It is a bit frustrating to be the only healing class to not have an ability to save myself that doesn’t involve dying first. So I have two options that I think might be necessary for heroic modes of ICC:

(5/5) Nature’s Guardian (when brought below 30% hp, I gain 15% of my max hp)
This will cause me to lose Healing Way (I don’t use Healing Wave much) and Healing Focus (apparently there aren’t fights where you really have to worry about spell push back, it’s just a talent so I really don’t have to worry about it)

If I remember correctly, I had about 26k hp with shout last raid. So if I dip to 30% my max health will change to ... 30k it looks like. This means at 30% hp I would jump back to ROUGHLY 12k hp

My other option is to spec deeper into the Enhance tree and pick up (2/5) Toughness (4% increased Stam and 12% reduced stun) and have (2/5) Max hp increased by 6% when at 30%.

Unbuffed I have 1343 stam. 4% increase on that would be ~1397. 54 more stam, or 540 more hp unbuffed (this would probably translate to MAYBE 700 with buffs, I don’t feel like calculating so I’m just going to guess). So 26.7k hp in raid. I hit 30% at 8010, and go back up to about 10k.

The pros with the second spec are 2/3 Enhancing Totems for raid buffs ... which isn’t really needed because we have a lock with the sp buff.

I’m not really sure which would be better overall. Anyone have an opinion?

I really have never played a shaman at the end levels, I think if you’re looking for an oh-shit type of deal the first sounds more appealing to me. My thinking is if you’re going to get hit by something that would kill you.. its just going to kill you. Usually the preventable deaths are the ones that bring you very low and are followed up by something 1 second later… so the boost of hp at lower seems better for me. Might give you the buffer you need to be followed through by a hot or heal etc.

Again I have no idea in actual practice what is more preferable.

I have a macro for a self-targetted, tidal focused, NSed healing wave. We have to make our own “oh shit” spells :(

But I definitely share your frustration with not having many defensive spells.

Make a macro that says,

/raid Parallel didn’t swiftmend me!

thats pretty clutch.

Just die like a man.

The former option!

If you have free talent points I would go with the stamina option, but I don’t think I would worry about it one way or the other since you don’t use healing wave anyway.

Edit: I meant the nature’s guardian stam :P

imo you should just get improved reincarnation so you would be able to reincarnate every boss pretty much and its alot less points than the other options (only 2)

Cprawr - 02 February 2010 10:30 AM

imo you should just get improved reincarnation so you would be able to reincarnate every boss pretty much and its alot less points than the other options (only 2)

It’s just that dying as a healer is very hard to come back from. I want to prevent it from happening so I don’t have to scramble to catch up in hardmodes.