Heal the Soul (2-Set) is supposed to make you
Chain Heal more, which it does indeed. Stacking it to 50 guarantees you a full crit
Chain Heal, but accounting for the critical strike chance you already have, realistically 30 to 35 stacks will already guarantee that.
According to the
blue post, critical healing from totems is supposed to work as well for
Heal the Soul, but this isn't the case on PTR at the moment. I'd like to see this working, as it would put a lot of power into the
Healing Tide Totem cooldown window (could even combine it with
Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem). This is a great improvement over the old set; which forced you to target players with
Riptide in particular.
Now the 4-Set (
Heal the Soul) has 2 parts to it, one is free
Chain Heal casts whenever you drop
Healing Stream Totem,
Cloudburst Totem,
Healing Tide Totem,
Mana Tide Totem or
Spirit Link Totem. This part is undeniably great; extra free
Chain Heals are always a good thing, especially as they benefit from the buff of the 2-Set, but there's a lot of odd interactions with those
Chain Heal and it is unclear whether the current interactions are intended, or if the set is only half implemented for now. Some buffs get properly consumed to buff the totem
Chain Heal (
Unleash Life), but others don't get consumed even though they do buff the
Chain Heal (
High Tide,
Jonat's Natural Focus). Judging from how the set is working on PTR, I'm assuming that its supposed to use and consume all
Chain Heal buffs as a normal
Chain Heal would.
The other part is the cooldown reduction on totems whenever you crit with a
Chain Heal hit. This one I'm not sure about. It does work with every
Chain Heal hit, so one cast can reduce multiple totems, or one totem multiple times, but what totem it reduces appears to be random. The issue is that some totems benefit a lot more from the reduction than others,
Cloudburst Totem and
Vesper Totem in particular scale greatly with cooldown reduction. This means the more totems you have to drop, so the further you get into a fight, the weaker this part of the set gets (as
Cloudburst Totem is usually the first one to get used), especially once you have to drop utility totems which will steal some of the cooldown reduction. I would like a little more restriction on what totems that this can effect (maybe just one totem like
Healing Stream Totem/
Cloudburst Totem or
Healing Tide Totem), as you never really want to be in a situation where you don't want to use your spells. Maybe addressing that some totems gain a lot more from a flat 2 second reduction than others would also work, as constantly reducing 2 seconds on a 30 second cooldown is more impactful than on a 180 second cooldown. At the same time this is clearly the smaller part of the set in the current implementation, so personally I'm not too bothered, I'd just like it to be more than that.
Issues aside, this set already plays and feels a lot better than the old iteration. You get incentivized to press
Chain Heal but aren't forced to, as you can use the 2-Set buff with the 4-Set by dropping totems as well. It's less optimal but you still gain a decent bit of healing. The current implementation on PTR strongly suggests that its not finished yet however, and we'll have to see how the set changes in further builds.