Resto Off Spec Shopping List

[kitsu 55]

http://tangoniner.com/wow/UltimateCrit.jpg

 

I threw this together with MrRobot with the highest ilvl in mind just to see what the stats would max out at. My resto playstyle involves trying to save people from dying and not worrying about total output. I also dont like worrying about mana. Going heavy into crit is great for both of those goals.

 

I rarely glyph riptide because with a ton of mastery and crit it is a great lifesaver. I drop HS tot and then try to riptide the lowest person as often as I can, and then I use chain heal to get most of my tide stacks. I also play UF because I enjoy seeing huge crits. It's pretty much a gambling addiction that doesnt cost money.

 

One could def go for the 4 set and be happy, but if youre getting into farming some heroics and progressing on others at this point, tier tokens are probably MS rolled still.

 

When you get a higher ilvl ele chest, save your old one! it's itemized perfectly for resto. The weapon from Sha and the gloves from Galakras are as well.

 

The head from Nazgrim has a huge amount of crit, so that or the gloves from Galakras are a great out of set piece if you want to go for the 4 set.

 

Almost everything is pre-Thok, and if not there are tons of very resto friendly pre-thok drops you can use instead.

 

GL and Happy Hunting!

[Stoove 347]

I have a few comments from my experience as a MS Resto, which I think are important considerations.

 

The very important point you start with is about "Saving people from dying and not worrying about total output". This is a support role, and if you're running as the third healer on some fights that's fine (even sensible). However, I don't think it's a tenable position for a MS healer. On most fights (and especially progression Heroic), at least two of your healers should be worrying about total throughput. With that in mind, things like Healing Rain and Chain Heal are essential to use, and this is one reason we like using the 30% Haste breakpoint.

 

A point about mana: Healing Surge is not an efficient spell at all. Even with high levels of Crit that you specified in the screenshot, it's almost half as efficient as Greater Healing Wave, which also does higher healing and is more reliable in most important situations. It also gains more in a single hit from your Mastery, which maximizes your use of Mastery nicely. If you're in the business of saving lives, you shouldn't be in the business of relying on your Crits to succeed. Ironically, the initial hit of Riptide is more mana efficient than Healing Surge is.

 

I also think that UF is a funny choice for the kind of build you describe. UF takes up an important GCD, and you have to cast it on the person you want the large heal on. That means that you have an extra GCD between spotting who is in danger and getting them a heal, which I think is dangerous. While it might work sometimes, too often splash heals get in the way or your priority changes before you get to cast. This is why I think that UF is not a good talent to use even in the situation you described. The best situation I can think to have it is when you're tank healing a predictable but bursty tank damage fight.

 

So I would choose to go more balanced on the stats and use a different build, mainly because I think that the concept of the build and its reality are contradictory.

[kitsu 55]

Ever since mageara in tot it's seemed to me that any ele can be a good third healer in a 10 man. resto just has a lot of cooldowns that, if timed right, have a lot of output potential without involving all that much skill.

 

I had a little discussion about this Main ele - off resto role with another guy in another thread, but that got locked. so i thought id make this thread for any ele in a similar role.

 

I have a lot of off spec options as far as gear goes and I have a lot of gems, so I am currently trying a few different things as a third healer in Heroic SoO. I tried getting 30% haste and having everything all nice, it seemed like it would be good if you knew what you were doing. it was also a little boring. resto doesnt have any procs or all that many instant heals. i wanted something with a little more action, like holy priest. 

 

this crit focus build is great fun and you dont have to know what youre doing aside from cooldowns. i have tried casting healing rain non stop, going on healing surge sprees just to see crit numbers, nothing runs you out of mana with that much crit.

 

I usually heal Immersius, Juggernaut and Nazgrim. i just go resto on immersius because with ele mastery one cast gets, on average, 4 stacks of the dot. its not fun. Jugger is a cd fight and we do the run and hide strat during siege mode, so thats a no brainer. Nazgrim is the rough one. if an assasin and a warrior add are near each other i just pop a cd. there is a lot of rng deaths on that fight if youre not blanketing heals. during berserk phase he trucks the tanks. that's when you go for big crits with UF. 

