Wondering where / how our guild's resto shaman can improve

[Crimpingblow]

Hi everyone!

I've received a large amount of help personally over on the rogue forums, and now I'm here wondering how our guild's resto shaman is performing and where he can improve. To start with, http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...wsurmom/simple is a link to his armory page, and https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...A#type=healing is a link to some of our pulls on Iskar last night. You should be able to see our raid two nights ago here https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...9&type=healing

Basically, I'm not super familiar with resto shamans, but he is consistently far behind our other healers including fights where our strategies seem to be perfect for resto shaman (stack method on Sorcrethar seems like it would be amazing for Healing Rain). I'm curious as to whether there are any things I can suggest him to change in order to perform better.

[Koor]

He doesn't have any set bonuses plus he's undergeared compared to some of your other healers. For example he has 690 weapon while one of your druids has a 715 weapon plus 4-set. This obliviously hurts his performance. He not only looses the set bonus itself, but also his high tide chain heals are less efficient due to having less riptides around.

Socrethar isn't that amazing for healing rain as it seems. True most of the raid is stacked, but those with the gift move out, therefore a substantial part of the healing is to spread targets. Plus the dispells are a significant mana drain. On Socrethar he was out of mana mid fight, and he didn't use elemental blast at all for the 1000 spirit buff. On some encounters there was good use of elemental blast. This is something to work on -- even when healing gets hectic, he needs to remember to weave in elemental blast otherwise he'll be out of mana at the end.

[Crimpingblow]

Thanks for the reply man! Like I said before, I'm not really super aware of all things shaman (play rogue, dk, monk and paladin) so I figured I'd post here for help. Outside of not weaving Elemental Blast for the 1000 spirit buff, does anything else stand out as things that are being done wrong / should be done differently? For instance I can usually look at another rogues logs and see their uptimes on things like SnD, Rupture, how often they're using their cooldowns etc. and make suggestions based on that information. I know that healing is a wholly different beast than dps and changes on a fight to fight basis, but as far as uptimes of different buffs (if any) and priority of healing spells (Surge vs Chain Heal for example) does everything there look correct?

Thanks!

[Deleted]

Looking at this breakdown of your Iskar kill - he's playing a shaman like it's a paladin.

He casted 35 healing surges and 40 healing waves in a 7 minute fight - that's 75 direct heals (and 35 of those being extremely mana intensive ones). He only cast 23 chain heals, which should be his bread and butter. And it's not like he was spamming the tanks due to poor healing by other healers on them, his #1 target for healing surges was your fury warrior.

Basically, he needs to cast a LOT more chain heals as compared to healing waves and (especially) healing surges. There's specific situations for those heals, but he's grossly overusing them. If he's going to cast 98 hard casted heals (healing surge, healing wave, chain heal) ... chain heal should generally be the vast majority of those.

If he gets more comfortable using chain heal in most of the cases where he's using healing surge or healing wave, he'll see his throughput go way up. He's got decent usage of his riptide and healing rain (not perfect, but manageable) ... he's just got to think like a shaman and not a paladin. Direct heals are used only when absolutely necessary (or when only one target is taking damage, which is rare in raids). Chain heal FTW.

[Koor]

Those 35 healing surges had an average overheal of only 6.74% though. With such a low overheal it seems they were needed.
This was also a small raid (13 players), there were less opportunities for chain heal to jump compared to big raids.

[Crimpingblow]

Thanks guys for the new responses! With regards to the Iskar fight, we were short on healers that night (short on everyone honestly, normally have ~20 raiders) so it's possible that he was panic healing like that? There are logs available from the night before Iskar that show his performance on a normal basis (normal group composition). I know that with neither t17 nor t18, he's missing out on a lot of bonuses to his chain heal / riptide throughput. Even with these factors, is it still overall better for him to use chain heal in most situations?

EDIT: Here is a link to the aforementioned log of the previous raid night. This should give a better picture of his playstyle, as it shows our normal raid comp and normal healing setup.

[Shockeye]

I've had a hard time bouncing from Chain Heal spam being king, to single target heals in a Healing Rain with HST being better, back to Chain Heal. I honestly hate spamming Chain Heal, it feels so... half-assed... to do so. When CH is the stronger option over HS, then really, CH becomes the go-to and not a choice at all, which is dumb. I like to keep all three primary healing spells in the mix, just in order to not fall into the CH spambot mode.

