(Another) Resto shaman in need of advice, logs included

[Deleted]

Hello, I'm new to the mmo forums and fairly new to WoD, but trying to pick up the most fun spec and class once again - resto shaman, as the title hints. I've healed since late BC and extensively throughout WotLK, mainly HC 10s. I barely touched Cata and skipped MoP, so things have changed considerably as far as healing goes.

The group I'm running with is fairly small and our roster has been slightly unstable, ranging from 11-15 people, and our regular healing setup has been Hpal Rdruid Rshaman or Rdruid 2xRshaman. Some fights go better than others, but it seems I very seldom top meters, which is why I'm hoping for advice from some more seasoned shamans.

I feel like I should be able to push my throughput with my current ilvl, but at the same time overuse of CH can drain my mana pretty quickly. I've got 2 tier pieces and managed to pick up heroic chewtoy last reset, so I'll have to see how that affects my longevity this week. One thing I know that I should improve is SLT use and probably CD usage in general, as well - this largely comes down to knowledge about fight length and proper timing, and I'm currently working on that. In order to try to maximize HST, RT and HR uptime I've recently picked up TellMeWhen, and I really like it as I run with it near the center of my screen and also use it to track my longer cooldowns.

I'm guessing that providing further details on my playstyle won't help much at this stage, so here comes the links to armory and logs.

I can't post functional links yet, sorry for that, I had to include an extra space before the . net / com.

Armory: eu.battle. net/wow/en/character/stormscale/Vuduka/advanced

Logs: warcraftlogs. com/reports/fghpa7T9JR3V8XDn#boss=-2

Any advice on where and what to improve would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

[Alltat]

Armory looks fine. Gems, enchants, talents, and glyphs are all fine. You could switch some of the talents around for specific fights, but the ones you're using right now are good enough for anything.


Looking at the logs, the biggest thing you can improve is cooldown use. You should be using both Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem on every fight, and should be able to get two uses out of at least one of them if a fight lasts 4-5 minutes. On longer fights like Beastlord and Maidens, you should be getting three uses of each of them. Use your cooldowns early and often. Even if you don't need the healing to keep people alive, HTT and Asc are both good for conserving mana. You could also use Astral Shift and Spirit Link Totem a lot more to mitigate more incoming damage.

Your uptimes can also be improved. Earth Shield and Healing Stream Totem aren't terrible, but should ideally be much higher. Your uptime of the Elemental Blast is also very low on some fights. You only cast it 11 times in 10 minutes on Maidens, which explains why you ran out of mana in the last phase. With more consistent EB use, you would have entered that phase with ~70% mana and would have had enough to last the entire phase.

On the topic of mana, I see you're only using channeled mana potions. As you've probably noticed, they're not very useful on all fights, and you got interrupted while channeling a couple of times. Always bring a stack of regular potions too, and use them on less channel-friendly fights. They're also good on all those fights where you're not really expecting to go OOM but things go wrong and you have to salvage it, like on that week's Gruul kill.


Other than that, it looks good.

[Deleted]

Looking at the logs, the biggest thing you can improve is cooldown use. You should be using both Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem on every fight, and should be able to get two uses out of at least one of them if a fight lasts 4-5 minutes. On longer fights like Beastlord and Maidens, you should be getting three uses of each of them. Use your cooldowns early and often. Even if you don't need the healing to keep people alive, HTT and Asc are both good for conserving mana. You could also use Astral Shift and Spirit Link Totem a lot more to mitigate more incoming damage.

This is something I'm actively trying to improve on, you're right on the money. I'm kind of getting used to the fights and the fight lengths, having a clearer picture of how long the fights are and when damage spikes can be expected is probably the only solid way to make the most out of all cooldowns. Upping Astral Shift usage is a good point, that's something I really tend to forget on some fights. Going to add it to my TMW.

Your uptimes can also be improved. Earth Shield and Healing Stream Totem aren't terrible, but should ideally be much higher. Your uptime of the Elemental Blast is also very low on some fights. You only cast it 11 times in 10 minutes on Maidens, which explains why you ran out of mana in the last phase. With more consistent EB use, you would have entered that phase with ~70% mana and would have had enough to last the entire phase.

