Resto shaman seeking critique

[Cenerae 1]

My guild is 13/14 on normal mode currently. We typically 3 heal most of the time, and my usual co healers are a holy paladin and a resto druid (with a priest and mistweaver on backup duty). However, sometimes I don't feel like I'm really pulling my weight compared to the other healers in the raid team. I'd like some feedback to see if I'm doing the best I can be doing or not.

 

My armory is here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/cenarion-circle/Liwei/simple

And logs are here: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/135924/

 

Some notes for my part:

 

- I've never been a primary healer until this patch. I've done bits of it here and there throughout this expansion to fill in, but doing it full time is new to me. Hence my uncertainty.

 

- My guild leader suggested a heavy mastery build. I'm seeing the benefits on the actual progression fights (or earlier this week when we had to 2 heal Norushen for the first time), but it feels a bit of a waste when we're 3 healing in general.

 

- I feel I may perhaps have too much spirit, as I've not been finding any need at all to be using the totemic recall glyph - again, except on progression fights. Wondering what I could replace it with, or if I should consider lowering spirit.

 

- I know the chi-ji trinket isn't that good. Trying to get Thok or Nazgrim to cough up one of theirs to replace it.

 

Thank you for any advice.

[Stoove 347]

Hi there!

 

Interesting post, I'll try and get you a nice long analysis at the weekend. Until then, I just want to comment on these two bits;

 

 

- My guild leader suggested a heavy mastery build. I'm seeing the benefits on the actual progression fights (or earlier this week when we had to 2 heal Norushen for the first time), but it feels a bit of a waste when we're 3 healing in general.

 

- I feel I may perhaps have too much spirit, as I've not been finding any need at all to be using the totemic recall glyph - again, except on progression fights. Wondering what I could replace it with, or if I should consider lowering spirit.

 

Your build is very heavy Mastery. You'll see on any non-progress and non-2-healing fight that you just won't be doing much healing at all. I find that about 50-60% Mastery is great for progression fights, and it allows you more stats to put into Haste or Crit which will give you quite some benefit. Especially since you have the LMG, the "breakpoint" for that is at 30% Haste (~7k) which will save you a lot of Mana. That leads me to...

 

If you have too much spirit, which is perfectly fine especially late in the tier, definitely reforge out of it. If you're struggling on progression then Haste increases will help somewhat (as described above) and Crit increases will increase your active regen (from Resurgence) while also improving your output. I'm at 13/14 as well and we're 2-healing Garrosh - I've just stepped down from 14k to 13k Spirit because I'm spending most of the fight on full mana!

 

I don't use the recall glyph for two reasons;

1. I think the final tick of HST is more valuable than the mana at this stage.
2. When you have more than just HST dropped (which is very often for me) you're wasting your other totems by recalling them.

So I prefer to glyph Fire Elemental or Water Shield dependent upon the fight.

[Stoove 347]

One question; How do you see your role in the Druid/Paladin/Shaman combo?

[Dognfluen 0]

I terms of stats prio - you have choosen to go heavily on mastery (nerfing other stats).

 

I have been switching / tweaking the stats on my shaman quit a lot, and found with 4set bonus (like you also have) did require a new twist:

 

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/terokkar/D%c3%b8gnfluen/advanced

 

My stats:

Mastery: 63,88%

Haste: 24,05% (surgest you try to get 7613 haste rating)

Crit: 23,62%

 

With 4 set bonus active, I then fell that going with slightly more crit makes a huge diff. in raids.

 

Both in terms of gemming / reforge you go hard for mastery (we have similar ilvl), nerfing intellect, haste og crit stats.

 

If you reallie want to improve your shaman try to use all those lovely websites - personally I use:

 

http://www.wow-heroes.com/

http://www.wowprogress.com/

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/

http://lifeingroup5.com/

 

First 3 website am I using to look at other (more hardcore) healers - seeing how they value their stats, reforges and gems. I try to look for players raiding same type as myself (10- or 25man) and see what effect diff. values have.

 

Best of Luck improving on your raidpreformance.

