Making a switch

Joe,

When I switch to resto I use a lot of my ele gear (switch out a few hit pieces), should I care about mp5 for N10-25 raids?

Shakura, Lothar (US - A)

Shakura, this is a fairly common question. And to be honest, no, it's not something that you should be overly concerned about. At the end of The Burning Crusade and even early into Wrath, this would be a stat you wanted to stack, but that has changed, especially in the end game. Restoration shaman share a lot of stats with elemental shaman. Haste will help out by increasing the healing efficiency of your spells like Chain Heal and Healing Wave. Crit rating will help proc restoration talents such as Ancestral Awakening. Crit also allows you to take advantage of Improved Water Shield. This talent really goes a long way to make up for the lack of MP5, so as long as you have those two stats covered with decent spellpower, you can heal in a pinch and be fairly effective at it as long as you have the right talent spec supporting it.

Power Auras clarification

Hello Joe,

I have been a fan of Power Auras for the past year or so, and always found reading on other's people's ideas of using it with a big interest. I Also found your last article for resto users of PA on wow.com very interesting, but I have a question for you, Joe, about the Energized buff tracking in Power Auras.

There are two different buffs with this name - one, coming from the shaman relic, stacking spellpower after using Riptide, and another, after Solace healing trinket procs (buffed mana regen). I have been using both (relic and trinket) and I have been experimenting on how to distinguish between these two buffs, but Power Auras seems to fail to tell the difference. No matter how I tried to set up the aura, it either showed the Riptide buff or the Solace trinket buff, probably depending on which one procced first, but most of the times I found this to happen totally randomly. I haven't found any other distinctive ID for each of the two different buffs, they only share identical name - Energized.

So if you happen to know the solution for this - I would be extremely grateful if you could either mail me back or address it in your next blog entry.

Regards,

Alicja

Alicja, you've actually caught onto something there that I should have covered. Since receiving your email, I have tested this out and have encountered the same error. After much poring over the buffs and the addon power aura, I believe that I have the answer to your question. Power Auras Classic allows you to specify spell by either name or spell ID. Spell ID can be found through wowhead.com quite easily.

The solace trinket is http://www.wowhead.com/spell=67696 for normal mode trinket, spell ID 67696. Heroic is http://www.wowhead.com/spell=67750, spell ID 67750. Totem Energized buff http://www.wowhead.com/spell=71220 is spell ID 71220.

Instead of the name of the spell, you can put the spell ID where the name would go -- [71220] for the totem, and so forth. I hope that gives you the answer you are looking for. I tested this out and it worked pretty spot on!

Just the basics

Joe,

I've a couple (likely simple) question regarding Shaman healing mechanics, and you seem the perfect fella to ask.

1. Riptide's HoT. It's "consumed" upon that target receiving a Chain Heal. But...
a. Does this mean the HoT is clipped, and any remaining healing is negated, or does that clipping apply the clipped amount to the CH as well? I presume the former.
b. Is it consumed by only a primary Chain Heal hit, or any secondary jump as well?

2. Do all crits crit for the same multiplier? To take a page from D&D, is it always a double-heal, or rather, do different spells crit with a higher or lower multiplier?

3. Chain Heal only requires the next target for each jump be within 12.5 yards, yes? (And what're the chances of Blizz ever increasing this range, perhaps with a glyph?)

Thanks fella. I'm sure I could figure some of this out with the combat logs, but having only recently started healing heroics, I've not started digging into those yet.

Vorin, Kilrogg (US-A)

Vorin, these are very common questions among players just starting down the restoration shaman path, so let's see if I can give them a nice solid answer.

1A: Once a person with Riptide is targeted by a successfully cast Chain Heal, all remaining HoT effects of the spell are consumed immediately. This occur even if it is in between ticks. There is no "rounding up" on the timer, so to speak, so any healing effects from the HoT left are lost.

1B: The wording of the spell is very specific here:

"your next Chain Heal cast on that primary target within 15 sec will consume the healing over time effect and increase the amount of the Chain Heal by 25%"

This means that it will only be consumed and buff your healing if the person is the first target of your Chain Heal. Due to the nature of CH, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, as it will effect the healing totals of all your other jumps after the first (sort of like a super charge).

2: The short answer is yes, they all have the same multiplier. Spell critical heals will only heal for 150% of their normal amount. That said, it is possible to cast two critical heals of the same spell back to back and have different results, as our spellpower fluctuates or what the total of the base heal was before the crit. You can test this yourself; a spell that heals for around 5k will heal for somewhere around 7.5k when it crits. This is different than DPS crits, which can be pushed higher than 150% by talents.

3. Blizzard has already increased the range of the spell in a previous patch. Pre-patch 3.2, Chain Heal would jump up to 10 yards. Post patch 3.2 it now jumps up to 12.5 yards. Restoration shaman were seeing less and less use in hard mode encounters, as many required raid members to be further than 10 yards apart to avoid certain encounter effects. While they've increased it once to bring us up to speed with other healing classes and to make sure we were viable in hard modes, it is very unlikely they will increase it again. On top of having a good range between jumps, it is still a smart heal, and so it goes where it's needed within that range. I don't think it will get buffed anytime soon. That said, Glyph of Chain Heal does pretty darn good by increasing the maximum targets affected by chain heal by one.

Hope that answers your questions!

That's it for this week. If you have any questions you want answered or anything you want clarified, feel free to email me or to ask on twitter. Be sure to add the tag #asklodur.

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