Resto and restless

[Jeff 1]

Hello to the masses.

I am one of 2 or 3 healers in a raid that is just starting progression in 10 player TOT. We are only 3 bosses in at this point. I am always looking for ways to improve my healing skill and numbers. I find this easy to do with my dps characters because of simcraft; but I have no luck finding any such thing for shamans. So I read as much as I can from several sources. Haste break point has me confused. I believe my haste is likely too low and my mastery might be too high but it seems that every time I mess around with my stat weights, I am worse off. So I am wondering if any of the subject matter experts here can look at my char stats and tell me what you see? I do not have a raid that provides the 5% haste buff. I do have 4 piece. I do follow a stringent rotation..well, set of rules....for the fights that allow them. So my play style is not what is concerning me now, just my stats and how to set these up properly for Robot.

Thank you for taking the time to read all that dribble and thank you again for your time in responding.

http://us.battle.net...atloot/advanced

I have changed out the gem in my helm to rivers edge but armory has not updated that just yet.

[Tarazet 144]

Your haste is high enough to reach the first soft cap without the haste buff and with your Ancestral Guidance talent. In fact, you only need 3039, so you can reforge slightly more out of Haste, but you likely wouldn't even notice the difference. Your stat priority is good as-is.

[Xinto 18]

As a 10man raider, resto shammy's are good but for throughput which is what I assume you are measuring, its hard to top an equally geared, equally competent, healer of any other class, other than Holy Priests which are about on par.

Mastery is awesome for shamans, if they can get full effect of it.

Mastery is said be to best for throughput but declines after 50% and you're running at 64%. I would recommend trying a high crit build. Drop a bit of mastery for crit, it won't make huge amounts of difference but will increase you mana regen (even though you have a good amount of spirit) which allows you to be a little less mana dependant.

Another option would be to drop your mastery a bit to boost your haste, Again this will increase throughput through allowing more heals to be cast and maybe beating your other healers to the punch allowing your mastery to be more effective.

These are both minor changes, neither should make significant difference as you are stat'd well to begin with. But if you are unhappy, do some testing. Try a full crit build (mastery ~50%, haste ~3300 {to account for any latency issues even with a good connection}).

Peoples play style really does have the biggest influence on output than anything you can do with the stats so have a play around. I gaurentee messing whole heartidly with your secondary stats will not make your healing useless. So unless you're only just killing bosses by the skin of your teeth, while you are testing you won't disadvantage the raid majorly.

You never know you may even find the solution to your problem. Although shammy's are behind on the healing in 10man even after the few buffs they got in 5.3. Don't get me wrong, they are a good healing class and in general are still within 10-15% of the highest healing class spec.

Also, your level 90 talent may not be optimal. Although unleashed elements looks good and with correct use can rescue your tank (along with your masses of mastery). Primal Elementist is much more likely to benefit you. Glyphed you can have 10% increased healing for 1 min out of 3. Thats a 33% theoretical uptime. This can obviously be stack with healing buffs/abilities such as healing tide totem and ascendance giving you an overall hps increase of better than 10% within that minute.

If you use your stone element you also have a 20% dmg reduction on yourself which increases your survivability and therefore the raids. Its simple to use and you have a visual remind in the form of a beam which connects you and your pet throughout its cast. Just a thought =)

Edited June 13, 2013 by Xinto

[Stoove 347]

Good info from Xinto there. My thoughts;

WALL OF TEXT WARNING

Companions

What stats you like is HEAVILY influenced by who you're raiding with. What classes are your fellow healers? Anyone who works with absorbs a lot (i.e. Disc or Paladin) makes your choice of heavy Mastery sub-optimal.

Haste Soft Cap

Effectively for Resto at the moment, you only have the Earthliving breakpoints as softcaps. You can take these if you want, but in 10-man it's worth bugger all IMHO. It does basically no healing unless you're running either the Riptide glyph or are getting loads of people in your Healing Rain (which in 10's is almost certainly not).

Haste is technically the best stat for throughput, but remember that it's mana-negative so you'll run OOM in a flash. This is why it's not chosen as a priority for us. The best way to approach Haste is to decide how much you're comfortable with in terms of cast-speed and go with that. For me, I choose to go with as little Haste as possible because I'm happy with slow cast times.

If you find that you're being beaten to the heals a lot, you might want to increase your Haste.

Gems

I notice you have Green Mastery/Spirit gems in your Yellow slots. I'd advise using Orange Int/Secondary instead, since the Int bonus gives a nice extra kick to your heals. You can probably afford to drop some Spirit since you're at ~30% more than I am unbuffed, and replacing green with orange is a good way to do that.

Spirit

As I said, you have LOADS of Spirit. Probably too much. Reforge that trinket IMO, get a nicer stat out of it. Remember that if you're not dropping Mana Tide around 2-3 times each fight you're not doing it enough; this will allow you to compensate for loosing regen.

