Mastery is the way in 4.1?

[ikno]

For the Shamans who have a 'special role' in world-first guilds
Spirit > Intellect > Haste > Crit > Mastery

why the quote around special role?

[Seriss]

I dunno. Blizzard's definition of triage still isn't really there. If you consider triage to be healing people who are closer to dying over people who aren't, then sure that exists, but it's always been that way for as long as I've been healing.

The triage GC talked about with leaving people at half health and conserving mana doesn't exist and probably never will. The whole "bigger health pools means you don't have to top people off" thing was a complete lie. I still feel like GC pulled that whole blog post out of his ass without even looking at what the raid encounter team was doing. I want to see him kill any raid boss in this tier without healing anyone past 50%. lol.

The triage model that GC described only applies to very few situations, I feel. For example, when Nef does his every-10% AoE people will need to be at full health, but afterwards, it's time to allow the HoTs to do their job until the next big AoE. That's for raid healers there only though. Tanks need to be spammed till kingdom come. My poor mana

Or take Cho'gall. Raid damage in p1 will occur when the shadow add is consumed. After that, raid damage will not occur, allowing HoTs to tick for ages, as the next add will be a fire add, causing just tank damage. I see many people try to spam heal the raid when 2 HRs and a WG would do the job for relatively little mana.

But other than those sort of gimmicky scripted damage events, we struggle to top people off. Because no matter what Blizz said about healing becoming less spammy and taking your time to top people off, decision-making on spells, etc... it all comes down to button-smashing all over again, and if my tank is low and the other healer has a dc, I will spam-heal Healing Surge instead of the wiser GHW because I need to deliver fast and cannot afford the GCD for a RT (happened last night during Nef hero tries... I swear the re-kill is harder than the first kill -.-)

If anything, healing became more spammy than ever, I feel. Even when someone is at 95%, I will cast healing wave, I will keep riptide on CD, I won't stop healing, because if I do, people drop lower. And pushing them back up with the massive damage spikes that are common in current content, is just crazy what with heals not being big enough or fast enough (if I have 2 GCDs, I can boost my GHW to be big and fast, but... hey, seriously, the moment that I NEED that huge heal, I won't have those GCDs to spare... So here we go, NS, work your feeble magic -.-)

I think I'll go and mess around with my gear again. Grab more mastery. It dropped a bit after I changed a few things around. (For a while, I was at 13.37 mastery and am now down to 12. I'll see how much I can get out of it while maintaining at least 15% crit unbuffed. That'll be 20% raidbuffed then... should be okay... but I'll just try it. I like trying. I like messing with my gear.)

[Alltat]

Int>Spirit>Haste>Crit>Mastery

I cant wait for ppl to go down belove %80 hp or something like that I prefer to keep them above %80 with mah heals since I can manage my regen.

If that's the case, does it even matter what stats you go for? Mastery isn't there so you can wait until people are low before throwing super-efficient heals. It's there because people will drop to low health quickly, and you'll get a boost to your healing when you need it the most.

The mastery -> haste -> mastery -> haste cycle seems a bit silly to me, as I see no real reason to gear for farm content when you could be preparing for the next actual challenge. Farm content is farm content; it's the stuff you can already handle. I guess it might apply when you have all the hardmodes currently in the game on farm status and are waiting for the next content patch, but how many people can honestly say that they are at that point?

[Tronada]

why the quote around special role?

Means that they are only brought to be Mana Tide bots.

If you see in the Ensidia screenshot from today's news on front page, you can see Mek's earthliving in the scrolling battle text.
- Mek has stopped healing before when Shamans were struggling and holding back progress, see Ulduar HM. I'd guess that Mek is not playing a 'special role'.

[Hypernetic]

Means that they are only brought to be Mana Tide bots.

If you see in the Ensidia screenshot from today's news on front page, you can see Mek's earthliving in the scrolling battle text.
- Mek has stopped healing before when Shamans were struggling and holding back progress, see Ulduar HM. I'd guess that Mek is not playing a 'special role'.

Isn't he the guy who, at the end of ToC, said Resto was worthless and switched to Ele? =/

[fragglerocker]

Isn't he the guy who, at the end of ToC, said Resto was worthless and switched to Ele? =/

I think so Hyper.

