Restoration Druid - Versality > Mastery since 7.1.5 ?

[Grenor]

You guys can tell me that she cannot be successful with this all day, but I am part of the raid where it all happens time and again.

Xavius is a boss that demonstrates that heroic mechanics hardly punish Rejuv spamming playstyles, it's not an exception, it's just one clear example of bad designed mechanics. On one of our earlier heroic Ursoc kills she did 80% ilevel healing, out of which 60% (!) came from Rejuv spamming. Tranq 10%, WG 8.5%. Efflorescence came out last (16th place), she used it a grand total of 1 (one!) in the try I am quoting here. She more or less does the same things over various expansions now and in Legion it works better than ever before.

So Haste or Mastery? Doesn't matter for small raids since content isn't properly designed for these groups anyway. She started putting everything into Haste, but with 3+ HoTs rolling regularly on Mastery is more of a thing now. Still doesn't really matter much.

Xavius is a boss with a unique mechanic that resets mana and allows for spamming without being really punished. If you look at the logs, you will see that in most cases of 2 healing a raid of 10, one healer will be way ahead of the other. This is not a sign of better skill, it's caused by the mechanic. The one starting in the dream has a easy life, because of nearly inifnite mana. The other one should be careful with mana.
If she would be that high in stats with being second in dream, ok that would be astonishing. But with infinite mana and a lot to heal, it's easy.

Enter content that's meant for your ilev and let her spam with haste focus and you will have a nice time wiping.

[oddmyth]

There's a finite amount of healing to be done and a finite number of people who can do it. If you reduce the number of people doing healing, they will in fact do more healing. A 12-man raid that is working on content you don't overgear will require 3 healers. So 2 healing that content will allow the druid and/or the priest to perform better than groups who are in fact 3 healing the same content.

[Cheze]

it shouldn't come as some kind of surprise that you can succeed in lower-end content while playing suboptimally; it's pretty easy to get high healing percentiles by doing things like underhealing fights that you flagrantly overgear, which is basically what happened in your xavius example (plus xavius is very well suited to dumping mana like that.)

The druid in question would undoubtedly have done better by using their higher efficiency spells more frequently/better; I don't really see why cheesing logs on h xavius is some kind of problem

[Alltat]

went oom for 5 seconds during the fight and another 20something seconds at the end.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. During an "ideal" boss fight, you drink a mana potion and then run out of mana ~20 seconds before the boss dies, with all your HoTs then ticking and all raid members ending at 1 hp right as the boss goes down. In practice that obviously never happens, but running out of mana is only bad if someone dies because of it. Keep in mind that as druids, our healing doesn't stop coming just because we stop casting for a while. Her HoTs will still keep ticking for another 10-30 seconds while she regenerates mana.

You guys can tell me that she cannot be successful with this all day, but I am part of the raid where it all happens time and again.

Yeah, but if your first Xavius kill was a week ago then it's a raid that kills content by overgearing it. She doesn't seem to be holding you back, so there's no reason why she'd put in effort to improve beyond the skill level of the rest of the raid.

Or you could simply look at how much of a stat they have on a fight?

That just tells you what items they've got, not what items they want. If you bonus roll a nice titanforged item you're going to use it even if the stats aren't what you'd like. I have more mastery than haste, not because I prefer mastery but because that's the gear that has happened to drop for me. Our artifact also happens to have crit and mastery, so you get a big pile of that no matter what you prioritize. Add in the neck enchant and haste has some catching up to do before it becomes your highest stat, no matter how much you prioritize it.

[Weissrolf]

That's not necessarily a bad thing. During an "ideal" boss fight, you drink a mana potion and then run out of mana ~20 seconds before the boss dies, with all your HoTs then ticking and all raid members ending at 1 hp right as the boss goes down.

Indeed it is not a bad thing, aka there was hardly much of a penalty for her spamming Rejuv all the time. Which she successfully does at most bosses (I posted an Ursoc example, too). It's a successful playstyle most of the time, even more so when I am around as a third healer to fill the gaps left by the other two (they don't change anything in their healing when a third healer is around).

It's a design choice by Blizzard to allow people to play that way successfully. I find this to be "bad design" from a challenge perspective, but admit that it is "good design" for allowing all kinds of players to be successful in their game.

Which brings us back to this thread: The consequence is that (for small raids) it really doesn't matter which stats you prefer, they all work more or less equally well. The RDSW weak aura reports stats all over the place for me, which suggests that chance and daily changing situations plays a bigger role than static mechanics.

Yeah, but if your first Xavius kill was a week ago then it's a raid that kills content by overgearing it. She doesn't seem to be holding you back, so there's no reason why she'd put in effort to improve beyond the skill level of the rest of the raid.

Our first kill was on Nov 28th. I assume we were overgeared, which begs the question: Why is it so easy to be overgeared for a raid boss that you see for the very first time? How did she get her higher level equipment? By spamming Rejuv in Mythic+ content! Yay.

Not to mention that she still managed to score 91% compared to all other Resto druid of her item level. So she scored (and successfully filled her role) better than most other Resto players by doing what? Resto spamming! Urgs.

[Deleted]

So whats the conclusion in the end?

I also tried out the stats-weakaura and in any given fight mastery and crit are good, versa are okay and haste was weakest stat for me. Does that mean i should get rid of haste now or is the weakaura wrong? Is mastery really that good in a nighthold hc 16man+ raid? Sometimes if most of my healing comes from tankhealing and hotstacking the weakaura sets mastery over int to 1.00 and int something 0.9ish. What?

