25 Man Resto Shaman Optimization

[CptDan 25]

A bit of background: I've been recently coming back to the game (took a break around the time ToT came out and barely did anything there) for the past couple of months I was raiding with a 10 man team and was recently invited to the main raid team which is working on Heroic 25 man content (Working on H Iron Jugg atm)

 

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the changes in 25 man. The hardest thing to get a clear break down of is the stat weight priorities. I see so many conflicting reports that it's hard to sort it myself. I figured I would post here and try any suggestions in flex runs this weekend and hopefully have it sorted by next week.

 

Information Required:

 

Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Cptheals/advanced

 

Logs: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-8ek0yenbxtm2pq32/

 

I wasn't sure which log to link, I think that is the main report from the raid earlier tonight. 

 

Healing Comp: MW Monk x 2, Disc Priest x 2, Druid, Myself, Holy Paladin

This changes fight to fight, as this is a progression attempt, we had a lot of healers. I'm not sure but I think that normally we would have one less priest on the healing team.

 

Things I am already working on:

 

1. Making sure to get as close to 100% uptime on Tidal waves. I do better on this on some fights than others, but I know it's a weak point.
2. Using my elementals for the buff (I almost always forget to do this)
3. Ascendence Usage (I haven't quite gotten this down yet)

 

Rotation: UE > Healing Rain > HST > RT Maint. > Chain Heal > Single Healing as needed. Earth Shield on tank.

 

Focused questions: 

 

1. Best haste breakpoint for 25 man and our raid comp?
2. Suggested levels of crit?
3. Is the 4p bonus worth it? I have the normal mode gloves.

Also, any other tips for optimizing my healing would be greatly appreciated. 

 

That said, Thank you so much in advance for any help you can provide. Our next raid night is tuesday next week.

[Stoove 347]

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the changes in 25 man. The hardest thing to get a clear break down of is the stat weight priorities. I see so many conflicting reports that it's hard to sort it myself. I figured I would post here and try any suggestions in flex runs this weekend and hopefully have it sorted by next week.

 

OK, yes. Don't panic, there are conflicting reports because as it turns out there are lots of different ways of going about this. If you change your playstyle accordingly, stacking any of the secondaries can work out pretty well. This is why there are so many conflicting reports!

 

 

1. Making sure to get as close to 100% uptime on Tidal waves. I do better on this on some fights than others, but I know it's a weak point.
2. Using my elementals for the buff (I almost always forget to do this)
3. Ascendence Usage (I haven't quite gotten this down yet)

 

Good things to work on. The optimal usage of Ascendance (assuming you have a few seconds stationary for ramp up time) is:

• Riptide someone who will be in the stack
• Precast Unleash Elements to buff your Healing Rain
• Precast any buffs you have which take up a GCD
• Place Healing Rain where the stack will be
• Cast Ascendance, and any other cooldowns which don't take a GCD (Elemental Mastery and Potions in particular)
• Spam Chain Heal your heart out.

Often popping Spiritwalker's Grace during Ascendance can help, but your 4pc set doesn't stack with Ascendance (so only use it when you need either the extra throughput or the movement, or both).

 

 

Rotation: UE > Healing Rain > HST > RT Maint. > Chain Heal > Single Healing as needed. Earth Shield on tank.

 

Pretty decent priority, but honestly I tend to put HST > HR. Largely because I play 10-man, not 25s :)

 

 

1. Best haste breakpoint for 25 man and our raid comp?
2. Suggested levels of crit?
3. Is the 4p bonus worth it? I have the normal mode gloves.

 

1. You have the legendary meta, so always always always choose the one at 30%, since it's a kind of breakpoint for your meta gem too. Good stuff! :)
2. We usually recommend here to gear using the tactic listed below. I wouldn't advise any specific minimum.
3. We have an ongoing discussion about it. It's good if you remember to use it, especially so because it can save a raid. I like to have it on hand, esp. towards the end of a fight.

