Pandas !

Pandas !

I haven't written anything for a while which is mainly due to my old keyboard died, and that there really haven't been much to debate.

I highly doubt that there will be a lot of adjustments on any class before the release in two weeks time, and if there is some changes I guess it will be minor tweaks or tooltip clarifications.

So, how is the shamans holding up ?

Shamans are currently in a decent position (if we look much more than a month back the answer would have been very different) and I do honestly doubt that we will be benched on any of the current encounters, all though I cannot speak for 10man since the hard mode testing was before any of the "tweaks" were put in place hence my experiences from it will be more or less worthless.

For 25man I would say that we are looking very strong, and possible one of the strongest healers for some of the fights, and no that wasn't a typo.
The major reason is the abilities that we have been granted and how they work, let us look at Ascendance which duplicates your healing (except for totems) which is quite good.
Ascendance does also have the "benefit" from also being somewhat decent while being on the run aside Spiritwalker's Grace you can blanket your raid with Riptides while moving assuming your raid is low and still do a fair amount of healing. Or in more stationary environments you toss out HR and spam CH while you see the raid HP moves rapidly to a 100%.
Healing Tide Totem is very, very good and is one of the throughput CDs that we have been wishing for.

Furthermore, if we look at our new talents we can choose to get even more cooldowns such as Elemental Mastery - 30% haste for 20 sec on a 2 min cooldown. It will have its uses on some encounters over Ancestral Swiftness.
However, if we pick Primal Elementalist we are granted 2 additional cooldowns: Fire Elemental: 5% dmg increase and 10% healing,  and Earth Elemental: 20% dmg reduction and 10% healing, however, since the elementals have to channel it to you they aren't doing any damage so you trade the damage from increased healing, and you can always stop the channel and let the elementals go back to do damage whenever you do not need the increased healing.

I will personally go with a spec something along these lines for the majority of encounters:

Glyphs: I have not made up my mind a 100% yet, but I am fairly sure that for 90% of the time I will stick to Telluric Currents and Riptide with Water Shield / Fire Elemental Totem or Healing Wave for personal healing. It will depend on the encounter, but they are all situational.

As for stats then there is no doubt about spirit will be very valuable, but do not forget the importance of int.

As for the secondary stats haste, crit and mastery.
Haste is a strong stat, but outside the breakpoints of Riptide, Healing Stream, Healing Rain and Healing Tide Totem there is hardly much to gain from it (http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=41 ) can you see the result.

So crit vs. mastery what to choose ?
There is a couple of ways to answer this one being "What is your setup?" and by that I mean if you play with 2 x disc in your raid grp. then the value of mastery will be a lot lower than e.g playing with 2 other shamans. Then there is the question of the encounter in general as is it moderate and steady damage or is it low damage with the occasional burst? In the first scenario I will value crit higher due to mastery will most likely not be reaching that much of an effect whereas the second scenario will have a use for mastery to heal people back to full as fast as possible.

However, personally I will be going for crit in the beginning and it is mainly due to the difference between crit and mastery is not that massive (Okay, if a person is on 2% hp then it is, but when are you ever gemming / gearing for that scenario?) so on average for the majority of fights (some will require different setups :O ) crit will come out on top, and furthermore it will grant you more mana back from Ressurgence which is something that I always enjoy during progress since mana is always an issue. 

I must admit that I am really looking forward to raiding in MoP, and with the latest adjustments to shamans I am very much looking forward to try MoP healing. 

Happy leveling !