Nah. If you don’t like how they do things you stop paying and stop playing. That’s your only option
Yeah, I wasn’t precise, I was using “parse” when I was more talking about details and to some extent breakdowns of each spell’s contribution to healing. Like a poster above claimed that season 2 is contributing +8% of their overall. I suspect that includes overhealing, supported by my own logs. When corrected downward by the 40% overhealing it’s closer to 4%.
Taking a step away from the weeds, and making a clear point: I dislike the S2 and S3 sets for 2 reasons. 1) It contributes nothing to damage, and 2) by design, they are prone to overhealing (as opposed to something you can control actively through playstyle). Is it so wrong to dislike casting Rip on someone at full life just to stack a buff??
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i heal with every class that can and i feel like i’m constantly casting things on players at full hp for buffs/setting up for the big heal they’ll need shortly. i’m not finding this a shaman or even a shaman set issue, but a healer issue in general.
not arguing your point, more supporting it and adding that it extends beyond us.
You just answered your own question. The two tier set grants extra healing to allies when you cast healing rain. You spam it on cooldown so its not like you can take advantage of this tier set. It ends up leading to a Massive amount of overhealing. The 4 tier set buff also has an extremely short duration, so again, more wasted buffs if everyone is full.
There are no other healers that has a problem like this in their 2 tier set. Lets go down the list and compare.
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I’ll take the reliable S1 bonus in a heartbeat. I was sad in season 1 cause it was a boring tier bonus, but man did it go downhill from there (i did not expect it could). I did not enjoy Season 2 or 3 sets at all personally.
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it would be a fine idea if they did it some other way. a special site inside the main battle.net would be better over the forums… if you have 100 toons you get 100 votes… im sure that griefing has happened but at the same time the forums are a minority of the amount of people that play the game
K. We just gonna pretend the same hypotheticals don’t happen with S1.
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To the people who don’t like chain heal, go play Paladin. Chain heal has been iconic since vanilla. Go home you’re drunk.
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Season 1:
- (2) Set Bonus: While Healing Stream Totem/Cloudburst Totem is active, your chance to critically strike is increased by 10%.
- (4) Set Bonus: Your critical heals have 215% effectiveness instead of the usual 200%.
Season 2:
- (2) Set Bonus: When you cast Healing Rain, each ally with your Riptide on them is area healed by Tidewaters for (175% of Spell power).
- (4) Set Bonus: Each ally healed by Tidewaters increases your healing done by 1% for 6 sec and increases the healing of your next Healing Wave or Healing Surge by 10%, or your next Chain Heal by 2%.
Season 3:
- (2) Set Bonus: Chain Heal, Healing Surge, and Healing Wave mark their initial target with a Tidal Reservoir, causing them to receive 15% of all Riptide healing you deal for 15 sec.
- (4) Set Bonus: Riptide’s healing is increased by 20%. If Riptide is active on the same target as Tidal Reservoir, its heal over time effect has a 5% chance to create a new Riptide on a nearby ally.
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S3 doesn’t even seem to be in the running, which makes sense because the HOT is just underwhelming even though it reads well. The bonus riptides from the 4 set were also underwhelming at 6%. Having the duration of the tidal reservoir moved up to 18 sec to match the base duration of riptide for more chances or a proc or increasing the base % by a 1% would have made that feel a lot better.
S2 seems to be getting the most attention, and while it may be situationally better, but I’m still unconvinced. While I appreciate that they’ve tried to create more combo mechanics that cause our spells to reward more nuanced game play in a manner such as we already have with tidal waves, tidal waves is tied to an instant cast spell and easy to weave into a rotation. One of the biggest issues with S2 is timing.
In order to get the maximum value out of the S2 bonus you have to execute the following cast sequence
riptide (GCD ~1 sec)
riptide (GCD ~1 sec)
Primordial wave (GCD 1 sec)
filler heal / damage (1.5 cast + GCD 2.5 sec)
filler heal / damage (1.5 cast + GCD 2.5 sec)
riptide (GCD ~1 sec)
riptide (GCD ~1 sec)
healing Rain (1.5 cast + GCD 2.5 sec)
Healing wave/chain heal(1.5 cast + GCD 2.5 sec)
that’s about a 15 second base timeline, assuming you can stand still for most of that, so to intentionally utilize this build, you have to be thinking 15 seconds ahead of time for when damage would be coming in. Not saying you -cant- do that, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say in the midst of battle in M+ especially, that’s pretty hard to get right and you’re probably just getting some extra heals randomly when you cast healing rain, and getting a bonus to a chain heal/healing wave every 10s whether strategically it’s a great idea or not. I’m already trying to time my cloud burst totems in line with burst damage when possible, I don’t want another long cycle build up to keep track of.
S1 is boring, absolutely, but it brings some interesting things.