• Pick your favourite stat (in my case, Crit).
• Push to the Haste breakpoint (30% usually)
• Take as much Spirit as you are comfy with (about 12-13k for me)
• Everything that's left over gets piled into your favourite stat.
• In terms of stat weights, that means you want to put your favourite stat as over half the weight for Intellect (I have Int = 1, Crit = 0.55) so you gem for it too.

 

Some other pointers I noticed:

 

• I imagine you have a 5% Haste buff in your raid, so you can drop a bit of Haste. Use Ask Mr Robot for that, he will optimize you best.
• You have a nice setup for 25's. I recommend considering trading in a glyph for Glyph of Chaining on really spread out fights.
• Placement of Healing Rain is always a thing to work on.
• You could consider moving from Rushing Streams to Ancestral Guidance for some fights. In 25s you will find it especially nice on Heroic Protectors. It's an awesome little cooldown :)

 

I looked at your Juggernaut kill in your log, it looks pretty solid. Looking at your cooldowns cast, I'd just comment that you used only once; Spirit Link Totem, Ascendance, Healing Tide Totem. This is perhaps forgivable considering the length of the fight (under 6mins), but if you're on progress always always always always make sure to cast those cooldowns as often as possible  =]

 

I don't know how much of that you already knew, so I apologize if I patronized a bit. If you find our posts helpful, make sure to click Like and we'll post more like that! :)

[Ashtoret 2]

Hi CptDan,

 

Let me try to answer your post fragment by fragment.

 

 

My first advice to you is to run Siege normal a few more times because I can see that you still have upgradable pieces (head piece, bracers, trinket). You could also try to get a different trinket altogether, there's some discussion about whether Thok's trinket is better or worse then Siegecrafter but they are both better then Nazgrim trinket. Since you have that trinket from flex you can try to run flex again to get a better trinket.

 

 

The most important thing about your stats is that you feel good about them and that they complement the other healers in your raid. As long as you don't waste points (for example you are in between haste break points), just go with the strategy that works best for you and provides you with the best hps. I can give you a personal example- after reaching the 40% breakpoint in haste I noticed a drop in hps, too many resources went towards reaching that cap, which only means one more tick on Healing Tide Totem, a cd which is only used once every 3 minutes, so the rise in hps was overall not noticed at all. Only after getting more gear and raising crit to a higher level I got a steadier hps throughput.

 

 For the things you're already working on here's some advice:

1. Try to maintain Riptide on both tanks as first priority, and on low targets/ people who tend to get low/ even yourself. That will make you already at about 90%. A good practice is to always have Riptide on someone who is the target of Chain Heal because if buffs the Chain Heal.

2. You can use a version of this macro to help you make sure you're using the elementals' buffs.

3. Cast Ascendence right after you've casted Healing Rain and threw down a Healing Stream Totem to make the best use of it. Continue spamming heals and if you need to move use Gracewalker with it to make sure you didn't waste Ascendence time on movement only. Ascendence can be very powerful, it's not smart but it gives a good blanket heal during times of big raid wide damage. Notice that it works very well with the Conduitivity talent, meaning that your Healing Rain can last the full 15secs of Ascendence and spread happy heals all around!

 

 

 As for your focused question:

1. The best haste breakpoint is the one you can reach without seriously affecting other secondary stats. In your item level I would try to go with around 30% one and very soon the 33%. The next viable one after 33% is quite a jump (40% for another tick of Healing Tide Totem) so wait awhile before jumping there. I can see that you're already around that area, I never bother memorizing the numbers myself because I let AskMrRobot do all the math.

2. As high as they can go. I like crit better then mastery. A lot of Siege gear has TONS of mastery, so even while working out of it you'll still have a lot left. Again that would depend on your personal style and what you would prefer. Try to play around and see what feels more comfortable for you.

