[Resto] Does our Mastery need a rework? Here's my idea what it should look like.

[Deleted]

Hey fellow Shamans,
I just saw the Restoshaman discussion at FinalBoss and the question about a Mastery rework made me listen up, because i thought of that so many times already. I share the opinion that its a pretty good mastery overall, but useless or unefficient in many situations though.

We are support aoe-healers and i'm fine with it, so i thought of a well working, yet decent and not overpowered mastery myself.
How about this.
All our targeted Heals have the ability to trigger an aoe-hot for about 3 seconds with the target as its center. So basically a little healing rain around our target. The healing effect should be about 5% of the initial healamount with 0 mastery and 20% with about 2000 mastery. I think this tuning should be "ok" for the moment. I can't make a statement about the radius yet, since it needs an investigation how it would work out in general.
This AoE-HoT is not stackable and if a character would visually gain the heal of 2 healcircles, only the higher HoT will provide its healing and the other one is ignored. This will prevent people from grouping in those Heals.

Furthermore, this mastery would make healing more flexible and efficient for us due to the fact that we have to use healing rain for steady heal, but movement will force us placing it again and again. Instead of wasting our mana for that we would have the oportunity to singletarget-heal and making use of a weaker version of healing rain.

What do you guys think? Pretty cool idea or a waste of time reading it? The visual effect of the AoE-Hot should be decent and pretty transparent for the sake of performance.

[Deleted]

A new mastery would need a total rework on all our spells.

I would not call it a total rework. They have to implement the AoE-HoT-Effect and then assign it to every spell. This is probably an effort of half an hour or so.
The thing is... if something doesn't work like intented they have to work out an exception for it and we all know Blizz goes the easiest way.

Blizzard has told us that they want to change or rework the shaman class later in this expansion or the next.

Yep.... but it's not a tremendous amount of work to do so now. The most time while working on a game is the time crafting new assets such as models, textures, effects and stuff. Pretty much everything that has a visual outcome. Scripting is done quite fast and you can't tell me that they have no time doing such a crucial thing for making the Shaman work again. At least for this addon.

[Irisia]

There are enough HoTs in the game and we don't need more AoE healing. Our mastery is great for the job we are best at, sniping people who are low and delivering strong healing when the raid takes excessive amounts of damage.

It would be nice to see our mastery on meters/logs though, to get a better picture of how much of our healing is contributed to the stat.

[Rafal]

It would be nice to see our mastery on meters/logs though, to get a better picture of how much of our healing is contributed to the stat.

this right here would be perfect.

[Socialhealer]

absorbs still make resto shaman mastery look like a complete retard.

sadly blizzard have to spend so much time fixing ele/enhance after they break them each expansion there seems to be little time left to fix resto

[Deleted]

absorbs still make resto shaman mastery look like a complete retard.

sadly blizzard have to spend so much time fixing ele/enhance after they break them each expansion there seems to be little time left to fix resto

made me lol

[Nepinator]

In a game where healers should be working co-operatively to keep a raid alive, I find that absorbs actively diminish the effectiveness of Shaman mastery. The more absorb classes we have in a group, the less useful we become. Other healers don't really have this issue or they don't feel it as keenly. As soon as our Disc Priest is gone my healing practically doubles. Obviously there's more to topping meters and we are good spot/clutch healers, but in Mythic content it's generally not recommended to let people stay low or sub-50% health for very long. There's always high damage going out.

I do think our mastery needs a rework. I like the concept of Deep Healing but currently the way healing works (as it has always worked really) is that we strive to prevent Deep Healing from being necessary, we don't want people to be on low HP for long and often it is necessary to top people off quickly, despite all that Blizzard have said about changing that. It's not that easy to change the way healing works in this game and obviously we don't want to be bored or healing at too slow a pace either, we like to be quick on our feet as well and react to challenging situations.

