new resto shamam on the block!

[nsgid]

As the title says, I'm new. A few guides I read are out of date so I was wondering what you all go for with stats? Spirit haste crit mast or spirit crit haste mastery? Also what amount of spirit should I aim for? As for a haste buold, what should I aim for as a goblin? Here's my shaman, he's 484 and ungemmed because I jist got all this gear today and obviously need to replace the enh pieces lol. But he will be at least 500 ilvl tomorrow for sure. Also, any tips as resto healing? Last but not least, is the lightning bolt glyph worth taking to regen mana? Thanks all!

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Also, what are the best professions for healing?

[Koor]

I'd recommend the icy veins guide, it's pretty up-to-date:

http://www.icy-veins.com/restoration...-healing-guide

Haste breakpoints are summarized nicely in:

http://www.totemspot.com/vb/entry.php?b=41

With low gear, I wouldn't recommend going haste since you'll get out of mana. Prioritize spirit and crit (which gives you mana back through
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=16196/resurgence).

The lightning bolt glyph used to give more mana back during cata, but now it's not much. Also when the healing gets hard and you need mana most, there isn't much time to cast lightning bolts. To regenerate mana actively, the totemic recall glyph is better. With the glyph you can recall the healing stream totem just before it expires, and get the full mana back.

[flossie116]

/agree with Koor.
The lightning bolt glyph used to be impressive- if I remember right, now it only gives back a net gain of about 2k mana on cast. Really not worth it at all.
At low levels, your best bet is 5400ish mastery, 7116 haste breakpoint for the extra tick of healing rain, and then loading the rest into crit while maintaining enough spirit to cast when needed. As your crit increases, you'll find that the amount of spirit you need will decrease due to resurgence. Some shamen maintain this high level of crit/ low spirit build even with high gear- tend to never run out of mana.

[Reptar]

I have a quick question from that guide. It says the following:

•When you want to increase the mana efficiency of one of your direct heals, cast it after casting Unleash Elements.

- I'm just curious how this increases mana efficiency. Thank you.

It also says at one point to use Unleash Elements before every other Healing Rain, but later in the article it says: "You should usually use Unleash Elements with mana management in mind and preferably in combination with Greater Healing Wave

[Koor]

I have a quick question from that guide. It says the following:

•When you want to increase the mana efficiency of one of your direct heals, cast it after casting Unleash Elements.

- I'm just curious how this increases mana efficiency. Thank you.

It also says at one point to use Unleash Elements before every other Healing Rain, but later in the article it says: "You should usually use Unleash Elements with mana management in mind and preferably in combination with Greater Healing Wave

I think greater healing wave is a bad example since the mana cost of casting Unleash Elements is about 30% of GHW, so it kind of cancels with the 30% healing boost. Maybe it assumes that the unleash fury talent is being used for an extra 50%.

I personally use it most of the times to boost HR.

[Tiberria]

I think the advice with using Unleash Elements with a single target heal is more that if you have a single target that needs a large burst of healing and ULE is off CD, consider combining the two. I would personally always use Healing Surge over GHW in that situation, because it is both much faster and does more expected healing per cast than GHW when you factor in the +30% Crit from Tidal Waves.

However, using ULE with a single target heal is more of a one off emergency event that you use at the expense of raw HPS/HPM when you need that single target burst to prevent a death. 90%+ of the time, you should generally be using it with Healing Rain.

[Deleted]

However, using ULE with a single target heal is more of a one off emergency event that you use at the expense of raw HPS/HPM when you need that single target burst to prevent a death. 90%+ of the time, you should generally be using it with Healing Rain.

Even in that case I don't think UE is best. Casting two HSs instead takes the same amount of time, heals for 65% more , and the cruical heal lands one gcd faster. It takes more mana, but you can often cancel the second cast especially if the first one crits.

[Reptar]

After re-reading, I'm thinking the concept of more efficient ties in to our mastery. UE + GHW may cost more mana up front, but on a low health target it will probably come close to topping off the target with one spell, rather than spamming multiple into the target. That's just my guess though.

[Tiberria]

After re-reading, I'm thinking the concept of more efficient ties in to our mastery. UE + GHW may cost more mana up front, but on a low health target it will probably come close to topping off the target with one spell, rather than spamming multiple into the target. That's just my guess though.

The problem with it is, UE + GHW takes nearly 3 seconds to get off, and in most raid environments, if the target isn't topped off by the time that combo lands, it will certainly gain enough passive healing, smart heals, etc to take it out of the mastery sweet spot (i.e. sub 35% HP) before you can get it off.

[Reptar]

The problem with it is, UE + GHW takes nearly 3 seconds to get off, and in most raid environments, if the target isn't topped off by the time that combo lands, it will certainly gain enough passive healing, smart heals, etc to take it out of the mastery sweet spot (i.e. sub 35% HP) before you can get it off.

That makes sense. Perhaps the person who made that raids in 10m where it's only him and 1 other healer. As for me, I'll stick to using UE on my healing rains =)

[AnTwan]

I think using Unleash Elements with a single target heal was okay before 5.4. With the changes to Healing Rain we got, Unleash Elements should probably only exclusively be used with Healing Rain. If you can get 3 people in Unleash Elements'd Healing Rain then it is worth the heals you are getting. I, for instance, have them macro'd together in a cast sequence so that I tap the button to unleash elements on my focus and tap it again to give me the reticule to drop on the ground. Once Unleash Elements is off cooldown (about a second more than healing rain) I do it again.

At ilvl 500 or so it's still better to basically ignore mastery. The last two tiers have put a lot of mastery on gear we simply haven't needed. I would suggest using Ancestral Swiftness as your talent, get 871 Haste, get your spirit to 14k and then scale up or down depending on how you feel your mana usage is and dump the rest into crit. All crit, all the time. If you can forge out of mastery, do that first. Once you start getting into SoO flex/normal-ish gear I would start going for a haste of around 9100 (the healing stream totem break point depends on latency.) and drop your spirit down much lower. Right now I am running it at about 10k and I STILL don't have mana problems. Crit is very powerful.