Mastery / Crit

Mastery is extremely good IF you get the full benefit out of it, which in ToT (and especially with lots of absorb classes) you simply won't. It's great, but beyond 50% it's pretty much a waste of good stats. I'm considering lowering my Mastery even further, to about 40% if I can. The reason is that in ToT you tend to have to top people quickly and keep them there, so your healing is more on people in the high health region than low. Crit overtakes Mastery on single-target heals at *about* 50% health, and on AoE heals it's at *about* 65% iirc. Most of the time in ToT, your heals will be on players above this level. This is certainly what I find. What I'm saying is that I think you have more Mastery than you can possibly benefit from.

Crit is really good this tier. For two reasons; 1) It provides regen AND throughput, allowing you to gain throughput by reforging out of Spirit but still keep lots of regen. 2) Crits proc Ancestral Awakening, which is our best tool for tackling sustained spread-out raid healing. ToT has a LOT of that second one, to Crit is really useful for you (especially on, for e.g. Tortos). Crit procs are ALSO a smartheal, which means when you're raiding with absorb classes you have an extra edge to get your healing in.

Talents

I notice you're using Ancestral Swiftness and Unleashed Fury. I think that these are poor choices for the current tier, and I suggest that you play around with them. Take Primal Elementalist and consider glyphing Fire Elemental to give you a clutch +10% healing cooldown (useful on; Jin'rokh, Horridon, Council, Tortos, Megaera, Durumu, Primordius AT LEAST) every three minutes. You can even find a macro in the RShaman guide which allows you to 1-button the totem AND the buff that the elementals give you.

For this tier in particular I'd recommend Elemental Mastery over Ancestral Swiftness. I know people say "oh you run OOM faster" but hear me out here; it is insane when used at the same time as Ascendance. Use my suggestion for an Ascendance Macro to gain ALL THE BURST healing. It's absolutely insane.

General Comments

You mentioned that you use a sort-of rotation. I think that this is naive. Rotations are for DPS classes; healers must do whatever it takes to keep the raid alive first and foremost, and as a secondary priority react to whatever other healing needs to be done. If your "rotation" is Riptide, Chain Heal, Chain Heal, Chain Heal, Riptide, then it'll be useless on Ji-kun (and several other bosses). You must always be adapting your ability use to the environment and the situation, and there is no alternative to doing this if you're going to be a good healer.

Another thing that I think every Resto Shaman should be told is plan your cooldowns. I don't know if you do this, you didn't say, but plan exactly when you are going to use Healing Tide, Ascendance (macro'd), Spirit Link, your Elemental Totems, potions, and anything else you can think of. Plan them, and then execute that plan. You find that you can use all of the above AT LEAST twice a fight on average, and it's a complete shame to not use them because you "might need them later".

Summary

Glad to hear you want to improve. You're going the right way about it (talking to people about how you can improve) so take on board as much advice as possible. Let us know what classes you're healing alongside, and also take a look at the fight-specific tips we have for Resto Shaman.

Good luck!

[Stoove 347]

Oh, I forgot to mention. Here's my own armoury page;

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/ghostlands/Stoove/advanced

[Jeff 1]

This is the type of information that makes me a better resto shaman. Thank you.

The other healers are Disc Priest and a Holy Pally.

As for a rotation, I guess that was the wrong choice of words as healing seems to be mostly reactionary in the group I am in. So outside of ES, rip, totems, rains, and CD's...I am healing what needs to be healed when it needs to be healed. Sometimes those other two healers have a very difficult time keeping the tanks up and I end up having to spam greater wave for awhile which is so bad for me. Takes away from my specialty as a raid healer and my mana. Also causes me to have to use CD's when they are supposed to used at more optimal times. So along with myself getting better, those other two are either getting replaced or better..and quickly.

I have wondered about those two talents in particular. I am going to make those changes and we are picking back up tonight on Council so that will be a good fight for trying these out.

Interesting comment on the haste. I think I have been more confused and worked up about all the haste information than anything else of late. Thank you for lending a sane mind to the haste madness!

Healing Surge. I never use it. I have been using chain, lesser or greater only. I don't think I understand what benefits (if any) there are in using surge instead of lesser or greater. Do you yourself typically use this in any particular circumstance?

Okay thank you for the information again. I am off to regem and reforge then I am on to the tips and tricks.

Edited June 14, 2013 by Jeff

[Xinto 18]

Crit is good for mana regen and comes in from direct heal crits so that may help in some respects and help with the on the spot GHW and HW's being used.

The Primal Elementalist is great (twice as good as I realised) as your elementals don't share a cd so thats 10% healing increase for 2min out of 3min if used optimally.

Let us know what you conclusion is. Good luck with the testing and indeed progress.

[Jeff 1]

Ended up working right up until raid time so I did not have the chance to make the changes prior. I was really bummed about that. Now I have to wait another week since we are a Wed/Thur raiding group.

