resto worst healer atm?

[Fudal]

If your Raid group survived and you beat the boss then HPS is irrelevant. The only time to worry about that is if you are going OoM or there are unnecessary deaths due to poor heals. Otherwise don't obsess with meters.

[Nythiz]

While that is true, nobody has as strong cds as resto shamans have, and for that reason alone they're vital to every single healing comp. What's hard to understand about that

That doesn't make us balanced though. We don't have any specific utility that makes you want to bring a shaman at all times, even when you could bring a healer that can put out more effective healing.

Our cooldowns are strong, but by shifting ascendance to a talent (that is still very potent, but often sub-optimal in a raid environment) we're not really "kings of cooldowns" anymore. HTT is our only large throughput cooldown remaining that is baseline; and although I personally think it's the best (does a ton of healing, allows you to keep casting during it's output unlike Tranq, etc) it's not miles ahead. SLT is for me without doubt the strongest cooldown in the game when you look at how it can change the tide of a battle, it also is very niche at that though.

For comparison my resto druid has gained a really solid cooldown with Essence of G'Hanir this expansion, and also they made Tranq usable on the move thereby eliminating it's biggest weakness (well warranted imo). My druid also still has a tank cooldown on a very short cooldown in Ironbark.
So looking at it baseline, my druid somewhat even has more healing cooldowns in that regard.

So I find the "edge" that shamans used to have in cooldowns to be something that has somewhat diminished this expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

A lot more parses up...still the last: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...hps&dataset=90
Wouldn't it be nice to be a holy paly where a ton of your healing done is judging off of CD...

Dunno.
I played holy paladin and I didn't very much care for such a boring monotone repeating way to gain HPS.

Shaman playstyle is solid, so even if our healing would be suboptimal (I wouldn't really call it bad), i can take some comfort in that

As for the healing stats. There are more parses up indeed, it still seems very wacky though. At the 90% percentile we're bottom, at the 75% percentile we're in the middle on HPS, but bottom for normalized scores (not really sure how that works but w/e). It's a bit hard to read. But if this pattern settles as more parses come in, it's some cause for concern.
Our strength comes from progression raids (aka current mythic), we will only go downhill as people get a better grasp on the fights. At the same time, the two classes who are log wise closest to us, disc priest and resto druid; actually GAIN from having more fight knowledge as both of them are proactive healers. So they should see their HPS go up as they get a better feel for the fights.

- - - Updated - - -

Not true at all.

Shaman have two aoe cooldowns. Healing tide and Spirit Link. We have no tank cooldowns.

Healing tide heals for 576% spell power base. Revival heals for 720% spell power base, Tranq heals for 900% spell power base, Aura of Mercy heals for 300% spell power. All four have artifact talents that improve their aoe cooldowns one way or another. In practice Tranq ends up out performing the others because of the 2min cooldown, and revival and healing tide end up coming out pretty even except revival is instant while a lot of healing tide ticks can get wasted. At least it's better than aura of mercy, however if a paladin runs aura of sacrifice and is good with their cooldown usage they can get more healing out of that than a healing tide.

Every other healer has single target cooldowns. Paladins get blessing of sacrifice (and bop to cheese certain encounters), Druids get iron bark, Monks get life cocoon, Holy Priests get Guardian Spirit.

Spirit link is basically the only reason to bring a shaman right now. You can get everything else you need out of the other healers with more throughput and without being dependent on the raid being low health. Additionally the only way to parse near the top as a shaman is to under heal farm content. Healing content with the proper number of keeps people's health too high in general for mastery to be fully effective.

I love playing my shaman, but our mastery holds us back more than it helps us. If we had a different mastery blizzard would have to increase the percentages on a lot of our heals to stay competitive.

Healing tide totem is still probably a very strong contender for the strongest raid cooldown.
Revival does more healing, but it's biggest downside is often that it's all in one burst; whereas a lot of the times where you need that big throughput cooldown the damage comes in waves. Revival too soon and it's a lot of overhealing and in the worst case you're still have to pop some shit to get people up after all the damage landed, wait too long and people start to freak from not seeing big heals or dying due to getting hit by multiple stuff.

Tranquility is a really strong heal, but the druid is locked in it's heal. Shamans can dump a HTT and continue healing. That is a very strong aspect that can NOT be underestimated. The ability to tranq once every 2 minutes instead of once every 3 minutes is done by a talent, for which the druid sacrifices quite a bit of throughput from the other options. It's also often not really needed as you often have enough healers to cover all your cooldown needs in the 3 minute windows.

In a way every single cooldown has it's own strength, but I know for a fact that HTT has always been regarded as one of the strongest also by the other healers.