 

Døgnfluen

[Cenerae 1]

Thanks for the responses. I'll try to address some of the points brought up to explain why I'm doing what I'm doing, and then you can all tell me why I'm dumb :3

 

Your build is very heavy Mastery. You'll see on any non-progress and non-2-healing fight that you just won't be doing much healing at all. I find that about 50-60% Mastery is great for progression fights, and it allows you more stats to put into Haste or Crit which will give you quite some benefit. Especially since you have the LMG, the "breakpoint" for that is at 30% Haste (~7k) which will save you a lot of Mana. That leads me to...

 

If you have too much spirit, which is perfectly fine especially late in the tier, definitely reforge out of it. If you're struggling on progression then Haste increases will help somewhat (as described above) and Crit increases will increase your active regen (from Resurgence) while also improving your output. I'm at 13/14 as well and we're 2-healing Garrosh - I've just stepped down from 14k to 13k Spirit because I'm spending most of the fight on full mana!

 

I don't use the recall glyph for two reasons;

1. I think the final tick of HST is more valuable than the mana at this stage.
2. When you have more than just HST dropped (which is very often for me) you're wasting your other totems by recalling them.

So I prefer to glyph Fire Elemental or Water Shield dependent upon the fight.

 

I could attempt the next breakpoint. I could certainly reforge for it. But as far as the recall glyph goes, I am able to time it to the point where the totem has expired, but I can still reclaim full mana from it. This doesn't waste ticks, though the window to do this is pretty narrow. I could be deluding myself here, but I believe it's functioning that way.

 

That doesn't render the second point you made moot or anything, that's just my experience with it. I could probably swap the glyph out, though I'm not so certain about the benefits of the fire ele totem glyph. I'm primarily using it for the damage more than for the empower effect.

 

One question; How do you see your role in the Druid/Paladin/Shaman combo?

 

Honestly I'm not sure. My healing feels all over the place. On some fights, my healing stream is 30% of my throughput because I'm not doing anything. On others, my mastery build feels like it gets sniped a lot because of who I'm co-healing with (though I doubt it would be much different with another setup). I -do- have very potent heals when it comes to emergency healing spikes, but I don't know if that really counts.

 

I guess if I were more experienced at it I could give you a better answer. Sorry.

 

If you reallie want to improve your shaman try to use all those lovely websites - personally I use:

 

http://www.wow-heroes.com/

http://www.wowprogress.com/

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/

http://lifeingroup5.com/

 

First 3 website am I using to look at other (more hardcore) healers - seeing how they value their stats, reforges and gems. I try to look for players raiding same type as myself (10- or 25man) and see what effect diff. values have.

 

I've considered it, but looking at hardcore healers may not be especially relevant to my situation. Unless I'm mistaken, you gear differently when bulling through heroic progression.

Edited November 1, 2013 by Cenerae

[Stoove 347]

I've considered it, but looking at hardcore healers may not be especially relevant to my situation. Unless I'm mistaken, you gear differently when bulling through heroic progression.

 

Absolutely this! Doing what hardcore raiders do probably won't work for you - the key is to make sensible decisions yourself.

[Stoove 347]

So I ran your logs in comparison to mine through a site called comparebot (excellent resource to use by the way!) and I found a few things you might be interested in. Our guilds are at about the same progress level, so this should be a good comparison. We even 2-healed the fights. (One thing to note: our guild's kill took about 50% longer than yours, so I did easily more overall healing.) The comparison is here. I did want to do Norushen because you said you were interested in it, but the problem is that it's got some parts where the healers are away from the raid (not a good comparison!) so I chose Protectors instead.

 

My observations;

 

