Mastery or haste resto druid

[Iamtheway]

To the OP

Check it out yourself, look at your meters and what spells you are using. I agree with myyarr or w/e. The more rejuvs you cast, the less you need haste. but if you are also doing ALOT of direct healing, you will want those spells to go off as fast as possible. If you balance your rejuvs with your direct healing(yay cast time reduc to nourish), haste will even itself out and you can stack haste and mastery evenly.

You are a smart druid, look at what you are doing and determine for yourself what you need to do

[praide]

With 4.0.6 ive been going Intellect > Haste to the next breakpoint > Mastery > Haste > Crit

^^ this. Keep in mind raid buffs. As folks have pointed out, it partially depends on your role but a side note to that would be, it depends on how you and the other healers in your raid heal.

[frostybeef]

Whats the ideal numbers I should be heading for regarding intellect / spirit?
I have some gear reforged from mastery to spirit. My mana seems ok at the moment, so would you recommend putting the spirit back to mastery then..
All of my gems are intellect as far as i can remember unless required for a decent socket bonus and meta gem.

You should stack intellect. There is no cap you should aim for or point at which it passes other stats, int is the best stat for resto druids. With spirit it's a bit more fuzzy. In general I'd aim to get enough haste to reach the 2k wild growth break point and then from there try to maximize your spirit. Unfortunately there are very few pieces that have both haste and spirit on them, so you will need to reforge around a lot. As a general rule of thumb for reforging always reforge your crit first, any haste over break points second and then mastery. After a while you will get a feel for whether or not you need more spirit, from there you can reforge as needed.

With gemming, default to +40 int gems. If you get 20+ int from using a single purple or orange gem then go for it. If you need to reach a breakpoint then use +20 int and +20 haste in your yellow sockets (but ONLY if it will get you to a breakpoint).

[Dariela]

I've been going Int > Spirit > Haste > Mastery > Crit. When I am happy with my spirit I'll stop, but so far I still want more.

The real issues I see is haste is always good, while mastery is only good sometimes. Haste will increase your thruput in every situation. It will allow a spell to land fast enough to save somebody that is going to be hit again soon. It always makes hots tick faster, regardless of break points. It lowers the GCD of our other instants. It will make you breakfast in bed and rub your feet while you eat.

Mastery increases thruput in limited situations (although not at the cost of our precious mana). It will do nothing to help me tag someone with a quick heal that is going to die elsewise. It only increases hot healing when you have already hit them with a hot. It requires a lot more micro-management. Sure, your tank heals will hit harder, and if you have time to pre-hot your target it will add to a lot of healing, but in any situation where you need to be quick or reactive, haste is the clear winner every time.

It is one of those cases where theorycraft is not realistic. Sure, I can come up with plenty of math sims that say mastery is really strong. The issue is those are rarely realistic models. In the real world (of warcraft) things are rarely so cut and dry. I don't find myself in those perfect situations where I can have a hot on all my healing targets all the time. Most of the time people get a WG or a rejuv, and I let the shaman chain heal them for the rest (or whatever they do now). No mastery there. The haste allowed my hots to tick faster, and allowed me to put out more spells. In those situations, every point of mastery may as well have been agi.

Mastery isn't bad, but it certainly isn't the steady, secure power that we know as haste. It's certainly better then crit, but I'm not ready to give up my consistent speed for situational power

[Deleted]

Blizzard is creating items in the way so You can beat the appropriate content level in it. (talking mostly about tier items now)
That said, I dont think blizzard creates one single tier item that they "expect" will not be used by anyone.
In that spirit I guess there is a reason behind socket colors, for socket bonuses, for this item having this stat and that item that stat.

If You look at t11 set pieces..
396 crit rating haste in total
337 haste rating in total
377 mastery rating in total

I believe low haste is there to compensate for the haste we are getting from leather other stuff (belt, boots).
Crit and mastery are pretty equal on other items we use (wrists, neck, rings..)
However watch the crit rating there..396 crit rating says that blizzard actually thinks crit is more useful for resto druids then mastery. Its just from pure numbers..i dont actually agree with that statement, but thats what it looks like.
Reforge is introduced into the game, but I dont think blizzard is optimalizing and developing items counting that their stats will EVERY resto druid reforge. They would just create the item in default looking as the previous reforged.

So maybe its not about haste being better then mastery..thats just pure fact (until you reach caps ofc) but its more about mastery or crit? I know that changes for 10 men / 25 men..but its something to think about..

[emni]

I disagree. Last night I reforged everything so that mastery was a priority. I've been assigned to tank healing lately as we're using one resto druid for raid heals, and one for tank heals. I heal the main tank. ALL of my direct heals landed under 6% of my overall healing. Wild growth, Rejuv, and Lifebloom were the top 3, and accounted for at least 65% of my healing. All of my other heals, SM, Efflo, HT, Nourish, Regrowth made up the other 35%. The only fight in BWD I did any good on was Maloriak, and it was the AOE dmg that got me 2nd on the meters. All the rest of the fights I was last.

Why do people keep using meters as some kind of measurement of how good they are? Just because you were 2nd doesn't mean you were doing better than usual, it might also mean the other healers screwed up.

[krebul]

In my experience, in raid healing in 25m crit is an amazing stat. I have ~20% crit self buffed and about 1290 haste self buffed. My mastery is only around 12%. Now, I've read on EJ that after you've gotten your additional rejuv tick, crit is the best throughput stat for rejuv. I do excellent healing output in our raids.