[Kelsierx]

I've had a hard time bouncing from Chain Heal spam being king, to single target heals in a Healing Rain with HST being better, back to Chain Heal. I honestly hate spamming Chain Heal, it feels so... half-assed... to do so. When CH is the stronger option over HS, then really, CH becomes the go-to and not a choice at all, which is dumb. I like to keep all three primary healing spells in the mix, just in order to not fall into the CH spambot mode.

Yeah I actually like how 6.2 has worked out for resto. Just spamming CH the whole time is kind of monotonous.

I'm loving how much more of a role riptide is playing.

[Koor]

EDIT: Here is a link to the aforementioned log of the previous raid night. This should give a better picture of his playstyle, as it shows our normal raid comp and normal healing setup.

This is the mana graph for the night:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ss=-2&source=1

On council (7:14 min encounter), he was OOM at 5:00.
On Gorefiend (7:03 min encounter), he was OOM at 4:30
On Socrethar (6:25 min), he was OOM at 4:00

This is the highest priority issue to fix in my opinion. He needs to plan his mana so it'll last the entire fight, not start too aggressively with healing surges etc, then be OOM later on (e.g. the spirits on gorefiend, he used healing surges on them -- it's OK if they aren't healed to full, even if they are just healed to 70%, they will get out with 30% and DPS can finish them outside with execute bonuses).

A big part of getting OOM is not using elemental blast, he didn't cast any on that night.

He could use cooldowns more often, for example on Socrethar and Council, he used healing tide totem only once. Even if not strictly needed for their healing, cooldowns help to save mana since he (and other healers) can cast less while the cooldown is active.

On that night chain heal did about 18% of his healing overall (3rd place), with healing surge 2.82%, so that's a bit more "normal" log. Healing wave being top is indeed somewhat strange, but part of it could be just that he was OOM and couldn't afford to cast anything else.

Looking at chain heal, he casted 186 times with 730 hits, so it's an average of 3.92 hits per chain heal. This is somewhat low, but should improve with the 4-set.

[Forsedar]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...aling&source=2

This is the breakdown of my abilities, though its on a fight we were learning so I was being QUITE reserved with cooldowns in order to see how long we can last without me trying to pump them out.

Chain Heal is my #1 by a large margin and my direct healing with Healing Surge and Healing Wave is very minimal. Just tell him to play Resto like its MoP.

[Deleted]

This is the breakdown of my abilities, though its on a fight we were learning so I was being QUITE reserved with cooldowns in order to see how long we can last without me trying to pump them out.

Chain Heal is my #1 by a large margin and my direct healing with Healing Surge and Healing Wave is very minimal. Just tell him to play Resto like its MoP.

Not sure if a mythic council is compareable to the average heroic fight with its very high constant damage while your always stacked up.

Honestly there's a lot of stuff going wrong, so much that it's kind a hard to tell what the major points are (if that makes sense)
- Use more chain heals
- Healing Tide usage could be a lot more efficient. Check out where you need to use them and if that would give time for additional healing tides.
- He just seems to overheal a lot in general? Not sure if he's just slow in responding to damage.
- Low riptide casts wich probably is the reason of the low amount that chain heal bounces as well. Try to riptide more or otherwise use glyph of chaining to have short term fix for the chain heal bounces.
- Like someone else already mentioned, he's having mana issues at some fights, He never used a single Elemental Blast during the whole raid while he is specced for it.
- 0 Unleash life, use this for speed buffs or when you have to move to heal + buff the next heal
- Hardly any damaging spells, during downtime just throw on some more flame shock -> lava bursts
- 1 healthstone used

Some are not that impactful but they all add up, not trying to BM the shaman but he has a lot to fix

[Deleted]

Looks like he is bad keeping riptides up, makeing his chain heal lower aswell, he is not using his cooldowns when best mastery kicks in.
Also his Links are very bad.

it seems like he does not have much knowledge of shaman healing. Making the most out of our mastery is very important and since he has over 90% he should use it better.

Also he has 30-50% overheal. with that i can only guess is he to slow on healing targets.