resto shaman healing in BoT tonight

[zshikara]

Hey, I just wanted to share an experience I had last night before I went to work (I am at work now) on my resto shammy in BoT.

We only managed to do the first two bosses (of which valiona and theralion we were unable to down in the 3 attempts I was able to attend for tonight due to my limited time), but I got a good dose of healing time in the "hardest" raid currently available (reg of course).

I consistently held 11K HPS on Halfus, and 10.5K on valiona and theralion putting me in first place on the healing charts above an equally geared resto druid and holy pally.

Now look at my gear and stat arrangement before commenting please. My character is listed in my sig. I stack a mastery heavy build with my gear as I believe its the most effective way for a resto shaman to heal (even before the buff we got to our mastery).

I get told off and called a noob for offering this advice on the official forums, so I hope this community will provide some better feedback. I admit I am not the most experienced raider in this expansion, but I have been raiding since BC.

So basically what I want out of this post is what you think about mastery > crit or whatever else you might think a resto shaman should stack. I have posted a detailed guide a while back on this forum, but I'll recap the basics here:

I went for 916 haste (I am at 940 currently)
2K spirit (I am at 2460 before buffs and flasks)
I specced into the passive 3% crit bonus from ele (I have 14% crit with a +5% almost guaranteed to be in the raid with me)
I have 1250 mastery (increases direct heals by up to 45%)


I am not claiming to be the best resto shaman ever, quite the contrary; if I did I wouldn't bother posting here.

TL;DR: I strongly support and practice stacking mastery as the most important stat as a resto shammy. Discuss.

[Dersoe]

No idea, i don't do PvE alot I find myself OOMing alot in baradin hold though, so more spirit would be the logical response for me. No idea on high tier raids.

[Iamlampard]

haste(soft cap) for extra tick on dots and crit for ancestral healing/awakening are two priority. then mastery...
yes excluding int/spirit here. just looking at equip bonuses

mastery is good that we heal more on low hp target but its so situational, heavily stacking mastery would be yeah not so good.

[Thaendra]

I felt that before the patch, mastery was NOT a good stat as resto. Why? I mean overall. For some specific fights, such as Nefarian, people consistently get low enough for the mastery to really shine .. other than that, there really weren't many fights where I'd personally take mastery over haste or a form of regen (crit and/or spirit). People often like to refer to fights such as Chimaeron, but mastery is entirely useless (aside from during feud) if your small heals already put people over 10k.
That is before the patch though. Maybe I will get more chance to test now, but because of the buff mastery might end up pulling ahead... still, I think at this point most people aren't geared enough to forgo the regen stats just yet. And I mean the real regen stats - not healing throughput - I realize that it saves mana to use one healing wave instead of two, but this is assuming you use the appropriate spell for the person's HP level to begin with. An exception to this might be shamans who regularly tank heal on hard-hitting bosses and are therefore regularly getting the benefit of their mastery.

[Corysi]

The patch only increased the benefit gained from Mastery by .5% per point. Before the patch, Mastery provided around the same gains as Crit did except it didn't proc AW or Water Shield. After the patch, Mastery provides around the same gains as Crit + .5%.

In addition to that, you will be primarily raid healing/topping people off. You won't see the full gains of the stat unless the people you are grouped with are incredibly bad and taking large amounts of damage. Right now, even in hard modes, Mastery can't compete with other stats.

[Deleted]

I'll say again what I've said before; Mastery is really only worth going for over crit if you find yourself in the situation of people dying because you can't keep up, rather than the situation where people die because you go out of mana. This is pretty rare unless you're raiding very high end heroic encounters.

Also, mastery was buffed to be 20% more effective. .5% may not sound like much when you say it like that, but when it was 2.5% to begin with it's pretty huge.

[PHILIP1193]

I did write a log post about this, but firefox crashed and lost it grrr.

Anyway attempt two...

Mastery is a stat that has is most useful when healing people below 50% health, it also is slightly better than crit because of it scaled healing effect on those people will below 50% health. That said, in normal dungeons and especially as your guild progresses and your healers heal for more and your tanks take less damage due to better gear, you will find your self healing in the 50-100% health bracket more and more.

Unfortunately mastery does not work that well in this health zone and crit becomes your best friend again.

While i agree a lot of people have been avoiding mastery, more and more are starting to stack it, i think your stacking it possibly a bit too much and are neglecting other important stats, given the raiding type your doing.

