Ancestral Vigor (10% health buff) Tips and Tricks

[Whoopsa]

For those that don't know, the buff that you gain from the Ancestral Fortitude talent that increases your max health is called Ancestral Vigor, and I'll be referring to it as AV here. The point of this thread is to hash out what it does and does not do.


Here's a general overview of how it works:

You heal someone in some manner (whether by HR, Earthliving, a Riptide HoT, a direct heal, or a Chain Heal bounce, it doesn't matter, but HST does not apply) and the recipient of the heal gains a buff that increases his max health pool by 10% of the amount you healed him for, and this buff lasts for 15 seconds. Upon receiving another heal (or EL tick, or HR tick, or whatever), the 10% from THAT heal is added on to the previous amount and the buff is refreshed. This continues until the buff caps out at 10% of the target's original (i.e. before AV) max health, at which time further heals simply refresh the buff.

Here are some little nuances of AV that might not be that obvious:

1) It can be stacked via HR on an entire raid before a pull even happens.

2) Multiple Resto Shamans each contribute to the AV health pool, meaning you don't get a bigger benefit from it, but it will stack more quickly.

3) Using HR on cooldown can prevent this buff from ever falling off throughout the entire fight, essentially giving you and anyone else stacked with you a 10% health buff.

4) A simple rolling Riptide is enough to keep the buff on the tank throughout the entire fight, giving them an extra 10% health permanently.



Just thought I'd shed some light on this relatively new mechanic, if anyone else has any good uses for it or tricks you can do with it, post them here.

[BennyZee]

My question about this is: Is it worth going out of your way to keep it stacked on the raid? (ie, laying down a healing rain on a stacked raid that's at or near full health)

[Jinto]

No, but it can be useful to proc the buff on certain people during an encounter.

[Endus]

I'd say it's worth maintaining on the tanks, but if you can keep a Riptide active on them, that'll do the trick.

[Makatafinger]

is there an add on to keep track of that buff ?

[Deleted]

i would of thought so check curse for riptide timer or something am sure something will pop up

[Alltat]

The buff can't realistically fall off from a tank, so that's not an issue and there's no point in tracking it. Even if you're not actively tank healing, you should still be keeping Earth Shield and Riptide (for AF procs) up on the tank at all times, and that'll stack up the buff pretty fast and keep it from ever expiring (it lasts 15 seconds, seemingly refreshing the entire stack every time ES triggers or RT ticks).

For raid healing, there's no particular point in stacking it up in advance, since it'll be fully stacked ~5 seconds into the AoE anyway, and Healing Rain will keep it up for as long as that phase lasts. Again, the 15 second duration ensures that it won't fall off until the danger has passed (specifically, it'll last until 15 seconds after your last heal).

[Whoopsa]

The buff can't realistically fall off from a tank, so that's not an issue and there's no point in tracking it. Even if you're not actively tank healing, you should still be keeping Earth Shield and Riptide (for AF procs) up on the tank at all times, and that'll stack up the buff pretty fast and keep it from ever expiring (it lasts 15 seconds, seemingly refreshing the entire stack every time ES triggers or RT ticks).

For raid healing, there's no particular point in stacking it up in advance, since it'll be fully stacked ~5 seconds into the AoE anyway, and Healing Rain will keep it up for as long as that phase lasts. Again, the 15 second duration ensures that it won't fall off until the danger has passed (specifically, it'll last until 15 seconds after your last heal).

It takes a lot longer than 5 seconds to stack it on an entire raid.

Consider: It adds 10% of your heals, up to a max of 10% of one's health. This means that you need to heal someone for their entire health pool to achieve maximum AV. I don't know about you, but it takes a LOT of time for a single Shaman to stack that up. Consider things like Sinestra's breath or Nefarian's electrocute and how long it takes for the entire healing squad to top the raid off again. THAT takes longer than 5 seconds, so it goes to reason that it would take a single Shaman considerably longer to do the same. In my 10 man group it takes at least 15 seconds of CH and HR spam to get that up on every member of the raid. Tossing out an HR every 15 seconds even when it's not needed seems to be worth giving the entire raid 10% more max health, because unless you're running 2-3 Shamans in your group, it could take quite a while to see any kind of help from that buff if you're just doing it yourself.

[Alltat]

Okay, 5 seconds was a pretty gross understatement. Realistically you'll be around 40k HPS in a ten man during a heavy burst phase like Zon'ozz RAWRAWR mode, so split across ten people it'll take you most of that phase to stack it up. That's not too much of a problem, though, as people are unlikely to need that extra health for the first half of that phase - if people are starting to drop very low in the first 10-15 seconds then you won't manage to keep them up through the full phase anyway. I suppose there might be some fight mechanic where you take a very high amount of damage over a very short duration, and I just can't think of it right now, though.


Ancestral Vigor had about 80% uptime on DPS on Zon'ozz (the only actually challenging fight I've done since the patch, so I use it as my one data point) without any thought given to it, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep it up all the time on everyone for AoE fights. Tank uptime was 100%, as could be expected.