Idea for Resto Shaman mastery overhaul/rework

[Embermoon]

So, how crazy would this be, as a total replacement of the current resto shaman mastery?

- Keep the direct inverse relationship of lower health = more benefit from mastery.

**EXCEPT**

- Take a snapshot of target's health, at start of heal being cast
- provide a flat, mastery-based percentage bonus amount to totemic heals, like HTT & HST. (SLT would be unaffected, I'd think)
- increase the haste (by mastery percentage) of single-target cast healing spells (i.e. shorter cast time, plus more HoT ticks)

**AND/OR**

- increase the critical chance (by mastery percentage) of both multiple-target cast healing spells, and auto/smart-heals.


With this mastery mechanic, it seems to me that spirit would remain a regen stat, and haste would remain a throughput stat, whereas crit and mastery would both be (albeit "chancy") throughput and regen stats. And, the power of mastery would increase with gear level. If Blizz needed to tweak Resto Shaman up or down, in power, then this would seem (to me) to be an easy way for them to do so, and more easily achieve balance. I'm thinking that it would also either eliminate the pursuit of haste breakpoints, or else make pursuing them a complicated and aggravating task.

Would it be balanced for PvE and PvP?

Would it be technically feasible?

Would it devalue other stats?

[shammypie]

So, how crazy would this be, as a total replacement of the current resto shaman mastery?

- Keep the direct inverse relationship of lower health = more benefit from mastery.

**EXCEPT**

- Take a snapshot of target's health, at start of heal being cast
- provide a flat, mastery-based percentage bonus amount to totemic heals, like HTT & HST. (SLT would be unaffected, I'd think)
- increase the haste (by mastery percentage) of single-target cast healing spells (i.e. shorter cast time, plus more HoT ticks)

**AND/OR**

- increase the critical chance (by mastery percentage) of both multiple-target cast healing spells, and auto/smart-heals.


With this mastery mechanic, it seems to me that spirit would remain a regen stat, and haste would remain a throughput stat, whereas crit and mastery would both be (albeit "chancy") throughput and regen stats. And, the power of mastery would increase with gear level. If Blizz needed to tweak Resto Shaman up or down, in power, then this would seem (to me) to be an easy way for them to do so, and more easily achieve balance. I'm thinking that it would also either eliminate the pursuit of haste breakpoints, or else make pursuing them a complicated and aggravating task.

Would it be balanced for PvE and PvP?

Would it be technically feasible?

Would it devalue other stats?

interesting but i think your idea is a little overreaching/too complicated. You want a mastery that is simple but effective. This helps for balancing, design work and implementation (think bugs), and ease of use. increasing our haste would not be as beneficial due to haste caps and mana regen. If you have to come up with 5 different things to make it work it probably isn't feasible.

The most common idea i have heard is to switch mastery and ascendance mechanics so that more mastery = more AE heals from everything (instead of 100% of heal amount you have a scalar value) and then for big incoming damage you have scaled increased healing (for a cd i would hope it would be 1-100). this would be simple to adapt to and easy to implement.

However you should continue to think of more ideas. If we get a rework like warlocks we will have a lot of leeway in what we can do. Just remember that how your mastery works need to be simple, effective, and not cause balance issue in PVE & PVP (see real life).

[Toxigen]

Honestly, I like our mastery.

Strong for PvP, and it suits my PvE playstyle and role.

[Sparkidy]

How about making mastery interact with overhealing in the following way:

[x%] of overhealing you do with Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge and Riptide is evenly redistributed to up to 3 nearby low health targets (where x is some value derived from your mastery rating)

This idea seems pretty simple to me, they have the ability to measure and interact with overhealing already (druid mushrooms), it would do wonders for our spread healing issue / our heals getting sniped, and by spreading it between 3 targets (or 2, or 4, or whatever) it's not going to turn it into another meaningful AoE heal, which we already have enough of.

The only problem I could foresee is if that x value could rise over 100% via mastery stacking and it would be higher hps to heal a full health target then a low one, but that would be easily fixed by having a low enough coefficient in the first place so it would never be possible to reach 100%.

