Some of you old-timers may be wondering about where the heck Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave ran off to. Well, both of these spells have decided to get permanently hitched to our restoration brothers and sisters, effectively dumping us. That's right, our only actively cast healing spells are now Healing Surge, Chain Heal, and Healing Rain. I see you giving Healing Surge the stink eye; try not to judge it quite yet, it's more potent than it looks.
Please note that I will only be covering the spell modifiers (mainly talents and glyphs, not necessarily procs/secondary stat scaling) that directly effect healing. There are several other glyphs/talents that boost resistances and help to dispel, but I will not be including those within this article.
Unless you're hard casting Healing Surge for some odd reason, this spell is more than adequate for the pinch healing that you'll need during leveling/soloing/raiding. Trust me, this spell has been saving my shaman butt for months now. Check out these modifiers that makes Healing Surge more potent for us.
Modified by:
1) Maelstrom Weapon - For each stack of Maelstrom Weapon, Healing Surge will both cost less mana and heal for greater amounts.
2) Healing Storm - This glyph will cause your healing done to be increased by 20% per Maelstrom Weapon stack.
3) Echo of Elements - This talent can cause your Healing Surge to "echo," effectively casting Healing Surge a second time without any extra effort from you or resource cost. Both the original spell an the echoed spell can crit independently.
Might not be so bad, eh? Now let's break down some of our other healing abilities.
Chain Heal is not a spell commonly cast by an enhancement shaman unless said shaman is within proximity of several raid mates and their healers are struggling. Remember, it is your job as a dps to do damage, not play healing hero. In the event that your healers are oom, you may use Chain Heal and Healing Rain as last ditch efforts to save your raid team long enough to make a kill. If you need to save yourself in the event that you accidentally stood in the bad though, use Healing Surge. Chain Heal doesn't heal for a ton single-target, and can unfortunately only bounce so far.
Modified by:
1) Maelstrom Weapon - For each stack of Maelstrom Weapon, Healing Surge will both cost less mana and heal for greater amounts.
2) Healing Storm - This glyph will cause your healing done to be increased by 20% per Maelstrom Weapon stack.
3) Echo of Elements - This talent can cause your Chain Heal to "echo," effectively casting Chain Heal a second time without any extra effort from you or resource cost. Crits will behave as if you had cast Chain Heal twice, meaning they'll do their own thing regardless of what the original spell did.
Much like Chain Heal, Healing Rain is not a spell commonly cast by an enhancement shaman unless said shaman is within proximity of several raid mates and their healers are struggling. Healing Rain can help to stabilize a group's health, though overall doesn't do a ton of healing. Remember, it is your job as a dps to do damage, not play healing hero. In the event that your healers are oom, you may use Chain Heal and Healing Rain as last ditch efforts to save your raid team long enough to make a kill. If you need to save yourself in the event that you accidentally stood in the bad though, use Healing Surge.
Healing Rain also plays a part in how the talent Conductivity works. More on this a little bit later.
Modified by:
1) Maelstrom Weapon - For each stack of Maelstrom Weapon, Healing Rain will both cost less mana and heal for greater amounts.
2) Healing Storm - This glyph will cause your healing done to be increased by 20% per Maelstrom Weapon stack.
Healing Stream Totem
This totem has been a healing staple for us shaman for quite some time now. While it has had a bit of a makeover since Cataclysm, this totem can still put out a good little bit of healing. Currently this totem is a single target smart heal, and prefers to target those in the shaman's group who have the lowest health. The Mists of Pandaria version only lasts for 15 seconds at a time and has a cooldown, but said cooldown is relatively short (30 seconds). If you're in dire need of a second Healing Stream Totem, and fast, you may reset the cooldown if you're specced into Call of the Elements (3 minute cooldown on this talent).
Modified by:
1) Call of the Elements - Resets the 30 second cooldown on this totem. Usable once every 3 minutes.
Healing Tide Totem
It's a totem, it's a talent, it's a "major" healing cooldown! That's right, Healing Tide Totem is not a standard water totem for us damage dealing shaman, but it is available to us via talents. Unfortunately, this talent is second to Ancestral Guidance in terms of healing output capabilities, mainly due to the fact that it doesn't really scale all that well for us. Plus, it's fickle and likes to oscillate on how many ticks of healing it'll put out. There are situations where this totem could potentially be more useful, however. If your raid needs a healing cooldown during periods where you're not able to hit a boss, for example. Though, for the most part your healing team should be able to plan around mechanics to make it so they can make the greatest use out of your hybrid healing abilities (which would be to use Ancestral Guidance whilst you are parked on a boss/pile of adds). This totem can also be highly useful in soloing situations where you find yourself kiting more often than hitting something, though those situations are rather rare.
You may not have Healing Tide Totem and Healing Stream Totem out at the same time; popping one while the other is out can end up being a slight waste in both the totem itself, and the GCD.