Crit for normal is probably going to still be the king for now till heroic level raiding where by mastery and to some extent haste will become better again (hello haste from wolk), your currently at 14% crit unbuffed which is quite low, what you should look at doing is stacking more crit which will also help you regen mana via tallents which in return will help you heal for more and you can cast more spells due to more mana available. Try getting to 20% crit unbuffed with about 30-35% mastery and i think you'll find your HPS will increase even more.

If nothing else, give it a go?

[darkhybridx]

Was this 10m or 25m? If it was 10 man and your healing with a pally/druid then you shouldn't be in first (unless this was after the hotfix, then I haven't been able to look at the numbers). You should be 3rd behind them on the 2nd boss, maybe 2nd on halfus.

This doesn't mean your badass, it means that they're not up to par or you have lots of overhealing. A resto druid will own on 10 mans and a paly should out heal you on any fight where tanks take a lot of the damage.

In our 10m BoT full clear this week we had a sham/paly/druid setup and I ended the raid with a HPS of around 8k. Pally and druid were both around 10k. ( we had 2 wipes on Cho'gal and one one the dragons). I could have pulled 10-11k if i wanted to, but there was no reason. A pally will have a easier time keeping the tank up and if a toon has druid hots rolling on it you don't need to GWH them to 100%.

As far as mastery goes it's really not that great of a stat. However, if your crit is about as good as you can get with gear and you don't have mana problems then it does help. On fights like council phase 3 mastery does help a lot, same for phase 2 cho'gal. But if you have any sort of mana issues then spi/crit would be a better stat. The haste cap is easy to get to with even heroic 5 man gear, but more can't hurt.

[zshikara]

Was this 10m or 25m? If it was 10 man and your healing with a pally/druid then you shouldn't be in first (unless this was after the hotfix, then I haven't been able to look at the numbers). You should be 3rd behind them on the 2nd boss, maybe 2nd on halfus.

This doesn't mean your badass, it means that they're not up to par or you have lots of overhealing. A resto druid will own on 10 mans and a paly should out heal you on any fight where tanks take a lot of the damage.

In our 10m BoT full clear this week we had a sham/paly/druid setup and I ended the raid with a HPS of around 8k. Pally and druid were both around 10k. ( we had 2 wipes on Cho'gal and one one the dragons). I could have pulled 10-11k if i wanted to, but there was no reason. A pally will have a easier time keeping the tank up and if a toon has druid hots rolling on it you don't need to GWH them to 100%.

As far as mastery goes it's really not that great of a stat. However, if your crit is about as good as you can get with gear and you don't have mana problems then it does help. On fights like council phase 3 mastery does help a lot, same for phase 2 cho'gal. But if you have any sort of mana issues then spi/crit would be a better stat. The haste cap is easy to get to with even heroic 5 man gear, but more can't hurt.

to answer your questions:

This was 10 man. I haven't done any 25 man situations at all since cata went live.

I did not have any overhealing except for riptide hot and elw hot (and some with healing rain).

The way I heal is I deliberately take advantage of my mastery. The most I will ever heal someone who is over 90% health is a riptide if noone else needs it and healing wave (the small cheap slow one, I think its called healing wave now and not lesser? I can't log in right now as my laptop at work can't support wow to find out. lol I feel like a noob not knowing the names of my own core abilities XD) which basically means I can't run oom in situations like that very easily. Maybe its my playstyle that makes mastery such a good stat, but I never really have mana issues unless someone messed something up. Now I did used to have issues before I adjusted to the new style of healing, but not really anymore.

[PHILIP1193]

to answer your questions:

This was 10 man. I haven't done any 25 man situations at all since cata went live.

I did not have any overhealing except for riptide hot and elw hot (and some with healing rain).

The way I heal is I deliberately take advantage of my mastery. The most I will ever heal someone who is over 90% health is a riptide if noone else needs it and healing wave (the small cheap slow one, I think its called healing wave now and not lesser? I can't log in right now as my laptop at work can't support wow to find out. lol I feel like a noob not knowing the names of my own core abilities XD) which basically means I can't run oom in situations like that very easily. Maybe its my playstyle that makes mastery such a good stat, but I never really have mana issues unless someone messed something up. Now I did used to have issues before I adjusted to the new style of healing, but not really anymore.

Presuming you currently have the 'new' buff to purification in place on your server, then what your saying is fine in principle.

My concern is how good your druid and pally are at healing, even with our new buff, paladins are still OP to us. My other concern is how much raid damage your guild is taking.

The only way to really help you is to run a world of logs report for your next raid night and post it up here, so we can see your spells, how much you use them and compare it against other people in your guild.

At the moment every thing we tell you is subjective to the way your guild as a whole is handling fights.

Phil