HC Resto shaman - stats sense check

[Armani20202]

Hey!

My guild recently lost a few healers in our 25man HC farm roster and I am swapping from my disc priest to a Resto shaman (because disc priests are everywhere and easy to recruit) and we can’t seem to get a good Resto shaman – so we’re settling for me!

I’ve done a bit of reading up and I’ve played my shaman a fair bit as my alt and I just wanted to see if any HC raiding Resto shamans could look at my gear and stats prios and let me know if I’m going in the right direction?

My armoury link is here - http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...d%c3%a0/simple

• Im aiming for the 36.47% haste breakpoint for the tick of earthliving (I think)
• Spirit to about 14k passive (with procs etc with the help of ask mr robot)
• Trying to reforge out of mastery because there is loads already
• And just getting as much crit as possible.

Im not 100% sure if I should replace my chest gems with int crit or int haste – or just keep them the same.

Am I heading in the right direction?

Thanks for any help you can give!

[Deleted]

Well that's almost exactly my resto shamans stats from this point I was reforging my excess into crit

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Personally I prefer improved healing stream totem over ancestral guidance it's usually in the top 3 of my spells on healing done and also extremely handy when on the move

[Armani20202]

Well that's almost exactly my resto shamans stats from this point I was reforging my excess into crit

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Personally I prefer improved healing stream totem over ancestral guidance it's usually in the top 3 of my spells on healing done and also extremely handy when on the move

Hey - thanks for the reply - its good to know im going the right way!

oh and yeah normally i would but i was on Thok HC last night and i was using AG with a BOP - but again nice to know its common to do that!

Cheers mate!

[Koor]

Hey! Im not 100% sure if I should replace my chest gems with int crit or int haste – or just keep them the same.

Yes, I'd replace the pure red gems with orange gems. Either will work well, I personally prefer haste but crit is viable as well.
BTW for thok the water shield glyph is nice, it returns insane amounts of mana.

[Armani20202]

Yes, I'd replace the pure red gems with orange gems. Either will work well, I personally prefer haste but crit is viable as well.
BTW for thok the water shield glyph is nice, it returns insane amounts of mana.

Great i think my haste is wrong at the moment and should be 13163 instead of 12738 (i think) so ill probably put int haste and see how close i can get to that breakpoint.

ohh nice - i didnt know that - ill deffo give that a go - thanks dude!

[Koor]

There is a nice table of haste breakpoints on http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=41.
Totem breakpoints are less reliable, you typically need to be a bit above them to get the extra ticks.

[SH4D0WS1N]

Personally I go for high haste breakpoints. This whole healing meta is about sniping and giant damage spikes, so why not get people up as quick as possible? I know some people say it's not mathematically an HP/s increase but I'm pretty sure I've read that exact argument for the rdruid haste breakpoint that literally everyone goes for. In addition, not that much crit is actually needed to drop literally as much spirit as possible. At the moment in 580 gear I'm sitting at 50% haste with OUT ancestral swiftness (I will swear by EotE being sleeper OP), 9.3k spirit, and the rest dumped into cit. Secondary gemming will always pass primary gemming for us. Glyph of Totemic Recall is an amazing playstyle to pick up and learn. You can drop a lot of spirit with it. Earthliving haste breakpoints (and riptide) are entirely useless. In 10m the riptide one might not be as useless, but in 25m it definitely is. Go for a HST/HTT/HR breakpoint. Go for ~200 higher if it's a totem breakpoint to account for crappy Blizzard programming.

[Shockeye]

Personally I go for high haste breakpoints. This whole healing meta is about sniping and giant damage spikes, so why not get people up as quick as possible?

Yeah, that's my line of thinking as well, and so I've got my Haste at around the 40% (raid buffed) mark. I've been looking at rebalancing my stats and most, if not all, the Resto Shaman I've looked at as ones I know play and perform well keep a much lower Haste value and push more Crit and Mastery, so I got to thinking that I might drop it down a bit.
I do need to keep my Spirit sitting higher than I'd mathematically like to, just due to the nature of my guild (we're pretty damned casual so we have a mix of player skill levels, meaning I tend to need more mana than I may otherwise require in a perfect world), so Haste is the one I'm looking at for some adjusting, to put more into Mastery (my co-healer is a Holy Priest, and she's very good, and we're pretty much neck and neck in the meters, bouncing back and forth in first and second position).

Anyway, Haste, yeah, not sure if higher or lower is the way to go.

