Restoration Guide to MoP

[Deleted]

Sorry I've been so silent in the shaman forums around here, I have been playing around with loads of numbers *juggling with numbers*.

Following Therya's new number formula's, I've been looking a bit more into crit then spirit and ignoring mastery completly with my current gear.

Currently non-buffed, I am on 5.5k spirit, 17.37% haste (5005), 50.95% mastery (I can't go lower) and 21.71% crit. Now that amount of spirit might shock you, but combined with Horridon's trinket, the crit providing is actually good enough that I don't oom myself, with the exception of Twin Consorts where I oom myself too fast.

Note that my findings are from a 25 man pov. This is also with 2 other resto shamans and a disc priest with mana restores, where I am also using mana potions, spirit flask and spirit food, giving me a total of 7k spirit buffed.

Throughput wise, it's an insane amount higher. Crit scores and the numbers providing it is not fluxated with the health a person has, like our mastery. What I've seen is that our mastery doesn't shine at all, yet we still gear and aim to get 45-50% mastery, something I do not see working if it doesn't work at all. So why not change the priority from mastery to crit?

This is what I've been trying. My amount of spirit is drastically low as I wanted to test it out, but even with 6800 spirit, I am still able to normally heal and even better. My rotation was in no way different. My glyphs were Glyph of Cleansing Waters, Glyph of Water Shield and Glyph of Healing Stream. I barely used the Totemic Recall, which I could use to save even more mana.

Crit is definetly a stat being overlooked here, I got the feeling. I will not claim that you should all swap to crit, but if you notice that your heals are lacking, try swapping out mastery for crit, without loosing spirit. This can work for both 10 and 25 man and especially in combination with the 4 piece. Each crit has a 20% chance to proc AA (from HS, HW, GHW and the initial burst of RT) and the 50% chance from non-crit is huge. With crit, the AA procs will be even higher.

If you feel adventerous, try it and post it.

P.S.: reason for 5000 haste is that I do need a good amount of haste to comfortable heal, but I had not enough to go for 5676.

Do you raid heroic mode? I guess its just different styles or healing but Im running with about 12k spirit unbuffed and 17% crit and im almost running out of mana for some fights (like horridon hc 25- we 5 man heal it)

[Puupi]

I've been flagging for crit based gear for some time (as most of you have probably noticed) and it works just great in 10 mans. I'm testing some spirit+haste+mastery combination now though, worked fine on Durumu HC yesterday atleast. I enjoy having higher amounts of haste and with crit stacking it isn't really possible. That's why I'm doing these tests. Higher haste values makes your healing more responsive and reliable, but at the cost of mana regeneration.

The so-called "big thing" here is that the secondary stats shammies have are roughly equal; all combinations of stats are good enough to get the job done. With the exception of stacking haste+mastery and minimizing crit+spirit you will have mana problems, but other than that, everything works.

@Schadow:
I'm a bit sceptical about the reasoning for going as low as 5000 spirit in 25 man raiding. You can do that for 10 mans if you can sustain your own mana like that, but in 25 mans your Mana Tide Totem is a pretty big key utility, there are 4-5 other healers as well. If I remember right, you get an average of "17% extra" from spirit due to Mana Tide. If you have 6 healers in your raid, that's 6*17% which is roughly 100% of your spirit. If you go with 5k spirit instead of , say 15k, your 25man raid has 10k less spirit due to your gem/reforge choices. I don't think it's worth it to gimp your raid that much for personal little preference.

[Schadow]

Do you raid heroic mode? I guess its just different styles or healing but Im running with about 12k spirit unbuffed and 17% crit and im almost running out of mana for some fights (like horridon hc 25- we 5 man heal it)

At the moment, no, not yet, so this is purely 25 man normal (11/12 currently). I can't speak for the heroic community, simply as I am not there yet. But there are also a lot of shamans out there who are also only at normal.

@Puupi: the thing is, even in 25-man, it will be worthwhile. The thing is that people think we bring mana tide. While that may be true, it should be seen like a priest's hymn, it's extra, but you can't really depend on it other then as a shaman. And they don't, a druid has innervate, a monk has mana tea, a paladin has Divine Plea and for priest, I do not know. If the druid casts innervate on him or herself, they regain 10% more mana.

