Lodur here to chime in on the Tier 8 set bonuses for Restoration Shamans. Matt posted them earlier, but I‘ll paste them here again for easy reference
Shaman
- Shaman T8 Restoration 2P Bonus  Reduces the cooldown on Riptide by 1 sec.
- Shaman T8 Restoration 4P Bonus  Reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 0.2 sec.
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So, lets take a gander here. Like many of the other sets, the two piece bonus has left me feeling a bit strange. This is different then what they’ve done with our 2 pieces in the past.  Lets take a look at the Tier 7 2 piece.ÂÂ
-  Your Water Shield is 10% strongerÂÂ
That is a very very nice 2 piece. It’s a percentage, so if the amount of mana Water Shield returns goes up, this has that much more punch. Lets take this a step further and go back to the Tier 6 2 piece.ÂÂ
- Your Chain Heal ability costs 10% less mana.ÂÂ
Again, same deal. A percentage that scales well with the abilities on hand. I know I used this set bonus well into Naxxramas healing and I was very sad to see it go.
This new 2 piece set bonus is interesting to me because its a flat amount, it doesn’t scale since a second is a second anyway you slice it. 1 second reduction brings the ability to a 5 second cooldown, which makes it like any of the shock spells with 5/5 reverberation. Having it available 1 second sooner is nice, I know I’ve wished I had it up that one second sooner many times (Malygos Vortex comes to mind). There is something that can take this a step up from decent however. Another recent Shaman change that has to do with a particular glyph available in the patch fits this set bonus quite handily.ÂÂ
Glyph of Riptide — Increases the duration of Riptide by 6 sec. (Up from 3 sec)
This, with the 2 piece bonus gives us a 20 second hot, on a 5 second cooldown. I can definitely see that being useful, and if it stays at a 6 second increase, I’ll most assuredly pick one up.ÂÂ
Next on the billet is the 4 piece set bonus.
It doesn’t seem like a lot up front, but I like this. I really really like this. Right now through moderate gearing (and taking on more crit to reach a balance of stats) Lodur is at 438 haste before Wrath of Air totem. 438 haste equates to roughly 13% which means Chain Heal right now is 2.2 seconds to cast for me without the totem, and 2.1 seconds with. This will let me bring it down to 1.9 second cast with only self buffs. Add Heroism / Bloodlust and a Retadin or Critchicken and thats about a second and a half cast time for chain heal, with only the global cooldown to worry about. With Glyphing and a decent amount of spell power you’re going to be hitting 4 people with sizeable heals that much faster.  This set bonus pushes us a bit further up the raid healing totem pole so to speak.ÂÂ
While I’m here I’d also like to mention our new relic
Shaman T8 Restoration Relic — Increases the base amount healed by your chain heal by 243
Keep that relic in mind as you’re looking at the 4 piece set bonus and it’s just one more notch in the belt for swinging Chain Heals.ÂÂ
Overall I’m pretty pleased with the itemization coming in 3.1.ÂÂ
What do you think?
Till next time, Happy Healing
Lodur
Stop sending me scary subliminal messages!!! >____<
I’m pretty sure the .2 seconds off Chain Heal would be before haste effects. So it’ll be a little less than .2 seconds overall. Hopefully someone will do a comparison between 5% to Chain Heal and this new .2 seconds off. I’m guessing that when spamming Chain Heal, the .2 seconds is better since .2 is 8% of 2.5.
I’m not real happy with the 2 piece bonus. It’s not going to improve my healing much at all. There’s maybe one or two times a fight that I hit riptide and it’s still on CD. Maybe that accounts for 1/10 of 1% increase in healing. Very nice for PvP if I ever had to wear PvE gear in a PvP setting. Basically the only time this set bonus is good is when there’s a lot of movement required (i.e. Heigan).
@Mekias, We all know how much blizzard loves movement fights now. Ulduar is no different. With that said I understand the 1 sec is pretty meh, but we’ll see how that plays out. Also even if the .2 second reduce is given pre haste, that brings the cast down to 2.3 seconds. Now if we follow the haste formula found in this post here
https://worldofmatticus.com/2008/12/23/chain-heal-rises-as-circle-of-healing-falls/
the math works out to a cast time of 2.03 seconds before additional haste such as Wrath of Air or player buffs. Either way you slice it this is going to help you push sub 2.0 seconds on your chain heal cast if you really want it.
Personally, I’m a bit ‘meh’ about the 4pt bonus – I like to mix it up a bit but it seems they’re slowly pushing us towards CH being the only heal to use again.
Most other classes are getting ‘on spellcast gain haste or SP’ and, honestly, I’d rather have something like that so that I could choose to utilise it with my other spells.
Seeing priests get something like 250 sp on casting their shield, and we get what is, effectively, a pile of haste rating in an environment where spamming hasted chain heals (with all mana changes) could run us out of mana.
2pc I could take or leave – I use riptide quite a lot in multi-tank situations but I don’t really want to drop my LHW glyph for the riptide one as (again) I’d be losing flexibility in my heals.
