The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Chain Heal
by Vonya
Today, my gentle snowflakes, we’re going to discuss the shaman healing ability “Chain Heal.”
No, I don’t have a cute and catchy nickname for this one (I’ve got a GREAT one for Earth Shield though, which should more than make up for the lack here) - I think Blizz did a really good job naming it, and I can’t think of anything shorter that’s as apt.
Let’s take a look at the tooltip:
Heals the friendly target for X to Y, then jumps to heal additional nearby targets. Each jump reduces the effectiveness of the heal by 50%. Heals 3 total targets.
It’s got a 2.5 second cast time and only the normal global cooldown. 40 yard range.
What does it DO?
Heals the friendly target for X to Y
Pretty self-explanatory - it’s a healing spell. In general, it’s about half the size of the shaman’s bigger heal, but takes just as long to cast and has the same range. At full rank, it’s about 3/4 the mana cost of Healing Wave.
Obviously, if this was all the heal did, nobody would use it.
Lucky for us, there’s more!
then jumps to heal additional nearby targets.
Oho! This line here is where the beauty of Chain Heal becomes obvious. It’s a multi-target heal. This also reveals one of the other beautiful things - this is a multi-target heal. Not a group heal. It will heal people who are not in the same group as you. To the priest who has been struggling to do multi-target healing via Prayer of Healing, this is more than a little incredible. In raiding, it’s invaluable.
There’s another piece of this that needs to be noted - “nearby”. The jumps DO have a range, and it’s a reasonably small one. You can expect that it will bang around in the melee group just fine, or in the ranged group, but you really can’t expect it to jump from melee to ranged and vice versa. I think the range is five yards between jumps.
Each jump reduces the effectiveness of the heal by 50%
Basically, the first person the heal hits will get hit for 100%, the second person will get 50% of what the first person got, and the last person will get 25% of what the first person got.
This is actually kinda handy, from my perspective. In five-man healing, few people need as much heal as the tank does, and in most cases of group-heals, the healing that’s actually needed is on a ladder like this. It would be easy to see this as a negative, but really, I think it’s a positive.
Something important to note from this is that you should always target the person who needs the biggest heal when casting Chain Heal. Don’t keep targetting the same person - swap around. Be efficient. Give the biggest part of this heal to the person who needs the biggest heal.
Heals a total of 3 targets.
That…yeah, that pretty much says it all.
The Hidden Stuff
There’s more to this spell than just what the tooltip can tell us.
First off, it’s stupidly mana efficient. And by stupidly, I really mean it. This spell eeks an incredible amount of healing out of a little bit of mana. Sure, you’ll run out of mana casting it, but you’ll get more healing per mana from this spell, assuming you’ve got at least two people who need the heal. Much like the priests Frisbee spell, this gets better the more people that need the heal.
It also scales VERY well with +healing gear, getting a decent amount of the +heal applied. Again, stupidly mana efficient. If my research is correct, it gets 71.4% of your +healing gear. Rank 4 gains the same (full) bonus of +healing that Rank 5 gets, and thus downranking to Rank 4 is common to save mana without sacrificing much healing done.
Secondly, it’s smart. And by smart, I mean it jumps to the person who most needs it and is in range. If three people need heals, and you cast it on the person who needs it most, it will determine who to jump to next in an intelligent manner. That’s AWESOME.
Every jump from Chain Heal can crit. Every single jump can crit, or none of them. Assuming you have the Ancestral Healing talent (the one that increases your target’s armor when you crit heal them), then each crit of chain heal can apply the Ancestral Healing buff to your target.
There is a possible bug where if the shaman who cast the spell is the second jump, the spell may die prematurely and not jump past them.
Downsides
The aggro from the spell goes to you, not to the person it’s jumping off of. Sure, that’s not much of a downside, but you have to admit - it would have been SO COOL.
It’s got a long cast-time. Easily interrupted or delayed.
It will not proc the Healing Way buff. Again, you wouldn’t really expect it to, but it’s worth noting.
Summary
Chain Heal is considered one of the strongest heals in the game, especially for raiding. Because it is so absurdly mana efficient, so intelligent, and is not group dependent, shaman healers find themselves in high demand for healing the incredible amount of AOE damage found in raiding situations.