3. I really like the 4-pieces tier bonus and use it as another healing cd for moderate damage. I use it regularly even if there's no movement whatsoever just as another cd. If you want to keep your heroic gloves you can run normal to get the shoulder token, or if you upgrade your normal gloves you'll end up with about the same item level that you are now.

Edited January 17, 2014 by Ashtoret

[Stoove 347]

My first advice to you is to run Siege normal a few more times since I can see you still have pieces missing (head piece, bracers, trinket). You could also try to get a different trinket altogether, there's some discussion about whether Thok's trinket is better or worse then Siegecrafter but they are both better then Nazgrim trinket. Since you have that trinket from flex you can try to run flex again to get a better trinket.

 

I disagree here. I'd take (and in fact I am taking) Nazgrim's trinket over Seigecrafter's trinket. Thok's Trinket is amazing, but I can't have it. The BiS pair is the one from Sha of Pride and the one from Thok.

 

Multistrike is severely underestimated on progress fights, in my opinion. However, it is definitively not as good as Cleave.

 

The most important thing about your stats is that you feel good about them and that they complement the other healers in your raid. As long as you don't waste points (for example you are in between haste break points), just go with the strategy that works best for you and provides you with the best hps. I can give you a personal example- after reaching the 40% breakpoint in haste I noticed a drop in hps, too many resources went towards reaching that cap, which only means one more tick on Healing Tide Totem, a cd which is only used once every 3 minutes, so the rise in hps was overall not noticed at all. Only after getting more gear and raising crit to a higher level I got a steadier hps throughput.

 

I agree that you should take stats that you feel comfortable with. However, I want to point out that totems don't have functional Haste breakpoints. This means that in any given fight you are just as likely to see a bonus at the theoretical breakpoint as you are to not see it. I would strongly discourage anyone from aiming for a totem breakpoint, at all, ever.

 

 As for your focused question:

1. The best haste breakpoint is the one you can reach without seriously affecting other secondary stats. In your item level I would try to go with around 30% one and very soon the 33%. The next viable one after 33% is quite a jump (40% for another tick of Healing Tide Totem) so wait awhile before jumping there. I can see that you're already around that area, I never bother memorizing the numbers myself because I let AskMrRobot do all the math.

 

Again with the Haste breakpoints for totems. Do not take totem breakpoints. The 30% breakpoint is really excellent though, I would advise sitting on that one. :)

 

I don't mean to be critical to Ashtoret, I think that his post was very helpful and accurate overall. I just wanted to point out the exceptions.

[CptDan 25]

@Ashtoret - I totally agree, there are items in desperate need of an upgrade. I was sort of thrown in over my head. Hopefully since i'm starting lower than others they already have the gear I need to roll on. I'm the only resto shammy so I should be able to snag drops that otherwise would be disenchanted. I really need a better helm and I like the stats on the thok trinket but have yet to see it drop on any difficulty. In time, I'd like to have a variety of trinks to select from per fight. 

 

@Stoove - I see what you mean with the totem break points. I will have to analyze logs more to see if my totems are being clipped. I personally like the 33% haste breakpoint for the extra tick to my HST. HST makes up a large part of my healing currently using it on CD, HR makes up a ton also. That said I want to try the 30% breakpoint as an experiment and see how much more I can get into crit. With sharing trinkets with an entire healing team, and our guild using EPGP (no complaints there) I may have to wait on BIS trinkets, but will try to get the best I can from flex.

 

I will try to implement the suggestions in this thread with a followup posting of some logs. Fortunately we log every encounter on WOL, so those should be plentiful. As I raid with this character more and get more experience healing progression fights the stats will have more experimental data behind them. I hope more people do 25 mans and 20 man in the future. Tens have their place, but I greatly prefer 25s. 

 

Thanks a million guys! Until next time.

[Stoove 347]

@Stoove - I see what you mean with the totem break points. I will have to analyze logs more to see if my totems are being clipped. I personally like the 33% haste breakpoint for the extra tick to my HST.

 

My apologies, but it sounds as if you have misunderstood.

