Tips for our Resto Shaman?

[Dangerpaws]

Hello Shaman!

Our raid has recently had a healer quit, so one of our DPS is going back to heal on his Shaman. As a fellow healer, I'd love for this transition to be as smooth as possible. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about Resto Shaman healing, so I was wondering if you excellent fellows wouldn't mind briefly going through our logs to provide tips/pointers. Thanks in advance!


Our latest logs:

warcraftlogs. com/reports/BN7cDbJgRQ2ZpfCq

Apologies but I can't post functional links, so I left a space in the URL. Shaman to look out for is Dovdrek. I suppose Blast Furnace and Kromog would be the best fights to analyse? From what I can see, some cooldown usage could be better (e.g. Ascendance), with maybe higher uptime on Ele Blast (what's a good benchmark uptime anyway?) and Healing Stream Totem? Not sure what else I should be looking for.

[Alltat]

Clickable link

From what I can see, some cooldown usage could be better (e.g. Ascendance)...

Indeed. His cooldown use is okay, but it could be better. Looking at Blast Furnace, he didn't use Healing Tide until 03:09 and didn't use Ascendance until 04:49. On Kromog he saved Ascendance until 03:16 and didn't use Spirit Link Totem until 03:53. On Iron Maidens he didn't use any cooldowns at all until 06:43. Overall he's got the 'often' part down of the old "early and often" saying, but he needs to get better at the 'early' part. Even if there's not that much to actually heal early on, you're not losing anything by popping a cooldown since it'll be up again by the time it's needed, and HTT and Asc are extremely mana efficient and can save your whole healing team some much-needed mana.

...with maybe higher uptime on Ele Blast (what's a good benchmark uptime anyway?) and Healing Stream Totem?

- Earth Shield: should be >99%, which he isn't even close to. I'd recommend using an addon like WeakAuras to track it.
- Healing Stream Totem: theoretical maximum is 50%, but 40% is a more realistic figure. If it's below 25%, he's wasting half of the casts.
- Elemental Blast: should be >30% if mana is a concern on that fight. Doesn't matter on easy fights, but you don't learn if you don't do it.
- Healing Rain: hard to check and dependent on the fight, but you can plot its healing done and look for gaps. It should be up anytime you're stacking.
- Ghost Wolf: the lower the better, but <2%. Unleash Life grants the same speed boost, so Ghost Wolf is only for emergencies.

Not sure what else I should be looking for.

Active time is usually interesting to look at. A lot of healers aren't really used to healing while moving, causing their performance to plummet on mobile fights. As a veteran DPS player he seems to have that down, but he can still get better at making use of Spiritwalker's Grace. Paired with Ascendance it can be almost as powerful as Healing Tide Totem on stuff like Blackhand's phase one demolitions. SWG+Asc on one, HTT on the other.


Judging by the logs, I also recommend that he gets rid of Glyph of Riptide. It's not a bad glyph if you're an experienced healer, but if you're new then it just makes life difficult and reduces the amount of healing you do. The initial heal of Riptide has excellent synergy with mastery and heals for quite a lot (think 4k HPS). Looking at his Riptide casts and how many targets his Chain Heal hits, he's failing utterly at making use of the glyph, and would be much better off if he got rid of it and just cast Riptide on cooldown. Overall he'd perform better if he used (unglyphed) Riptide and Chain Heal more, and Healing Wave less.

[Dangerpaws]

Oooh, thanks for the advice!

Indeed. His cooldown use is okay, but it could be better. Looking at Blast Furnace, he didn't use Healing Tide until 03:09 and didn't use Ascendance until 04:49. On Kromog he saved Ascendance until 03:16 and didn't use Spirit Link Totem until 03:53.

To be fair to him, it was our first Blast Furnace kill after like 4 proper attempts, so we weren't very settled on the healer CD usage relative to fight length. He was assigned to drop HTT right after transition to P2, so he was probably saving it in case we didn't actually botch P1 again. No reason not to use Ascendance though, especially as I was burning a bit more mana than necessary at that point keeping our group up.

- Earth Shield: should be >99%, which he isn't even close to. I'd recommend using an addon like WeakAuras to track it.
- Healing Stream Totem: theoretical maximum is 50%, but 40% is a more realistic figure. If it's below 25%, he's wasting half of the casts.
- Elemental Blast: should be >30% if mana is a concern on that fight. Doesn't matter on easy fights, but you don't learn if you don't do it.
- Healing Rain: hard to check and dependent on the fight, but you can plot its healing done and look for gaps. It should be up anytime you're stacking.
- Ghost Wolf: the lower the better, but <2%. Unleash Life grants the same speed boost, so Ghost Wolf is only for emergencies.

Looking at HR usage, it seems low and with no casts in P2. I'm not familiar with the minimum number of players necessary for it to be worth casting though. With our group having 5 melee, would you keep it up at all times on the Elementalists during P2?

[The Yeti]

Looking at HR usage, it seems low and with no casts in P2. I'm not familiar with the minimum number of players necessary for it to be worth casting though. With our group having 5 melee, would you keep it up at all times on the Elementalists during P2?

Is your whole raid not stacked on the elementalists that you are targeting, other than when you are debuffed? HR should always be used on the elementalists during this phase for that reason alone.

[lavaburstandstuff]

I think his cooldown usage on kromog is ok, but he should rely more on chain heals and less on healing surge and healing wave. Also tell him to track riptide and HST in tellmewhen or weakauras and pop it whenever it's not on cooldown. Tidal waves uptime (66.25%) is really low, so more riptides and chainheals is a way to go. Since he has 4p he will actually save more mana that way than spamming healing waves.
Looking on blackhand wipes - again, extremly low amount of chainheals, extremly low uptime of tidal waves. Fix that and he will perform much better on every encounter.