1, flat crit that’s excluded from DR because it’s a buff not base stats. We’re all hitting the DR on crit to some extent in S4 due to gear scaling so having a flat 10% to add on is huge.
2. Due to gear scaling, our critical strike should be extremely high, so the 4 set will apply to a higher % of casts.
3. The 10% crit applies to both damage and healing
4. Crits restore mana, we all know mana has become a limiting factor in our builds with how mana hungry chain heal can be in long fights and getting a little more back would be nice.
I’d love to see some more interesting designs in tier set that aren’t just stat boosts like the druid 4 piece in Aberrus
- (4) Set Bonus: Flourish increases the rate of your heal over time effects by 30% for an additional 16 sec after it ends. Verdant Infusion causes your Swiftmend target to gain 15% increased healing from you for 6 sec.
I think the biggest issue is the current shaman talent trees make basically everything cool and strategic optional so you can’t make the tier set interact with it or you exclude some players. Ancestral guidance, mana tide, healing tide, spirit link, ascendance, unleash life, living weapon, primordial wave, earthshield … these are all optional talents that would all be GREAT things to tie into part of a set bonus so that you could trigger some extra power periodically when/where you needed it.
Sadly, that’s not the world we play in, so I’m voting for S1
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S1. Shouldn’t even be a contest here. Why would you pick a tier that made you play an inferior way? s2 and s3 aren’t even that big of a healing increase.
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I feel like this is more blizzards fault for never really making any good set bonuses. Rather just bonuses that might have been strong, but just made you use abilities you disliked
Season 1 not only increases our healing but also our damage as well. Vote season 1!
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Please vote for Season 1. It’s the most fitting for all forms of content.
I understand that people may feel that other set bonuses are more useful in whatever content they play, but all forms of gameplay should be considered. While I cannot speak for the strength of Season 2/3’s tier in an M+ or Raid environment (though it has been discussed plenty already), I can speak for PvP.
The Season 2 set bonus was entirely worthless in PvP. Every Resto shaman used crafted gear instead for better itemization, which means we hit BiS much later than many other specs. While this may be a numbers issue that could be “fixed” with stronger values in Season 4, there are many more issues with the tier that make it exceptionally unappealing.
The Season 2 bonus forced you into taking, at minimum, 1 additional talent point towards Healing Rain, and a PvP talent slot into Rain Dance. Realistically, taking Healing Rain at all meant you also used another 2 talent points into Overflowing Shores and Acid Rain. This puts you down 3 talent points in a tree which has very little wiggle room. I think the only thing you could realistically give up is the 3 Primordial Wave talent buffs, which means you’d trade strong healing talents just to use tier. You also needed to give up one of your 3 extremely good PvP talents, most likely Static Field Totem, as Living Tide is always required and Grounding Totem is used in most situations.
In addition, PvP inherently doesn’t work too well with ground-based, unmovable AoE abilities. One of the most common complaints about Rsham is the reliance on Earthen Wall Totem as a defensive, which requires that you remain within the totem’s radius. Healing Rain would be yet another limited-movement requirement, and movement is very often essential in PvP combat. Theoretically, the tier could be buffed so much that standing inside of Healing Rain is more optimal than kiting the enemy’s damage, but then you introduce potentially toxic gameplay where players are too tanky while simply standing still.
While the Season 3 set bonus would most likely remain the strongest set bonus in PvP, scaled up to Season 4 values, I don’t want to make my decision based on one facet of the game when this choice affects everyone. I assume that Riptide-specific buffs aren’t as strong in PvE as the Season 1 tier, based on my understanding of the game and based on some of the posts above, so I am voting for Season 1.
Added note:
If you feel strongly against my choice because of my focus on PvP, then consider petitioning Blizzard to put PvP-specific set bonuses directly on PvP gear, as many PvP players have asked for since the reintroduction of tier gear.
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For what its worth, Cdew has said while s1 might not be as good as s3, its still pretty good in arena.
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Exactly my thoughts on it. S3 may be better, but S1 is still good, and would be even better when scaled up to S4 numbers.
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S1 plays nice with our crit dr and the healing bumps will feel good on all of our spells and allow us to play more freely in talent swaps to go with the ebb and flow of buffs and nerfs
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Im down for 1 or 2, i liked 2 alot it was awesome lining it up with a huge Pwave on a 5 man party instant full health for everyone was so good. 3 is pretty meh in general, hardly ever pay attention to it.
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Season 1 would be fine it’s just hella boring. Season 2 was best by far in raid and mythic plus.
Season 3 would need some tweaking to properly compete especially since its initial design failed. Albeit the Riptide buff from the 4 piece is no laughing matter at how strong it is.
I mainly PvP so season 3 is the only real option here for me. On the occasion I do run some dungeons I enjoy season 1 even though it’s a bit boring, I just like crits.
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