While I also said that it's not wise to go 5k spirit due to that fact, I'd say about 8-9k is at least a comfortable amount (although I believe it will be close to 11k with ToT 522 gear), the 5k was more for number testing with haste and crit. You mention a haste+mastery combo and even though I do not know how problematic Durumu HC is, if it deals even more damage during colorblind phase, then I can see that work, especially in combination with either Ascendence or Healing Tide.

But that would require us having two gear sets. Now that is normally not a problem, for example a heavy mastery gear set for megaera, haste and mastery for durumu and, say, spirit+crit for twin consorts, but there should be some kind of middle way where you can go at least on average for those that can't.

12k spirit unbuffed and 17% crit is where I'm starting to get sceptical though, I do not see any possible way that you go oom like that unless you use Healing Surge Oo

[Puupi]

I have raided with 10,5k spirit and 28% crit unbuffed, yet still ooming. In 10mans you really can oom, and most of the encounters will make you oom or atleast close to oom. You just can't sit at 50-100% mana for the whole fight, the HPS requirements make sure of that.

As I said earlier, all of the secondary stats are pretty equal. So it doesn't really matter what stats you have, you will end up in the same mana situation and same HPS anyway, if you don't overheal a ton. This is for 10 mans.

In 25 mans you can generally slack with the healing to regenerate mana, and you will overheal a lot more, too. In 10 mans you can't slack with the healing usually, you need to be healing all the time to keep people up.

[Biggety]

@Puupi: the thing is, even in 25-man, it will be worthwhile. The thing is that people think we bring mana tide. While that may be true, it should be seen like a priest's hymn, it's extra, but you can't really depend on it other then as a shaman. And they don't, a druid has innervate, a monk has mana tea, a paladin has Divine Plea and for priest, I do not know. If the druid casts innervate on him or herself, they regain 10% more mana.

Except that Mana Tide is not like those abilities. All of the abilities you list restore a flat percentage of the caster's maximum mana. Mana Tide restores a percentage of the Shaman's spirit. Meaning, it is the only mana regen ability that scales with gear and scales for the whole raid based on the shaman's gear. In 10-mans that's not a big deal. In 25 mans, it should be. If you sacrifice throughput stats in order to significantly increase the mana regen for 4-5 other healers, they can provide greater healing.

It's kind of a crappy niche, but it is a niche.

[Schadow]

I have raided with 10,5k spirit and 28% crit unbuffed, yet still ooming. In 10mans you really can oom, and most of the encounters will make you oom or atleast close to oom. You just can't sit at 50-100% mana for the whole fight, the HPS requirements make sure of that.

As I said earlier, all of the secondary stats are pretty equal. So it doesn't really matter what stats you have, you will end up in the same mana situation and same HPS anyway, if you don't overheal a ton. This is for 10 mans.

In 25 mans you can generally slack with the healing to regenerate mana, and you will overheal a lot more, too. In 10 mans you can't slack with the healing usually, you need to be healing all the time to keep people up.

I won't start a war between 10 and 25-man healing, although I will agree it's a far different rotation, but there is no slacking involved in either. But I'll also say I can not speak for the 10-man community.

The thing is is that Chain Heal can be used far more often in a 25-man enviroment. Combined with crit, each heal of it can crit and each crit restores mana. This alone makes crit a bit more efficient to look at, considering that mastery is far less of a stat as you heal with 4 other healers (as a minimum). This is more on a feeling level though then raw numbers, so I won't go too deep into it.

Regarding the 5k spirit and mana tide, I mentioned that it was just to juggle with numbers as my gear was based on mastery. I won't advice it at all and I'm going back towards the 10k spirit as I know about the niche of mana tide. So stop biting me there. Regarding those spells, you're right. For each tick of Mana Tide, we give 3x the spirit of the spirit we have.

[Puupi]

My point wasn't to start a 25 vs 10 war. But you do have 5-6 healers in 25 man, one healer can easily just stop casting for a while to regenerate mana. If you do that in 10 man when you are 2 healing, it's just not possible.