I strive to refresh ES before it drops off or when I have a free GCD/during movement, but in general it's pretty low on my priority list. HST I try to maximize, is there any convenient way to see its uptime from logs? Or do I have to check every boss fight separately and divide the number of casts by fight length?

On fights where mana generally is an issue I try to cast EB off cooldown. I had a look at some Maiden fights, and noticed I don't have that many extra EB casts on some other kills where I finished with extra mana, even though the fight lengths were pretty similar (+/- 30 sec). I can only assume some other things went south that particular fight, too. We're currently trying to progress on hc BF, and I cast EB whenever I can there it's one big clusterfrock right now, and healing has never been tighter. EB is golden, though, as long as there are GCDs free. Do you know if people with high ilvl (690 and higher) have enough regen through spirit and 4p-bonus to completely skip EB? I've been curious about that, since it seems mana becomes much less of an issue with 4p - depending on RNG, of course.

Oh, and I do have normal mana pots on me, too - but just to check, you can only use either one during a fight, right? I have never tried to use both during one fight, I've only assumed that I need to pick one. And as long as I get more than 7 sec out of the Channeled pot it should beat a regular pot. There are opportunities for that on most fights as long as I communicate with the other healers, unless I screw something up.

Thanks for the feedback, back to the workshop and try to get things right

[Alltat]

I strive to refresh ES before it drops off or when I have a free GCD/during movement, but in general it's pretty low on my priority list. HST I try to maximize, is there any convenient way to see its uptime from logs? Or do I have to check every boss fight separately and divide the number of casts by fight length?

It's under the "buffs" tab. Set it to "cast by friendly" in the top left corner of that window, then set the source as yourself. Scroll down to the "Healing Buffs" section and it should be in the list. The number of casts and the total uptime should be listed. The graph isn't very useful when looking at multiple fights, but if you look at individual fights you can see when it was and wasn't up. Good for figuring out if your uptimes are low because you're slow to cast it or because you're forgetting about it for an extended time at some point.

Worth noting however is that Warcraft Logs (like World of Logs) doesn't do well with buffs that are up from before the pull that never fall off. A perfect 100% uptime of Earth Shield tends to be registered as 0%, as the parser doesn't see the buff being applied or expiring. WL claims my ES uptime for this week's farm night was only 48%, because I had full uptime on four fights and those got registered as 0%.

Do you know if people with high ilvl (690 and higher) have enough regen through spirit and 4p-bonus to completely skip EB? I've been curious about that, since it seems mana becomes much less of an issue with 4p - depending on RNG, of course.

At 689 I still need EB, but you can start getting rid of some spirit jewelry. The difference isn't huge, though; going from BRF normal to mythic items, there's about 30% more spirit. It's going to take at least another tier before that adds up to enough that you can drop EB as a result. Even then, it comes down to whether the extra stats you can get from using non-spirit gear is better or worse than the benefits of switching to Primal Elementalist.

Oh, and I do have normal mana pots on me, too - but just to check, you can only use either one during a fight, right? I have never tried to use both during one fight, I've only assumed that I need to pick one. And as long as I get more than 7 sec out of the Channeled pot it should beat a regular pot. There are opportunities for that on most fights as long as I communicate with the other healers, unless I screw something up.

Yes, you can only use one of them. I just mentioned it because you got interrupted a few times and the regular mana potions are more reliable and don't require you to take a nap.

[Gardiff]

You can give up EB (and I do for a few fights) but the alternatives are generally garbage and so there isn't much of a point. You can argue the healing buff is nice from the elementals and its true, but you can also argue gearing around less spirit for fights and keeping EB more than makes up for it. Its the same principle by autoclave is useful. Not because we need the spirit but rather because it lets you use more haste / mastery necks / rings / cloaks. Not to mention the 500 secondary stat point, while random, is not garbage.

That and you will want to keep a spirit set for mythic furnace if you ever plan on getting there. That's really it though.