But that could lead to more interesting game play anyway - for example if you managed to have 120% mastery, medium to high damage phase (using low round numbers for the sake of ease), do you heal target [1] on very low hp for 100, or do you heal target [2] on full hp that redistributes 120 healing to targets [1], [3] and [4] for 40 each? Target [1] might need it more, but you could do more overall healing the other way, but it may be less important to heal those guys. That sounds like meaningful decision making to me.

Thoughts?

[Deleted]

How about making mastery interact with overhealing in the following way:

[x%] of overhealing you do with Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge and Riptide is evenly redistributed to up to 3 nearby low health targets (where x is some value derived from your mastery rating)

Thoughts?

I like it, ofcourse if that would be in addition to current mastery to keep PvPrs happy. Not dwelling into absorb territory of other healers and making mastery useful for every sort of fight instead of just those where lots of people are staying at lowish HP for relatively long time (megaera). But i think it would need to have some sort of diminishing return or im afraid that shamans would just be assigned to spamheal tanks outside of throwing casual HR + totems every once a while to boost their HP constantly and direct heals being majorly affected by Earth shield.

Not sure if that is a bad thing, probably still better than the role we are currently filling.
hehe, sort of "atonement" shaman

[shammypie]

How about making mastery interact with overhealing in the following way:

[x%] of overhealing you do with Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge and Riptide is evenly redistributed to up to 3 nearby low health targets (where x is some value derived from your mastery rating)

This idea seems pretty simple to me, they have the ability to measure and interact with overhealing already (druid mushrooms), it would do wonders for our spread healing issue / our heals getting sniped, and by spreading it between 3 targets (or 2, or 4, or whatever) it's not going to turn it into another meaningful AoE heal, which we already have enough of.

The only problem I could foresee is if that x value could rise over 100% via mastery stacking and it would be higher hps to heal a full health target then a low one, but that would be easily fixed by having a low enough coefficient in the first place so it would never be possible to reach 100%.

But that could lead to more interesting game play anyway - for example if you managed to have 120% mastery, medium to high damage phase (using low round numbers for the sake of ease), do you heal target [1] on very low hp for 100, or do you heal target [2] on full hp that redistributes 120 healing to targets [1], [3] and [4] for 40 each? Target [1] might need it more, but you could do more overall healing the other way, but it may be less important to heal those guys. That sounds like meaningful decision making to me.

Thoughts?

its a step in the right direction but not quite there. CH and HR are the high HPS spells so they would need to be included.

[Sparkidy]

I don't PvP at all so didn't even consider that, man that would be AWFUL for pvp haha. I doubt you could have separate masteries, and adding my idea on top of what we already have would be stupidly OP so...I dunno.

But i think it would need to have some sort of diminishing return

That's why I think you'd need a low coefficient or starting point for the mastery, you wouldn't want to turn them into a full-HP target spamming machine for weak smart-heals for the raid, which is what would happen if mastery approached 100%. But the beauty of it is, you can change your style as the fight goes - low dmg phase, spam Healing Wave which is pretty much mana neutral at this point for some light maintenance healing, then if someone takes a spike, change to them for more direct effective healing. And if some sneaky Disc priest Penance-snipes it first? Doesn't matter, it'll still be effective. Raid-wide AoE? As well as normal AoE spells, spam GHW or Surge on the Earth Shielded tank to spread those lovely smart heals around.

Obviously any overhealing done from the redistributed overhealing wouldn't redistribute again in an infinite cycle. It seems like they're pushing a few classes and specs into atonement style healing (MW, disc, druids getting the new talent option for wrath-atonement, pallies with battle healer glyph etc), and this is similar but it's passive smart-healing deriving from other healing instead of damage.

Edit:
I thought about making it "all healing spells" but I think this would make it too good. Especially if totems were included. Including CH and HR might work, I don't have the mathematical know-how to work it out, but I think that would mean spamming your highest HPS heal(s) would be the best answer in almost any situation. My idea was to fix what seems to be our main problems - lack of spread healing, and getting sniped, and with that in mind, I don't see the need to buff CH and HR with that kind of mastery