[Tiggol]

Someone asked this before but I dont think it was addressed, will this be the case in 10 mans as well? I was also curious what the go to tank heal is, GHW or HS? I've just been using HS primarily because im geared towards crit/haste atm, and the 55% crit chance on HS has seemed like a better choice with the mana gains and the fairly constant crits, if I were to switch to mastery I assume this would change to GHW.
(I apologize for the ramblings, I was in a rush while typing this)

[Whoopsa]

Someone asked this before but I dont think it was addressed, will this be the case in 10 mans as well? I was also curious what the go to tank heal is, GHW or HS? I've just been using HS primarily because im geared towards crit/haste atm, and the 55% crit chance on HS has seemed like a better choice with the mana gains and the fairly constant crits, if I were to switch to mastery I assume this would change to GHW.
(I apologize for the ramblings, I was in a rush while typing this)

The main reason why mastery was undervalued in 10 man was expressly BECAUSE it didn't affect ES/RT HoT/ELW. With that being changed, I'd expect mastery to perform quite well in 10 mans now. I'm not sure if it will be on par with Crit for 10 man, but definitely better than Haste.

[Jynus]

Someone asked this before but I dont think it was addressed, will this be the case in 10 mans as well? I was also curious what the go to tank heal is, GHW or HS? I've just been using HS primarily because im geared towards crit/haste atm, and the 55% crit chance on HS has seemed like a better choice with the mana gains and the fairly constant crits, if I were to switch to mastery I assume this would change to GHW.
(I apologize for the ramblings, I was in a rush while typing this)

GHW is still better....

[Hypernetic]

Someone asked this before but I dont think it was addressed, will this be the case in 10 mans as well? I was also curious what the go to tank heal is, GHW or HS? I've just been using HS primarily because im geared towards crit/haste atm, and the 55% crit chance on HS has seemed like a better choice with the mana gains and the fairly constant crits, if I were to switch to mastery I assume this would change to GHW.
(I apologize for the ramblings, I was in a rush while typing this)

Even with crit GHW is better, GHW has a 100% chance to return mana on crit whereas HS only has 60%. GHW is also more HPM.

Haste or mastery is kind of a preference thing IMO. They are both good. I prefer mastery even for tank healing. I rarely have those "FUCK .1 seconds left on cast when the tank died" moments, tank damage isn't THAT bursty. When they do go low mastery is definitely helpful.

I've found that in most 10m fights you are rarely just healing a tank and nothing else, the mastery helps you raid heal too even if you are just throwing down healing rains.

[Gistwiki]

Just a heads up, it looks like Mastery will indeed boost Healing Stream Totem in 4.1.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6328/hst1.jpg
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/6254/hst2.jpg

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267584057 - Source

That'll be a rather large boost too.

[Agallochh]

Just a heads up, it looks like Mastery will indeed boost Healing Stream Totem in 4.1.

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6328/hst1.jpg
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/6254/hst2.jpg

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267584057 - Source

That'll be a rather large boost too.

Hot diggity damn! So excited about this. Fire and Forget spell benefiting from our mastery. OHHHHH YEAH!

[Tendae]

The reason mastery is preferred over haste most of the times is because the raid boss damage, and healing itself has changed a lot. In WotLK, most of the time you found yourself in need of snipehealing someone, thus causing you to stack loads of haste to get your casts as fast as possible. Right now, the fights are not like that, most of the time at least. Someone won't go down in an instant (unless it's from their personal failure which causes them to be pretty much oneshot), which also means that you won't need as fast heals either. Also, since healthpools are a lot bigger compared to the healing done of spells, one big, slower heal is a lot better than a few weak, faster ones, due to being less of a hindrance of to your mana.

Mastery just happens to have one very strong reason to be stacked: It makes your healing done extremely "smart": Chain heal already jumps to weakest target on health, but with mastery in it, that target will also be healed the most. It also turns healing rain to smart spell, due to increased healing to most wounded. The only problem, tho, is that we still are not quite there where other healers are, mostly due to the fact they seem to like to keep us as a druid (HoTs) and paladin (burst healing) fusion, that doesn't really excel at either. I'd love to see the devs to just pick one of em, and enhance that more, while keeping the other there but kinda as a bonus really.