Modified by:
1) Talents that only restoration has which passively boosts all of their healing, including totems
2) Haste plateaus, which enhance doesn't shoot for
Ancestral Guidance
This particular talent currently offers us dps shaman types the biggest bang for our talent point...assuming we can swat at things. Ancestral Guidance yields the highest output while we are in our Ascendance form, though please keep in mind that tying the two together may result in a complete waste of Ancestral Guidance, unless there's an increased damage taken and received phase, such as the gas phase on Will of the Emperor normal mode. For soloing purposes however, if you happen to pop AG while in Ascendance, you could very well see yourself go from nearly dead to full very quickly. Stormstrike/Stormblast, Lava Lash, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lighting, the initial impact of shocks (meaning NOT Flame Shock's tick, just the impact when you first cast it), and Fire Nova all essentially become means of healing through this talent for a short duration.
Modified by:
1) The use of dps cooldowns in conjunction with this ability.
Conductivity
What this talent does essentially is give anyone within the shaman's healing rain either 20% of their healing done (say, you cast Healing Surge on yourself while in your own healing rain, each person standing in your rain will likewise receive 20% of the healing that Healing Surge did to you) or 50% of their damage done is turned into healing (again you and a few raid mates are standing in your rain, Lava Lash hits for 150k so everyone in that rain gets a split healing total 75k). Currently Conductivity is a dps loss due to having to waste Maelstrom resources on dropping Healing Rain, suffers from positional issues, and overall has a lower HPS output than both Ancestral Guidance (our current best talent option for that tier) and Healing Tide Totem. Conductivity will be getting some love come patch 5.2 by having its "standing in the Healing Rain" requirement removed, but chances are pretty good that most of us will be sticking with Ancestral Guidance as our primary choice.
Modified by:
1) Elemental Blast - This is currently a talent that no enhancement shaman should be taking because of its lower damage output compared to Unleashed Elements and even Primal Elementalist, but due to its massive secondary stat boost plus some of the love it will be receiving in patch 5.2, it's worth noting. In 5.2 it is said that EB will also give a boost in Agility every time it is cast for enhancement shaman who choose this talent, which in turn will make the healing done via Conductivity a bit more powerful. However, due to resources (both Conductivity and Elemental Blast consume Maelstrom Weapon stacks, so you'd have to potentially hard cast one of these abilities) this combination may not be the best for enhancement. While it appears that tier 14 will allot us more Maelstrom procs, I have my doubts of this combination being worth the hassle for our spec.
Feral Spirits
That's right, even our wolves heal us! Just us though, they really don't like anyone else. Every time they attack, 150% of the damage they deal heals both them and us. Pretty neat, eh? But that's not all! If you have Glyph of Feral Spirit in, they deal another 40% in healing, which is to say pretty darn potent. Yeah that's right, our wolves aren't just a little damage cooldown that looks all flashy, but they're also a fairly decent self healing cooldown as well. Pretty hard to take us down when we have our wolf pals out!
Modified by:
1) Glyph of Feral Spirit
2) Mastery - The Feral Spirits attack using a spell called Spirit Bite, which deals nature damage. Due to our Enhancement Mastery, the more mastery we have, the stronger our wolves will attack. The stronger their attacks, the more healing we receive.
Glyph of Flame Shock
While this glyph's changes won't be implemented on live servers until 5.2 (at the time of writing this post, this glyph adjusts the damage and duration of Flame Shock), assuming that it makes the cut, I figured that it would be worth mentioning to those of you who are reading this in the future. Come next patch, you will personally be healed by 30% of the damage your Flame Shock does. My assumption is that if you were to spread your Flame Shock via Lava Lash and had multiple Flame Shocks rolling at once, you'd likewise receive healing from those Flame Shocks.
I'll admit that this glyph looks pretty good on paper, but from the sounds of it this may end up being a fairly lackluster choice at first, since Flame Shock doesn't do a ton of damage by itself. It may however end up scaling nicely towards the end of this expansion. We'll have to wait and see what the theorycrafting community's verdict on particular glyph is to know for sure though.
That's everything we have currently. So let's break it down into simple terms, going by what is typically specced for and glyphed:
Personal/Single Target Healing: Healing Surge, Feral Spirits, Healing Stream Totem, Flame Shock (5.2 with a glyph)
Party/Raid Healing: Chain Heal, Healing Rain, Healing Stream Totem, Ancestral Guidance (or Healing Tide Totem)
Healing Glyphs: Feral Spirit, Healing Storm, Flame Shock (possibly in 5.2)
Also, don't forget your professions and racials. If you're an herbalist, Lifeblood can help you out in a pinch (plus the extra haste is pretty neat) and if you just so happen to be a Draenei, Gift of the Naaru can restore 20% of your (or a friend's, or Tsulong's) health to you (or your friend, or Tsulong even) over the duration of 15 seconds. Can't beat free healing!
I hope this article has helped you out some, even if it is rather lengthy. Remember, enhancement shamans have a ton of healing utility within our bag of tricks, so there's no need to feel helpless if you're hurting!
Great article! I found your blog thru Pretty Fly Draenei. Nice to see a fellow Enh Shaman around :)
ReplyDeleteThank you kindly! It's always nice to meet a fellow enhancement shaman ^_^
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