The only real drawback to the spell is how long it takes to cast, which is why, at higher levels, I’m going to experiment with spell haste gear to see if I can increase my reaction time and avoid potential “My heal was almost there!” situations.
Even if it really WAS “almost there”, that doesn’t provide much comfort to the rogue whose pancreas is now decorating the wall behind you.
June 5th, 2008
Spell haster is amazing beatifull with this. SK Gaming have a Shaman healer who cast that spell (raid buffed) on Kil’jaeden by 1.3~1.4 seconds. This is beatifull.
Me, as a healer, i can do a Greater Heal (raid buffed) by 2.1sec. It’s amazing what spell haste can do for a healer, and a shame of what he can do for a shadow priest. It’s only good with Mind blasts and Vampiric touch, who really don’t need spell haste.
Spell haste -> all healing classes
Don’t use it with shadow priests -.- Mind flay don’t use it, all others are instant and mind blast is fast enough.
June 5th, 2008
Spell Haste with chain heal is disgusting. seriously. I’ve been slowly building a spell haste set (slooowly, because it’s hard to get the stuff to drop, and I’ve had ridiculously bad drops in Zul’Aman lately), and I can’t wait to be able to start seeing the effects of this.
June 5th, 2008
quemedo, actually, shadow priests benefit a lot from spell haste now. Haste does affect Mind Flay and it also lowers the global cooldown for Shadow Word: Pain, Vamipiric Touch, Vampiric Embrace, and Mind Blast.
Mathematically, it’s either the best or second best stat to gather as a shadow priest, depending on how much raid buffed shadow damage you have.
June 6th, 2008
The Official Nickname of Chain Heal is Brain Heal.
because it does the thinking and finds targets for you!
June 6th, 2008
One beautiful attribute of the chain heal is missing. This is the ability that make shamans reach No1 on healing meters, pushing down priests and poor trees like me
It’s instant cast, so reaches the targets first, before all other heals. Am I stupid? It’s written that has 2.5 cast! Well, on the FIRST target it’s 2.5 cast. But the other two are selected instantly when it hits the first. When you start casting it, the soon-to-be targets are maybe on full HP. Maybe when it lands, the first target is already on full HP, thanks to a quick paladin or tree (or a priest who wastes her mana on flash heal). But the two other targets are selected by the server, in a microsecond, so the second and the third jump surely hits someone who needs healing at that moment.
That’s why top raiding guilds run so many resto-shamans, and just one holy priest (spirit buff) and one resto druid (tree aura on tank group). There is low overhealing with shamans, their effort is rarely wasted.
June 6th, 2008
You’re right on the haste in later content - I think just about every healer goes for haste in late T6. 2.5 seconds isn’t incredibly fast, but it’s a very spammable heal. I mean, you don’t normally do stop casting with chain heal. Even if your first target gets topped off halfway through the spell, in many cases you can just let it finish and jump to two targets who need a heal quicker than they would get if you stopped chain heal and started casting something else on them. Since it’s a smart heal, you will get some overhealing on your initial target but the jumps will still be the best choices.
June 6th, 2008
Not every healer. I don’t like haste as a priest, even with 6 pieces of T6, and I don’t really know any in game who are actively looking for haste pieces either. Shaman on the other hand apparently are directly affected and enamored with it. Generally I top the heal charts in our raids, and only recently has one shaman starting coming close…and he attributes it directly to his haste. I see a lot of Paladins going for it also, but not sure why. Seems they are sacrificing their crit/regen for haste witch pretty much helps them use mana faster. So…there is a secret there I don’t understand.
Also, regarding priests in high content. Guilds who bring only 1 priest for ds are truly missing out on serious healing, especially in Sunwell. And frankly we only use spirit on one fight currently, and that Brutallus just because we want to eek out as much dps as possible for it, because frankly…it is a stupid fight and I hate it. (yes, I port out after Kalecgos, respec, kill Brut and redo for Felmyst. I can’t wait till we get a little more dps so I don’t have to do that anymore lol ).
One more thing, careful how you compare SKgaming and guilds of that ilk to almost anyone else in the game. They are truly hardcore and what works for them more than likely is not going to work for you.
