For those of you who don’t know, they have buffed cloudburst’s amount healed from 20% of stored healing to 30% but they have also increased the CD from 30s to 45s. This change applies to the DF alpha only.
Please note that it is currently 30% on live so they have basically reverted a nerf to the existing CBT storage rate.
This may sound fair on paper but it’s actually genuinely terrible for the following reasons:
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CBT’s value has already been brought down by forcing us to spend several talent points to get to the baseline spell (2 for healing stream totem charges, 1 in CBT itself and a couple of mediocre talent points to even get to CBT). This makes it harder to justify taking it when talent points are at such a premium already. It’s such a core part of our toolkit, being one of our only spread AoE heals (along with pwave) - something shaman is famously bad at. It needs to be easier to obtain imo.
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CBT overheals a fair bit. Because all of its healing happens in one quick burst and it’s divided evenly between injured allies, it’s very common that it overheals, especially in situations where a lot of people are mildly to moderately hurt and a couple of people are seriously injured/near death. If someone is even slightly injured cloudburst will heal them for the same amount as someone at death’s door (mastery excluded). So all this extra healing you’ve given CBT is not always going to offset the CD increase.
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The blizzard blue post talking about this change is talking about the massive amounts of CDR that they give for CBT. I have a number of things to say about this:
a) First of all, this is not as impactful as they think it is. CBT has a very high uptime already so how is giving us a lot of CDR going to help much unless you are pulling it early (not often the case if playing optimally).
b) More to the point, we don’t even take all of the CDR talent nodes they’re talking about! For example, Call of the Elements, which is a badly tuned capstone talent that we just don’t have the points to take (even if we wanted to) and is literally on the other side of the tree to the mandatory (for CBT anyway) nodes of Swirling Currents and the 2nd Healing Stream Totem. In order to take all this CDR on our totems, we would have to sacrifice so much utility or other forms of throughput that it wouldn’t even be worth it.
c) The CDR we do take is not as impactful as they think it is. They specifically mention Totemic Surge, which is only a 4s reduction and, once again, is only useful if we’re pulling our CBTs early. They also mention Totemic Focus which isn’t actually a CDR, rather a duration increase for CBT. This essentially means it’s almost certain we will end up pulling CBTs early because now we have an EVEN LONGER CBT window. I would argue these talents are slightly anti-synergistic in a way. How does this benefit us exactly? Also Water Totem Mastery (which is CDR that wasn’t mentioned in the blue post) is an absolute joke and barely qualifies as a talent and we only take it because it’s mandatory to get to CBT itself.
d) Making it a 45s CD desyncs CBT with our pwave if we take continuous waves (which is currently far better than Tumbling waves because it’s not RNG). This further incentivises us to NOT take a talent - this is bad design imo.
Honestly, I like resto shaman a lot and CBT is probably my favourite thing about the spec. There is already talk in the resto shaman theorycrafting community of not even taking it as an option which is a shame because it’s a core part of the spec’s playstyle and probably one of the higher skill ceiling abilities in what is already a rather easy (compared to other healers at least) spec. With these changes, it heals about as much as on live but with a longer CD and hence less uptime. this is also assuming you take a lot of the CDR we’re forced to take when we don’t really want to. Awesome…
If you really must nerf CBT, do it by changing the healing amount to something like 25% and keeping the CD at 30s. I, however, don’t think it needs to be changed at all. It’s not even our highest healing spell on live most of the time and shaman is already on the lower end of HPS and is regarded as more of a utility healer. Remember that is with 30% storage and 30s CD in SL!
If I had to choose, I’d rather you scrap all the CDR on CBT and keep the totem itself the way it is on live servers.
Please revert this change and leave our poor CBT alone!