So…not impressed – I would have liked to see something which made, say, Earthliving more effective or split HW / CH like t7 4pc. I guess it also doesn’t help that I prefer the looks of t7 😉
/hug
Auriks last blog post..Twilight Vanquisher Avarix
I don’t like it if 2pc boni are crap.
Why is this bad: As Lodus said: an excellent bonus should scale with gear. Don’t get me wrong, riptide is an excellent tool for us shamans and even our only one if on the move (except earthshield, kinda). So this 1 sec reduction is ok-ish for 5 mans or 10 mans, a 25 man raider won’t care much. Just saying that Ulduar is movement heavy doesn’t justify this bonus. Nearly all encounters will leave you with tons of room to stand still an cast, otherwise mages would be pretty useless dps classes. And optimizing the time to stand still and cast chainheal will often be the key to pump out some good healing, not running in circles and waiting for riptide to come off the cooldown.
Because let’s not forget: HPM and HPS of riptide is not extremly good. And the HoT is rather weak, especially compared to what other HoTs are flying around in a 25 man raid. So Riptide is a good spell, but not at all a spell worth casting every second it comes available!
In addition to that: while those additional second we win might somewhen save a person if all other healers are dead and NS + HW is on cooldown and you have to move, riptide will get a lot of competition comes 3.1:
-improved renew
-4pcT8 resto druid
So while riptide once felt kinda unique, those two changes devalue it somehow and will make sure that more than enough little insta heals will be flying around in 25 man raids. And this makes me think even more that the 2pcT8 is pretty bad, I’d rather have a bonus that would affect the spells I use because I want and not the one I use just because I’m running around.
4pcT8 is ok but non-scaling as well.
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Hmmmm idk…. The 2p set bonus from Tier 7 imo, still better then 2p T8.
Tbh, 1 second less on riptide is kinda lame, but only the fights in Ulduar will make me get a solid opinion on this.
Tough the new relic is Sexy!
I don’t particularly like the new t8 set bonuses but I disagree with most of you saying it is useless. I find myself using riptide quite often at it’s current state; I don’t use it for the HoT effect though, to me it’s an instant 2-3k heal that could easily save someone in a touchy situation. Knocking off 1 second to that could help immensely on a lot of fights. It’s up to yourself if you’re going to decide on spamming chain heals or if you are going to make the most out of the changes Shamans have been given. I agree that chain heal is our most effective heal and it’s always my top heal, but that isn’t to say I don’t mix it up. You are being negligent if you aren’t using a quick LHW to top someone under 5k off (assuming HoTs aren’t on the target and they aren’t expected to take anymore damage), the same goes with Riptide and HW. How many times have you found yourself in the position that a tank died, you weren’t on tank heals but you were in range and could have hit him with a Riptide followed by a quick HW or LHW giving the tank healers just enough time to get in their following heals?
As for the 4set change, I am all for this change. I’m not overly concerned about the loss in spell power that we recieved from the t7 bonus. As it stand in a fully raid buffed setting, I’m pushing 2900 healing. This is more than enough currently. Considering the better stats on gear in Ulduar, our healing will be higher or at the worst scenario equalize out to the bonus we received from T7 4set and on top of that we’ll now have more haste which adds to our most effective heal. Not considering any buffs, my shaman is at 641 haste; I get a lot of inquiry asking if that’s too much but personally I wish I had more. I don’t itemize for crit as I feel I can get so much more healing output thanks to haste. Raid buffed my chain heal is 2 seconds with my current gear, I will be itemizing the same as I am now so I can’t expect my haste rating to go down (up if anything), add on the t8 4set bonus and raid buffs and I think I’ll have my chain heal down to 1.8 seconds without BL, that is huge! This of course is considering that chain heal will remain our most effective heal come Ulduar and as long as there is raid healing that needs to be done I don’t see that changing.
I know there are those out there that will disagree with me and you are totally entitled to your opinion. The other shaman in my guild itemizes for Crit over Haste and while I am always ahead on the meters by quite a bit there is still plenty of occasions that his large crit heals have saved us in more than one occasion.
Ordieth The Immortal – Resto Shaman of Artifice on Boulderfist Horde US server
Wow… do you guys really not use riptide all the time? o.O
I pretty much use it whenever it’s up, blows my mind that someone said they use it once or twice a fight??
The 2 piece is Amazing. Despite what people are thinking It looks like blizzard is pushing us away from the CH spam of teh past. The Synergy between Earthshield,LHW,Riptide and Improved Watershield is obvious.
I used to gem for haste and was at nearly 700 Haste.. however your mana regen will not carry you through fights if you are casting a heal every global cooldown. I have found that gemming int and bumping my mana pook to around 29-30k raid buffed allows me to use the Riptide sling shot to get off blazing fast (sub 1 sec) lHW’s with Major healing from the AA Crits as a bonus. I also have much less mana issues and my over healing has skyrocketed. chain heal is a nice spell and situationaly your best call but with other classes having much more mana efficient ways to heal mutiple targets (and faster) its not viable as a primary option past Naxx 25.
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