6.2 Resto Shaman Stats

[Deleted]

I've been thinking about the T18 Bonuses + class trinket and how they affect our stat priority and gearing strategy..

Personally I don't think it'll change all that much, except we might value spirit more than we do now (ie. use double spirit trinkets). Mastery will still be best on progression fights followed by haste and then crit. I think our 2set and 4set quite clearly indicate that we need haste over crit to pump out the chain heals faster. Possibly stop going for mastery at a certain point and then go all out haste?

As for talents/glyphs, I don't think we'll take echo unless we absolutely need double spirit link. So default setup will be Ancestral Swiftness/Rushing Streams/Elemental Blast/High Tide. Possibly swapping swiftness for elemental mastery if theres a huge burst phase. Going primal ele if mana is no issue. I also think riptide glyph is going to be completely dead (thank god), and I seriously doubt glyph of chaining will see the sunlight during progression.

Another thing is when to break 4set from T17 -> T18.
The 2set is fairly underwhelming imo so I don't think we'll want to swap until we can go from 4set -> 4set.

Keep in mind I haven't done much PTR testing so I don't know most of the fights. Post your own thoughts if you disagree or have comments!

[Deleted]

(ie. use double spirit trinkets)

Unless they drastically rework the trinkets no healing class will be using double spirit trinkets - the leech one is completely bonkers and triple-dips from everyone's stats.

[Alltat]

Personally I don't think it'll change all that much, except we might value spirit more than we do now (ie. use double spirit trinkets).

Unlikely. With more spirit on neck/rings/cloak, the value of more spirit will be reduced somewhat. Higher item levels also means more spirit on each trinket, making it much less likely that you'd ever want/need two. Being able to cast more Chain Heals is nice, but when it comes at the expense of all your spells (CH included) healing for less, you risk just gimping your burst healing without actually gaining anything.

I think our 2set and 4set quite clearly indicate that we need haste over crit to pump out the chain heals faster. Possibly stop going for mastery at a certain point and then go all out haste?

Haste will certainly increase in value as the 4p set bonus adds a fixed-ish amount of healing per cast. Crit increases the healing done by that HoT, but haste increases the number of HoTs and the healing each one does. I doubt this will be significant enough that you'll ever want haste over mastery, though. But that'll depend on largely itemization; haste will never overtake mastery if there are a lot of mastery+haste items, but might if you end up having very high mastery and very low haste.

As for talents/glyphs, I don't think we'll take echo unless we absolutely need double spirit link.

Echo will still be good. The initial hit synergy is gone (thankfully; I always hated it), but we still have High Tide and Riptide is still an excellent spell even without any synergies. It costs very little, heals for a lot, and can be cast while moving. Mobility in particular is part of what makes EotE great. On fights like H&F you can pretty much cast things non-stop for the entire fight despite all the movement thanks to EotE letting you save Riptide charges when standing still and then using them when you need to move.

[Gardiff]

Stat priority is not likely to change. I am not sure what you are seeing that directly shows haste suddenly overtaking any stat based on the bonuses.

Echo will absolutely for sure have a role simply from the double riptides. There are a LOT of fights on the PTR (relatively speaking) which have high movement (in < 1 minute intervals) spread mechanics with or without heavy AoE going out that are gated by time (so you can have two charges). Having two charges of riptide is incredibly valuable in these situations. RS/High Tide will still be used. Tier 6 is a little bit strange though. If we can spare it we might consider UF on non-mana intensive fights. I will copy over what I posted on the PTR forums for this below as to why.

"Also of interest is that the tier 6 talent that enhances elements interacts with the single target riptide that is spawned. It makes sense obviously but the tier 6 proc gets consumed by the riptide and the normal UE gets increased by the chain heal. The thing is the riptide itself that is spawned ALSO is affected by normal UE. Thus you are essentially getting a chain heal that is 30% stronger as well as a riptide that is boosted by that 30% and the subsequent 50%. That is pretty powerful actually (that the riptide gets hit by the 30% too) and I think it shouldn't be changed (honestly I doubt it will because it is something so minor) but it will at least do something decent with that talent because of how the 4 piece works"

Regarding 2 set being underwhelming - it ISN'T. With the power of 4 piece the two work very well together. It isn't like a resto druid 2 pc / 4 pc where both synergize even with archimonde trinket (ours archimonde trinket is awful and does not synergize at all with our 2 pc / 4 pc and general spell selection (see below)) but the 2 pc/4 pc is good. In short 2 pc / 4 pc is great with our toolkit because the riptide that spawns is a separate riptide spell completely from the ones you generally cast. Thus you can roll double riptide on important targets (with high crit chance) for important targets which is amazing for us actually in certain situations. It also is just powerful in general even if this isn't your goal.