[Deleted]

Thanks to both of you for your valuable input!

Raidnight tonight, going to try and squeeze in more CDs on all the fights. Would you say there's any merit to using Glyph of Chaining on Hans&Franz when raiding with a small group (<15 players), as people tend to stay somewhat spread out during stamping/lava plate phases? I don't like HR much on that fight, since it's mostly applicable during the phases when there is little to no damage going out, and when/if dropped during stamping phases people are not likely to stay in it for long. RT and HST seem to be boss on that fight, and naturally HTT and Ascendance. SLT also seems to be nice for Supplex.

Got any advice for progressing on hc BF? Or is it better to adress these issues in the Raids&Dungeons forum?

As always greatful for tips & advice,

Vuduka

[Alltat]

Would you say there's any merit to using Glyph of Chaining on Hans&Franz when raiding with a small group (<15 players), as people tend to stay somewhat spread out during stamping/lava plate phases?

I haven't tried it, but it seems like a decent idea. Much of the fight is spent standing still for 2-3 seconds, then running, then standing still again. Seems like you the only thing you really lose out on is that you can't spam Chain Heal during Spiritwalker's Grace, meaning you won't be able to get quite as much out of Ascendance.

Got any advice for progressing on hc BF? Or is it better to adress these issues in the Raids&Dungeons forum?

You might get more general advice there, but for restoration shaman specific stuff, there were two things I found useful:
- You can mitigate a lot of damage in phase one by interrupting stuff, and a lot of damage in phase two with Capacitor Totem. Just don't use stuns in phase one, or you'll interrupt the engineers' Bomb cast and screw up the timing of the whole fight. You can also mess with the adds in phase three, but that phase isn't really a problem on heroic anyway (it felt more challenging on normal).
- The cooldown scheme I found worked best was to use Ascendance during each of the three phases, and Healing Tide during the transitions. There's a lot of damage just as you switch phases, before all the old "leftover" adds are dead. Using Ascendance early will let you conserve some mana while still having it up again for later. You can also use Spirit Link early on to save some mana, or just dropping it on Blasts in general, as the only time it gets to shine is just as you've transitioned into phase three and everyone is stacked up with very varying health.

[Deleted]

I haven't tried it, but it seems like a decent idea. Much of the fight is spent standing still for 2-3 seconds, then running, then standing still again. Seems like you the only thing you really lose out on is that you can't spam Chain Heal during Spiritwalker's Grace, meaning you won't be able to get quite as much out of Ascendance.


You might get more general advice there, but for restoration shaman specific stuff, there were two things I found useful:
- You can mitigate a lot of damage in phase one by interrupting stuff, and a lot of damage in phase two with Capacitor Totem. Just don't use stuns in phase one, or you'll interrupt the engineers' Bomb cast and screw up the timing of the whole fight. You can also mess with the adds in phase three, but that phase isn't really a problem on heroic anyway (it felt more challenging on normal).
- The cooldown scheme I found worked best was to use Ascendance during each of the three phases, and Healing Tide during the transitions. There's a lot of damage just as you switch phases, before all the old "leftover" adds are dead. Using Ascendance early will let you conserve some mana while still having it up again for later. You can also use Spirit Link early on to save some mana, or just dropping it on Blasts in general, as the only time it gets to shine is just as you've transitioned into phase three and everyone is stacked up with very varying health.

That's some excellent BF advice, I'll certainly try to bake that into my gameplay. I was actually dropping Capacitor during P1 a lot during our progression runs, since tank damage was, at times, VERY spiky and Cap totem seemed to mellow it down a bit. The cooldown usage tips are also good to have, because I've pretty much gone with gut feeling and dropped HTT on transitions/in P2, and used SLT to mitigate P1 damage and again on P2 for blasts. I'll probably do some /target and /focus interrupt macros for P2, too, since it's really harsh on mana if that phase drags out due to lack of interrupts on the heals going out. But in general it's a pretty chaotic fight to progress on, until you learn the fight well enough to assert control over the numerous adds and burst phases.

Anyway, on to raiding. Thanks a heap, this is really helpful!