I have now changed out a few gems, reforge changes and the talents are swapped out. Running through LFR tonight or tomorrow to see what its like for me. Mastery is down to about 50% now and rid myself of some spirit (11069) and forged into crit (18%). I think I might lop off a bit more spirit for crit. Really excited to go out and try all these new changes.

I have been using my own food for +spirit and I realize now that this is not needed. So moving to int food. How about flasking though? Still using spirit flask instead of int. I am going to try to swap that out too. I spoke to another heal shaman on the server and he said he doesn't even use either flask and instead he uses the crit elixir now. Not sure how to feel about that but my immediate thought is that this is an incorrect practice.

Thank you again.

[Xinto 18]

I would say Int is certainly better than crit elixir ... that is likely a cost thing these days.

Try Int flask and see tbh. It will increase your throughput making every heal you do more potent, as long as your not overhealing too much, thats more effective.

Good luck with the testing but remember 25man LFR and 10man Norm are two different beasts for a shammy healer, but you full well know that. It will give you an excellent chance to get use to an adjusted healing style.

Thanks for posting

[Stoove 347]

Firstly, you're completely welcome for all the information. This is the kind of thing I've been dying to do since I became mod here. Tell your friends about our awesome forum!

Healing Surge: Oh yes that exists. It's as neglected as the 9-button on a microwave and twice as dirty. The ONLY situation I ever found for using HS over another heal is when you're in absolute urgency to get the heal out. Example: Dying tank, or the few seconds after Stomp on Tortos. In terms of mana cost, healing power, or Resurgence returns, HS is useless in PvE.

One thing I did think was that using a HS rotation during Ascendance would put through greater numbers, but when I ran some calculations the difference was minimal to nonexistent.

The Primal Elementalist is great (twice as good as I realised) as your elementals don't share a cd so thats 10% healing increase for 2min out of 3min if used optimally.

They can't be popped at once, and using one starts a short cooldown on the other. Expect a small delay between the two.

I have now changed out a few gems, reforge changes and the talents are swapped out. Running through LFR tonight or tomorrow to see what its like for me. Mastery is down to about 50% now and rid myself of some spirit (11069) and forged into crit (18%). I think I might lop off a bit more spirit for crit. Really excited to go out and try all these new changes.

I have been using my own food for +spirit and I realize now that this is not needed. So moving to int food. How about flasking though? Still using spirit flask instead of int. I am going to try to swap that out too. I spoke to another heal shaman on the server and he said he doesn't even use either flask and instead he uses the crit elixir now. Not sure how to feel about that but my immediate thought is that this is an incorrect practice.

Spirit is one of those things where there's technically no "correct" answer. Your Spirit is now a lot closer to mine, but remember that I'm running a Spirit proc trinket. I find that a comfortable level of Spirit fully buffed and flasked is ~13k (plus or minus maybe 1k). I tend to flask for Spirit, which is great for progression, but last night on our farm kills I tried the Intellect flask because I got one from a gold bag. It's not a bad choice, especially for farm kills. You will notice the difference both in terms of HPS and in terms of lack of mana; again, good use of Mana Tide (and other planned cooldowns) is essential for compensating.

In terms of food, go for +Intellect. It's much better these days IMO.

Glad to see you're excited! Keep us updated on how it goes! (Though I will be on holiday next week, I look forward to hearing of your inevitable success.)

[Xinto 18]

They can't be popped at once, and using one starts a short cooldown on the other. Expect a small delay between the two.

Thanks Stoove. I don't actually play a shaman, I research it for my wife.

How long is a short delay? As in seconds or 10s of seconds. Just curious tbh.

[Stoove 347]

You can't have both up together, expect ~30s between the end of one and the start of the next. Does need verification though :)

[Tha 0]

just seen your question and like to give you an answer from my view. We are 2 Shaman Restro and 1 Disci Priest. If you want do heal Tanks dont get to less Mastery, 64% or more are ok if you going to heal tanks. We have 7/12 Bosses down on 10 normal and 3 or sometimes 2 heales feels good for all boss fights so far.

Most urgent thing for my oppinon is read as much as you can about Restro and then do what >you< think what is right because iam sorry i dont agree with all what is mentioned in the posts above. And i dont think you should say all what i say is true. Because it depends always on your group and how you can play the healer-role ...

take care Tha

--- and sry about my english

ps: i dont care about Primal Elementalist, because iam ok with the passive which you can have instead and also the bonus dont depends on an extra click

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/der-rat-von-dalaran/Tha/advanced

Edited June 14, 2013 by Tha

[Xinto 18]

I'm not going to argue with you Tha, as I agree it is best to try and see what works best for you and your set up.

We are only giving hints and tips based on experience and our reading. I have to say your set up is pretty much what I suggested for Jeff to try (gems slightly different).

If you prefer the passive, good on you, it comes into its own with direct heals and could easily save a life at many times in a fight. But for overall throughput which is what it seemed Jeff wanted, Elementalist used well would do better. Not saying healing is about throughput but it should be considered and balanced with the overall.