On the other hand no other healer has the same kind of mastery we do and that makes Shamans more unique, maybe niche in that regard. I wouldn't want us to lose anything that makes us unique, I don't want to be a clone of a Resto Druid or another healer but I do want raid leaders to always be able to say "yes, we definitely need a Shaman for this" and for us to not feel like other healers can do what we do, but better and more efficiently. We will definitely need a little help, especially if all the fights in BRF are high movement/spread out fights. Not talking massive buffs of doom, but something to make quality of life a bit better.

[Deleted]

so basically u would like to good on meters...

to be honest we are at this moment on great spot, while we dont top meters when everything is great, once shit hit fan we are best healers in raid. Thats just awesome.

[Ilfayt]

Hmm, I wonder if they could do something to 'preserve' the current style of Resto mastery, but add a secondary effect for when people are fuller on health, akin to how Elemental's mastery now does '2 things'. In this case it'd be the current effect(maybe a little weaker to compensate an 'added' effect)+a new idea. Not sure what it could be, I don't play resto Shamans myself, but I've been looking into them for a while(I want to try it out and my main guild has a resto shammy who struggles to keep up), so I know the 'issue' but not familiar with what could be a decent solution.

[Deleted]

so basically u would like to good on meters...

to be honest we are at this moment on great spot, while we dont top meters when everything is great, once shit hit fan we are best healers in raid. Thats just awesome.

I don't think so... Yeah we have great CDs to compensate some fails, but in Mythic mode fails mostly lead to a retry due to massive manaloss or a waste of CD.
There are some fights where Resto-shamans have a hard time, not particular struggling to keep up, but times when our present skills dont fit well.

On the other hand no other healer has the same kind of mastery we do and that makes Shamans more unique

Mastery is making us unique? I don't think so. What makes a class unique is the playstyle in general not a single function or stat. Just my opinion.

I wonder if they could do something to 'preserve' the current style of Resto mastery, but add a secondary effect for when people are fuller on health

Hm, that cannot be called deep healing anymore^^.

Overall I don't think Deep Healing will work as a good Mastery anytime soon. Therefore it's just too situational to make a proper use of it.

[Vraull]

Rsham mastery is fine as is.

[Orcbert]

I haven't had trouble at all with my raid's healing. I'm the shaman healer and our cooldowns and mastery are invaluable. The paladin tops the heals and is a good work horse for keeping people topped up but a shaman is a great glue healer. We keep things together and patch up dicey moments. Combined with an absorb healer (I love healing with disc) we are even more powerful. I think the toolkit for shamans is in a good place, but perhaps we could have a slight bump up in the numbers department.

The mastery really works into this play style and I don't want to see it changed. It's unique and not some static flat healing stat (like mastery is for a lot of people). It's powerful enough to really help progression and you can simply start to gem and enchant out of it when your guild starts making easy work of everything.

As for your proc-based heal, I would much rather have our guaranteed healing. What you suggested could be frustrating when it's not proccing much and useless on heavy spread fights.

[Deleted]

As for your proc-based heal, I would much rather have our guaranteed healing. What you suggested could be frustrating when it's not proccing much and useless on heavy spread fights.

It shouldn't be a procc-based system. There should be a 100% triggerchance by every direct-target Healspell. The Mastery shoould just scale with the healing done by the aftereffect.

Combined with an absorb healer (I love healing with disc) we are even more powerful.

Not really. A good equipped Disc and Healpala do nearly all the work in Heroic/Nonheroic. Mystic Content leaves the People with ~50% hp so our Mastery is still not effective. And keeping the people topped is kinda mandatory in mystic, cause nearly every ability will kill you when you have around 40-50% hp.
A Druid is more effectiv in most situations.

[Orcbert]

Not really. A good equipped Disc and Healpala do nearly all the work in Heroic/Nonheroic. Mystic Content leaves the People with ~50% hp so our Mastery is still not effective. And keeping the people topped is kinda mandatory in mystic, cause nearly every ability will kill you when you have around 40-50% hp.
A Druid is more effectiv in most situations.

