I want to make a post discussing the new talent taking P wave’s place, Whispering Waves.
This talent really doesn’t make sense in the modern landscape of World of Warcraft healing. Before I explain why that is, let me explain how Healing Wave is mostly used with Pwave.
With the current way P Wave works, generally the only time you use Healing Wave is once every thirty seconds. Here’s how that once every thirty seconds roughly looks.
You have riptides rolling, you press Pwave, you press Unleash Life, you press Ancestral Swiftness, you then finally press Healing Wave.
The reason this talent doesn’t make sense in modern Wow is simply because of how extremely difficult it actually is to successfully complete a cast of healing wave. With the above process you are not actually casting healing wave. It is being used instantly. It’s an ability you rarely actually ever cast.
In Mythic plus Whispering Waves is going to be useless. The amount of burst damage that occurs during healing checks simply outpaces the cast time of healing wave. That isn’t even taking into account that, even if the cast time of Healing Wave was half of its current value it would not do enough healing to keep your team alive during most healing checks.
Even with perfect play, where I precast my healing wave before the damage occurs and have the healing of Whispering Waves take place at the exact moment of the burst. My team will still die because it’s simply not enough healing to matter. Not to mention the fact that most difficult healing checks also come with a movement check. You simply will not be able to cast Healing Wave regardless due to the heavy movement involved in Mplus and its long cast time.
In raid this is also completely useless. Primarily because of how fast healing happens in Mythic and Heroic Raid. HP bars are topped usually in less than 3 to 4 seconds after most damage events in raid. It would almost be impossible to time your healing wave to occur during the small windows needed to provide effective healing. The movement issue mentioned earlier obviously matters here as well. It’s just going to be very, very difficult to cast an effective Healing Wave with all of the movement required in modern raiding.
The only way you can effectively use this talent in raid is to just spread riptide and spam healing wave on the tank or maybe a target with a DoT of some sort. Just using healing wave on full health targets hoping the cleave from Whispering Waves becomes effective healing. I should mention that I think this talent will be semi decent if you do this exact thing. But why would you ever do that when Totemic exists? Spreading AV to your entire raid and doing massive AOE healing instantly with no cast time.
This talent is a horrible design in the current landscape and needs to be reverted to Pwave or made into another Shadowlands Covenant ability immediately.
Thank you for reading