Are they a complete healer able to solo heal in groups now ? I mean without beeing overgeared for the zone. I heard they reduced the heal gap betwin druid, shm and cleric but is it close enough to consider them a "healer" ?
Sure they can heal solo in groups. But I heal better 8) some melee heavy groups might actually prefer a shammy over a cleric depending on what they are doing.
Yes, shaman are healers. All priests are capable of healing a group themselves. Blezon's Mending Rk. II Classes: SHM/98 Skill: Alteration Mana: 1647 Target: Single Range: 200' Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 3.75s, Recast: 1.5s, Rest: 1.5s 1: Increase Current HP by 10491 Sterivida Rk. II Classes: DRU/97 Skill: Alteration Mana: 1087 Target: Single Range: 200' Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 3.75s, Recast: 1.5s, Rest: 1.5s 1: Increase Current HP by 10462 Reverent Light Rk. II Classes: CLR/98 Skill: Alteration Mana: 1366 Target: Single Range: 200' Beneficial: Blockable Casting: 3.75s, Recast: 1.5s, Rest: 1.5s 1: Increase Current HP by 11625 2: Increase Current HP by 2906 (if HP Below 20 Percent) That is the difference in the size of base comparable heals nowadays. Considering so much of the power of a heal comes from AAs Healing Adept (raises the amount a heal heals for) and Healing Gift (Increases the probability of a crit), the difference in size between these heals in negligible. All priests have group heals. All priests have rezzes. All priests have additional faster heals. All priests have a "rescue" type ability (divine arbitration/epic, survival of the X, X intervention). All priests have additional buffs to boost hit points (cleric aura, shaman and druid wild growth lines). All priests have defensive heal/debuff proc buffs. We're all in the heal boat together now.
Shaman and druids are as effective in groups for healing as clerics. I would hesitate to take any of the three, if they are a competent player.
You mean the mana cost? Shaman pay a premium on all their spells due to their cannibalize spells, AAs, and spiritual channeling. That's been going on a loooong time. The straight up power of the heal itself is not really that much difference in practice. Max Healing Gift AAs means that you crit more often than you do not, so all priests are overhealing a lot of the time to ensure that someone doesn't dip down too far on a spiky damage round.
My Shaman had trouble healing, especially against AE damage, until level 87, when he got Qirik's Recourse (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=26216&source=Live). Add Qirik's Mending (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=26261&source=Live) at 88, and life got noticeably better.
Yes and no. Shamans are not sufficient for the entire way from 1-100 because the buffs to shaman healing came around HoT, and before then shaman heals were way below that of clerics. After the buffs, Shamans still struggle a bit with single target healing. The spells quoted above do not give the practical difference between shamans and clerics, which is that clerics have several fast, emergency single-target heal lines: http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=34152&source=Live http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=34167&source=Live They also have a line of heals that combine large heals and cures, which are very useful in today's content and allows a cleric to heal while curing DoTs and debuffs. Finally, Divine Intervention and Divine Arbitration gives a cleric several saves against the tank going down against difficult content. On top of that, Clerics get an innate +5% to healing spells, which make their already bigger heals even bigger. Shamans get none of this. In their place, shamans get 2-3 melee debuffs that lower mob melee damage. However, these are a lot less useful in today's content, where the bulk of tank deaths occur due to one of two issues - Several mobs hitting the tank at the same time Spell damage from rares Against a crowd, a main healing shaman doesn't have the time to debuff everything before the tank goes down. A shaman's debuffs also do nothing against spell damage, which is the biggest cause of tank death in today's game. What shamans do have over clerics is sustainability. Shaman mana regen is several times that of clerics, and therefore shamans are able to sustain healing a lot longer. However, sustainability is not an issue in today's group game - what matters is short-medium duration heals pers second, and in single target healing, shamans have a weakness. In group healing, however, shamans are pretty damn decent. This is because shamans are able to stack a 6.7k / tick group HoT with a 8k direct heal every 24 seconds, which procs a 4.5k recourse for the rest of the 24 seconds, resulting in ~11-12k AoE healing per tick before crits. They also have an emergency AoE heal every ~minute and an AA line of AoE heals for extra healing every 15 minutes. Combined with spot heals, a shaman is fully capable of handling all the aoe healing in a group by himself. Thus, to best make use of shamans, what you want to do is to combine him with a merc healer. A merc healer + shaman combo is what a lot of groups use and this is sufficient for just about all group content. A shaman by himself, however, is going to struggle against content that puts out a lot of single target DPS, because the spikes are difficult for a shaman to deal with.
Gnomeland, Shaman get the Reckless line- it's a 1 second cast time single target big heal, that also hurts the shaman themselves. They are able to stack more HoT than that, too. Their spell-based HoT (which is now identical output per tick to cleric) stacks with their AA Ancestral HoT, stacks with the waves of healing from Recourse, stacks with the HoT from Counterbias for the tank, stacks with the HoT from their epic. AI is their answer to arbitration. It's why it was put into the game. It's why it can be used, with appropriate AAs, twice in a 3 minute interval- just like arbitrate + epic can. Against a crowd, a shaman is able to AE debuff- they have AE malo, AE slow, and AA AE cripple if they're using that too. Now, naturally, shaman have fewer spell options on heals than a cleric, and their bases are usually lower. The question is, can they heal on their own- not whether they want to, but if they can. And they can. At lower levels, yes, it's harder- the size of their heals was adjusted in Secrets of Faydwer, and likewise druids (which is also when they got their answer to arbitrate), but they didn't pick up more healing utility spells until later. Recourse group heal makes the biggest difference, so at the lower levels if too many people take damage at once, they have issues with that- though their group curing is very good, and has been ever since Legacy of Ykesha when they got Blood of Nadox. Once they're in the 90s though, there's no reason they can't heal a group on anything that group is geared for.