[Deleted]

With your gear I'd recommend a stat prio like this: int > spirit to 9-10k > 9100 haste (the 89xx HST breakpoint, +200 rating) > crit > mastery > more haste > spirit. There will be a point in near or at full BiS that you simply cant get less than 10-11k haste at which point I'd recommend going for the HTT breakpoint at 11400ish haste (and then add +200 rating). Mastery is crap, the more crit you have the less spirit you'll need. Just plug the above priority into a reforging tool like AMR or something and hit optimize.


glyph/talents

rushing streams is best imo except on malkorok. take AG for malk. Totemic persistance is a very slight performance increase, and personally I prefer projection on all fights so i can send a HST far away to heal people that are otherwise out of range, or to place a SLT/capacitor properly. We don't really have any glyphs that are super good for us, but we do have some traps. riptide glyph is dogshit, if you think about it, you rarely have need for more than 3 riptides. Healing wave looks good, and is also good if you use HW a lot.. which we don't in this tier. With regen so crazy with crits all over the place, if I find a situation where I need single target healing, I always use GHW or HS. Fire ele is a decent glyph if you just want to use it to boost your HTT (lines up perfectly). Chaining glyph is dogshit for nearly every 25man fight. Only exception would maybe be paragons depending on how you handle fiery edges. Totemic recall glyph is good to use, if you actually need to conserve mana. Major glyphs I use: Spirit walker's grace, HST, Capacitor (for garrosh), recall, fire ele. Change between them on a fight-per-fight basis as needed. Water shield glyph is good for Thok.

If you want some fight specific tips or any questions in general feel free to whisper me ingame (we're on same server). Not going to post all in this reply since theres a lot of small stuff, and i cba typing it all if you already know 90% of them

You can go through our logs and see my spell usage if you want. I know that helps me whenever I play a different class.

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...32250/latest/#

[Armani20202]

Thanks for all the help guys - i really appriciate it!!

[minywheats]

My raid healing comp is all druids and priests so pushing haste is the only way I can ever sneak heals in. Sitting at 50% raid buffed. Feels pretty good

[Kaitlaa]

I joined a 25 man guild a few days ago to get in a team for WoD. Before that I only healed 10 mans and I did about 110 - 120K Hps on boss fights, sometimes more sometimes less, a bit depending on how much damage was taken and how the other healer was doing.
I expected my numbers to go up in 25 mans. But I was mortified, they were bad. One problem was the low fps I was getting in 25mans, which I fixed following some advice from the new guildies. But the numbers still didn't get really good. I was used to heavy healing on tanks with a little bit of raid healing (keeping healing rain and my totems up) but in this group the tanks barely took any damage. Most of the heals that landed went to the disc priests and the two palis, when my chain heal landed it resulted in an overheal. I adjusted already some of my talents/glyphs according to your post, I also changed gear out a little (especially since I got a new much better weapon in that run). But I'm still a bit worried about going into another 25man and my numbers not significantly improving.
At the moment it looks like I have to steal heals from the disc priests/palis and I just don't see how. One of the priests and one of the palis was a bit (3, 4 IL's) better geared then me, the others about the same.
Here's a link to my armory (it won't allow me to insert an actual link... hence the a bit strange format)
us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Kaitlaa/simple

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[Koor]

I expected my numbers to go up in 25 mans. But I was mortified, they were bad. ... At the moment it looks like I have to steal heals from the disc priests/palis and I just don't see how.

You can't -- absorbs have priority over heals, disc priests are stronger in 25-man compared to 10-man due to their uncapped level 90 talents, and in current item levels the absorbs often take care of much of the damage by themselves, not leaving other healers much to heal except during short burst periods.

A good raid leader knows that's just the way absorbs work and won't expect you to top the HPS meters with multiple absorb healers in the raid, but rather to use your burst healing and cooldowns wisely in the short periods extra healing is needed.

[Axelond]

I can't really speak for lower ilvls but around 585-589 you want

15316 haste, GCD cap and extra tick on healing rain

At most 6k mastery, that is counting the 3k mastery passive buff.

Around 10-12k spirit, even with 50% haste you mana should be fine because of high crit. Remember for shamans 1 crit rating is around 0.33-0.5 spirit.

As much crit as possible 12-15k is a good number depending on what gear pieces you get.

[Deleted]

@Kaitlaa

Since you do not seem to have any heroic boss kills according to your armory, I assume that you refer to 25man normal mode raiding.

With your item level of 570 and assuming your raid has similar item level, it is appropriate to say that you are horribly overgeared.

