Improved ShieldsFollow

If anyone has a beta key and can post this on the beta forums where blues go... please do.

Improved Shields should increase a shield by 1 orb for each point. This means as resto, you could have a maximum of 11 Earth Shield orbs, 9 water shield orbs, and 6 lightning shield orbs. The ENTIRE POINT would be to reduce the number of times we have to spend on GCD to rebuff shields. I VERY OFTEN can't even use Earth Shield in fights because there is simply so much raid damage going on that my mediocre earth shield on the tank isn't "helping" the main tank healers enough and no one else is capable of raid healing.

This would make Earth Shield an EXTREMELY efficient amount of hpm, but it STILL remains one of the worst hps in the game due to the cooldown on the proc. This would also encourage us to put points into Improved Water Shield since with a glyph and improved shields we would end up with 9 orbs meaning, we'd have to have 9 HW or LHW crits before reapplying it (oh... or 9 aoe's that remove our orbs). More time healing instead of MORE TIME reapplying buffs is always good. We are the only healer that has to constantly reapply every buff we give out (even in the middle of boss fights). Every 2 min we lose 4 gcd's just from totems.

Since 11 orbs on Earth Shield could be considered crazy (though honestly LOLEARTHSHIELD), the main point here is to encourage people to put points into Improved Water Shield (which in its current form is very undesirable). The bonus to water orbs could also be placed into "Improved Water Shield" since it is a fairly ... blah talent anyways. Currently, we either have to cast mana inefficient HW and LHW in order to proc our water orbs (which means when we do crit, then we have to use a gcd to reapply it... instead of healing) or simply not cast HW or LHW in which case we keep our orbs and do better healing with chain heal. Obviously, in its current state... everyone is going to cast Chain heal just like we do now. The best talent for this I think would be something like this:

Chain heal Spam Spec

I find this CRAZY because every "new" thing we get from WotLK is inferior to getting more MP/5 from Elemental. How sad is that?

I think Bliz wanted raid-spec resto to be something more like this:

Raid Resto Spec

But there isn't enough incentive right now for this spec. First of all, half of the new talents are still broken. Moreover, HW and LHW are still far too mana inefficient and they proc more GCD's for us to use on NON-healing spells. I really doubt dev's are actually playing shaman at all. I don't think they are intentionally ******** us, but I also don't think they understand the restriction GCD's put on people.