I raid a a fair amount at 80. Ancestral Awakening only seems weak until your in a situation where you can’t use chain heal. On those boss fights I’m casting mostly lesser healing and riptide, with healing wave on main tank (preferably right after a riptide). Without Ancestral Awakening I wouldn’t be able to even pretend to keep up with other healing classes on those.

This is the talent build I assembled less than a minute after logging in to 3.0.8: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxIZxcezVeoxkrIot

A couple notes about the build, no nature’s guardian cause its useless. If your down to where your praying for snake-eyes or bust its time to throw in the towel. No Improved Earth Shield. Good tanks don’t get hit often enough to make it worth the 2 points. The rest my choices should be self-explanatory.

I clear naxx 10/25 3 times for now, malygos 10/25 only 2 times and OS with 1 dragon only alive in 25 mode – but we oneshot it so i think we will manage to do it with 2 easy – with all 3 is other story – still some ppl don’t know to move – but for now wipes where not because lack of healing or mana – it was because lack of xp of some ppl…

And how do you handle heroics without healing focus? Like strat where you have zombies beating on you or that voidwalker dude in VH that does tons of periodical damage?

The only thing I’d personally change in your spec would be leaving out elemental weapons. If you read the tooltip and calculate that is only 45 additional spellpower and no change to the earthliving hot at all. So if you’re going towards 1.8-2k spellpower this talent gets really bad.

As for HW. I really have to test this out. But I have a gut feeling Riptide and LHW will stay my primary heal for tank healing. The amount healed by LHW is just exactly right for spammage and topping up a tank very fast. HW on the other hand can’t be spammed and I have to stopcast if i don’t want to waste all my mana in a short time. Stopcasting has two major problems:

1. if you precast and you see your tank needs a heal but not as big as the one you’re precasting you’ll do so much overheal.

2. stopcasting as a priest is pure beauty, as it lets you get outside the 5SR. As a shaman I don’t benefit from 5SR so heals I can spam do fit better.

So I’m not sure if I’m down with healing way. It sure looks better now, but I just can’t see myself use HW as my primary single target heal.

About the Imp. Water Shield, ive already been taking points out of there and im currently very happy with 1/3.

I raid mostly Naxx 10, we just cleared our way to Sapphiron last night, and i really like this build for 10-mans and heroics. Been trying it on OS 25-man also and had no problem – we didnt leave any dragons alive – but still.