[Stoove 347]

I had a little discussion about this Main ele - off resto role with another guy in another thread, but that got locked. so i thought id make this thread for any ele in a similar role.

 

Yes, and that was an inappropriate place for the conversation which is why I am glad you moved it here :)

[SparkSovereign 61]

Yes, and that was an inappropriate place for the conversation which is why I am glad you moved it here

Yeah, sorry about that.  I misread your interest check as a place to provide a use case you might want to address with that guide, and then got kind of carried away.

 

I think a key point about the notion of resto as an offspec to elemental is that as elemental, you aren't really used to managing your mana.  Consciously you're aware that managing mana is a thing that healers do, but it's very different from actually doing it on a regular basis; closest you get is, when, say, your side's healer dies on Spoils and you're the only hybrid.  (I successfully kept everyone alive!  We died to enrage that pull.)  As a result, going high haste mostly enables you to waste your mana faster, since it's assumed you aren't as proficient with the spec as a fulltime resto MS.  Until last week, that had been my general experience with off-healing; ludicrously high burst throughput, burn through all of your mana if you try to keep up the rest of the time.  2-healing with low spirit/crit was pretty awful, but worked out brilliantly as a 3rd healer for Lei Shen.

 

We seem to have a lot to say about offspeccing resto.  Maybe we should make a dedicated "how to offspec resto" thread, with mini-guides for various situations (most notably how much offspec gear you can muster at your gear level; early progression and late progression are two very different beasts).  You've got a lot of important wisdom in the first post here already, but the thread name indicates it's more of a BiS list than a guide.  What do you think, add wisdom to first post here, or make a dedicated offspeccing guide?

[Stoove 347]

Yeah, sorry about that.  I misread your interest check as a place to provide a use case you might want to address with that guide, and then got kind of carried away.

 

Definitely not a problem

 

Consciously you're aware that managing mana is a thing that healers do, but it's very different from actually doing it on a regular basis; closest you get is, when, say, your side's healer dies on Spoils and you're the only hybrid.

 

This is one reason I try not to put in too much of my opinion into these discussions. Mine are very coloured by the years of mainspec experience, so I will always lean towards best practice builds. However, I do object to phrases such as this:

 

this crit focus build is great fun and you dont have to know what youre doing aside from cooldowns. i have tried casting healing rain non stop, going on healing surge sprees just to see crit numbers, nothing runs you out of mana with that much crit.

 

Which in my considered opinion are untrue and unhelpful. From the dual standpoints of experience and theorycraft, Crit mitigates the mana cost of things but simply won't stop you running OOM on anything but perhaps Healing Wave.

 

So from the perspective that SparkSoverign outlined earlier about helping the healer manage mana, Crit is certainly good. Having said that, the free (smart AoE) healing that you get from the 30% Haste breakpoint, as well as the Haste contribution to the Meta Gem awesomeness, really does make it worth it mana wise for those of us who mainspec.

 

I suppose that I really can't get my head into the groove of "offspec Resto" so I can't quite get the challenges involved. If I were talking to a mainspec Resto who is having trouble mana managing, for instance, I wouldn't tell them to roll straight Crit. I'd tell them to gear normally and work on their technique. So when it comes to giving advice for offspecs, I tend to find the position a little hard to relate to.

 

However, since you (plural) have some experience with the challenges of offspeccing Resto, I'd be happy for you to make a guide/discussion thread, provided that it is clearly marked as being specifically for offspec, and also that it mentions mainspec players probably will not get valuable information out of it. This, I think, would be a very good approach. Once the introductory post is formatted well and everything I'll even sticky it. How's that for an offer?

 

EDIT: Also, I think SparkSovereign deserves likes for that post.

[kitsu 55]

There's one more thing i want to try still before we go into any kind of guide, so lets just use this post as a sort of current discussion and notes area and then go back and summarize when we've had a bit more experience.

 

I almost have the set i linked at the start of the thread, just not that high of ilvl. i've tried it in raid and was happy with it. reasonably large crits on low hp tanks, and pretty decent crit streaks. so i had fun while waiting for my time to pop healing tide in siege mode on juggernaut. i have just been terrible at remembering to log fights since i started to go crit happy, but hopefully I'll remember this next coming week.