[Grenor]

So whats the conclusion in the end?

I also tried out the stats-weakaura and in any given fight mastery and crit are good, versa are okay and haste was weakest stat for me. Does that mean i should get rid of haste now or is the weakaura wrong? Is mastery really that good in a nighthold hc 16man+ raid? Sometimes if most of my healing comes from tankhealing and hotstacking the weakaura sets mastery over int to 1.00 and int something 0.9ish. What?

RDSW bases it's stat weights solely on hpm. In some scenarios this might be ok, but more often than not you need enough healing in a limited timeframe. Then hps becomes important --> haste is a really good hps stat.

And that the sw fluctuate with any given playstyle and talent choice should be common knowledge.

Haste til you are comfortable with it. Rest depends on encounter and playstyle, but keeping them all on the same level gives a good allround package.

[Alltat]

RDSW bases it's stat weights solely on hpm.

That seems useless. We're limited by GCDs (i.e. HPS) far more often than we're limited by mana. Most fights have a lot of burst damage. There are exceptions, but not enough to be worth gearing for.

[Grenor]

That seems useless. We're limited by GCDs (i.e. HPS) far more often than we're limited by mana. Most fights have a lot of burst damage. There are exceptions, but not enough to be worth gearing for.

Often you can deal with this burst by managing heal cds together with the other healers. On other cases you may have damage bursts but followed by a low damage phase. While i agree that you need haste (i'm comfortable with 20-25%) to strengthen your hps and lowering your gcd, you shouldn't force it to high. Resto druids run in mana problems too. And it's important that your healing on chosen single persons may be interesting. The gcd lowering doesn't help much here. Crit and specially mastery are good at this.

Long story short : Use Haste til you think you cast fast enough and don't go oom. Balance the rest.

[Tiberria]

That seems useless. We're limited by GCDs (i.e. HPS) far more often than we're limited by mana. Most fights have a lot of burst damage. There are exceptions, but not enough to be worth gearing for.

I strongly disagree with this. If we are executing our highest HPS "rotation" - i.e. WG immediately on CD, keep up LB and Efflo and spam Rejuv in every spare GCD, you can easily go hard OOM in less than 3 minutes. From an overall throughput perspective, we are more mana limited than any other healing spec. Until you reach the point where you can use WG every 10 seconds without OOMing, you are mana capped and HPM is the limiting factor (i.e. you should be trying to burn mana on WG over more Rejuv fillers wherever possible).

If what you mean is we can be GCD capped during the segments of fights where meaningful throughput is actually needed (i.e casting WG every CD is a waste of mana anyway during much of the fight), sure I can see that. However, I think we are more capped by our WG CD in those situations moreso than GCDs in terms of pushing max throughput.

[oddmyth]

There is no infinite mana in Legion. Every druid has the exact same mana pool at 110 and every druid regenerates mana at a very similar rate, the only difference being relics providing more points in Knowledge of the Ancients and/or getting Blessing of Wisdom/Innervate and using Mana/Leytorrent potions.

The real difference between every druid is how much healing we do, with each spell we cast. So unless you overgear the content, or the content gives you infinite mana (Tich, Xav), or the fight is very short and you couldn't use all your mana, then HPM will always be more important that HPS. If your healing team can't provide enough HPS to deal with a segment of a fight, then it's a healing CD problem or your overall HPS for the entire team is the problem (ie. undergeared, not executing 100%).

Haste is completely subjective per fight.

That just tells you what items they've got, not what items they want. If you bonus roll a nice titanforged item you're going to use it even if the stats aren't what you'd like. I have more mastery than haste, not because I prefer mastery but because that's the gear that has happened to drop for me. Our artifact also happens to have crit and mastery, so you get a big pile of that no matter what you prioritize. Add in the neck enchant and haste has some catching up to do before it becomes your highest stat, no matter how much you prioritize it.

Since we are still making assumptions about what this means, here's another one. Druids in top ten lists have gear and trinkets to swap around. Trained Solider and Artifact only give ~2-2.5% mastery. Haste is the second cheapest secondary stat (375 points per percent), and is very easy to stack.

[Orangetai420]

Until you reach the point where you can use WG every 10 seconds without OOMing, you are mana capped and HPM is the limiting factor (i.e. you should be trying to burn mana on WG over more Rejuv fillers wherever possible).

Is this ever possible? I thought that our mana pool and regen was static this expac. I understand that our heals become stronger and we need to cast less, but if we GCD cap won't we go OOM at the same rate as the start of the expac (excluding any effect from trinkets)

- - - Updated - - -

Not to mention that she still managed to score 91% compared to all other Resto druid of her item level. So she scored (and successfully filled her role) better than most other Resto players by doing what? Resto spamming! Urgs.

How did your other healers do? Sounds like your druid is picking up a lot of slack. Rejuv spam isn't great HPS if your heals are getting sniped by paladins and monks.

[Tiberria]

Is this ever possible? I thought that our mana pool and regen was static this expac. I understand that our heals become stronger and we need to cast less, but if we GCD cap won't we go OOM at the same rate as the start of the expac (excluding any effect from trinkets)

Well, in theory, regen trinkets should keep getting more and more powerful with higher ilvl trinkets and more tiers coming out. However, Nighthold has 0 regen trinkets (and ToV also had 0), so they might be doing away with them completely.