Also Unleashed Fury through Unleashed Elements would be more button pressing than Elementalist to gain full effect.

Edited June 14, 2013 by Xinto

[Stoove 347]

Certainly, playing around with stats and finding what you feel good with is the way to do it. That said, if one's having problems finding a good direction I feel that's where threads like this really come in useful.

My experience of tank-healing is that it completely depends on your tank. We have three tanks, two of which take almost no damage and one is like his armour is made of paper - for the first two, I'd never want Mastery but for the last one Mastery is truly excellent. It really depends upon your situation and your team. I find that most of my healing is spread out across all targets, so I don't worry too much about tank healing.

ps: i dont care about Primal Elementalist, because iam ok with the passive which you can have instead and also the bonus dont depends on an extra click

You're free to disagree with us on Primal Elementalist; it does take practice and discipline to get right. It does take button presses (hint: use the macro shown in the Resto Shaman guide here on Icy Veins) but it's throughput is the most when used correctly. This is directly in line with the dev team's philosophy of "active talents should be slightly more powerful than passive talents". There's a big gain in using PE where it counts.

[Wierzbowski 0]

TLDR:

Drop Echo of Elements --> Ancestral Swiftness.

Drop Elemental Blast --> Unleashed Fury.

Drop Healing Tide Tot --> Conductivity.

Drop Fire Totem Glyph --> Glyph of Riptide.

Get good at dropping healing rain on packs of 4-5+ raid members. Takes practice but very doable. Obviously the more the better.

Healing rain >> Riptide >> LHW >> LHW >> Riptide >> LHW >> LHW........ (more sustainable throughput)

Ascendance >> Unleash elements >> Healing Rain >> Healing Stream Tot >> Riptide >> GHW >> GHW >> Riptide >> GHW >> GHW......

Other than that there isn't much to do. If healing rain isn't going to hit that many, its just riptide, maybe a chain heal, use your judgement. By that, I mean, sometimes you need to put out more aoe healing immediately.. so with less set up time, so you shuffle the rotation.

The Post

This is to improve throughput (more healing for same or less mana spent) - which I believe is your goal? Only personal from my experience. Fights with movement and players spread out evenly just aren't ever going to be a shaman's strength as we stand now. In the end you have to push yourself through this and I saw one guy tell you to go with what you feel is going to work for you. That's definitely the best idea.

• Try different talents. Drop Echo of elements and get Ancestral Swiftness. Drop Elemental Blast and get Unleashed Fury. Drop your totem glyph and get Glyph of Riptide. Conductivity is absolutely under rated in my experience and opinion. I get massive throughput from that. Finding frequent places to use healing rain (which you have buffed with unleash elements) on 4-5+ members of the raid takes practice, but is often doable. At that point, it's riptide, LHW, LHW, riptide, LHW, LHW... (the efficiency of LHW counteracts cost of healing rain). Cast each spell on a different raid target that needs heals. Glyph of riptide is going to allow you to spam that rotation if needed. 30% of that LHW is diverted to whoever is in your healing rain, and they are already soaking up healing from the rain itself. Drop a healing rain and get the tank and 4-5+ melee dps in the radius and watch the effective healing numbers pour in with average drain on your mana. Drop a healing stream totem and switch LHW to GHW in that rotation and you have increased throughput even more, sacrificing mana. Pop Ascendance during this? Lights out.
• Synergy. The changes above to your talents and some glyphs will increase how well your spec (and spells) will work together. You have 5% more spell haste passive, your riptide has no cooldown, which allows you to chain together 2 x LHW or GHW. Every time you use unleash elements (which should be on CD) next heal is now 50% more powerful (with conductivity, 30% of that buffed heal gets dumped to anyone standing in healing rain). Do you see the shift I'm trying to demonstrate? Trying to use the healing you're already doing (riptides, with LHW and GHW on different raid targets) and do more with it (dump it into Conductivity targets coupled with healing rain default effect).

Edited June 16, 2013 by Wierzbowski

[Stoove 347]

Interesting post there about maximizing healing from Conductivity. I might give it a go on one of our farm nights at some point, but I don't think it's very useful for progress IMO. Especially on fights like Tortos or Horridon where there's too much movement to get people in that Healing Rain all the time. Remember also that you'd have to drop Healing Tide Totem for Conductivity, which means you lose a BIG cooldown. I wouldn't risk that on Megaera or Ji-kun, for example. Also note that the Conductivity rotation in 10's is only useful when you have lots of melee DPS (which we tend not to have enough for).