You're thinking about it like a competition instead of a team effort here. Yes, absorbs are 100% healing and do really well on the heals as there will never be overabsorbing, but playing with a disc priest lets them shield a target after they take a chunk of damage and then you can heal them up with more benefit from your mastery while they are still in a safe effective health zone.

Yes you want to keep people topped off as much as possible but taking damage is built into the encounters and will happen. The bigger the hit the more a shaman is helpful.

[Deleted]

There are enough HoTs in the game and we don't need more AoE healing. Our mastery is great for the job we are best at, sniping people who are low and delivering strong healing when the raid takes excessive amounts of damage.

It would be nice to see our mastery on meters/logs though, to get a better picture of how much of our healing is contributed to the stat.

That's how i've always felt about shaman mastery. Awesome at keeping people alive, bad at useless meter whoring. One could argue that the smart healing nerf has hit shaman the hardest because they'd get a direct numerical benefit from always healing the lowest targets. Plus it is kind of their role (in a perfect raiding world); other healers can top players off, shamans make sure that the player lives to see the next heals.

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as there will never be overabsorbing,

Of course there is overabsorbing. It's just not labeled and treated as such. Every shield that drops or is not 100% used up is overabsorbing, just like overhealing. You paid mana for it but gained no benefit.
It takes a while to realize that it was overabsorbing, instead of getting the instamt response o overhealing, but after the shield has dropped it's just the same.

[kvanslam]

Hmm, I wonder if they could do something to 'preserve' the current style of Resto mastery, but add a secondary effect for when people are fuller on health, akin to how Elemental's mastery now does '2 things'. In this case it'd be the current effect(maybe a little weaker to compensate an 'added' effect)+a new idea

I would love to see more interplay with the player's health percentage. Below a certain % our deep healing kicks in, but above that percentage our heals could be more utility oriented, like adding duration to the current DoT or increasing the absorb amount from another player (or bring back something like ancestral vigor above that percentage). I think this would preserve our "when the s*** hits the fan" model while buffing our healing to people consistently being topped off (which is the majority of the time).

[looorg]

I guess they could "fix" our mastery or they could just change the order of heal vs absorb. As it is now absorb comes first. Make health comes first and absorb last, which I guess would make absorb almost useless since it would only prevent death as if in if you have no hitpoints to subtract then you take some aborbpoints instead. A better version might be to take a split of absorb and health instead of just one or the other.

That said tho I do find it horrible annoying to watch like warcraftlogs and see that me and the paladin heals for almost the same amount, and then he gets another ~15% of free absorb ontop of his healing for not doing anything. No more button pushes or anything. It's just free. It's turning into a pet peeve of mine.

But then logwise being a shaman is a b*tch, previously the free healthbuff (a.vig) we had didn't count. Spiritlink totem does nothing or negative healing according to the logs -- ideally it should do nothing since it should take away as much as it gives back since it redistributes hp. But from logs it seems like it's always a negative impact; ok it's only -0.xx something so it's not big but it's still negative. The dmg reduction isn't, and can't easily, be counted either.

It's that or I would love to see a secondary effect of our mastery; such as turning overhealing into something. Overhealing on a target splashing out (like water to keep with the theme) from targets for X yards and hitting nearby targets. I guess you could have a cascade effects or limit the amount of jumps. But that might make it a smartheal and blizzard currently hates that ... for shamans.

[Illiterate]

That would be 100% useless in pvp.

[Lothrik]

It would be nice if there was some sort of alternate component that kicked in when a target is at high health. Perhaps apply a HoT similar to what Earthliving used to do, but have the proc chance scale non-linearly with target health and mastery percentage. Definitely not necessary though, our mastery serves its purpose just fine.

[Alltat]

Resto mastery is fine in dungeons and in heroic/mythic raids. Yes, it's garbage in LFR and normal mode farm runs, but the game shouldn't be balanced around that.


If people aren't taking enough damage for our mastery to do much, the content is so easy that it doesn't matter what our mastery is anyway.