Looking for guidance. (Restoration) (Logs included)

[DarkSkar]

Hello fellow WoW geeks! I have picked up raiding after taking a break during mists due to attrition. I have some logs from my guilds WoD Heroic last night and was wondering if anyone had some constructive criticism for me. I KNOW for a fact I am no where near good so hopefully y'all can point out my flaws. Thanks in advanced!

Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...kskar/advanced

Logs Overview: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ss=-2&source=3

[Alltat]

Looking at the armory, you have some cheap/missing gems and enchants, but I assume you know that. Talents and glyphs are fine (pretty standard choices).


Looking at the logs, the main issue seems to be that you're not using your major cooldowns nearly enough. On Darmac you didn't use Ascendance or Healing Tide until about five minutes into the fight, meaning you could have used both earlier and still have had them off cooldown again. On Oregorger you used HTT early on (which is good) but didn't use it again when it came off cooldown, despite the fact that there was clearly a lot of incoming damage (every other healer outhealed you significantly during the last minute). On Flamebender you didn't use Healing Tide at all - it seems that the druid and holy priest were assigned to handling the firestorms, but you can still help out (I normally use Ascendance on one and Tide on the other). Spirit Link use looks good, though.

In addition to not using Ascendance as often as you could, you're also not getting full value out of it. On Maidens you used Ascendance twice and only got 144k healing out of it. On Darmac you got 237k; on that same fight earlier tonight I got 1.46M healing from Ascendance, so a quarter million is very low. Try to always drop a Healing Rain, then immediately activate Ascendance and start spamming Chain Heal. Use Spiritwalker's Grace if necessary to make sure you can utilize the full 15 seconds. It's a +100% healing buff, so really go nuts. The Ascendance on Oregorger is a good example of what it should always look like.


Aside from that, there are a couple of small things you could improve:
- Riptide use is low. It should be cast on cooldown. You sometimes go almost 30 seconds without casting it, which means weak Chain Heals.
- Earth Shield uptime could be better. It's flawless on some fights, but on others you don't refresh it for a minute. See Kromog in particular.
- Healing Stream Totem uptime could be improved a bit. Aim for 40% on all fights. Notably, you stopped using it during Oregorger's roll phase.
- Ghost Wolf use is a bit excessive. On Thogar you spent almost 5% of the fight as a dog. On twins you cast GW while you already had +30% speed.
- Healing Rain was overall good, but sometimes inconsistent. Especially on Kromog and Darmac. You seem to stop using it when damage gets heavy.

[Deleted]

Currently at work so can't browse through logs at any greater length, and I see Alltat has already covered several things. One thing that pops out to me is that you're running Ancestral Swiftness but not the RT glyph - usually people run either EotE or RT glyph, with your current setup you're limiting your RT casts. An easy solution is to get rid of the bland and rather pointless HW glyph and get the RT one, which allows you to blanket the raid with RTs prior to damage spikes and then spam CH like it's no one's business. This way you also get to keep Ancestral Swiftness. If you're fine with your current glyphs, then I would strongly advice you to try the EotE talent - 2 charges on your RT and SLT are awesome, and the extra UE charge also helps a lot on movement intense fights.

You should also consider going with Rushing Streams over Conductivity, only fights where I can think of Conductivity being used to its full potential are Flamebender where you can keep HR on the tank/meele camp pretty much the whole fight, or perhaps on Gruul. Lava lashes/wolves and Cave ins/OH smashes may necessitate HR recasts here, too, so I probably wouldn't run it even on those fights. RS greatly increases HST healing output AND provides an additional 10% damage reduction for the raid, which on many fights can be much more useful than the raw healing output.

I'm not too sure about Totemic Projection as there used to be a delay for projecting SLT. At one point the damage redistribution portion was lagging after by a few seconds, and last I heard the 10 % damage reduction was not moved from the initial point of the totem area. I haven't played around much with projection since myself, but if anyone can confirm that the SLT-projection issues have been fixed, please tell Anyway, CoE is neat for additional HSTs/Capacitor totems on-demand.

Work on Alltat's suggestions and try playing around with some different talent/glyph choices, but overall you look like you're doing well.

[Alltat]

One thing that pops out to me is that you're running Ancestral Swiftness but not the RT glyph - usually people run either EotE or RT glyph, with your current setup you're limiting your RT casts.

If you check the Riptide cast distribution in the logs, he doesn't cast Riptide nearly as often as he could right now. There's frequently 10-20 seconds between casts, so the cooldown is not the limiting factor. At this point, getting the glyph would just gimp his Riptide healing without actually making any difference to how much he can cast it. While Glyph of Riptide isn't bad, I think he needs to get a lot better at proper Riptide use before the glyph is even worth considering.

You should also consider going with Rushing Streams over Conductivity, only fights where I can think of Conductivity being used to its full potential are Flamebender where you can keep HR on the tank/meele camp pretty much the whole fight, or perhaps on Gruul. Lava lashes/wolves and Cave ins/OH smashes may necessitate HR recasts here, too, so I probably wouldn't run it even on those fights. RS greatly increases HST healing output AND provides an additional 10% damage reduction for the raid, which on many fights can be much more useful than the raw healing output.

Agreed; Rushing Streams is the better talent on most fights. Conductivity is really nice on Oregorger too, though, if you position your rain well. For Gruul it depends a bit on how your raid does the fight and how many healers you have; it's useless if you have enough healing to heal everyone up before the next slice. For Flamebender, I prefer Rushing Streams to get more healing on the ranged. Healing the melee is easy enough anyway, but I guess that depends on raid composition and whether you put any ranged/healers in melee.

[DarkSkar]

Thanks for the input guys. I will work on riptide usage. The reason I delay HTT a lot is due to our raid leader asking me to save it on those fights. Like Flame bender I was asked to save it for firestorm 3 which didn't come. I'm sure I had enough time to use it earlier though looking at the time from storm 1 to the kill. I really really need to work on Ascendance usage.

For Conductivity over Rushing Streams, I completely forgot to change it after Gruul/Oregorger. We stack ranged on Orergorger in a way that makes HR pretty nice.

Thanks again!

[Alltat]

Thanks for the input guys. I will work on riptide usage. The reason I delay HTT a lot is due to our raid leader asking me to save it on those fights. Like Flame bender I was asked to save it for firestorm 3 which didn't come. I'm sure I had enough time to use it earlier though looking at the time from storm 1 to the kill. I really really need to work on Ascendance usage.

It's just over two minutes between firestorms, so you should have been assigning the same people to #1 and #3. Could be that it's your raid leader who needs to work on cooldown usage; either way, a lot of potential is wasted.

[DarkSkar]

I think its more my fault because I should have realized that i could HTT on FS1 and still have it up for FS3 too.

I really appreciate your help. Without shamans like you I would still be clueless lol.