Regarding our raid makeup, I am very lucky to be the only resto druid, and we have two warlocks. Since druids are the obvious ideal class for Dark Intent, they both give the buff to me, which stacks on the haste portion of the buff . After the shadow priest haste buff, I have about 22.5% haste.

When raid healing in 25 man, you are not going to be receiving a whole lot of benefit from your mastery. Reforge mastery to get enough haste for an extra rejuv tick, and keep the natural crit on your gear. I know all raid setups are not the same, but I am fortunate enough to have dual Dark Intent buffs on me which is probably giving me enough haste for an extra tick on everything up to Wildgrowth (not 100% sure on this though).

When we run our 10 mans, I keep the same setup, although I know I could probably squeeze out a bit more throughput if I reforged some crit to mastery. In general, don't ignore crit. It is a phenomenal boost to Rejuvination healing.

[Cerelli]

you will have the added WG tick, which IMO is a lot more beneficial than added crit rating. with the reduced CD on WG and increased healing we got in the last patch it is a huge spell for our raid healing. luckily enough for you, you can get that tick through clever use of raid buffs. most people will only get 1 DI buff if they are lucky and will need to cover the additional haste on their own.

[Myrrar]

EJ does not say Crit > Mastery the more you RJ. They may have debated it looking at the numbers, but by number crunchers they say mastery is best for hots between caps if you aren't direct healing.

If you are in 25 man not getting a lot of benefit from your mastery you are playing wrong. You need to learn to time up your Rjs, Wgs, and efflors to get the most out of mastery.

One of your locks needs to be putting that haste buff on your spriest, you're just hurting your raid by hogging both. If you have one and the 5% you need 1574 haste, 21.5%.

[krebul]

EJ does not say Crit > Mastery the more you RJ. They may have debated it looking at the numbers, but by number crunchers they say mastery is best for hots between caps if you aren't direct healing.

I didn't say crit is overall better than mastery if you rejuv more. I said crit is the best throughput stat for the spell rejuv. Subtle but important distinction there. I did not do any number crunching myself, but I am just taking EJ's word for it. I got this from the following quote on EJ druid forum

Due to its greater itemization cost and weak bonus, crit adds significantly less throughput than haste for all spells besides Rejuvenation).

I basically interpreted that as, if you are going to be using rejuv a lot on people without hots on them (i.e. raid healing in 25 mans), then crit should not be ignored.

If you are in 25 man not getting a lot of benefit from your mastery you are playing wrong. You need to learn to time up your Rjs, Wgs, and efflors to get the most out of mastery.

There is really no way (or at least I don't know of a way) to know how much of your healing is being affected by Mastery. In 10 man, its pretty fair to assume that the vast majority of your healing will. WG first, and then Rejuv on the targets that have WG up is not rocket science, and is pretty easy to do in 10 mans. 25 man is a different ball game. I try as much as I can to Rejuv targets with WG on them, but there are often many more people who are in need of a heal besides the targets that WG landed on. It is very frequent in 25 mans that you just have to heal people with no hots on them. After a fight is over, I really don't know how much of my healing actually benefited from mastery because 25 man is much harder to double up hots than 10 man.

Last night HM Halfus was the first heroic my guild has killled, and I was at 19k HPS for the beginning of the fight, and finished the fight at 14k after the damage subsided in the later phase. I don't think I'm playing wrong.

One of your locks needs to be putting that haste buff on your spriest, you're just hurting your raid by hogging both. If you have one and the 5% you need 1574 haste, 21.5%.

It's not that I'm hogging the buffs. The locks are putting the buff on me not because I'm asking for it, but because resto druid is the only one who will reliably keep their 9% damage buff. Its not my fault if spriest can't keep it up permanently like druids can (If they can, then our locks don't know it). But I can certainly enjoy the benefit from it.

[Myrrar]

EJ: The only time it mentions anything about crit and RJ is "Due to its greater itemization cost and weak bonus, crit adds significantly less throughput than haste for all spells besides Rejuvenation)." That does not mean crit is the best RJ stat. It's saying haste always > crit, unless you RJ a lot because haste between break points is pointless. It's not even talking about crit.

Mastery isn't a throughput per spell stat. It's a general throughput spell. Mastery still > crit for raid healing.

Logs and meters has nothing to do with playing correctly. There are druids who use a lot of mastery doing 19-20hps at the finish on heroic Half. Pre-patch, if 30% of your heals or more were effected by mastery mastery >crit. Meaning if you are using RJ and WG and effloring groups that's a very easy amount to achieve. After that patch, mastery is even better, you don't want to stack mastery or fully ignore crit, but when reforging and you don't have a haste cap to hit, Mastery > crit in every situation.

Spriests can keep the buff up with a significant dps increase, tell one of them to stick it on him.

[krebul]

I will try your advice tonight. I have been reforging mastery to haste to reach my break points. I will undo that and try doing crit to haste. Also, thanks for the 1574 number, as I didn't know how much haste I needed to get the extra WG tick with only one DI.

[Myrrar]

I will try your advice tonight. I have been reforging mastery to haste to reach my break points. I will undo that and try doing crit to haste. Also, thanks for the 1574 number, as I didn't know how much haste I needed to get the extra WG tick with only one DI.

Tbh, if you can't hit the WG cap without both wait to tell them to switch one. Just work towards only having one so you can add some dps to your raid. Don't screw yourself though by not being able to hit that cap =]