If you're going to consider any few of Wier's tips but not all of them, remember a few things;

• Glyph of HST is excellent on most fights (esp. Megaera, council, Jin'rokh, Horridon) so think over carefully replacing it.
• Glyph of Riptide makes your standard HW rotation much more mana intensive. DO NOT use it to blanket Riptides on the raid. That'll eat your mana in no time. Even then, it's a non-trivial increase in mana-cost. The alternative that I use is to glyph Chain Heal and use that for my third spell after Riptide; RT - HW - HW - CH - RT etc...
• Sacrificing Elemental Mastery for Ancestral Swiftness will gain you more long-term throughput at the cost of burst throughput. I recommended using EM with Ascendance to maximize the gain from both; that makes the result more than the sum of the parts, and you'll lose out on your Ascendance healing by a lot. I find that Ascendance overheals a LOT after the first couple of seconds (due to everyone else's AoE heals going off too) so I like the extra burst which gives me a chance to get more of that as effective healing.

Ascendance >> Unleash elements >> Healing Rain >> Healing Stream Tot >> Riptide >> GHW >> GHW

Not a good order to do it. Pop UE and place Healing Rain first, then use Ascendance (it's off the GCD) immediately. The cast time at the start of Ascendance is a waste of burst healing (the cast time is ~3s which is AGES in Ascendance). If Asc is still up and your HR runs out, it can then be worth recasting during Ascendance if you have a big Haste buff like Elemental Mastery.

While under Ascendance, you will get more net healing from ignoring HST until you have a spare GCD, but the extra smartheal could save lives so do this at your discretion.

[rjparker1 7]

Hello to the masses.

I am one of 2 or 3 healers in a raid that is just starting progression in 10 player TOT. We are only 3 bosses in at this point. I am always looking for ways to improve my healing skill and numbers. I find this easy to do with my dps characters because of simcraft; but I have no luck finding any such thing for shamans. So I read as much as I can from several sources. Haste break point has me confused. I believe my haste is likely too low and my mastery might be too high but it seems that every time I mess around with my stat weights, I am worse off. So I am wondering if any of the subject matter experts here can look at my char stats and tell me what you see? I do not have a raid that provides the 5% haste buff. I do have 4 piece. I do follow a stringent rotation..well, set of rules....for the fights that allow them. So my play style is not what is concerning me now, just my stats and how to set these up properly for Robot.

Thank you for taking the time to read all that dribble and thank you again for your time in responding.

http://us.battle.net...atloot/advanced

I have changed out the gem in my helm to rivers edge but armory has not updated that just yet.

Been playing Shaman for 5 of my 8 years in wow, so I think I do have some knowledge in this.

I was a Priest healer for 2 years, and a Tank for 1 (first started WoW as a Warrior).

I have been DPS for pretty much ALL of my Shaman experience, and always as Elemental. Just recently I switched to Resto / Enhanced because it's time for a change.

Haste, is in my opinion the MOST important (after spirit) for heals. The faster you can cast, the quicker you can heal. Spirit is somewhat relative and you will get many different opinions, but from my view I like the scale that haste gives everytime it increases.. There is NO hast "soft cap" for heals.. that cap is for ticks on damage, but heals are short bursts and very little HoT, maybe 12 seconds.. so you won't ever need to worry about "ticks" just recast whenever they are off CD.. it's that simple.

There is a very interesting Youtube video (search for Mop Shaman Resto guide) the guy has ZERO spirit on his items, he has reforged haste, and he is doing heroic dungeons (yes I know not a RAID) and his mana stays high, he heals ALL the time regardless if anyone needs heals or not.. to "top off" as he calls it, the damage.

I tried this method, and it WORKS! I did 4 RAIDS last night, trying different strategies, you just need Riptide glyph and Chaining Glyph (for increase chain heal distance). I healed even when someone was only 5 to 10K damaged, I just alternated, riptide, earth shield, then heal wave, rinse repeat. I threw in occassional chain heals and greater heals and every CD I popped Heal totem and Tide totem and of course a well place heal rain.

Doing this my mana stayed high (even if it's low, if you are not out you have plenty). If you need mana you have mana tide totem as well.

You won't find any simulator to test your heals on.. there is no way you can compare, EVERY instance, and EVERY toon is different.. if they stand in fire, or boss decides to focus damage, or they take damage (such as fire) and they have 0% resistance to fire they take more damage than someone with 20% resistance.

NO way to predict any of this.. You just have to make it work with your style of play.

Having been DPS for YEARS, and tier full 7, 8, 9, 10.. I *WAS* number 1 DPS in every fight, period. so I am VERY familiar with the recount skada damage meters. I do NOT agree with the HpS meter, that's hogwash.

to me your heals are to keep people alive not a competition for how much you can throw out due to a situation and say your heals are better than mine.. maybe YOU waited for someone to get low so you can give a HUGE heal just to get your numbers high..

There is only 1 metric and is DEATH. Did anyone die on your watch? NO? Well then you did your job!

What else matters, nothing!

In looking at your toon I have this:

Get those glyphs I mentioned in addition to your elemental.

Take your Elemental spec, put your heal gear on. Go to askmrrbot and let it decide what you need to optimize your toon.