Spirit link is IMO one of the strongest cooldown in the game if used properly. It can trivialize certain game mechanics like few other cooldowns, BoP probably comes to mind in being of the same category. However you're right in that SLT has it's limitations and at times niche uses.

- - - Updated - - -

If your Raid group survived and you beat the boss then HPS is irrelevant. The only time to worry about that is if you are going OoM or there are unnecessary deaths due to poor heals. Otherwise don't obsess with meters.

'
While it's true that HPS doesn't say as much as DPS in a lot of situations.
It's a metric that is (unfortunately) used all too often to decide between healers.

It can start being hard to justify bringing a shaman, if you can pick a healer who does more HPS and really doesn't bring less utility/tools to the table.
I mean if your raid group survived and you beat the boss it's all fine, but until that moment you want to grasp at every potential straw that can increase the odds of your raid team doing that.

I mean if you look at the good things shamans bring to a raid, you're looking at:
- Certain cooldowns. The strength of SLT is undisputed, but it's far from vital to a raid's success. HTT is strong but also not a must. Ascendance is no longer baseline, so we don't have "more cooldowns" either, if anything other healers surpassed us in that.

- Chain Heal. It's a unique and rather strong AoE heal that really shines in certain stacked healing scenarios. However other healers' toolkits have expanded and our niche is getting smaller every expansion. On top of that Blizzard has shown it's not shy to nerf that for trivial reasons (as in 7.1.5).

- Mastery giving us an edge on progression.
This is the fortress of our success that is next to crumble. Because if the "Reason we're strong on progression and slightly behind on farm", becomes the "Reason we're barely catching up on progression and way behind on farm" we're going to have a bit of a problem.
I mean we're still the healer that in some way scales negatively with fight experience.

On top of all that our set bonuses also aren't anything to go wild about either; unlike that of other healers'.

[Jynus]

If your Raid group survived and you beat the boss then HPS is irrelevant. The only time to worry about that is if you are going OoM or there are unnecessary deaths due to poor heals. Otherwise don't obsess with meters.

This is relevant to exact 0 guilds in the world tho as raid groups will always wipe. So now what?

[Rafal]

If anything early logs should be skewed in our favor from under representation. We are "good progression healers."

But I have to say I am not really feeling it. Chain heal feels very weak for how much mana it costs. Usually spamming chain heal would rise my HPS as fast as I can cast it... but for some reason it feels more like a struggle to break even.

[mcbubble]

If anything early logs should be skewed in our favor from under representation. We are "good progression healers."

But I have to say I am not really feeling it. Chain heal feels very weak for how much mana it costs. Usually spamming chain heal would rise my HPS as fast as I can cast it... but for some reason it feels more like a struggle to break even.

To get to the throughput of the other healers we need very specific conditions: *stacking and constant damage. *Even then we will OOM ourselves fast if we have to spam. *I find it very frustrating to see paladins judge and HS on CD and topping meters...then looking at holy priests and see them with a LOH and Group LOH every minute while having no mana issues...so yes, I'm just as frustrated as the OP.

[Deleted]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/117187834

Limit used a resto shaman as one of their three healers for their mythic Krosus kill. Although he is buttom on the meters for that fight, they picked a resto shaman over a priest or monk because of our amazing toolkit for progression. Resto shaman is in a very good spot right now. All healers are.

[Nythiz]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/117187834

Limit used a resto shaman as one of their three healers for their mythic Krosus kill. Although he is buttom on the meters for that fight, they picked a resto shaman over a priest or monk because of our amazing toolkit for progression. Resto shaman is in a very good spot right now. All healers are.

I think a lot of guilds still use a shaman because they're notoriously good to have on progression fights where our mastery kicks in. But for some reason (be it nerfs to our class, be it buffs to other healers, be it homogenization) current logs show that not to be the case at the moment.

Of course shamans don't need to be top dog on every fight; however shamans have always scaled negatively with fight experience. Our mastery diminishes as people take less damage; other healers (mainly drudis pre-hotting and disc priests through attonement) also play better if they have the fight knowledge to know when their preactive healing is most effective.
I also know that current amount of parses can still be considered relatively low, but it's a bad forecast so far.

I'm not really sure what kind of toolkit shamans bring these days that other healers can't bring as well.
If you say we have an amazing toolkit for mythic+ runs, I would completely agree. Best ranged interrupt, AoE stun totem, ability to talent into 2 extra cooldowns, bloodlust, great indoor mobility with ghostwolf, etc.