 

i was thinking about what it would take to get above 8000 haste but still keep all that crit. it might be doable to recycle old ele gear into resto gear. that would just change out spirit for haste and then we could really see what kind of burst could be put out before going oom. I have some pieces that will work, but i want to try it out in game before i make any judgements.

[SparkSovereign 61]

There's one more thing i want to try still before we go into any kind of guide, so lets just use this post as a sort of current discussion and notes area and then go back and summarize when we've had a bit more experience.

 

I like that idea.

 

We might want to break things up into a few mini-guides for people in different situations.  I've been a 10man player for my entire raiding career, so I can't speak to 25, but the following situations come up at least once or twice a tier for me;

• You have no spare gear, and are being asked to be a 3rd healer for a burst fight.  With little/no gear modifications, how do you play resto with an ele stat build?  If you can make one gear modification, what should it be?
• Same question, but for a steady throughput fight.
• Your guild's 2nd healer is out for a week or two and you're filling in, but don't have much spare gear.  How much reforging/regemming do you need to do to be able to do the job?  How do you play it?  (Hopefully this is around the point where we can direct playstyle suggestions to the existing resto spec guide, and spend our time on minimizing the necessary stat modifications to be successful.)
• You have spare gear and are preparing to be a regular, on-demand healer for fights that need it (or if a regular doesn't show up).  At this point we can direct people to the existing resto guide for gear and ideal playstyle, but it might be useful to write down the sort of tips I was getting in the other thread, things like "if you don't need them for a scheduled burst phase, use your healing CDs like you would DPS CDs".  Stuff they might forget to do in the nervousness of learning a new spec; CD usage is the big one, but "common pitfalls" would be equally helpful.

I'm still going through this process myself, but over the next few weeks I'll keep track of any revelations I have as I move from case 3 to case 4.  So far, the biggest pitfall I've run into is "once you've built a resto set, remember to switch to it when you switch specs".  At least it wasn't as bad as when I did that offspeccing resto-enhancement back in ToT!

[kitsu 55]

thats one of the best things about transmogs sparks, it lets you make your heal set look waaaay different than your ele set. although even then i forget once in a while.

 

im in a bit of a different spot than you once we have the gear on though. i have a full set of healing tier and all the extra bits except a neck. and then i have all my old ele gear, and i also keep all the int mail that drops in case i need it sometime. i spent all of normal soo saying, if we need one extra cd, i'll AG and we'll be fine. so my problem is im just not that excited about or experienced at resto.

 

when i go heals on a fight, output is already being delivered at an adequate heroic level by the usual 2 healers. we just need someone to give us an edge. something extra to fill in the blanks. and really, it's kind of backup burst. our tree can do output and burst just fine, and the disc provides a nice cushion to slow down the pain. some fights on heroic just have an overwhelming amount of bad stuff going on and shaman cds are brilliant for making things good again in a hurry.

 

My angle on my healing set is that i want to like it. i want to be interested enough to have fun and try for a goal. i want to maximize my potential heal per single target cast, and i like the gamble of crit. i also want to see how far crit can go mana-wise over spirit. if i can get a set together with 8000 haste and 40% crit, i'm sure to find out.

[Stoove 347]

• You have spare gear and are preparing to be a regular, on-demand healer for fights that need it (or if a regular doesn't show up).  At this point we can direct people to the existing resto guide for gear and ideal playstyle, but it might be useful to write down the sort of tips I was getting in the other thread, things like "if you don't need them for a scheduled burst phase, use your healing CDs like you would DPS CDs".  Stuff they might forget to do in the nervousness of learning a new spec; CD usage is the big one, but "common pitfalls" would be equally helpful.

 

Nice post again. :)

 

I think that you can further break this up into two different situations:

 

• You have spare gear and are preparing to be a regular extra healer
• You have spare gear and are preparing to be a regular replacement healer

In the former, the discussion you and Kitsu have been having is informative and useful (provided we don't start claiming it's impossible to OOM again). In the latter, I feel that the best solution is to learn to play Resto and try the best you can to gear in a more "standard" Resto manner. The difference being that as a replacement healer, you will be required to do more than just fill in the gaps.

 

In that latter case, I'd love to help a bit and try and put together a simple introduction for you :)