3.2 is Here!

3.2 has arrived -- not really news, unless you've been living in a cave (completely possible if you're a troll).

The entire patch was around 400MB, a pretty good size. Took about 5 minutes for me to download. Servers will be down though for at least another hour, but I would bet it will be longer based on past experience.

So what do we get? We get some new tier gear, a new 5-man and 10\25-man raid, a new 40-man battleground, and some new wallpaper. But what's in it for the shaman?! I've said a lot of this before in other posts, and I'm not going to go into everything, just wanted to point out some items of interest to us PvE resto shamans:

Chain Heal: Jump distance increased by 25% to 12.5 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.

Big Big Big. Chain Heal will be used again. What does this mean for stats? Haste Haste Haste.

Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target's armor.

Mentioned in a previous post. I think this will be helpful mostly to those mage tanks that don't have a lot of armor to start with. By making a flat damage reduction, armor won't matter.

Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman's Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.

This may make the resto\resto dual-spec obsolete. It will be a major improvement to Healing Wave. No doubt quite a few more shamans will be picking up this previously laughable talent.

Nature's Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.

One word -- macros. I macro Nature's Swiftness into most of my heals. Some will save it for an "Oh @*$&" moment. I usually find that by the time an "Oh @*$&" moment happens, the rest has already gone down hill so far that a single instant heal would not be enough to gather things back up. This, ultimately, will allow more heals to get out during an encounter.

Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.

I was in VoA this week. One other shaman in the raid discovered the dirty little problem with Tidal Waves. It's that Lesser Healing Wave is so fast on its own, with the haste you simply pick up on gear, that when you throw in Tidal Waves you end up hitting a wall on the global cooldown (GCD). What you end up with is a spell that casts faster than it can be used again.

So what this change does is remove the useless haste on Lesser Healing Wave and replace it with some critical strike - something that is always welcome.

Improved Water Shield: This talent now has a 10/20/30% chance to be triggered by Chain Heal, and the charges of Water Shield are no longer consumed by this talent.

Triggers on Chain Heal crits. No more need to refresh because of crit. Win.