But for raids, what extended toolkit do we really have? Windrush totem is nice, but it's not savage roar by a landslide.
We used to have more cooldowns than other healers, but that is no longer the case (we actually have less cooldowns than quite a few other healers as we have to talent for ours, and those talents are not always optimal in raids).
Chain heal gave us a niche but
The only real 2 reasons I would prefer a resto shaman for progression would be:
a) Spirit Link Totem if that's going to possibly provide a really good conditional cooldown.
b) Ancestral Vigor for 10% more HP

However I'm not sure if that is enough if the HPS is too far behind. On heroic we seemed to be middle of the pack-ish; which is fine. But on mythic the disparity between healers in logs so far is rather large, in some cases resto shamans seem bottom with being more than 100k HPS behind the top. Currently I'm going to blame that on the low number of parses, and the low number of bosses defeated. I'm just saying that I hope it's not a trend.

[Deleted]

Not a single top 20 guild in the world brings Holy Priest despite their great HPS throughput, shamans are fine.

[jayheals]

Not a single top 20 guild in the world brings Holy Priest despite their great HPS throughput, shamans are fine.

I don't keep in-tune with too much of the "top 10/20/50 guild" stuff, but strawberry puppy kisses used H-pal/H-priest/R-sham for their 3-heal mythic krosus, and on wow progress theyre 19 world rn. Healers are fine.

[Jynus]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/117187834

Limit used a resto shaman as one of their three healers for their mythic Krosus kill. Although he is buttom on the meters for that fight, they picked a resto shaman over a priest or monk because of our amazing toolkit for progression. Resto shaman is in a very good spot right now. All healers are.

Jesus, it's the mana tide totem argument all over again. Top level guilds bring shaman, so they must be in a good place. No you clown, they are not brought because of how good a place they are in. They are brought in because they have abilities that give 10% life and spirit link. Nothing else. And those 2 abilities only factor in for world first progression and have no impact on 99% of other guilds in the world for healing consideration.

[Deleted]

Jesus, it's the mana tide totem argument all over again. Top level guilds bring shaman, so they must be in a good place. No you clown, they are not brought because of how good a place they are in. They are brought in because they have abilities that give 10% life and spirit link. Nothing else. And those 2 abilities only factor in for world first progression and have no impact on 99% of other guilds in the world for healing consideration.

Which is exactly what makes them good for progression. Restos performance is not completely reflected on meters, cry more LUL

[Jynus]

Which is exactly what makes them good for progression. Restos performance is not completely reflected on meters, cry more LUL

What makes them good for world first progression is not applicable to 99% of the player base. I'm still baffled as to how people look at what world first guilds do as evidence of...well...anything.

[Deleted]

Interesting thread..

Im new to this forum and started wow 1 month after classic healing with a priest.
So I have some questions:
1. why are the T-Set boni not so good?
2. if you could chose - which legendaries would you wear and why?
3. I struggle hard with my spiritlink totem, any suggestion where and when to use it? Raid lead only wants me to use it in EN HC - Spiderboss, right before we get the feathers and move to the next plattform.

greets sunnysmile

ps: the LINK post restriction is ****... I cant post a propper thread with wowlogs and my char link because I have read, but not spammed enough yet -.-

[jayheals]

What makes them good for world first progression is not applicable to 99% of the player base. I'm still baffled as to how people look at what world first guilds do as evidence of...well...anything.

SLT and other various r-sham utility is still very useful in more casually progressing groups, even if it's not 100% necessary for groups running content at higher avg ilvls. And in more casual settings, healing throughput disparity between classes generally becomes meangingless since inflated ilvl and player skill can carry the day. I'm just not sure what's being argued I guess. Ya it seems our throughput is a bit lower than some other healers, but that only really seems relevant to people trying to rank. Cutting edge and casual raid teams still get a lot of value out of the resto shaman kit.

[Sageless]

SLT and other various r-sham utility is still very useful in more casually progressing groups, ...

Still find it funny how there is still this weird idea that resto shaman still have a variety of utility.
No we don't. Outside of SLT there is no reason that you would NEED a resto shaman, for world first you might use them for ancestral vigor as well, but that utility is only reserved for undergeared progression (as in world 100 guilds).
We are stuck with a mastery that is supposed to shine on progression, but looking at statistics up to now we are still 10+% behind the other healers. This would extrapolate to be 20+% when things get on farm since then our mastery will do even less.

And thanks to Legions artifact system you are stuck with playing a nerfed healer as rerolling is not something you can do untill after 7.2 possibly 8.0 since you'll be stuck 10% behind due to having to regrind artifact power, which requires doing mythic+ dungeons.