[Deleted]

In 25 man, it's always going to be more beneficial to fuel the other healers with mana tide than it is to increase your own personal healing by x amount. Unless we were purely outhealing every other class, there's no point sacrificing a huge amount of spirit for a few stats that won't even have a great effect on our throughput.

I'm sat at around 20k spirit at the moment with food and flask, thats 40k for my other healers during tide.

[Hoptam]

I would like to ask a question about HTT and haste buffs - are the ticks dinamicaly updated with haste buffs or I need to use say Berserking before droping HTT. Currently have the macro with HTT on first line and Berserking second so wanted to know if I had it wrong till now or it basicly doesnt matter :-)

[Deleted]

It's dynamic, your macro is fine.

[Xarganthos]

just a quick question, which boots are better for resto? (raiding 10m normalmode) the crafted boots with 2 red sockets or the ones from jinrokh?

[Aviators]

I am finding with the legendary meta, glyph of riptide is becoming more and more useful.

[Tiberria]

just a quick question, which boots are better for resto? (raiding 10m normalmode) the crafted boots with 2 red sockets or the ones from jinrokh?

The crafted boots are significantly better than the NM version of the Jin'rokh boots. You could argue that they beat the heroic version as well (if your goal is stacking max spirit).

[Deleted]

Hello everyone. Just leveled a restor shaman, and I immediately encountered a lot of things that other healer classes that I've played didn't have. For starters - all the healing I'm doing is VERY small. Like 2-3 % with great healing wave. Even less with just a normal healing wave. With this I'm forced to spam heal to everyone, but doing so drains my mana even on trash (sometimes I can't even heal out the trash, and we die, lol). On bosses it's usually at 80 % of his health I'm without mana already. This is kinda depressing, because I need to get this shaman ready for 25m raids, but obviously I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? Or perhaps what am I not doing.

[Deleted]

It's hard to tell what you're doing wrong if you don't provide logs or your armory profile.
(Although if you're going oom so fast you're probably doing something wrong)

For starters - all the healing I'm doing is VERY small. Like 2-3 % with great healing wave.

2-3% of what ? (Plus, what content are you talking about ? 5 man, lfr , 10m normal ?)
If it's 2-3% of your target health, that's not normal. Your GHW should heal for > 50k normal, > 100k crit, that's 10-25% of the target health.
If it's 2-3% of your total healing done, that's not that strange. Totems + Riptide + Healing Rain are going to be a big part of your healing. Often the contribution from direct heals is small compared to the time you spend casting them. (And yes, this isn't very rewarding...)

[Deleted]

wich stat good for 10 man hc? I have 50% mastery,16k spirit,13% crit and 7613 haste now. Mastery or Crit better? Spirit or Intellect good for 10man hc?

[Xarganthos]

is the 3764 haste breakpoint still bugged or has it been fixed?

[Cedlina]

wich stat good for 10 man hc? I have 50% mastery,16k spirit,13% crit and 7613 haste now. Mastery or Crit better? Spirit or Intellect good for 10man hc?

is it worth going for 7613 breakpoint in 10 man? i dont think so (playing 25 man tho), i would go with 3764 haste 50% mastery then crit, or full crit (never tried this, seems interesting)

[Deleted]

Full crit is nice in 10 man : awesome regen (often > 200k mana gained from resurgence during a fight), and it has a good synergy with your single target heals (which you're probably using a lot).
Although if you've got T15 4 pieces bonus, then crit is a bit devalued throughput wise (it remains just as good for mana).
Unfortunately I don't have a high enough ilvl to go to 7613 while keeping enough regen to sustain it, so I haven't tested yet. But I'm pretty sure going full crit after ~30% is not that interesting, and it's probably better to gear for haste after this point (which happens around 510-520 ilvl).

You might want to read what Puupi said about this breakpoint in this post.

[TenDance]

How do you reach 30% crit with 510 ilvl? Do you gem straight for it, pure yellow critgems? I had the impression that diminishing returns devalue critrating if you reach nearly 20%. I do geem for crit, but green gems with spirit. Imho manatide is, as sad as it seems, still a raidbuff which I'm responsible for. So I'm sitting at 12k spirit.