Resto Shaman Blue Post of Hope
Just a very quick post. I don’t normal bother with patch or hotfix notes, but this one made me so giddy I couldn’t resist.
While the recent 4.0.6 changes to Shaman have bolstered our healing quite a bit, many members of the resto shaman community have still been concerned about our viability compared to other healers. Apparently Blizzard has been monitoring things very careful since the patch, and have one additional hotfix that they want to apply to bring us up to par:
We are also applying a hotfix for Purification for the Restoration shaman passive from 10% to 25%. We think that shaman healing per second is not as competitive with other healers and while we hoped to bring down Holy priest and Holy paladins (in particular) in 4.0.6, which we did, shaman still appear to be behind. In this case, it is simply easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters.
Purification is one of the passive bonuses that Resto Shaman receive simply by specializing into the tree. It currently increases the effectiveness of our healing spells by 10% and the cast time of our Healing Wave and Greater Healing wave spells by 0.5 seconds. After this hotfix it will increase the effectiveness of our healing spells by 25% instead of 10%!
And if that news wasn’t enough to cheer you up? Blizzard is “thinking” about something that will resolve the greatest issue that we face as resto shaman – the lack of cooldowns.
We agree with the sentiment among some players that Restoration druids and Restoration shaman are lacking in the healing cooldown department. The shaman buff and Power Word: Shield adjustment above should bring all healers reasonably close in terms of throughput. The decision on who to bring then might end up being dictated by the strong cooldowns offered by paladins or priests. This isn’t the kind of thing we can address via a hotfix, but it is something we are looking at for the next major content patch.
As always, we appreciate your continued constructive feedback and will do our best to keep you informed of ongoing developments.
The silence on Blizzard’s part about this issue for so long left the community very nervous – how could Blizzard ignore something that seemed so obvious to us? This post gives us a much-needed dose of hope. While it won’t happen anytime soon, and may not even help us with this tier of raiding, we can be reassured that Blizzard is discussing giving us a cooldown.
My husband decided that resto shaman should throw a totem at someone and it should disappear and infuse them with a big burst of healing. I hope Blizzard comes up with something better than totem tossing, but regardless I am very excited about the possibilities.
The Blue Post link is here for those that are interested.
No no no. You should throw a totem at Barklay’s head, and it sticks there for a while doing flashy healy things.
A bear with a totem stuck to his head. I like that.
Sorry I didn’t explain your idea to your satisfaction
Glad to see this change. It sends a signal that they are actually looking into some class issues. With the recent hey lets piss off 1.2 million players with no explanation stance they have taken its good to see some love spread around.
We all know Barkley likes new hats…
Night recently posted..The Elusive Ghostcrawler
Hmm, nice post for my first comment ! Please bear with my English, I’m not a native speaker :s
It’s great that we finally get some feedback from the developpers, other than “we’re satisfied with the current resto shaman healing model”. A plain old buff to all of our spells is nice, and it looks like all the community shares this opinion (I don’t think I had seen such pity and compassion from all the other healers before…).
Now, what comes to my mind is that it’s cool right now, but as our gear improves, our passive bonus might be really overpowered : my tauren sense is tingling *nerf incoming*
I don’t really see what cooldown they could give us without crushing the lore under their feet, maybe a longer cooldown on unleash life and an effect more interesting (I barely use this ability, triggering a GCD to have the next GHW or CH buffed takes far too much time…). Maybe a fusion of the shaman with the element imbuing its weapon : Earthliving => guaranteed proc of Earthliving on all our targets for 10 seconds, Firetongue => the shaman radiates a small fire AoE, Windfury => stacks a debuff increasing lightning damage received… (don’t know about the other 2 imbues, I don’t know anyone using them xD)
Maybe a watershield-based unleash, for 0.5s shorter cast time on all our healing spells and higher crit chance… Nothing really new, I guess.
On a more global topic, thank you for your great articles, they are very helpful and fun to read !
Thanks for the comment Ypp!
I agree that the passive buff to our spells could create an over-powered issue in the future, but the great thing is that Blizzard can just tweak the numbers again as needed. They finally figured out that they need to leave themselves “hooks” to fix class imbalances more simply than in the past.
As far as a cooldown goes, my best guess would be something like expelling all the charges of our earth shield to provide some sort of damage mitigation. That would be an interesting tank cooldown. A raid-healing cooldown would be very helpful as well, but I’m at a loss to think of something that fits with the shaman flavor. I’ll just have to place my trust in Blizzard and hope they come up with something useful and cool.