In normal mode and with your item level, your pallies and your disc will and should not even leave anything to heal for you up to the point where you could simply play the bosses with the three of them alone.

My advice:
Go heroic.

[Shockeye]

A good raid leader knows that's just the way absorbs work and won't expect you to top the HPS meters with multiple absorb healers in the raid, but rather to use your burst healing and cooldowns wisely in the short periods extra healing is needed.

Absorbs are great for standard healing, but where Shaman really shine is in "critical healing", where you need to get the raid topped off fast, to respond to huge damage bursts and so forth. Disc Priests really don't have the tools to do much there. So the meters will still put the absorb healers on top, but rest assured that if a raid survives through high damage phases intact, you've done a successful job.

If a raid healer is just looking at HPS to measure the quality of the healers, that raid leader shouldn't be in that job.

[Lei]

I can't really speak for lower ilvls but around 585-589 you want

15316 haste, GCD cap and extra tick on healing rain

At most 6k mastery, that is counting the 3k mastery passive buff.

Around 10-12k spirit, even with 50% haste you mana should be fine because of high crit. Remember for shamans 1 crit rating is around 0.33-0.5 spirit.

As much crit as possible 12-15k is a good number depending on what gear pieces you get.

Not to nitpick or anything, but you're saying this like the proper pieces for a resto shaman in SoO would drop like candy. Depending on luck, "properly" (even to reach those stats you've stated) gearing a resto shaman can take huge amount of time. It is not like with hpallies or rdruids: first week: 4set -> gg (4 of the 8 class/role specific item checked on week one).

At this point of the expansion I'd just go for set pieces first if I'd start from "zero" in a hc guild (assuming noone needs them for MS, and proper pieces didn't drop in that slot): resto helm + gloves, elemental shoulders + chest, legs are the same for both, doesn't matter. Upgrade anything else that has proper stats, or the helm + gloves if absolutely nothing good dropped, then replace the tier pieces with the better itemized drops if you are lucky enough and see them drop.
Gem for crit (in+crit/spirit+crit is ok if the setbonus is not spirit), reforge spirit to crit. I'd reforge mastery to haste even if I don't reach any cap with it. This is how I would start gearwise atm.

@Kaitlaa
Considering you can 3 heal all SoO HC farm with 3 good geared healer, having 4+ overgeared healers on normal farm is just a torture. And it turns into a nightmare when the other healers are happened to be disc(s) PLUS hpallies. Yaay. :/

[Kaitlaa]

To Xentres:

I would love to go heroic and I'm hoping to get there with this guild. My old guild didn't have the attendance to attempt it (always at least 2 or 3 pugs in 10 man). I hope that with these guys it will work out. I'm not a hardcore player even though I love a challenge so I was trying to find a group that is somewhat on a similar level.

I just was worried that I had been doing something wrong which resulted in the poor numbers compared to the other healers.

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To Koor:

That is what I tried to do, but other then on Thok there was hardly anything to heal! On Thok my numbers jumped to about 170Hps - in part due to the wise use of devo aura by the palis, so we got him down before the 3rd transition.

But I was used to have to heal like that in every fight or we were wiping (in 10 man - usually with another pug healer) and it just destroyed my confidence to feel so useless in that group. And I came here to find out if I was doing something wrong, but from the responses I'm getting I guess it's just an overgeared group not running challenging enough content.

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To Shockeye:

In all fairness, nobody blamed me for the numbers. But I was mortified, cause I was used to different results. I don't like to be carried, I'm used to work as a healer and to come to group like this was a shock.

[Shockeye]

In all fairness, nobody blamed me for the numbers. But I was mortified, cause I was used to different results. I don't like to be carried, I'm used to work as a healer and to come to group like this was a shock.

Well that's good. I know what you mean about not wanting to be carried, and playing a healer is the one role where such a scenario is very likely to happen in a 25m raid.
But again, your HPS meters do not tell the whole story, just one detail about your healing output. You are in a perhaps less than ideal healing scenario, with Disc Priests and Holy Paladins, I'd be disheartened too, especially if you are accustomed to seeing different results.

As you are in an absorb-heavy healing team, I think you're looking at one of two scenarios. Either they don't actually need another healer (which is possible) or you are providing essential critical healing for which the others cannot compensate, so even if HPS is lower, getting the raid through bursts, spikes, emergencies and other scenarios is your job.

Here's a good article on Resto Shaman in an absorb-heavy environment, and the analytics to help qualify and quantify your place in the raid -
http://lifeingroup5.com/?p=3686