Use those as a guideline, don't reforge out of spirt as a healer, and change ALL gems that add spirt and make them appropriate.

For example you have spirit on your helm.. do NOT forsake Intellect for Spirit..Use the same gem as you have on chest, 80 int160 spirit..

That's my advice.

Don't let meters or other healers bother you, do the best you can, if your mana is still there at the end of fights then you did an efficient job. That's ALL anyone can say.

Edited June 17, 2013 by rjparker1

[rjparker1 7]

Good info from Xinto there. My thoughts;

WALL OF TEXT WARNING

Companions

What stats you like is HEAVILY influenced by who you're raiding with. What classes are your fellow healers? Anyone who works with absorbs a lot (i.e. Disc or Paladin) makes your choice of heavy Mastery sub-optimal.

Haste Soft Cap

Effectively for Resto at the moment, you only have the Earthliving breakpoints as softcaps. You can take these if you want, but in 10-man it's worth bugger all IMHO. It does basically no healing unless you're running either the Riptide glyph or are getting loads of people in your Healing Rain (which in 10's is almost certainly not).

Haste is technically the best stat for throughput, but remember that it's mana-negative so you'll run OOM in a flash. This is why it's not chosen as a priority for us. The best way to approach Haste is to decide how much you're comfortable with in terms of cast-speed and go with that. For me, I choose to go with as little Haste as possible because I'm happy with slow cast times.

In general I agree with this post, however the fact that you run out of mana means you are reusing abilities more often than the fact the abilities are faster to proc... that makes no sense to me.

You press greater heal, it does 20K heal regardless if it's a 3.5 sec or a 5 sec cast..like you said at the end..

If you find that you're being beaten to the heals a lot, you might want to increase your Haste.

That's the key, for me FASTER is better but Haste does NOT consume more mana...

[rjparker1 7]

This is the type of information that makes me a better resto shaman. Thank you.

The other healers are Disc Priest and a Holy Pally.

I have wondered about those two talents in particular. I am going to make those changes and we are picking back up tonight on Council so that will be a good fight for trying these out.

Interesting comment on the haste. I think I have been more confused and worked up about all the haste information than anything else of late. Thank you for lending a sane mind to the haste madness!

Healing Surge. I never use it. I have been using chain, lesser or greater only. I don't think I understand what benefits (if any) there are in using surge instead of lesser or greater. Do you yourself typically use this in any particular circumstance?

I reserve Healing Surge on myself, since I use Ancestral Swiftness, I macro the instant cast for an instant self heal.. healing surge is rather "needy" but useful just the same.

[Stoove 347]

That's the key, for me FASTER is better but Haste does NOT consume more mana...

Each heal costs the same mana, but since you can cast more (faster heals = more often). This means that you run out of mana faster. If you're not chain-casting heals, this is a valid way of playing but is likely to be sub-optimal in many cases. The fact remains that, when you stack Haste instead of another stat and use the same rotation you will run out of mana in less time. This is why Haste is known as being "mana-negative" formally in most theorycrafting circles.

The focus of most theorycrafting is usually to get the most HPS without foregoing on mana (with the idea being that when it is important, you will be gasping for mana regardless and it's therefore important to maximize your heals per mana [HPM]). Since Haste is mana-negative, we therefore only really want it when it gets us *extra free healing* (i.e. extra HoT ticks). This is only the case when you hit a haste "softcap" (technically a "break-point"), which is why we talk exclusively about Haste breakpoints. If you still disagree, then I imagine that some well-known theorycrafters would disagree with you in general.

If you need mana you have mana tide totem as well.

This is the wrong way to approach Mana Tide. Use it early (at ~80% mana) and then on cooldown throughout the fight. This maximizes your available mana pool. This is optimal, unless you are being used as a "mana-battery" for other healers, in which case you will already know when and how to use MTT.

There is only 1 metric and is DEATH. Did anyone die on your watch? NO? Well then you did your job!

I'm afraid this is a naive way of looking at the issue. Healers are all about metrics - you are correct in saying that HPS meters are not the way to tell whether one healer is better than another. However, HPS meters record your spell usage, what you did correctly, what you did wrong, and allow you to compare directly how you did on the last fight with how you did on that fight last wipe/kill. Use the meter as a self-improvement tool. What I'm saying is that Deaths are NOT the only metric. A good healer should use ALL of the metrics at their disposal.

Finally, and using my moderator voice, I will state that I disapprove strongly of people using their claimed excellence as a basis for their arguments. Any opinion must be backed up by a rational argument and/or data. "Look how good I am therefore I am right" does not cut it. I will warn, delete, or otherwise moderate posts of people who I feel are breaking this rule. Repeated offenders will not be welcome here, although nobody has broken this rule so far. Consider this fair warning.

[rjparker1 7]

This is the wrong way to approach Mana Tide. Use it early (at ~80% mana) and then on cooldown throughout the fight. This maximizes your available mana pool. This is optimal, unless you are being used as a "mana-battery" for other healers, in which case you will already know when and how to use MTT.

