It is time to address Chain Heal

#0 - May 22, 2009, 10:33 p.m.
Blizzard Post

The Discussion here on the board amongst ourselves has been going on over a month. Virtually every healer has agreed that Chain Heal isn't keeping up with the other AOE healing. Various solutions have been brought up and discussed. We did our part as you requested. Can you address this now? Just an acknowledgment of the problem would be a huge step in the right direction.

There has been theorycraft showing that CH isn't as strong as the other options. There have been logs produced showing how shaman are HPS capped. I'm not going to repeat all the data here, because you've read every post. Further, you have some of the top guilds putting shaman on spot heals instead of AOE heals or even replacing shaman with other healers for hard modes.

Mek, the resto Shaman from the #1 raiding guild Ensidia, is abandoning Chain Heal in favor of spot healing with LHW/RT.
http://ensidia.com/community/blogs/cause-and-effect.html
Chain Heal cannot compete with the comprehensive AoE healing power of four highly skilled Priest and Druid AoE healers. This is simply because if you compare the relative spell combos they have many advantages.

Vis Maior, a Top 20 US progression guild recently replaced one of their shaman with a priest, because Chain Heal could not keep up. Sixthy, the other resto is spot healing the raid with RT/LHW. His Chain Heal for the raid was 6% of his total heals.
http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t49212-resto_best_practices_pve_healing_discussion/p12/#post1248740
Deconstructor hard mode (25) really made Chain Heal look weak in my opinion. We had a 2nd resto shaman in for a few attempts and CH just flat out couldn't keep up with PoH / CoH / WG / etc / etc.

Mek and Sixthy are not scrubs that just started playing. They are some of the best players in the world.

#36 - May 23, 2009, 7:15 p.m.
Blizzard Post
We're not convinced there is a Resto or Chain Heal problem in PvE.

Part of what we wanted to do was give shamans other spells to cast besides CH. Riptide is an awesome spell and seems to be fun for a lot of shamans. People are still casting CH, and probably a lot more often than priests are using PoH and druids WG (depending on the fight of course). We would want to make sure that any change to CH didn't send shamans back to the Sunwell world of just using that one spell.

Yes it is iconic, and it's fine if shamans use it a lot. If they only use one button, shaman players are likely to mush their brains.