June 6th, 2008
It’s a good thing the Chain Heal jumps don’t give threat to the jumpee! DPS classes would hate that. Healers pretty much never have to worry about pulling aggro any more, except in rare cases where you don’t really want to be giving threat to a DPS class either. DPS, on the other hand, sometimes are threat-capped. From what I’ve seen, at least…
And the word is “eke”, not “eek”. By the way.
June 6th, 2008
What Feist said! Chain Heal is Brain Heal. You button mash it, it thinks for you, guaranteed!
June 7th, 2008
@ Dou - no…its ‘eek’! lol
June 10th, 2008
@Everyone
Sorry for taking so long to respond to these!
On Priest Haste
Personally, I don’t stack haste on my priest. I can absolutely see why someone would, but my preference is to stick with the base stats. Why? Because I have SO many tools. If I need a quick heal, I can use Flash heal. Frisbees, hots, bubbles - my weaponry is formidable.
On the shaman, I don’t have all those tools, and that long cast time is very long indeed when you’ve got a lot of people that need heals and a tank that’s dropping fast.
@ghostboci
*grins* That’s not just missing, it’s deliberately left out. Topping healing meters isn’t a goal that I try and glorify - I think the meters are a useful tool, but not nearly as good at telling how good someone is doing as I would like. If any class can just spam a single heal *coff*chainheal*coff* and top the healing meters, then it’s a useless test of a healer’s talents. =]
I love your insta-cast comparison.
@Hildi
Sounds like you’re of the same opinion on spell haste for healers as me! It’s not a terribly popular opinion, but I see the same logic you do.
I do, however, disagree with the spirit buff, but only marginally. For non-spirit classes (basically everyone but priests and trees, at the moment) it’s just a marginal buff. But even marginal buffs can help, and I don’t know any mages, warlocks, boomkins, elemshaman, etc who turn down some free spelldamage. =]
@Dou
Okay, okay. Point on the threat-giving, I’ll grant you that. *laughs*
However, the correct spelling of either “eke” or “eek” depends on the health of the person receiving the spell, directly correlated to how long they’ve been low on health and waiting for a heal, divided by how likely they were to have died before the heal got there.
*winks*
June 10th, 2008
“Spell haster is amazing beatifull with this. SK Gaming have a Shaman healer who cast that spell (raid buffed) on Kil’jaeden by 1.3~1.4 seconds. This is beatifull.” ~ quemedo
I dont believe this is even possible. Im quite certain. My shaman is geared in full t6 and I have about 160 haste. This only drops my chain heal to 2.26. In order to get below 2 seconds you have to have over 390 haste. Based on that fact in order to remove an entire second off of a cast you would need over 1000 haste.
June 15th, 2008
“I dont believe this is even possible. Im quite certain. My shaman is geared in full t6 and I have about 160 haste. This only drops my chain heal to 2.26. In order to get below 2 seconds you have to have over 390 haste. Based on that fact in order to remove an entire second off of a cast you would need over 1000 haste.”
There is a buff you receive during the Kil’Jaeden fight that makes you cast ridiculously fast. The encounter itself is impossible without this buff.
June 17th, 2008
Chain heal is my favorite heal in the game… don’t get me wrong, I would kill for a proper HoT, especially in situations like the levitation stages of Heroic Magisters when I’m frantically casting chain heal and counting on a trinketed healing stream totem to partly counteract the DoT damage everyone suffers from THE BURNING AIR, and zomg it really feels like we’re all gonna DIE if Chain Heal doesn’t jump just right! >.<
But even so, I like CH best. In addition to the mana efficiency, spammability and intelligent jumping…. it’s just a very pretty spell! Yes… I think chain heal is extremely cool looking. Even in the heat of battle, a small part of me watches with childlike wonder at the expanding shapes and zigzags that result when my three CH recipients are all jumping around and moving away from each other. (Sometimes you get a “4″ shape that looks an awful lot like the Human Torch making the Fantastic 4 sign in the air!)
And the more, the better… I love raid healing with other shammys and seeing the furious yellow laser-beam light show that results from simultaneous chain heals. Fun stuff, indeed.
July 4th, 2008
chain heal = LASSO OF TRUTH