My idea for a new Resto Mastery

[JudgePayne]

I have been reading a lot of blogs and people on the forums who complain about the current resto shaman mastery and it's viability in both 10 and 25 man raiding. I believe that in 25 man raiding the mastery has good potential and serves as a good healing buffer when people get low.

But in comparison to other healer masteries which are viable in both 10 and 25 man I think ours might need a revamp.

That being said I have taken into consideration all the points raised from shaman blog sites and popular shamans from top guilds combining them with points raised on the offical wow forums and here on mmo champion, to create this new mastery.

** Numbers below are purely placeholder but the concept is what were discussing **

Deep Healing: Causes your overhealing to create a HOT on the lowest life ally within 15 yards of the person healed for X % of the heal, the Hot lasts for 4 seconds.

Numbers below are placeholder ofc and the formula can be changed but using
this means the mastery scales as the players level up and the Hot themselves
only last 4 seconds.

X = ( ( Flat Number * (Mastery_Amount*.05)) / (playerLvL) )

75000 = ( ( 30000 * (4500*.05)) / (90) )

Would love to hear feedback on this.
thanks

** Edited the mastery from a absorb to a hot, a Smaller riptide spell

[Ize]

As much as I would love us to get an absorb mechanic and hate our mastery as it is, i think i would prefer the game removing other asborbs (expect PW:S) and getting back to more actual healing rather then keep ppl shielded...

[Kyuuseishu]

I think the game needs less absorb mechanics than more :P It is a good idea, but I feel mechanic wise due to the sheer amount of overhealing a shaman actually does this would become your main source of healing, mainly in stacked and spread AoE situations. This idea is quite similar to paladin mastery albeit only considers overhealing rather than healing in general and is a smart absorb per se.

Realistically the only class which should have access to absorbs (albeit they should be toned down for 6.0) are disc priest, the paladin mastery I hope will be reworked in 6.0 to move away from absorbs.

[Spectral]

No, I do not think adding a small heal absorb is a good idea. I think smart heals and absorbs should both be scaled back and/or removed, not just spread around to more classes. Deep Healing is actually reasonably decent and reasonably interesting; I don't really see the problem.

[Novean]

My idea is to give people earth shields worth some x-Mastery% of all healing you do. The earth shield would be either:

A) 1 Stack of it for the total additive amount (Such that we can create bigger earth shields much like priests make bigger bubbles) with some arbitrary max.

B) 1 Stack per application of Mastery up to 9 stacks. Then we have two subset options for B:

*Each stack heals for that specific amount that was used to trigger the shield
*Average of all shield stacks. (Such that a a first stack worth 50k and a second stack worth 20k, each trigger would then heal 35k if you only have these two stacks)


Which then becomes interesting cause earth shield increases your healing done on targets, and when they take damage (Changing the mechanic of earth shield for it to be all damage taken, since I believe it currently only works based off direct damage?) They receive the healing from it.

[Deleted]

Change the deep heal from a HoT to an Earth Shield charge that procs whenever the target takes more than x amount of damage. Now you have a completely unique mastery.

[Axelond]

Well...Right now your mastery sounds like Earthliving weapon combined with Ancestral awakening. There is nothing wrong with it but I would say if you are going to base a mastery on two very similar spells combining them and redesigning them would be way better then just create more spells that does almost exactly the same thing.

If blizzards adds this I do not want a replacement spell that gives us a flat 50% bonus healing to targets on low health. I JUST WANT BLIZZARD TO GET RID OF THIS MECHANIC! It seriously have no place in the current healing game. How can you justify creating a class that have a Legendary cloak that will automatically heal the lowest health raid member and at the same time have a mechanic that makes you heal more if you healed that target before the AI did...It seriously two mechanics that are working against each other. Not only are you working against your own smart heals you are going against your hole healing team trying to snipe for max healing. Yes normally all healers needs to do something similar but for shamans it's not just overhealing you get if you were to late to heal the target that is the penalty instead you lose out on the full mastery effect and also lose healing from your cloak/AG/Ascendance procs

However I would love a mastery that replaced ELW+AA and worked similar like them. They don't need to remove the weapon imbue if they don't want to. Just change ELW so it's a flat spell healing buff and leave the interaction with Unleash life unchanged or maybe its time for Weapon imbues to go the way of the mage armors and make it the rest of the imbues attractive for resto so its a big choice which one you pick. Just make the tooltips the cluster fuck Monks spell have and make the spells work diffrently for each spec (Easier to balance and more fun)

I don't really think we need to keep the granted proc chance on targets below 35% but I guess some people would still like some benefit of healing low health targets. Shamans have had this mechanic since wrath so I guess we can keep this part.

Mastery would work something like

"30% (5% on HR, 10% CH) chance for any heal to summon an ancestral spirit to aid you, Healing the most injured party or raid target within 40 yd for X % of the amount healed over 4 sec. Any heals on targets below 35% of maximum health will have a three times bigger chance to trigger this effect."

[delk]

Any number of different new masteries would be better (for both balancing and usefulness) than the current mastery. I'm sure we could think of 25 unique masteries that a lot of us would prefer to the current version.

Resto Shaman might lose some of their PVP mojo if the mastery changes, but the current mastery makes it nearly impossible to balance PVP and PVE without seeing stupidly large buffs to spells that are underutilized in PVP (like HR, CH) like we're seeing with 5.4. In 10s in ToT at least, there's a lot of fights where HR is just... hard to use at best. I just don't like them trying to fix the spec largely by buffing a situational ability. I don't know if any other spec has a mastery that seems specifically designed for PVP but is nearly useless in PVE.