[Dazu]

Jesus, it's the mana tide totem argument all over again. Top level guilds bring shaman, so they must be in a good place. No you clown, they are not brought because of how good a place they are in. They are brought in because they have abilities that give 10% life and spirit link. Nothing else. And those 2 abilities only factor in for world first progression and have no impact on 99% of other guilds in the world for healing consideration.

And the other 99% of players/guilds wont see any real difference in progression between equally skilled healers on different classes on average. What they will notice is a difference of CD's as having 3 disc priests for example isnt as good as 1 disc, 1 holy pally and 1 shaman etc.

Honestly HPS is meaningless for the most part. It can vary so drastically simply based on tank type, raid composition and how much people pad meters (You know, that person AoE healing to top off 5% of everones health despite no need to do it). I used to outheal far better priests on my holy priest in a previous expansion simply because I sniped CoH from them. Similar on my resto shaman ive had dps at 80% HP or so, riptided them which will fully heal them only to have a pally fully heal and waste the rest of my riptide. So pally healed that 20% more than me, but was it effective or wasteful healing? Some classes are great at doing that exact thing chasing rankings/numbers sadly.

Also as DPS is pretty poor indicator of true performance, the other things done in the raid such as utility also matters a great deal. Stuns/Snares/kiting etc matters. Id take a rogue doing 500k dps but knows how to use CD's to survive and interrupt over the rogue doing 550k but has a 50% chance dying on a fight because he cant use a CD for example.

[ehxy]

You gotta admit though spirit link totem is absolutely fucking amazing and I would say the top raid cooldown.

[Guran]

Still find it funny how there is still this weird idea that resto shaman still have a variety of utility.
No we don't. Outside of SLT there is no reason that you would NEED a resto shaman, for world first you might use them for ancestral vigor as well, but that utility is only reserved for undergeared progression (as in world 100 guilds).
We are stuck with a mastery that is supposed to shine on progression, but looking at statistics up to now we are still 10+% behind the other healers. This would extrapolate to be 20+% when things get on farm since then our mastery will do even less.

And thanks to Legions artifact system you are stuck with playing a nerfed healer as rerolling is not something you can do untill after 7.2 possibly 8.0 since you'll be stuck 10% behind due to having to regrind artifact power, which requires doing mythic+ dungeons.

Actually, less progressing guilds don't actually rely on SLT as much as the Mastery. Having a non-optimal players (because you're not a top100 guild, recruits don't line up whenever you want), means that shit happens. Either they have lag, aren't as responsive or simply stood in bad and died. At that point Shamans have the capability of stepping in and saving the raid. I've had several raid fights where either a healer died or got killed by a DPS tunneling and exploding on top of them or a tank died and the other one was getting pounded on trying to get that last 20% off the boss. That was usually the time where I was capable of pushing out far more healing than any other healer ever would. And every time our other healers compliment me on the spike in healing I can push out when shit hits the proverbial fan, because they cannot.

Although if 1 thing could use a change in our kit it's the high reliance on 2 talents and 2 legendaries to massively boost HR/CH healing combo, while without those, it's barely worth pressing CH for the occasional raid heal. As I mostly run the Riptide build, I really wish Wellspring was a viable alternative to the occasional raid AoE splash, (being instant would be a good start) because even though I like Ascendance, I feel it's the only option on the last row I have in smaller groups.

[Nythiz]

Interesting thread..

Im new to this forum and started wow 1 month after classic healing with a priest.
So I have some questions:
1. why are the T-Set boni not so good?
2. if you could chose - which legendaries would you wear and why?
3. I struggle hard with my spiritlink totem, any suggestion where and when to use it? Raid lead only wants me to use it in EN HC - Spiderboss, right before we get the feathers and move to the next plattform.

greets sunnysmile

ps: the LINK post restriction is ****... I cant post a propper thread with wowlogs and my char link because I have read, but not spammed enough yet -.-

T-Setbonuses aren't bad at all. But they provide boosts to our efficient spells for raid healing, rather than our throughput spells. (It does for M+ though)

2 set boosts Healing Wave / Healing Surge. The latter is not used as often in raids as it simply costs too much mana; for a little bit more mana you might as well use Chain Heal which heals for more in raids. Healing Wave is a good heal in raids, and this bonus will make it even better. But it's our efficient filler, in a situation when high throughput is required, the set bonus is questionable as you'll most likely be focusing on Chain Heal.
In M+ on the other hand you'll see great use out of the extra healing done by Healing Surge, which is your main heal in M+.

4 set boosts our Healing Stream Totem, which is one of our most efficient heals. It's a really nice bonus to have for overal healing done. But for just like the 2p it won't be a game changer for situations when our healing output matters most.

