By now I’m sure you’ve all heard about the tier 9 sets that have been released. Unlike Tier 7 and 8, instead of having two different levels of gear, there are three levels.
This is kind of nifty. It adds more opportunity for raiders of all levels to gain tier set pieces. There is no artwork for it yet, but you can click the link and check the stats. The big thing here is the set bonuses.
Instant castIncreases the healing done by your Riptide spell by 20%.
Instant castIncreases the critical strike chance of your Chain Heal spell by 5%.
These might not seem like a lot, but these are quite nice as it stands. Lets take a look at the 2 Piece. Riptide already seems to have received a little buff in it’s healing come the patch but lets use the value of the Rank 4 Riptide and according to the 3.2 talent sheet, the current rank 1 Riptide
The spell has two parts we’ll make the assumption that the set bonus affects both parts. The spell initially hits for 1604 to 1736, a 20% increase on that 1925 to 2083 on the front end. After the initial heal it places a heal over time for 1670. With the set bonus that HoT becomes 2004 over 15 seconds. While that might not seem like a lot consider a couple things. First it’s an instant heal and HoT for Shamans, never a bad thing. The new ranks for the spell haven’t been released yet (that I can find, if you see them please link them to me) so you can imagine those numbers will be higher. Secondly combine the 2 piece with Glyph of Riptide which increases the duration of the HoT by 6 seconds (or with these numbers should be another 800 healing if my math is right) and 2 piece Tier 8 , which lowers the CD of Riptide by a second and you have an instant heal that places a 21 second HoT on your target, and it only has a 5 second cool down. I can see that being extremely useful. Oh, and it still buffs chain heal on the target by 25%.
Let’s take a look at the 4 piece bonus now. Increasing the critical strike change of Chain Heal by 5% might not seem like a lot either, but you have to keep in mind a couple things. Before raid buffs I’m packing close to 27 % crit, maybe more depending on what pieces I am wearing. I suspect the vast majority of the Shaman Healing community falls between 25% and 30% before buffs (cursory glace at armory seems to support that theory) in a raid environment you can already get close to 40% crit. Adding another 5% to that is just insane, it will definitely increase our throughput quite a bit. It will also work hand in hand with changes to Improved Water Shield which now procs off of chain heal without consuming an orb. This will do wonders for our mana regeneration along with our healing throughput.
The newest item I’m probably most excited about though so far is not the Tier 9 set (while it is nice) but we have a new Totem. The Totem of Calming Tides is, quite simply put sexy. When you cast Chain Heal you have a chance to gain 234 spell power for 15 seconds. That is just nice any way you slice it. Combine that with the increased crit chance and the fact we’ll most likely be packing enough haste to have 2 second or sub 2 second chain heals and I suspect more often then not we’ll have the buff. There is no information on proc percentages yet, but it’s still very early in the PTR. It should also be noted that this so far does not just affect your chain heal spell power, but your overall spellpower, meaning when it procs Earth Shield, Riptide, our various Healing Waves and even Healing Stream Totem will gain a benefit. Personally I can’t wait to get my grubby little Shaman fingers on this one.
Along with the Tier Sets we were provided information for Badge Goggles andBadge Shoulders. While they are pretty good I just find myself hard pressed to get excited about them. Maybe after the models are released for Horde / Alliance.
The new totem and the Tier set fits very nicely with the talent and spell changes for Shamans in the coming patch, you can read my initial thoughts on them Here.
For those who don’t remember here they are again.
- Call of Air – Simultaneously places up to 4 totems specified in the Totem Bar. Can call different totems that Call of Fire or Call of Water.
- Call of Water – Simultaneously places up to 4 totems specified in the Totem Bar. Can call different totems that Call of Fire.
- Call of Fire – Simultaneously places up to 4 totems specified in the Totem Bar.
- Totemic Call has been renamed to Call of Earth -Â Â Â Â Returns your totems to the earth, giving you 25% of the mana required to cast each totem destroyed by Call of Earth.
- Tidal Waves has been changed to -Â Â Â Â When you cast Chain Heal or Riptide, you have a 100% chance to lower the cast time of your Healing Wave spell by 30% and increase the critical effect chance of your Lesser Healing Wave spell by 25%, until two such spells have been cast. In addition, your Healing Wave gains an additional 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus healing effects and your Lesser Healing Wave gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% of your bonus healing effects.
- Nature’s Guardian now give you a 100% chance to increase your maximum health by 15% for 10 sec instead of 50% chance to heal for 10% of your total health. Cooldown increased from 8 second to 30 second.
- Mana Tide Totem now has 10% of the caster’s health. (Up from 5 health)
- Nature’s Swiftness now has a 2 min cooldown. (Down from 3 min)
- Improved Water Shield no longer consumes a Water Shield Orb when you gain a critical effect from your spells, now also has a 10/20/30% chance to proc from Chain Heal.
- Ancestral Healing now reduces your target’s physical damage taken by 3/7/10% instead of increasing its armor by 8/16/25%.
Looking at those and looking at the set bonus I’m definitely starting to get excited. I’ll report more on it after I get some time in on the PTR, Lodur is transferred over on the PvE server for the PTR and will be getting some play time tonight after my raid and tomorrow for sure. I’ll update this when I get some more information on how the talents are working and how it feels in a raid environment, particularly hard modes.