 

The ticks that you should gain are often not added by the server. It is entirely unrelated to player input. This has been a known issue since HST and HTT were implemented on the MoP closed Beta. Since it is completely uncontrollable, it isn't worth taking those breakpoints at all. If you do like those extra ticks, then you may as well just stack all your stats into Haste and go as high as possible to increase your chances of getting that extra tick. Even then, I do not believe it to be worth the effort. There may as well be no breakpoint at all.

[CptDan 25]

My apologies, but it sounds as if you have misunderstood.

 

The ticks that you should gain are often not added by the server. It is entirely unrelated to player input. This has been a known issue since HST and HTT were implemented on the MoP closed Beta. Since it is completely uncontrollable, it isn't worth taking those breakpoints at all. If you do like those extra ticks, then you may as well just stack all your stats into Haste and go as high as possible to increase your chances of getting that extra tick. Even then, I do not believe it to be worth the effort. There may as well be no breakpoint at all.

I thought that this just meant that sometimes if you were on the edge of that breakpoint that you would get it and sometimes you wouldn't so people were stacking haste over that cap to ensure latency didn't affect their usage of it.

[Stoove 347]

I thought that this just meant that sometimes if you were on the edge of that breakpoint that you would get it and sometimes you wouldn't so people were stacking haste over that cap to ensure latency didn't affect their usage of it.

 

It's not quite that simple, because it's server side your personal lag doesn't affect it at all. Stacking a LOT of Haste over the cap might get you a tick "most often", but not "always". I wish it wasn't like that, but for some reason it happens.

[CptDan 25]

Well thank you blizzard. LOL. I'm still in experimental mode anyway so I figure if I try things out in a consistent manner and then look over logs i'll have more data to work with. 

 

There's always the theory craft debates on crit/haste etc. The one thing lacking in a lot of the theory discussions is play style. Like you said earlier, there are many ways to achieve the same thing. I love the feel of fast heals and in a 25 man setting this works mostly. I don't want to really rely on totems after reading what you had to say earlier but will the healing rain ticks still work. As you can imagine HR gets a lot of use in 25s.

 

Builds I'm going to test out:

 

Low(ish) Haste to 30% - High Crit - Lower Haste (12-13K)

 

High Haste (highest HR breakpoint I can get) > Spirit to 14k > Crit > Mastery

 

Totally Balanced: 30% Haste > 30% Crit > Spirit > Mastery

 

I will try to do this in organized manner with logs for each result. Get more data for 25 man content since I don't see as much information there.

[Stoove 347]

I love the idea of testing out builds like that! It's a good example of what I like to call "Experimentalcraft" (Like Theorycraft or Simulationcraft). I'm looking forward to seeing the results! ^__^

[CptDan 25]

I love the idea of testing out builds like that! It's a good example of what I like to call "Experimentalcraft" (Like Theorycraft or Simulationcraft). I'm looking forward to seeing the results! ^__^

I'm starting with a build that is balanced, I'll have logs up late tuesday night, i'll post them here. One of our other shaman in 10 man is interested as well so the data should be fun to mull over. Gives me a good reason to geek out over healing math. 

[Stoove 347]

One thing I'd advise though is that the difference in healing between one night and the next can vary a lot even with a constant build. A huge difference would be interesting, but not conclusive, necessarily.

[CptDan 25]

Totally agree stoove. I did a pug garrosh 10 man tonight that took like 15 attempts to down. (Don't ask) I saw my heals range from about 110k hps to over 130k hps. There are a lot of factors such as how clean the attempt was etc that contribute to overall healing done. The kill was done with myself and a monk healer and I was at about 125k. I don't have logs as it was a pug but I'll go over the recount/skada data a bit more later...

The trick to balance out the variances is an aggregate of data, but you know that already. I'm just gonna give you a bit more data to play with.

Any other experimental builds you would like to see logs of?

