So, if you’ve looked at the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator anytime recently, you may have noticed that restoration shaman finally got an update. While I definitely like most of the changes, there’s a big change looming that I’m not quite sure what to make of it quite yet. Healing Stream Totem, our tried and true companion, is getting re-worked. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a nerf or not, but my gut instinct is that it’s going to be a nerf. So what’s changed?
Well for starters the totem is now raid wide, it is no longer restricted to group only. That’s a bonus, don’t get me wrong, and one that I think we were missing for quite sometime. So, that part I like. Currently the cost remains the same, clocking in at 3% of your base mana. The base healing number has gone up from 28 to 81, plus your spell power modifiers and talents of course. But here’s the kicker, it now only targets one person, and it will always be the lowest health person in range. That’s right folks, it’s a single target totem now. If that wasn’t enough of a kick in the teeth, the duration has also been adjusted. It is no longer 5 minutes, instead it is a 1 minute duration totem. While it still doesn’t have a cooldown, and you can cast it as often as you want, the 3% base mana cost combined with a 1 minute duration means that if you want to use it you’re going to be burning a whole lot more mana in order to keep it down.
It’s a significant change, and one that I’ve been feeling pretty keenly in the beta. Healing dungeons is a lot more active, as you can’t really rely on the passive healing anymore. It is still affected by mastery so you can now use it as a single target spike healing tool. It’s an adjustment. I’m not going to call it a nerf, but it is a noticeable change in healing behavior for us. It’s just no longer the “always keep it down totem”. My personal belief is that it is a result of us having some new tools in the water tree. Besides healing stream totem and Mana Tide Totem we have our brand new Healing Tide Totem, or rather our Tranquility. That’s an interesting tool, and I can see us using quite well. The hardest thing right now is just breaking the mentality that you HAVE to have your totems down. It just simply isn’t the case anymore.
There are a lot of other changes like the glyph’s we’ll have to work with. Some are awesome, some are meh, others are incredibly situational. I’m going to be evaluating them over the next few days, possibly in video form, so be sure to check often. If you have a specific shaman question, please feel free to ask and I’ll see if I can find out how it shakes down in Mists.
For a second there, I thought that meant Harmonized Sales Tax.
What I’m curious about is if the spell sequence for party vs tank healing has slightly altered or not for Resto.
@mattuzzi I haven’t seen any change really, same spells. Glyph loadout seems like it’s going to be the big decider now of how you do things.
I haven’t decided if it’s going to be a nerf or upgrade, however I did get a report from someone on the Beta, that HST hits for 15k, were pretty sweet. I would imagine this would be a high mastery build, of course, but still.
I’m still trying to figure out the Synergy of Riptide with Tidal Waves and preparing to wrap my healy-thinking around not always having totems down.
@R0xsey it’s neither a buff nor a nerf I think. looking at it some more, it’s a re-purposing.
@Lodur That’s what I’m thinking. By turning it more into a smart heal with larger hits when it’s needed via mastery, I think it may be equal or just slightly lower in overall output, but much higher is effective output.
@R0xsey Strong possibility that. The problem is it’s a raid / group exchange. In a 5-man group it’s not going to be quite as “effective” for it’s 60 second duration. In a 10 man raid the effectiveness increases but not nearly as much as in a 25-man raid. Basically larger groups, more damage potential, more opportunity for it to not be over-healing and actually used.
@Lodur Your right, the re-work definitely seems more orientated towards raiders in 25 mans. I’d love to see some numbers pulled from it’s output and compare with calculations to the numbers from it’s current mechanic output minus over-heal.
@R0xsey Easy enough, expect it withing a week.
Must make a correction here, they said HST but it’s Healing Tide totem hits for 15k.
@R0xsey yeah, read that too. but I’ll have videos with shinny numbers for everyone to look at 😀
With it always targeting the “lowest health person in range” does that mean it will bounce to a new person if the current target gets healed higher than someone else?
@Arioch Yeap, it changes target every tick based on who the lowest health is.
Testing stuff