Great response Myk. You pretty much covered the basis on all the Shaman heals. Just missing one thing: Frozen Gift/Sundew blessing lines for Druid/Sham allow us to willfully twincast our heal. THAT in and of itself is plenty to handle damage spikes if exercising adequate prediction skills. I can't speak as someone who doesn't raid about raid content, but as far as group content goes: if the tank is taking too many spikes to heal with Frozen Gift, Reckless, Intervention, Recourse, Forceful Rejuvenation into Recourse/Intervention/Reckless repeat, Union of Spirits (these are 6 cooldowns and between the first 4 one of them ought to refresh after all those casts) - then the tank isn't geared for the content, assuming the Shaman has completed all of their healing AAs. Clerics DO have more Oh buttons but shamans have plenty themselves.
Yep, every priest has a twinheal line- cleric one is Glorious (paladins have it too, but theirs only has one counter of healing twincast). People are often nervous about them, about nuking to heal more, but I look at it this way- you're essentially guaranteeing yourself two crit heals when you need it (since a crit heal is double, unlike nukes, and a twincast makes you cast twice), with a chance of having what amounts to double crits. It's also a lot cheaper manawise than AA abilities that boost your crit chance at the cost of mana, since the second heal is free twice, and you're only paying for the nuke to do it.
Reckless heals for ~30k without crit. With a recast of 12 seconds, it's not enough to deal with spikes when it doesn't crit. The 1.5 min recast AI is great for group healing but it is no match for clerics' 6 second recast Fifteenth Emblem. The HoTs are great when stacked but the issue is stacking them in the first place - especially Counterbias which has to be cast *after* the tank gets aggro. Refreshing them is normally very difficult to do because you won't have the luxury of not casting a normal heal when the damage input is high. Yes, shamans have AoE malo, but that's irrelevant to healing. AoE slow is 50% BEFORE mitigation and produces enough aggro to get the shaman insta killed when the tank isn't blowing his AoE taunts. It's also useless vs. spell damage and so is AoE cripple. Don't get me wrong, shamans are capable of healing but in my experience - and I've played high level shamans, high level clerics, and high level merc healers, single target a shaman's healing capability is around the level of a merc healer. This is by testing them both in stress situations. A shaman IS going to get tanks killed from time to time by not having enough burst heal, while a cleric won't. The combination of DI, arbitration / epic arbitration, multiple fast emergency heals, and the flat out effectiveness of shining rampart vs. multiple mobs leaves shamans in the dust. Shamans are great at reducing the melee damage output of a single mob, and were you to fight only against isolated melee mobs, then shamans are the best group healer. But that's not what gets tanks killed in today's EQ. What gets tanks killed is multiple mobs and rares with massive spell dmg, both of which shamans aren't great at handling. The issue is what I said above - lack of burst healing outside of a 1.5 min recast AI and a 12 second recast emergency heal that heals 1/3rd of a tank's hp when it doesn't crit.
Shaman have always been a full healer for as long as I can remember. I played a raid quality Shaman in SoF/SoD/UF Era and had no trouble keeping up with heals in a group setting. Getting back into playing a shaman recently I can tell you things like Qrik's Recourse line have only made my job easier. Also things like the Apathy/Fatigue line make sure that when tanks pull a few mobs that they're all slowed by 40% at least which means I can focus on healing rather than slowing every mob individually.
I played back in kunark up to early GoD and shm/druid weren't full time healers. Well they could get the job done but with a lot of downtime and a bad pull could mean a whipe where a cleric would have done fine. Just back in kunark where cleric could cast a complete heal for 10khp and shm had a 600hp heal it was just rediculouse even with the 70% shm slow hehe.
Fatigue and the line are only 25% percent slows. Huh, I remember things differently. With 75% unmitigated slow,Torpor and 600hp heals, it wasn't too hard to main heal up to GoD. PoP was hard but it could be done. With Canni dancing we had the least amount of downtime of any priest. I remember the cleric complete heal taking a long time to land, so with single pulls it was very effective but if you got multiples it didn't work so well. Same for shm though. During GoD and up until probably SoF, it was hard for a shm to be main healer and limit downtime. Clerics were much better. Now though, all three class can main heal and, if played well, better than a merc.
back in these days you where running with a slower + a healer also torpor is post a PoP spell (gunthak or wathever the Xpack was called). During velicious, kunark,luclin and PoP shm M healer was simply not as good as a cleric but the class was dam popular since anyone with a slow spell was wanted in any group.
Can't forget that during PoP, shaman who knew the tricks were able to solo in popular zones (plane of valor) as well. (Mentioning it just cause PoP was the start of shaman starting to shine in one way or another.)
Torpor came out with Kunark. Stoicism (lesser version of torpor) came with LoY expansion. I believe in Velious we got Chloroblast, Luclin the lesser complete heal Kragg's Mending and in PoP we got an upgrade to Torpor with Quiescence along with a nice direct heal Tnarg's Mending. I agree that healing up to level 51 when we got Superior Healing was really hard and there usually needed to be another healer in the group, but past that up to GoD we could hold our own. Then from GoD to SoF, you usually need another healer to do much. Also, you are right, unmitigated slow was the reason shm were in a group. It was extremely powerful, which is why mitigation started with PoP. Today, though, it is pretty easy to main heal, unless you have an odd group setup or pulling large amounts of adds without crowd control.
Thinking about starting a box for my Mage so I can do tier 3-4 group zones easier. Would Shaman be the best choice and then use 2 wizzie mercs? Or should I go Cleric and just give my pet a slow proc weapon? My pet already seems to tank better than most tanks I have grouped with but I also have every tank AA maxed out and all pet defensive cooldowns as well.