What do you guys think of the Tier set and the Relic? Are you going to transfer over onto the PTR and try the new talents out? Are you looking forward to hard mode as a Shaman healer?
Until next time, Happy Healing.
Awesome changes, all of them!!! I can’t wait to try everything out on the PTR. I think Resto Shamans were due some buffing, and this so far looks to be very positive…
“Riptide is already going to receive a little buff in it’s healing come the patch”
Where did you see that? It’s not in the patch notes
Vvodka, Thanks for pointing that out, I was sort of in a rush this morning and meant to put
“Riptide already seems to have received a little buff in it’s healing come the patch”
Which is an observation based off of the tooltips I’ve been able to see which has put Rank 1 on the PTR at the same healing values that Rank 4 is now. It is possible it is just a tooltip bug, but I haven’t been able to play around with it yet.
All the 4 piece bonuses that offer 5% crit appear to be placeholders. Look at the priest 4 piece bonus for instance then compare it with the current 2 piece bonus.
I look very forward to having three different versions of Tier gear. I wonder, though, which ones will drop from where since there are 4 different difficulties. Has anything been said to that effect?
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@Tarqon it is possible that it is a place holder. Only time will tell.
I really, really hope this is a place-holder. This is a very bad trade from the t8 4 piece.
Currently I run 32%+ crit un-buffed. This means all of my heals have a 32% crit chance. I can only run this much crit because I don’t have to stack haste, thanks to the 4 piece t8 set bonus. Since CH is the only spell we need haste for, I can safely ignore it (for the most part) with this huge buff to the effective haste of that spell.
The t9 bonus will force me to stack haste heavily, instead of crit. I’ll lose 8-9% crit for all of my healing spells to gain the haste needed to make CH viable. I’ll gain 5% of that back, but only for one of my spells.
Basically, I’ll be losing 8-9% crit on all of my spells except CH, and 2-4% crit on CH, just to try and keep CH casting fast enough to not be worthless. This is a pretty nasty trade.
The only other option is to continue stacking crit like I am now and have CH take FOREVER to cast, making it even more situational than it currently is. This is likely the route I’ll take. Sure, it’ll hit hard when it hits (45%+crit raid buffed with t9 4 piece) but it’ll cast so slow that it will be beaten out by faster AoE heals even more than it currently is. It’s sad to think that I’ll likely nearly stop casting CH all together, but I just don’t see how it’s going to be feasible to gear appropriately for both CH usability and throughput with other spells. One demands high haste, the others get almost zero benefit from haste. It’s a choice of gearing for a single spell or all of my other spells.
I’d far, far prefer the same haste buff we have now, or a change to CH to let it cast faster if they’re taking that away.
-Z
I love the 2-piece bonus for T9! Riptide is more useful for it’s initial “pop” and the HoT doesn’t seem to be too sexy to me. Due to the fact that I or another fellow healer will likely have that person’s health topped off in a few seconds, the HoT kinda seems to be of little use in PvE… especially in 25-man content.
The 4-piece bonus for T9 is just crud. Well, not really “crud” so much by itself, but when you compare it to the 4-piece of T8, there’s no contest there at all. The T8 4-piece bonus is frickin bad to the bone. However, I can see what they are trying to do here with the T9 4-piece. It will definitely help us out with mana regen. I’ve been hoping that they would change the imp water shield so that Chain Heal could a return off of it… blizz has made (or will make) a good change here.
I agree with Zorash. I hope this 4-piece bonus is a place holder. I like socketing Intell and SP. I never socket haste, though i do seek after gear that has it.
But to answer your question Lodur, yeah I’m looking forward to healing T9 content. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Blizz surprises us with something cooler than 5% crit on that 4-piece.
After looking at some more gear and mechanics, I’ve realized that, assuming the 5% crit on CH 4-piece isn’t a place-holder, perhaps they’re trying to move us away from gearing so heavily from mp5.
With the IWS change and the mp5 on gear buff, we should be much, much less mana-starved in intensive or long fights. Historically I (and I think most of us) have geared for either haste/mp5 or crit/mp5, as mp5 has been such a painfully vital stat. Perhaps now we’ll be free to gear much more towards haste/crit. This would allow us to focus a lot more on throughput than longevity, and the longevity could come by way of IWS and more mp5 on those items that still have it.
It’s far too early to tell, but I can see this being viable. Taking a look at my current loadout I’m pretty crit/haste focused already. I have reliable druids that have innervates going to waste, so I take full advantage of that and push for as much throughput as possible. I’ve found that by dropping some mp5 I’ve been able to get my haste back up to pretty decent levels while still maintaining outstanding crit numbers (nearly 36% unbuffed). If I dropped a couple more pieces of crit/mp5 gear and used haste/crit instead I’d be able to get CH down to very usable cast times without the 4 piece tier 8. I’d be mana starved, of course, but that may not be the case come 3.2.
tl;dr – I’m less angry and worried about the t9 bonuses now and more curious what’s in store for us. I like the idea of gearing for crit/haste and not having to focus so heavily on mp5. More throughput from gear and mana regen via talents is a good thing.
-Z
I don’t rly like the totem from badges since i don’t like to faceroll chainheal the whole time. My favorite totem is still the pvp lesser healing wave one. I got my first piece of t9.2 yesterday and as soon ask i can i’ll get the next one because the riptide set bonus is 10 times better then the chainheal one.
Greetz,
Jayded (Deathwing EU)