[Stoove 347]

I really wish Telluric Currents was still a regen option, 'cause then I'd recommend that build. Sadly it hasn't been practical since MoP dropped :(

 

So no, I think the builds you outlined are good.

[CptDan 25]

We had a pretty off night for raiding, so I don't feel that solid on the numbers. We ended up calling raid early because it didn't seem like anyone had their head in the game. 

 

The stat build I used was haste to the 33% haste break point, then Crit was buffing to about 32% and spirit was around 13K.

 

Talent choices were AG and cleansing water glyph for the dispels, AG during Sun's Desperate.

 

Heals seemed to be okay, i'm one of the lower geared healers and was 4th on the meters. Overhealing felt really high, but better over than under. Mana regen seemed to be fine but I did use MT as often as CD would allow. 

 

I'll post up logs for the kills later, I think protectors and some wipes on Norushen were all that were collected tonight.

[CptDan 25]

Time to revisit this thread with some updated information:

 

1. The balanced build was pretty solid. Nothing game breaking but stable output, I topped the meters on H Norushen with it, but I feel that was mainly spell choice and timing. 

 

2. I finally got the legendary cape and will be using that tonight starting on H Nazgrim.

 

3. Most recent logs are here: WOL These fights are for last night, which started out okay, I wasn't fully awake yet from a nap, and then it got better as we got going. This also includes our H Iron Jugg kill.

 

4. While we are on progression, it's hard to experiment with a high haste build, which I do want to try. For tonight I am going with Haste at 9100 for HST (i know it's not reliable, but I'll try) mainly because it's easy to do in my gear. The rest is crit and I think i'm buffing to about 37% I'm at about 564 Item Level Now, and we'll see how it goes. I hope we can get enough data to find some trends in 25 man restoration healing.

[SparkSovereign 61]

I really wish Telluric Currents was still a regen option, 'cause then I'd recommend that build. Sadly it hasn't been practical since MoP dropped

 

So no, I think the builds you outlined are good.

A little late to the party, but Telluric Currents actually worked pretty well for me back in 5.3 as a mega-haste-stacked ele offspeccing resto for Lei Shen.  Phases 1 and 2 were essentially a healer's snoozefest (hots + shields, not much for me to do) so I spent my time dpsing the boss.  Pulled about ~50k, and kept my mana up despite the panic of those transition phases (I was in the 2-man group).  It actually worked out pretty well, although it's not the sort of situation that comes up much.  If you have any need to actually heal all the time (no matter how little) it really just doesn't work, but if you can spend your time pretending to be an atonement healer it's not bad.

 

As to the matter at hand, please keep us informed!  We have a lot of 10man people but not much 25man activity.  Good luck with your progression, and happy healing!

[CptDan 25]

Yeah, it's good to share some 25 man perspective. I'm hoping that the 20 man raiding catches on WoD.

 

TC had a great run while it was viable. I've been playing with DPS rotations while healing in 5 man heroics. Almost no need for a real healing rotation there. On some fights I can get upwards of 80k DPS, but that's with the buff for randoms so maybe like 70k or so, and that's with casting a heal mixed in with the Flame Shock, Lava Burst and Lightning Bolts.

[Stoove 347]

Yeah, I was more reminiscing for the days where TC returned something like triple the mana cost of LB. I remember doing Ragnaros with a HUGE Haste build, where my rotation was RT>HS>HS>LB>LB>LB which kept up with the damage really well. It was ace.

[CptDan 25]

Yeah, I was more reminiscing for the days where TC returned something like triple the mana cost of LB. I remember doing Ragnaros with a HUGE Haste build, where my rotation was RT>HS>HS>LB>LB>LB which kept up with the damage really well. It was ace.

I kinda hope they bring back some sort of offensive healing in WoD for shaman. Blizz seems to like the idea and did an okay job of weaving it in with atonement and fist weaving healing. Especially in current heroic content that bit of added DPS from the healing team really adds up. You feel this when you down Norushen with a few seconds to spare before the berserk.