Hey everyone, welcome to another addition of WoW Wednesday. So, its been two weeks since the release of the Cata pre patch, which to say the least caused a huge uproar over class changes.
So once I had figured out how my hunter worked (2 hours on a training dummy :)... I switched over to my two healers: a resto sham and my druid. Besides tree form being a cooldown, a few changes to our cast times, the increased mana pool :), and regrowth's HoT tick time being less and a few other minor things, I figured the way I heal as a druid never really changed that much.
However, it was a complete different story on my shaman. After casting one riptide and chain heal combo, it was clear that shamans, for the moment at least, have lost their ability to be as effectiveness as raid healers. The cool thing about shamans were that they could both tank and raid heal relatively easily in the same fight. However, now that chain heal doesn't do as much as it use to, there is no way they can compete on the same level as a holy priest and druid (if they purely raid heal).
This will change in cata with the addition of healing rain, but, for the moment the game currently has 3 tank healing (paly, shamn, disc priest), classes and only 2 viable raid healing classes, down from 3. So have resto shammies been nerfed? Well that depends... If you liked raid healing, yes, you have temporarily been stopped from doing that. If you you focused of tank heals, then no, you actually have picked up an "o stuff quick heal" to help save the tank from near death.
So before you hang your resto tree up to dry and switch to elem/enhance, remember that come cata... everything will be more balanced. So just tough it out for one more month.
And gratz to WoW's new sense of humour with there loading screen tips "Don't stand in the fire!"
Stay cool
Ace