I'm afraid this is a naive way of looking at the issue. Healers are all about metrics - you are correct in saying that HPS meters are not the way to tell whether one healer is better than another. However, HPS meters record your spell usage, what you did correctly, what you did wrong, and allow you to compare directly how you did on the last fight with how you did on that fight last wipe/kill. Use the meter as a self-improvement tool. What I'm saying is that Deaths are NOT the only metric. A good healer should use ALL of the metrics at their disposal.

Well since I have done Priests heals and now Shaman heals i figure if I still have mana left over, there is no efficiency to do better. If I take into account everything you stated, what I can do better and what can be done more efficiently, than the use of MTT isn't much help since mana management isn't my problem. I figure mana is still there, if I am not OOM at the end of the fight my tank is sufficient. Maybe other healers are beating me to the punch in a fight, so therefore I don't get to truly use all my "big" heals.. don't need to.

I look at HPS as a log, if you have a server and everything is working well, you never look at logs, no need to since nothing is broken. If the server crashes or locks up THEN logs become important because it's insight into what could be wrong.

In a boss segment everyone is alive, Boss dies before enrage and we all have our mana intact (as well as can be expected) then HPS is a worthless stat, there is no reason to diagnose or rehash what is obviously not broken.

If you go to horridon, and people constantly die, we never kill boss, over and over THEN you look at heals and someone says hey you aren't healing with xyz, when the adds appear, or whatever.. there is a problem, we adjust we retry now I find that when my heals are tossing about and I am suddenly dry in my mana pool.. ok now we can work on efficiency and working on the use of MTT to be used early.

That's why I said HPS isn't useful, it's there in CASE things are not done correctly, but like you said, claimed excellence (which is exaclty how I view the HPS meters) is abused.. it's a way to show off.

People have DPS meters, but in a RAID they ask, "do someone have DPS meters?" They can use that as a reason to BRAG, and that's why I say it's reliance is overused by a very wide margin, DPS and HPS. It's ALL relative, we are a TEAM, not a group of "experts" trying to attain the same goal.. the boss is dead, there are no winners no losers, there are only accomplished professionals doing satisfactory performance...

That's why I hate status reports, and graphs, and Employees of the month.. we have none of that in WoW, it's a game, pure entertainment.. we play for fun not be judged by others at how "well" we have fun. This isn't a competition..

The FUN is the reward for playing. If you take it more seriously than that, you have some VERY real problems. Yes there are people that need to keep the play entertaining for others, but that's why we have guilds.. play with you know, and virtual realms will also help fix this, and I believe when Virtual Realms becomes more routine, guilds will disband.. all of them. There is no need for guilds if you can have your "circle of friends".

There will not be any "gloating" among friends, because no one is going to care.

We should be simply gauging what we do by the outcome of the result, if a Boss dies and we all get loot (even if it's not what we expect) that should be reward enough, no difference in performance, no I can do better than you meters.. it's all in the journey not in the claim to fame.. there are no celebrities in WoW. You are a good player because you can play more often and when you want.. doesn't mean you possess more talent.

Edited June 21, 2013 by rjparker1

[Stoove 347]

I completely disagree that "killing the boss" is the only measurable outcome that matters, but that is a difference in philosophy rather than a difference in fact. The fact remains that for those people who want to do measurably better, the key word is measurably. That is why people are here, and that is why we talk about meters.

Since we talk about measurable improvements and statistics, using meters is unavoidable. However, the only bad reason to use meters is to compare different players. All other uses (at all other times) are good uses of meters. You can get a lot of information on your play style and room for improvement, and some people (myself included) derive a lot of joy from personal improvement. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this, and indeed many of the players who come to the Icy Veins forums feel this way. There are many different reasons for playing WoW and we do not like any of them to be criticized.

Haste stacking can be a viable and fun playstyle, but when one is looking to do as well as one can, it's probably not optimal. If you have fun playing Haste-stacking, I'm not trying to take that away from you. What I'm saying is that those people looking to do better should not expect it to work well for them (although yes, it varies, try it out if you think you'd like it).

[Xinto 18]

I look at HPS as a log, if you have a server and everything is working well, you never look at logs, no need to since nothing is broken. If the server crashes or locks up THEN logs become important because it's insight into what could be wrong.

I disagree, using your server analogy, you have to check logs so you can plan ahead for what you can improve before you NEED to improve/fix. Looking at something only when its not working isn't something I agree with, monitoring how well it is doing is vital to continue a good "server uptime" and efficiency.

If you go to horridon, and people constantly die, we never kill boss, over and over THEN you look at heals and someone says hey you aren't healing with xyz, when the adds appear, or whatever.. there is a problem, we adjust we retry now I find that when my heals are tossing about and I am suddenly dry in my mana pool.. ok now we can work on efficiency and working on the use of MTT to be used early.

