Over healing and haste

[Drdraenei]

Hello all,

I Predominantly occupy the healer role within WoW, I find it easier to do that dps as I am no good in keeping up rotations and find it hard to see when I am tanking, something to do with tanking a 100ft boss with spells flashing off everywhere. Didn't find it a problem in TBC, but wrath was a nightmare.

Anyway, my main is a Resto Shaman and I loved playing it in wrath when haste was the way to go, topping the healing meters felt good and was always low on the over healing meter. I loved the haste state and I always prioritised this over any other and I'm a bit miffed that apparently that is not the way to go.

Now my heals are slow(ish) 1.4 sec to land a GHW with Tidal waves and 1.9 sec to cast a chain heal annoys me when I check the healing meter and I'm 25% - 30% of that is over healing. In WOTLK, it was 1 second GHW (with Tidal Waves) and 1.5 second chain heal with about 15% over heal.

I've read up and I think the target for haste was 916 or something like that to give one extra tick on riptide and healing rain, but I would rather stack the haste for faster heals even if they are not as potent. I'd rather be the guy who heals people for a decent amount and keeps them up, that someone who heals them for say 50K when they are only down 20K health.

Is this wrong, is there a place in a raid for this type of healer? A healer someone who shoots off fast less effective heals while another class/healer puts the big heals down.

For the record I am more interested in the over healing chart than healing done chart

What do you think?

[Darsithis]

I've gone ahead and moved this to the shaman forum where I suspect you'll have a lot more help than in Gen

[Keiyra]

Im going to skip the "is that style of healing" wrong question for the moment.

The 916 haste is the first haste breakpoint you should reach - however, once you start having dragon soul gear (arguablely even before that) its ok to push haste higher. 916 does feel too slow for the non TW casts. (felt too slow to me for chainheal/HR casts for sure) -

If your gear lvl is 378+ it shouldn't be too hard to reach the next haste breakpoint of 2005 haste rating iirc.

That being said, you can play either style and both work (slower with more mastery or faster with less mastery) - just be cognizant of your mana usage and make sure you are tossing enough LB's inbetween - assuming you have TC of course. And at least for now, overhealing doesn't matter unless you are going oom.

[Endus]

What you're talking about is what's usually labelled as "sniping heals". It looks good on meters, but otherwise tends to bring less to the raid than providing better effective healing.

The best thing I can suggest is to try and get an addon that shows incoming heals; my Vuhdo provides that functionality for instance. This lets me see if another healer has a heal queued up on my target, and a guess as to how much it will heal for (it doesn't factor in crits or procs), so if they'll get topped to full by it I can just heal someone else instead.

Haste provides reasonable throughput, but we're going to be hitting the MoP pre-patch in the next couple of weeks; MoP's launch is the 25th of September and I expect at least 4 weeks of pre-launch event stuff. That patch is going to bring the new mechanics, including the nonscaling healer mana pools. The issue with this and Haste is that Haste provides reasonable throughput, but at a direct increase in mana spent; you get more HPS because you're casting more spells per minute, not because those spells heal for more. More spells cast = more mana spent. Less of an issue right now, more of an issue when Telluric Currents doesn't regen much and mana pools don't scale with Intellect.

You're likely going to be better off focusing on Mastery for straight throughput (along with an addon, as mentioned earlier, to avoid healing someone else's target and getting sniped), or Crit for throughput plus additional regen (via Resurgence). Haste's throughput is typically somewhere between those two, but the increased mana costs will become less sustainable.

[Seriss]

Im going to skip the "is that style of healing" wrong question for the moment.

The 916 haste is the first haste breakpoint you should reach - however, once you start having dragon soul gear (arguablely even before that) its ok to push haste higher. 916 does feel too slow for the non TW casts. (felt too slow to me for chainheal/HR casts for sure) -

If your gear lvl is 378+ it shouldn't be too hard to reach the next haste breakpoint of 2005 haste rating iirc.

That being said, you can play either style and both work (slower with more mastery or faster with less mastery) - just be cognizant of your mana usage and make sure you are tossing enough LB's inbetween - assuming you have TC of course. And at least for now, overhealing doesn't matter unless you are going oom.

For now, yes. In less than 2 months, you'll be in an entirely different situation. Heals will be slow. Every cast you make will require thought. You'll need to plan ahead, schedule your healing CDs for certain points in time during an encounter. As far as I could tell on beta, the start of MoP will be even harder on us than the start of Cata was.

As a shaman, you won't be the one "who shoots off fast less effective heals while another class/healer puts the big heals down." As a shaman, you're the guy who bombs the big heals on people due to our mastery. Unless, maybe, you glyph for Riptide... but that'll probably OOM you quickly and not really be very satisfying as you'll be some sort of a replacement druid.

