5.4 Changes

Now that Healing Tide will be a baseline spell for all Shamans in 5.4, Blizzard needed to replace the tale previously occupied by Healing Tide.  They have announced a brand new talent called Rushing Streams.

This talent will increase the healing done by healing stream totem by 100% and cause the totem to heal to targets at once.  It will share the same talent tier as Ancestral Guidance and the newly redesigned Conductivity.

Because of this change, I expect that many resto shamans will be considering keeping their T15 tier bonus and take advantage of this talent.  However, because of this, I expect we could very likely see the T15 bonus nurfed by Blizzard shortly after T16 comes out and the new tier is available to resto shamans.

A few days ago Blizzard got Shamans all excited over the proposed change that Healing Tide was going to be baseline for all Shamans, instead of being a talent that Shamans needed to spec into. This is now official in the new patch notes.

Not only is Healing Tide being made into a baseline spell, it is also getting significantly buffed for 25M raiding, similar to how we saw Revival, Tranq etc buffed previously.  It will now heal up to 12 raid members in 25M, up from the previous five.

Healing Tide Totem is no longer a talent and is a baseline ability for all Shamans. Additionally, this totem will now heal 12 raid members (up from 5) when used in a 25-player instance.

This is a great change, because shamans will no longer have to automatically select Healing Tide as the talent for that tier for most fights.

 

While Chain Healing is a resto shamans niche healing spells, it is always been unfortunate that it drops in effectiveness with every jump it makes between raid members.  However, in 5.4 shamans will no longer see it decrease per jump. Instead it the healing will remain static for every jump it makes.

This will also make it that much more important that resto shamans are chain healing off someone who has Riptide and/or Earth Shield since the jump healing will be so much more noticeable.

Of course, Blizzard could still change it at any time until the patch releases, but this is one of the great new buffs given to resto shamans for 5.4 .

There are some pretty significant changes that have been announced for resto shamans for 5.4, although they haven’t hit the PTR Notes yet.

The most significant change the fact that they are changing Healing Tide Totem from being a talent to a baseline spell for all shamans exclusive of spec.  Because of this, they believe they are going to buff the effectiveness of the totem for 25M raiding.

The other change is that shamans will get a new talents to replace the previous Healing Tide totem.  There is a lot of speculation over what it could be, but Blizzard hasn’t announced it yet.

Here is the full blue post:

 We do have more changes coming for Resto Shaman in 5.4, which you should be seeing on the PTR soon (though possibly not in the next build). However, since we’ve got a long weekend coming up here at the office due to the holiday, we wanted to let you know about a couple changes we’re going to try out for Healing Tide Totem.

First, it’s no longer a talent. Healing Tide Totem is now baseline, available to all three Shaman specs. As you’re all aware, it’s an extremely useful ability, which makes it difficult for us to provide alternative options in that talent tier. Giving Healing Tide to everyone not only lets us work on making that tier more interesting, but it also makes sure no one is missing out on one of Resto’s more powerful tools by selecting the “wrong” talent.

Second, now that Healing Tide is a baseline ability, we feel it’s acceptable to give it a similar treatment to Tranquility or Divine Hymn in 25-man raids. It will now heal up to 12 targets when in a 25-player raid instance (and remains at 5 targets in other content).

There are several other changes still in discussion (such as what we’ll be replacing Healing Tide with in the talent tree, just as one example), but we wanted to at least share what we could before the weekend. We’re hoping to get at least some of them onto the PTR in one of the next builds. Please keep up the constructive feedback – it’s extremely useful!

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