If you can improve your own healing you can make the encounter easier for other and give them room to improve/or conversely, give them an easier and more enjoyable gaming experience depending on the gamer.

That's why I said HPS isn't useful, it's there in CASE things are not done correctly, but like you said, claimed excellence (which is exaclty how I view the HPS meters) is abused.. it's a way to show off.

As Stoove pointed out, meters are VERY useful for SELF improvement, not to assessing yourself against others which is what you're infering, which hasn't been mentioned or implied once in this thread.

We should be simply gauging what we do by the outcome of the result, if a Boss dies and we all get loot (even if it's not what we expect) that should be reward enough, no difference in performance, no I can do better than you meters.. it's all in the journey not in the claim to fame.. there are no celebrities in WoW.

The aim of progression is to improve (to progress), from your point of view I can only see two outcomes (wipe or kill it) but thats not the case, the can kill the boss with only 1 person alive at the end. Or after 10min instead of 8 because you lost your main dps as you couldn't heal enough when it was needed ... even with enough mana at the end of the fight. Or ofc a tank had to use a major cd which had already been planed for a later part in the fight, meaning he dies later when he doesn't have the capacity to mitigate it when he had planned to.

It takes planning and knowing your class (I am in no way saying you don't know your class or your play style) but meters can really help you know your class much better and analyse how well you have been playing now compared to before, even if both times you killed the boss (or both times you wiped!)

Now going back to what this thread was about, the thread you decided to post it, self improvement of throughput in the meters. doing more effective healing through a fight. I like your suggestion and would happily try it but I would need meters to gauge how well it was working and if its an improvement over what I was doing before.

Also I would like to point out, if you have nothing to compare your healing with (which you clearly agree, other characters aren't appropriate) then you need to use logs of yourself to see how things worked out.

You are a good player because you can play more often and when you want.. doesn't mean you possess more talent.

I really don't agree with what I think you are saying here, it doesn't matter how much talent you have for playing the game, its skill which can be improved and wanting to improve your own skill at playing the game is natural and very enjoyable for some. Its actually what I guage my playing on, how well am I doing not to before.

In any case, thank you for post some suggestions and putting across a different point of view, for a lot of us we find it really interesting to know others views and experiences as they can lead to our own improvement.

[Hejgaard 2]

Haste stacking can be a viable and fun playstyle, but when one is looking to do as well as one can, it's probably not optimal. If you have fun playing Haste-stacking, I'm not trying to take that away from you. What I'm saying is that those people looking to do better should not expect it to work well for them (although yes, it varies, try it out if you think you'd like it).

I'm jumping in on this post because it is really interesting :)

I will start out by saying I strongly disagree with you on the haste point! I know most of the people in the discussion currently are gearing up in normal ToT which means that they don't have access to BIS items. Nothing wrong with that ofc. I'm currently sitting at 5/13 HC, which means I've got a bit more gear (around 530 ilvl atm). However, throughout my gearing I tried different setups and I see some clear tendencies!

As a starter - the good old shaman mastery rule still works: The harder the content, the more mastery you need. "Hard" means consistent, large amount of healing. If you are progressing on Horridon normal, you don't need huge amounts of mastery! Why? Because the dmg the raid receives is fairly low spike dmg. Esp. when playing with a priest, your raidmembers will stay at low health for a very short time, which greatly d evaluates your mastery. I would go a more crit heavy build if you are doing ToT normal. Simply because of the way the encounters are designed.

And here we come back to haste again. The point about haste being mana negative is true on a fight like Jink'rock or Iron Qon perhaps, where you have consistent AoE dmg over a long period of time. However, let's face it - very few encounters in ToT are designed like that. Instead, most of the dmg your raid will receive is spiky dmg. This is where haste becomes very handy! You want those spikes healed up as quickly as possible!!

Ofc, if you do not get the 5% spell haste buff it's gonna be hard for you to reach the breakpoints. Are you sure you don't have either a boomkin, Elemental shaman or hunter in the raid? If you have a hunter, he MUST pop a Sporebat (Spellhaste).

My advice would be to reach the highest haste-breakpoint you can, without having to use more than a few haste gems. Haste is NOT only to "heal before everyone else does", it actually boosts your output a lot, because of the extra tick on Healing raid, Healing Stream Totem etc. With my 532 ilvl I'm sitting at the 30% haste-breakpoint and my healing is really strong. Not only for the spike dmg, but also for fights like Megaera. I'm not a theory-crafter, I got most of my healing tips from actually raiding through many years, and the exact numbers for break-points I've found right on this site! So I have no theorycrafting to back what I'm saying up. But when that's said, I am pulling pretty decent numbers theses days, going heavy haste.

We did an experiment in my guild tonight, trying to see how high of an HPS I could reach. This was with 30% haste (5% from boomkin) and I ended at 190k HPS on Magaera normal... Say what you want, but haste is not as terrible a stat as you might think!

Anyways, I'm very interested in hearing what your further thoughts are! :)