-2 minutes even if it means having to talk your raid leader into giving you innervate over the Discipline priest is an incentive and significantly addresses your concerns about mana; too bad it’s only in that organized raid scenario which is my issue with it.
Necrolord Splintered Elements + Jonat’s seems to be the move for this set
Echo Riptide + Primordial Wave then Healing Wave then Jonat/Tier Empowered Chain Heal. Then use haste from Splintered Elements to launch some Lava Bursts and Lightning
Would still prefer they let us use any 2 leggo and rework the tier. Not swapping covenants at this point. I strongly believe we’ll be allowed any 2 leggo in 9.2.5 when the xpac is over
That is perfectly fine as well IMO. I think a lot of us were just trying to wrap our heads around how to game the Spirit Link cooldown to some functionally significant level (i.e. 60-90s reduced cooldown). The extra crit from the 2 piece is nice but hard to justify using that legendary over primal tidal core in raids just for the extra chain heals you’d want to try to use and certainly not enough to make much of a difference in Spirit Link cooldown, but it’s a nice 1-2 (…3, 4, 5) punch for M+ content.
What legendary is the chain heal chain lighting one? Does that effect have any relevancy to this or nah
You’re right about CH being garbage apparently. Doing some crappy math it seems to be about the same healing efficiency per cast as a Tidal Wave buffed HS, even before the godly conduit bonus. It also has a longer cast.
It does seem to need a healing buff. However you can’t buff it so much that people start casting it exclusively. This is why it’s important to have a dynamic modifier or resource as part of the base kit like the one I described above. They can try to incentivize CH with talents like High Tide or legendaries like Jonats but at the end of the day it needs to have a useful niche without those.
Also jump range is absolutely an issue in M+ and PVP. I think PVPers have a talent that boosts jump range and reduces mana cost every X seconds. We just need something like that for dungeons or for the rare raid situations where that may be useful. I also haven’t played this xpac but back in legion m+ mana wasn’t really an issue. I doubt its a big issue with affixes being nerfed and new bonuses that give you mana regen etc.
Chains of Devastation and no, none at all really. It only reduces mana costs for Enhancement; for Resto , it’s just instant cast time for a global spent on chain lightning.
First of all, healing wave is significantly faster than chain heal because of tidal waves, so this is simply wrong.
Secondly, this makes no sense whatsoever and is a complete butchery of theorycrafting. If you’re sitting there for 12 seconds just spamming a casted heal as resto shaman I don’t even know what to tell you. In any 12 second sequence in the game regardless of how heavy the damage output, you will be casting at least 3 riptides, 2 healing rains and a cloudburst. That means that you now have probably 4 seconds to use for spamming an ability(maybe less if you had wellspring up). Those 4 seconds are not going to be used on chain heals that use double the mana cost of a healing wave and is a significantly slower cast. You’re going to cast 2 healing waves that are buffed by tidal waves and the cloudburst conduit.
Not the typical use case, no one spans chain heals during spirit link, that is awful gameplay. Also healing surge is never pressed except as a true emergency heal in raid.
For Guardian, a completely stacked fight that is relatively short fight. Top rsham parse in the world did not cast chain heal a single time. Not once. On a stacked massive aoe fight. This is because it’s a dog tier spell.
If mana was not the issue, you would use chain heal to generate extra tidal wave procs, but you don’t because the mana cost is ridiculously high and simply not worth it.
Not really since even in stacked situations in M+ you don’t cast it because it simply isn’t worth casting over surge/riptide. Nothing to do with the jump
Tidal waves is a factor though you do have to weave riptide in between which is always worth doing and gives rise the the current playstyle you mentioned because of that synergy. CH is definitely not worth it just for the Tidal Wave proc when riptide is available if you are being that mana conscious.
However, it’s not out of the question to pre-cast cloudburst, 1-2 riptides, healing rain, and spirit link followed by mana tide (in this hypothetical), a healing wave to trigger Primordial Wave / swirling currents, and as many chain heals as movement / mechanics allow in the next 10 seconds. In fact, you’d want to pre-cast most of these if the damage is predictable.
I don’t disagree that the current talents, conduits, etc. greatly favor HW / HS, but “dog-tier” is a bit disingenuous especially if new set bonuses are being introduced to try to offer similar synergy or incentive. I don’t know if the current set is there yet, but I think you are selling the spell itself short just because it’s not the best or used by the best especially when the set bonus doesn’t currently exist. I have more issues with it mechanically than it’s mana cost and agree Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem is not worth running right now, but could see it being used in niche cases with the current 4pc set.
Dude it is abundantly clear you don’t really know what you’re talking about when it comes to healing raids.
Idk if you just play enh or ele but trust me when I tell you the set bonus will not help CH
I already made it clear, I think, that I don’t particularly like Chain Heal or the set bonuses that much, but I’m just trying to consider where they are coming from with these changes. For Resto and Elemental in general it’s clear they seem to think Lava Burst and Chain Heal are important spells for Ele / M+ and Resto / Raiding respectively which is definitely non-meta.
Of course, it’s entirely possible they are just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks simply because no one has used chain heal in a while. Neither of us have used it or know what kind of damage patterns might be common in the new content.
Who knows, maybe they will tweak the mana cost / resurgence rate in 9.2 as well which I would think is a relatively simple change if the feedback is received. Would the set bonus be any better in that case or do you just think Chain Heal just so far behind in mechanically in terms of synergy with talents / conduits that the relatively simple bonuses in most of these tier sets is in no way capable of salvaging Chain Heal and not worth the attempt? What would you rather see? +X% Riptide healing?
I’d rather see something similar to Tidebringer if they want to bring back chain heal.
“Every 10 seconds gain a stack of X, decreasing mana cost and cast time of Chain heal by 50% and letting it jump to one additional target. Max 2 stacks”
Or something that doesn’t have to do with chain heal maybe:
“Casting healing wave on a target places 3 charges of earth shield on them for 30 seconds”
I think we are on the same page here honestly. Let’s hope they are not set in stone yet.
This means r shamans dont have to worry about time gated power scaling cus they will have their full tier bonus from day one without equipping a single set item.
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Mana cost and low return. Chain heal does abysmal healing for the mana cost