[Drdraenei]

I use grid and clique at the moment which shows incoming heals. Shadow uf also shows incoming heals for me, my target and my focus. I always try to heal someone who is not getting healed, just like Keiyra said, Chain Heal feels so slow so I generally try and ping the first heal on someone who has a riptide about to expire (in an ideal situation) but i often feel someone else's heals are getting their before mine.

I'm also not a fan of mastery at all, it only (greatly) assist's us when targets are at low health and the main objective of healers is too keep everyone at max unless the boss fight mechanics call for people not to be healed up. But obviously during periods of heavy damage it comes in handy.

I don't like the big slow heals, I often feel like I'm not in the fight, I prefer to be a raid healer and just keep the tank topped up with ES and Riptide, casting fast heals, I feel more part of the fight that way, more used and more engaged, I don't want to be sitting there looking at my cast bar all fight!

Are the patch notes released yet, I want to have a good look at the Resto Shaman changes so I can decide if I will suit this class in the new expansion?

[Deleted]

Our overhealing is higher than in WOTLK mostly due to Healing Rain. You might want to disregard HR and other HoT overhealing when evaluating your performance, as this type of overhealing is pretty much unavoidable. Also, the worst kind of overhealing doesn't show up on meters -- when your CH fails to bounce.

Mastery is the best stat to minimize overhealing, for obvious reasons. While haste might bring your personal overhealing down a tad, it will in turn increase other healers' overhealing, because you'll often be sniping their heals.

[Drdraenei]

Good point it never occured to me haste might cause others to overheal and that by mastery scaling the heal to the health of the target so a high health target receives a little amount and a low health receives a large amount would reduce over healing also.

I just don't feel as involved in fights when I have long cast times.

[takolin]

I use grid and clique at the moment which shows incoming heals. Shadow uf also shows incoming heals for me, my target and my focus. I always try to heal someone who is not getting healed, just like Keiyra said, Chain Heal feels so slow so I generally try and ping the first heal on someone who has a riptide about to expire (in an ideal situation) but i often feel someone else's heals are getting their before mine.

I'm also not a fan of mastery at all, it only (greatly) assist's us when targets are at low health and the main objective of healers is too keep everyone at max unless the boss fight mechanics call for people not to be healed up. But obviously during periods of heavy damage it comes in handy.

I don't like the big slow heals, I often feel like I'm not in the fight, I prefer to be a raid healer and just keep the tank topped up with ES and Riptide, casting fast heals, I feel more part of the fight that way, more used and more engaged, I don't want to be sitting there looking at my cast bar all fight!

Are the patch notes released yet, I want to have a good look at the Resto Shaman changes so I can decide if I will suit this class in the new expansion?

I was under the impression that our main job was to keep everyone alive. And if that isn't possible, keep enough people alive to kill the big baddy to receive shinies.

[Endus]

I'm also not a fan of mastery at all, it only (greatly) assist's us when targets are at low health and the main objective of healers is too keep everyone at max unless the boss fight mechanics call for people not to be healed up.

Yeah, I have to strongly disagree with this, too.

The main objective of healers is to ensure nobody hits zero health, not to ensure everyone stays at max. If there's an AoE raid pulse every 10 seconds and no other raid damage, there's absolutely no reason for healers to bust their butts to heal that damage in less than about 9 seconds or so. The fight, in fact, is probably tuned so that if healers DO try and heal that damage too quickly, they're using spells that are more ineffecient, and will OOM as a result.

Your goal is to prevent people dying. If nobody dies, it doesn't matter WHAT their HP percentage is at.

[Deleted]

Usually the easiest way to make sure nobody dies is to keep them at full health if possible.

[Keiyra]

Usually the easiest way to make sure nobody dies is to keep them at full health if possible.

That goes without saying, but in progression, rarely is anyone actually at full health most of the time (its more like keep them above 65/75% - unless its something scripted like Electrocute where you have to get everyone like above 90% before it hits)

The bigger point is:
The goal is to keep people alive, keeping them at as high a health level as is reasonable based on mana constraints and fight mechanics, not just a simplistic "full health" (which you'll rarely achieve especially when talking new expansion/progression)

[Deleted]

Keeping everyone at full HP was the way to go during WOTLK, but Cata introduced much deeper HP pools, so the healing paradigm changed.

[Seriss]

Usually the easiest way to make sure nobody dies is to keep them at full health if possible.

Try that as a shaman in MoP... It's not even remotely an option for our class to heal that way unless we travel back in time and get back our ICC state-of-mana. Not like we'd want it back.

But they're really overly strict with our mana consumption on beta, especially as we don't really pull an overabundance of hps while spending our mana pool - compared to other classes (I'm looking at you, Spinning Crane Kick!).