WotLK - The state of the resto shaman

First of all, take a peek at the talent calculator at the official site. Here is a link for you.

Shaman Talents

Alrighty, now that we have a look at the talent trees let's review some of the new features.

Improved Water Shield: The first major addition is in Tier 3 of the resto tree. For 3 points, each time you crit with HW or LHW you will proc one of your water shield orbs. Not a bad talent, and will shine in 5-mans. The exact role of resto shamans in raiding has gotten much less clear with the changes. As raiding stands today, this seems like a waste of 3 points, since our role in raids is 95% Chain Heal and that does not work with this talent.

Cleanse Spirit: 1 point talent that cleanses poison, disease, and curses. Woot! All in-one cleanse including curses? Yes please! Very nice to have.

Blessing of the Eternals: 2 points for 4% crit and +10% healing from Earthliving Weapon. Not a bad talent, but I have never been the hugest fan of crit builds for healing since alot of healing crits are going to overheal. It seems Blizz is trying to push us in that direction.

Ancestral Awakening: When you critically hit with LHW or HW, it jumps to a raid member within 40 yards for 60% of the healing done. It is sort of like a big chain heal for tank healing, but it is uncontrollable.

Improved Earth Shield: Gives you 2 additional orbs and increases healing by 10%. An ok talent, but nothing that wows me.

Tidal Waves: 100% chance after casting chain heal to reduce the cast time on your next 2 LHW and HW by 50%, and your HW and LHW spells gain an additional 25% healing. I am a little confused if the extra 25% is only after a proc of this, or is an overall buff. This talent can be used in one of 2 ways. You can cycle between CH and 2 HW when healing, or you can be spamming CH on the raid and have the 2 HWs "loaded" and ready for quick help on the tank or someone that is very low. This should be useful regardless of the style in which it is used.

Spirit Link: Links the target with 2 nearby friendly targets, causing 50% of damage taken to be distributed to linked targets. Targets that take a hit equal to 30% of their total health will be removed fromt he link. Well, this thing is interesting. Let's do some quick overview using current values. A tank at 20k health is linked up with 2 other melee with 10k each. The tank gets smacked for 7k from a boss, so that gets split into 3.5k to the tank, and 1.725k to each of our melee. The is a HUGE difference in incoming damage. Just mop up the damage with Chain Heal. This talent as it reads is almost game breaking, so I am not sure how it will play out.

Other areas of interest include Elemental Focus now working to reduce mana off of heals too. The way it reads now it only procs of damage spells, but I have heard it does proc off heal crits as well. Also, Ancestral Knowledge is now +int, and Improved Shields ups both Water and Earth Shield by a small amount.

Overall I like most of the changes, but I dislike the overall direction of the class. In current WoW, all healers have a role the shine in. Shamans are the best raids healers, pallies for tank healing, druids for HoTs, and priests are the jack-of-all trades. In WotLK they seem to be muddying the waters and making everyone do everything. All of the new shaman talents are based on improving our single target healing.

While I like being able to single target heal better, I expected us to get something to benefit our raid healing. Almost none of the new synergy in the talent trees does anything for our raid healing. Not seeing the design of WotLK raids yet, it is difficult to judge our role. CoH got a nerf with the cooldown, and now they are pushing us to single target talents. Is Blizzard trying to move away from huge AOE damage on the raid? I guess time will tell. I personally like having a more defined role to shine in, and not making everyone a jack-of-all trades.