This is what people are probably disappointed with. The bonus overal gives us quite a decent bump in healing done, but for those fights where you need to put out max throughput, plus farm fights later on where mana is less of an issue, these bonuses are not super effective.

----

Best legendary depends a lot on the situation.
The healing trinket is probably the best to get. It works exceptionally well in combination with shaman cooldowns. Cloudburst Totem, Ancestral Guidance, Ascendance, Healing Tide totem. All those have a high percentage of overhealing, which feeds well into the trinket ability. Especially Ascandance and this trinket can make shit happen.

The second best legendary depends a lot on the situation.
Focuser of Jonat is a really strong legendary for raid encounters as it significantly boosts your chain heal output.
Uncertain Reminder is the new legendary that increases bloodlust duration by 75%, which is really strong with our artifact trait that increases healing done by 25% during bloodlust.
Praetorian's Tidecallers increase totem durations by 20%. It's not super huge, but for HST it works well with the 4P set bonus; and HTT gets a nice boost as our golden artifact trait makes HTT do more damage the longer it's up, so those 2 extra seconds you get are very strong.

The rest isn't superb, some are nice in certain situations.
I have Roots of Shaladrassil, which do amazing healing. Nearly 100k HPS on yourself, it's like constantly having a ton of HoTs rolling. It's really nice for mythic+ and solo content. And can do a considererable portion of your total healing done. In fact when you look purely at healing meter output, this legendary might actually be one of the strongest for increasing your HPS, as long as you take frequent damage.
Elemental Rebalancers make you do 10% more healing to people in your healing rain. There are quite a lot of encounters in NH where you have a lot of people standing in your HR.

------

SLT is really strong, but for newer resto shamans it's really hard to judge when this ability is used optimally.

There are basically a few major ways to use it:

1 - Use it as a flat damage reduction. SLT provides 10% damage reduction, so using it preemptively before a big attack reduces a bit of damage. (Worst use, but it's a use)

2 - Use it as a Lay on Hands for someone about to die. Since the health pools are immediately shared, SLT can bring someone from the brink of death back to 50%+ HP with practically 0 chance of dying after that.

3 - Use it to smooth incoming damage, this is the best use in a lot of raid settings. Because health is shared inside the totem everyone takes equal damage. That means if people pop defensives or a tank is present inside the SLT the incoming damage is reduced A LOT and also smoothed over all the people inside. You can trivialize certain raid mechanics
Similarily if a big hit is going to land on a single person, using SLT spreads that damage. Instead of the boss hitting a single person with 3 million HP for 5 million damage; the boss is now hitting a blob of people with a shared health pool of perhaps 30-50 million HP for 5 million damage.

4- Use it as a reset HP tool. Everyone health is equalized meaning that people are less likely to die in the next few seconds.


The thought behind your RL use of SLT is in the #4 category. He probably wants everyone to be semi-topped off before moving to the next platform. By using SLT everyone's health gets reset to the same amount. And people on like 10% HP, can easily be brought back up to 80% HP due to this.
At this point the chance of someone dying along the way is much smaller.

In mythic+ I often use it for reason #2 or #3. If the tank is suddenly about to die, I pop SLT and he'll be healed for 3 million HP instantly. (#2).
Alternatively if the whole group is getting pummeled, I often use it as a way to smooth incoming damage. Making it easier for me to heal and less likely that a random DPS just drops because he took a bit more damage than anticipated.

In raids too, you can easily use it for some flat damage reduction and smoothing incoming damage by just dropping it on melee or ranged groups.

[Deleted]

Shaman is a good healer not because it does the most HPS but because how he does that HPS. Sure the druid and the priest at same skill level will most likely outheal you but their healing comes from "padding", basically healing the missing health over time. The shaman and to some extent the priest will heal through throwing out big heals on a number of people when they need it the most and get them out of situations where they would die from the next AOE dmg that comes in. Lets face it although Blizzard said they will not make aoe that needs to be healed very fast they simply continued with their "heal that massive aoe now or wipe" philososhy and that is why shaman has a spot in the majority of the rosters.

My view on legendaries:
Gloves are extremely strong specially because of the set bonuses. They can pretty much make 100% uptime on HST.
Jonat is still a very good choice even now after the nerf.
Trinket is really strong but not so much because of the overhealing part but simply because it gives so much stats it's insane.
Head is imo a good choice on bosses where extra hero uptime in a long and healing intensive phases make a difference.
Others I think are not worth the slot they take, not saying they are useless but i think above 4 are better.