Here is the problem with the archimonde trinket (copied from the forums).
"Furthermore this trinket only works off of riptides we cast and does NOT work off of riptides spawned from the 4 piece (at least this is what I have noted when testing). This further de-values this trinket and most resto shaman just will not touch this trinket. "

Essentially if the archi trinket only works off of riptides we cast, you have to think ahead on who we will be riptiding with the changes in the patch. Double riptide rolling on tanks is going to be important on some fights and you won't really ever have more than ~4 riptides out at any given point. Because our single target heals / chain heal will ONLY copy over a riptide that isn't from the 4 piece, this trinket is very de-valued for us unless if all we are doing is chain healing (or HS/HW) off of a normal target with riptide (i.e. a tank since if you are doing this on a non-tank target it doesn't make much sense - remember the 25% buff is gone and is now baked in the spell itself). The reason we won't be as likely to do this next patch is because of the importance of spreading riptides out with 4 piece. The amount of output you get from the initial target from chain heal is more than doubled now because the riptide you spawn is a FULL NEW SPAWNING riptide (18 second duration) which has the initial heal also being present as well. Thus you won't want to keep chain healing the same target since your goal should be to getting more riptides out. With the 25% chain heal buff being baked we further don't have an incentive to just heal one target with chain heal which is something you may have wanted to do in current / past tier where you may have only been able to have a few viable riptide targets and had to heal off that target to get the 25% buff.

To summarize about the archi trinket, for shamans it does NOT copy over 4 piece riptides, it is still RNG, and it only copies over the CURRENT duration of non 4 piece riptides (so no fresh riptides or initial hit). Thus we run into a weak dilemma of why would we want to do this when we can get perfectly formed full 18 second riptides that HAVE the initial hit on each new target instead of chain healing (or hw / hs) the same target over and over again refreshing the 4 piece riptide (and possibly overhealing) while only having a random chance of possibly transferring over a casted riptide with the archi trinket. It just isn't good from what I have tested with it.

The trinket is just not worth it because of what you are giving up for it. It does not synergize well with 2 pc / 4 pc (in fact it is the exact opposite) and PTR testing can clearly show this.

You are right that glyph of riptide is completely dead come next patch but not just for the reason you stated. It was always pretty close / possibly worse depending on what you did with it. The reason it is hurt further is because if you glyph riptide glyph, the riptide you spawn from 4 piece does NOT get the initial heal which is actually pretty big (as tested on PTR).

As for spirit, I personally will have two spirit trinkets at least in the bags because blizzard may end up buffing it at some point (they mentioned it in an old dev interview but doesn't seem like it will end up happening) but you should always have a variety of trinkets in your bags to fit whichever situation. We might need them on a fight like Gorefiend (high volume spread damage for ~ 2 minutes followed by high volume stack damage for ~ 1 minute and repeat) but then end up not on a fight like Iskar (moderate damage but all stack damage with it being mostly bursty) so its on a per fight basis.

[Lothrik]

Unless they drastically rework the trinkets no healing class will be using double spirit trinkets - the leech one is completely bonkers and triple-dips from everyone's stats.

Not sure I follow. I see two trinkets in Hellfire with Spirit on them, and both of them look amazing. Unstable Felshadow Emulsion and Intuition's Gift both have spirit.

[Comfort]

The second you listed did not have spirit until the latest build. It had mastery instead which meant it was very strong for dps.
To make it a lot less attractive they changed it to spirit. The on use though is still nearly 5k crit on the mythic version iirc.
So at the time he posted there was only one spirit option.

[Lothrik]

The second you listed did not have spirit until the latest build. It had mastery instead which meant it was very strong for dps.
To make it a lot less attractive they changed it to spirit. The on use though is still nearly 5k crit on the mythic version iirc.
So at the time he posted there was only one spirit option.

I'm pretty sure it's had Spirit on it (at least, listed on Wowhead) since around the 19th as I remember talking about it with the other healers in my guild during raid, but I can see where the confusion could stem from.

[Deleted]

I'm pretty sure it's had Spirit on it (at least, listed on Wowhead) since around the 19th as I remember talking about it with the other healers in my guild during raid, but I can see where the confusion could stem from.

Intuition's Gift had mastery instead of spirit before the last build. It was basically the perfect fire mage trinket then, hence it changing. Kind of forgot about it.

Also, I didn't remember the leech trinket had spirit on it.

[Forsedar]

This is how I see things:

Blizzard is well aware of the issues with Spirit and how we may or may not need it. At the start of WoD (or even before, rather), it was made clear that they wanted Healers specifically looking at Spirit pieces as much as Tanks were looking at Bonus Armor. That has not held up, and while some Spirit for certain fights is nice (Mythic Blast Furnace), overall you can get away with Mastery Secondaries and just enchanting your weapon for the +Spirit proc.

That being said, despite Blizzards best intentions, Spirit is near useless with Elemental Blast and we benefit much more with Mastery off-pieces. I have continued to (and will continue to) gear for Spirit in the event that Blizzard changes things up for us making Spirit once again more enticing. Plus, at least for progression, I'd much rather leave the "DPS" off-pieces for DPS since my own benefit won't be large enough to warrant me taking a Ring over lets say a Mage for instance. Rarely, at least during our progression, is it a Healing issue.

I guess this was a little off-topic, but I do believe that Blizzard is working on a way to make Spirit more necessary than its current incarnation.