Bonding in WoW?

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that the type of healing that involves transferring damage wasn't really supported in World of Warcraft.

Well, it's time for me to eat my words. Wrath of the Lich King adds a new spell, called Spirit Link (the icon appears at the upper left of this post). Here's what it does:

You link the friendly target with up to two nearby friendly targets, causing 50% of any damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. If any target takes a blow greater than 30% of their health, or shared damage would reduce a target's health below 20%, the link is broken. A member of the link moving beyond 100 yards will also break the link. You can only have one link active at a time.

This is a canonical example of bonding, where friendly targets are linked and damage shared among them. Of particular interest is that this is a Shaman spell, and the Shaman's main heal is Chain Heal, which reads:

Heals the friendly target for 826 to 942, then jumps to heal additional nearby targets. If cast on a party member, the heal will only jump to other party members. Each jump reduces the effectiveness of the heal by 50%. Heals 3 total targets.

See what's going on here? Spirit Link links 3 targets together to share damage among them and then Chain Heal lets you heal three targets in one fell swoop. Nice, huh?

Now I just need to go level me a shammy...