We can hope that by 6.0 the developers realize what a mess our mastery has been making the spec (plus it must be a nightmare for balancing), and come up with something else. With the way raiding is currently, anyone sitting at or below 75% health is practically a liability as a number of mechanics can global them at that health and wipe the raid.

[Deleted]

Yeah, all of these ideas would be horrible for PvP. The hot? Worthless. An earth shield charge? About equally worthless.

Shaman mastery is the ONLY reason why there are still resto shamans left in arenas/rbgs. It's sure as hell not because of our great CC, mobility, survivability or anything else.

[Deleted]

How About Tieing Resto Mastery with there Ancestral Vigor? So, the More Mastery you have to More you can push the players health up based on your Max HP.

[Gurushock]

I like the resto shaman mastery.. maybe I'm the only one! But I think it's nice

[Cai]

I like the resto shaman mastery.. maybe I'm the only one! But I think it's nice

I am with you in liking our current mastery, but it just feels like our mastery is the reason we are being held back.



I do like the idea of overhealing creating earth shields on the target of the over heal.

New Mastery: Muddy Shield

When you overheal a target you create a Muddy Shield on the target for X%, X increases with mastery rating, of the overheal amount.

[Tiberria]

How About Tieing Resto Mastery with there Ancestral Vigor? So, the More Mastery you have to More you can push the players health up based on your Max HP.

That wouldn't work unless you are going to make Ancestral Vigor something other than a base health buff. The reality is, AV doesn't matter unless the health buffer it provides is the difference between a player living and dying. Sure, that happens on some fights, but I suspect that less than 10% of the total AV buffs that you put out are actually meaningful. If you converted it to a mastery, we would go from having a terrible mastery that doesn't fit with the current healing design to having a mastery that adds 0 effective output 90%+ of the time. It would be even worse than the current mastery. AV is too niche.

[Tziva]

I like the resto shaman mastery.. maybe I'm the only one! But I think it's nice

I like it philosophically, it just doesn't work well in practice. Between absorb mechanics and high spirit/big heals, it just seldom gets its opportunity to shine.

[Tiberria]

The biggest problem with the Resto Mastery is that it will never work in concept. By it's very nature, Resto Shaman almost need to be balanced around their maximum mastery gains. If you allow Mastery to scale our output higher than that of other healers on progression or difficult fights, then we become too strong on progression. As a result, they basically have to balance us around progression, which means that we can be expected to fall behind in any situation outside of that. The basic design of our mastery means, we essentially can only be as good as every other healer when we are getting maximum mastery gains, and we have to accept being worse than every other healer every other time.

It's demoralizing to essentially become worse the more gear you get and the more gear your raid gets. The balance around Resto mastery basically forces Shaman to perform less than other healers in non progression environments (LFR, normal modes, etc) unless they significantly outskill the other healers. Heroic progression raiders are a minority of the player population, which means that 90%+ of the Resto Shaman player base essentially gets screwed over by the current mastery design.

On top of all of that, it creates problems with PvE vs PvP balance. It's no secret that literally every single PvE focused buff we have received has been to Healing Rain or Chain Heal - because those aren't generally used much in PvP. Because mastery is so much stronger in PvE than PvP, it causes huge problems with balancing our toolkit and getting the buffs we need to be competitive.

All in all, it's a good concept, but it just is a failure in execution, and it will always be a failure, because you can't balance around that type of fight design. Our current mastery is almost something that would work better as a talent. Replace Conductivity with a talent that works like the current Deep Healing mastery - increasing our healing by X% based on target health. I can see it possibly being competitive with AG/RS on some fights, and we would have the option of not taking it and not having a huge chunk of our usefulness tied into it when we get little from it. They would obviously need to find a way to make the new talent workable for DPS, and give us a more appropriate, universally applicable mastery.

[Deleted]

I like the resto shaman mastery.. maybe I'm the only one! But I think it's nice

Same here actually. If it wasn't for absorbs all over the place it wouldn't appear in such a bad light (I would imagine). Plus it just feels super intuitive, lower health = bigger heals. Hell yeah o_O
Plus I don't like all those fancy-pantsy hot proccs or absorb shield or whatever crap there is going on. Keep it simple and to the point

Altough, yeah, in the current meta game it feels off. I don't feel at home in pve, but Unleash>Healing Surge picking targets up from execute range to almost full HP in pvp feels weird.

[Taalyn]

The biggest problem with Deep Healing is it was designed around the Cataclysm model of triage healing which does not exist anymore.

[shammypie]

easy fix: flat out increase healing by x%

smarter fix: switch ascendance and mastery

better fix: illuminated healing

my fix: puts a (i would say ES but it has to lie outside shaman shields so it doesn't overwrite water and ES and isn't confused with them) water spirit on the target who will heal the target for X% of the heal if the target takes damage within the next Xs (15 or so prob). This effect can stack up to X% of the target's maximum health (i wanna say 30-50%). This would work a lot like the paladin mastery but would heal the target instead of creating an absorb shield and would be one time use.

[Leouch]

Guys you forget about something important -> Shammy = totems, our mastery should do something with healing totems like: Increase healing done by HST by x%/xtend it duration by x sec/heal 1 more target for each X mastery... or something like that
Mastery can works on new totem exclusive for Resto

[Deleted]

Well it's nice to see that the PvE shamans do not care about the PvP shamans in the slightest. It's a bit like the whole Community and Blizzard feel towards Shamans in general. But good to see that I shouldn't care about PvE shamans either.