• You're killing bosses a lot faster than we are, which makes a difference in overall healing. Looking at HPS, we're roughly on-par and you even topped the healing meters this fight. Why do you feel like you're lagging?
• We spec differently for this fight; you took Rushing Streams, but when you take account of that I'm dropping HST about 25% more often than you are! That's one major place for improvements.
• My Healing Rain is doing about 12% less healing than yours despite my Haste rating being much (much) higher. I'd suggest that this is because your group is more bunched than mine, so good going!
• Interesting thing about Restorative Mists; I used it twice (you used it once) and the difference in healing done was about 6% when you account for that. I also used Ancestral Guidance which probably accounts for some of the extra healing I did in comparison to you. When you take overhealing into account, on average you healed more than I did when using Ascendance (but that doesn't tell us much about individual uses). I used mine pretty well, but I think the difference is explained by...
• Glyph of Chaining! This is the cause in the difference between your healing and mine (in terms of CH) and ALSO probably accounts for your larger throughput from Ascendance. I prefer to keep the glyph, but it's a matter of taste. If it works for you then fantastic! Consider swapping it in or out depending on the fight (I certainly do this).
• Your Ancestral Awakening healed people less often than mine, but that makes sense since you're very low on Crit.

So overall I think that you did somewhat similarly to me, with a few playstyle differences. You can improve (especially with your Healing Stream Totem!). I even learned a bit about how crap my raid is at grouping up. So we all win!

 

If you have any other fights you're particularly interested in, have a look at them (and comparebot them, link it here) and we can compare notes.

[Cenerae 1]

It's not, for me, about topping meters. I don't heal to do that (or I'd have picked a disc priest or holy paladin, given how powerful they've been, meter wise, this expansion). I just want to know that I'm doing the best I can do. And on the 2 healing Norushen attempt, I felt like I was doing a sloppy job of it, especially toward the end (I got into 'panic healing surge spam' mode). Hence me prompting the topic. :)

 

I don't recall specifically what I was doing for the protectors log you were looking at. we don't typically 2 heal that fight (or Norushen) but we were making do because one of our healers was going to be late. What I can say is, when I hit ascendance I typically attempt to activate it when I have several people standing in my healing rain. Not always, but that's the goal. And then I AoE heal as much as possible.

 

Chain heal glyph is one of my staples, primarily because I can't convince myself to use any of the other glyphs. I should switch it out on a fight by fight basis, but I don't know what I'd put in it's place. Spiritwalker's Grace perhaps - but if I don't need the chaining glyph then I likely won't have a use for SWG much either. I don't place any value on the fire elemental glyph, because I don't often use it for empower. Maybe I should, but I use the earth elemental for that. Fire elemental has purely been for damage.

 

As for healing stream...I do try to use it on cooldown, but obviously I could be doing a better job of it. I don't have anything to track the cooldown specifically, so sometimes I may not be noticing it's up for a little while perhaps. If I was to 2 heal Norushen again, I would likely swap rushing streams out for conductivity.

 

Maybe I'll take you up on the comparebot thing later in the week. I'm interested to hear from you if you have any other input in the meantime, though. Thanks for the feedback so far. :)

[Stoove 347]

Yes there's certainly a difference between topping the meters and actually doing your best (and I agree that the latter is what you want to be aiming for!). It's just the way that you talked about the problem in the original post made it sound like a comparative thing rather than a personal thing. Either way, we've identified some interesting improvements.

 

I always think that on fights like Protectors it's better to plan your cooldowns (thus making the best of them) and on fights like Norushen it's best to use them to save the raid towards the end. If that's what you're doing with Ascendance on Norushen then you're doing it right - if you're waiting for people to stand in the rain, then you should be popping it when you need it rather than when you can optimize it. Those two aren't always the same. The point is that if you need it, you shouldn't be putting it off because people aren't standing in the shinies.

 

I would never take conductivity for Norushen - there's too much moving about and to make the best of it you really need everyone to be in that Healing Rain all the time. Try it on Sha of Pride instead, I love it there. I recommend Rushing Streams for Norushen because there's high and consistent AoE that HST is a perfect tool for healing.

 

My impression from your armoury was that you weren't using the Chain Heal Glyph - I must have got that wrong by looking at your Elemental spec. In which case, I might have something to improve on (my use of Ascendance). I suspect that I used it sub-optimally on the kill I linked. We tend to find Protectors pretty much trivial even to 2-heal.

 

Choosing not to take the Chain Heal glyph is just as valid a choice as choosing to take it. Good fights to not take it are Sha of Pride, Malkorok, and Thok, Galakras (if you can suffer the sustained AoE loss in phase 1), Protectors (again, if you need burst rather than AoE), and maybe even Garrosh. It really pays to expriment. :)