[Resto] 50% Mastery, True or False?

[Drarim]

(This is regarding shammies not stacking mastery of course)

What's the deal with this magic number? At the start of the expac it seemed mandatory. Is it still the case?
FYI currently my stats are Haste 7613(break point)>Mastery 50%>Crit rest of the way.

[midgetsj]

People just like that because it feels good. You can have 35% mastery and still be just as effective as 50%. This raid you cant avoid mastery, even if you reforge out of it you still will be sitting at 50%. I run my spirit around 12k. Id recommend reforging out of spirit until your pretty close to that, then reforge the rest out of mastery. Should give you 25% crit or so.

[Soisoisoi]

Last I heard it was pretty pointless. You'll get to a point where you can't stay at 50% with your gear, and Mastery is blegh thanks to Absorbs anyway.

[Deleted]

There was never such a thing as a 50% mastery magic number. It was a widespread misconception concieved by some high-end players. It hung around until the addon that actually calculated raw healing your secondary stats give you proved mastery is 3 to 4 times worse than crit is. (name of the addon is Resto Shaman Stats)

The truth is, your "base" mastery will always be, give or take, 40%, even if you avoid mastery on every single piece of gear, you still have your mastery aura, base mastery and pandaren step enchant. On the other hand, with Rushing Streams talent, with the new nature of Healing Rain, your mastery isn't that far behind crit, so you still want highest ilvl pieces, even if there is mastery on them.

[Tiberria]

The 50% mastery "breakpoint" nonsense is something that was posted on Noxxic or something at one point back in T14 and has just been repeated erroneously as fact since then. Mastery is totally linear and means exactly what it says on the character sheet. 50% mastery means 50% more healing on a 1% HP target, with that 50% scaling down proportionately at higher HP levels. 45% mastery means 45% extra healing on a 1% HP target, etc. If Crit is better than Mastery for you based on the HP% of the targets you are healing, it doesn't matter if your current Mastery is 20% or 200%, Crit will still be > Mastery

Back in T14, you also didn't necessarily automatically have 50% mastery because of the lower item levels, so some people who bought into the myth would try to gear around 50% mastery like it was a haste breakpoint. At SoO ilevels, it is almost impossible to get below 50% mastery in the first place.

Even with the Rushing Streams talent and the Healing Rain mechanics change, I am still seeing Mastery come in SIGNIFICANTLY below Crit, even on heroic progression encounters. Whenever I have run the RSS addon to profile it, Crit comes in 2 to 5 times better than Mastery. This is the case even on fights like H Norushen and H Thok which you would expect to be highly Mastery favorable fights. I just can't see any justification for doing anything but avoiding Mastery like the plague.

[Shockeye]

Yeah, the "breakpoint" of 50% Mastery comes out of indecision masquerading as certainty mixed with the fact that you're going to end up with 40-50% Mastery just from your gear itemisation regardless of whether it is intentional or not.

It's good to have Mastery, it comes in handy, but there's no need to stack it as by far it is our weakest stat.

[Deleted]

I've also posted about it previously in the stickied thread:

The "50% mastery softcap is good" myth stems from very early MoP, back when most of us were half blue/half epic and were finishing up normals of t14/working on heroics. Back then in 5.0 the following was true:

• I'm assuming around 475 ilvl for most of these (aka start of heroics)
• Haste was horrible, most people were going for 871+AS. Spirit was also a very meaningful stat, which left us with a priority of Spi>Crit>Mastery, because you couldn't avoid those mastery items while keeping haste low. This automatically resulted in ~50% mastery. The ToT haste (and arguably 10 man spirit req) "revolution" is mostly fuelled by the presence of LMG.
• Class balance: Disc PoH spammage wasn't great until 5.1, and even then a lot of them were actually constrained by their stats, low ilvl disc priests were bad. Same with pallies, the current EF blanketing playstyle simply didn't exist, because they couldn't sustain so much HR spam for HP.
• Because of the above, absorbs weren't as present during progression. Which lead to most guides written at the start of the expansion to have a positive/neutral opinion on mastery.
• While mastery became bad during T14HC farm, we still couldn't switch to other secondary stats because 7613+AS was really hard to attain, so most people just continued on with cri>mst for next tier progression.
• Most proactive community members finished ToT progression before LMGs became readily available.

[Seriss]

People just like that because it feels good. You can have 35% mastery and still be just as effective as 50%. This raid you cant avoid mastery, even if you reforge out of it you still will be sitting at 50%. I run my spirit around 12k. Id recommend reforging out of spirit until your pretty close to that, then reforge the rest out of mastery. Should give you 25% crit or so.

Actually, you can't have 35% mastery. You will always have a minimum of 39% mastery if you have no additional mastery on your gear, enchants or sockets.

[hofoacviw]

On the topic of resto stats, with the amp trinket is it better to gem pure crit or int is still better?