Chain Healers Anonymous

First off I am not even remotely close to being an expert at being a resto shaman at this point. I’ve tried digging around and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of discussion about healing as a resto shaman. The stuff I can find is raid oriented and seems to revolve around varying themes of binding every key on your keyboard to chain heal and then rolling your face on your keyboard.


Spinel is now level 73 as of last night. My wife is playing her druid Caetlyn which she has speced feral towards tanking.

We’ve ran 3 instances now in northrend. Two runs of The Nexus and one run of Utgard Keep.

First off The Nexus is definatly the more challenging of the two instances both because the bosses seem to be a little more technical in strategies but also because the zone it’s self is not linear. You can get to and complete the bosses inside in pretty much any order you would like. Where as Utgard Keep is definatly a strictly linear dungeon and the only real difficult boss at least from a healers perspective was the last boss and only because both myself and my wife are not in full level 70+ blue/green gear. Neither of our characters were 70 for long before the expansion and whatever we didnt get from questing to 70 we pretty much dont/didnt have going into northrend.

On the very first run into the Nexus we had two Retribution Paladins, Myself, My Wife, and a Warlock. The warlock was in Teir 6 gear while the rest of us were all pretty much lvl 70 pre-raid geared.

We wiped twice the entire run, once due to not being able to keep the group alive on the final boss because people were too spread out and taking tail whips from the boss, the other time was from pulling two groups at once due to a patrol.

The second run we did was the Utgard Keep run which was composed of two mages, another feral druid, my wife and myself. I should point out that the other feral druid and one of the mages are two real close friends we have grouped with on many occasions.

We wiped on this run twice as well. The first time was on the second boss pair that once you kill one of them spawns a shade of themsleves till you kill the other. The shade eat me for lunch the first try and lead to a wipe. The second wipe was on the final boss, where I simply wasn’t able to keep up on the shadow smash damage the two feral druids were taking.

The third instance run was back to the Nexus with a Hunter, Rogue, Death Knight, myself and my wife.

We wiped only once and only because my computer decided to reboot just as my wife pulled the first boss we were attempting. Other than that the whole run went smooth.

Of the three runs for me the third definatly felt the smoothest healing wise.

I had an epiphony while healing the last attempt in Utgard that I tried out in the third run in Nexus that really paid off.

It was the pure synergy of Tidal Wave and Riptide.

Essentially previous to this epiphony I was trying to rely on Chain Heal to keep the tank alive and group topped off. Falling back to Healing Wave only as a neccesity when the tank fell below 70%. Only utilizing RipTide as a last resort and generally only to then utilize it’s Chain Heal Synergy.

In the Utgard Keep run I tried to heal more naturally and just do what made sense from a general healing perspective and that was apply direct healing to the target that needed healing. Only AE healing when it made logical sense. The key to making this work was to ensure that by using riptide every 3rd cast I kept Tidal Wave buff active for the 30% haste buff to my direct heals.

This allowed me to take advantage of a Healing Wave spell that only had a 1.4 second cast time and a Lesser Healing Wave that only had a .9 second cast time. When you consider the burst healing / hot from riptide and couple that with the HPS output from the 30% haste it made it a hell of alot easier to keep the tank and other party members alive.

I am going to keep playing with this mechanic and see how it plays out and will definatly be reporting on my findings at a later date