Help our resto shaman please! (logs included)

[Deleted]

So our resto shaman is struggling to keep up with our other healers, while not having exactly terrible gear for the content we're doing.
We're usually fine but the other day, I (disc) went shadow just for the hell of it and our healing really suffered.

This is tonights log (with me as Disc), we had some issues with disconnects, crashes and weird wipes that usually don't happen and we ended up only killing 5/7 Heroic (with one almost-kill on Ko'ragh). I'll post more logs from imperator when we get back on it sunday.


Please have a look though and post any general advice you can think of



Armory:
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Yazam/advanced

Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...4&type=healing

It's Yazam if that wasn't obvious btw

[Deleted]

He seems to overheal quite a lot, which might be due to trying to feed his cloudburst totem as much as possible. I've never used CBT + UF aside of dungeons/CM's, so I'm unsure about it. There's discussions that it can be viable in smaller raid teams, but I personally don't run raids with less than 20 people anymore. Someone else might be able to shed a bit more light on it.
I find it a bit strange that he doesn't have spirit on his neck, cloak and one of his rings. Considering he's not using Elemental Blast, I'd have thought he'd struggle a lot more with mana in that set up. He also doesn't have an enchant on his weapon and his non-legendary q ring. The massive usage of healing wave might be why his throughput is so low, but I'm not 100% sure.

Regarding glyph of cleansing waters: He probably only used this on Ko'ragh, but it's probably not worth a lot. You end up dispelling like 3x, and if you dispel quickly, the target's full health anyway.

[Seditian]

So our resto shaman is struggling, always being (by a large margin) the last on meters etc, while not having exactly terrible gear for the content we're doing.
We can usually carry him but the other day, I (disc) went shadow just for the hell of it and our healing really suffered.

This is tonights log (with me as Disc), we had some issues with disconnects, crashes and weird wipes that usually don't happen and we ended up only killing 5/7 Heroic (with one almost-kill on Ko'ragh). I'll post more logs from imperator when we get back on it sunday.


Please have a look though and post any general advice you can think of



Armory:
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Yazam/advanced

Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...4&type=healing

It's Yazam if that wasn't obvious btw

He doesn't use Chain Heal at all. Chain Heal is a very powerful tool on Butcher, because you can time it right after Gushing Wounds hits the melee group. Not sure if he's running with Conductivity, but even with Conductivity his Healing Rain isn't even up for 75% of the time, that could easily be higher if he wants to. Seeing as he's most likely on tank healing duty, he should definitely be using High Tide so he can use Riptides to still chain heal the melee camp for Gushing Wounds.

In a nutshell: he should use Chain Heal, he still has 61k mana left at the end and hasn't used a mana potion yet, effectively putting him at 100k mana. He definitely has the mana to use Chain Heal quite often.

Edit: Same on Ko'ragh, almost no Chain Heals at all. If he's having mana problems, he should definitely switch to Elemental Blast. He's only used Spiritwalker's Grace once, which means he's losing a lot of cast time by not being able to cast while running. Tell him to use the focus glyph in order to get the CD down to 1 minute. Ko'ragh doesn't have any mechanics that require you to run for 15+ seconds, 7 seconds is more than enough and this way he'll be able to use it more often.

High Tide is the best on almost if not all fights, tell him to get it instead of Cloud Burst totem.

Edit 2: In addition to the above mentioned pointers: tell him to enchant Gift of Mastery on his cloak. So many people underestimate the 10% movement speed bonus, people who do this need to be told that it's an incredible boost to your survivability and output. All his enchants just yell "poor", maybe you guys have a guild bank with some mats in it to at least give your healers proper (gift) enchants? If not, tell him to farm some gold and enchant it anyway. Epics, especially weapons and the questline ring, shouldn't have cheap (or no) enchants.

[Koor]

There are some simple things he can fix using weakauras which will improve his performance:

- Using healing stream totem more often. For example on twin ogron, in a 6:02 min encounter, he casted HST 6 times. HST has a cooldown of 30 seconds, he could have casted it almost twice as much.

- Similarly for cloudburst. I think cloudburst is viable in small groups, but again he casted it on twins only 6 times where he could have casted it 12 times. HST and cloudburst can be either interleaved, or if he takes totemic persistence he can even drop them together.

- Ascendance is on a 3 min cooldown, but was used only once. It's nice to pair it with cloudburst since 20% of the heals from ascendance are copied to the cloudburst totem as well.

- Similarly healing tide totem was used only once. In butcher for example, since the length was 4:30, he could use it within the first minute and it'll be up again near the end.

- He was using unleash with healing wave. Since he has unleash fury talented, I'd use it more often with healing surge instead, since it substantially reduces the mana cost and actually makes healing surge much more affordable (almost double the healing for about 30% extra mana cost).

- There are periods in which earth shield falls off and isn't refreshed -- again good weak-auras can help with that.

His healing rain usage is low. While rushing streams is stronger in smaller groups, specifically for butcher, I'd recommend going with conductivity since it can be placed on the stationary melee the whole encounter. This should help in improving his healing rain uptime.

Specifically in brackenspore, since mana isn't an issue on heroic with the blue mushrooms regen, he can cast many more healing surges instead of healing waves.

[Deleted]

I've suspecting he is a bit too mana conservative, thanks for confirming that. As for talent and ability usage, I don't personally know enough about resto shamans to explain all of this in detail but i'll give him the link to this thread and forward any questions he might have for you guys.

So TLDR list
-Pick the right talents for each fight (is there a nice breakdown of this somewhere?)
-Track cooldowns so he can use them more efficiently
-Use stronger spells more often (chain heal, healing rain, healing surge etc)
-Fix gear (including enchants - this I can deal with)


Thanks everyone and please keep it comming!

[Alltat]

-Pick the right talents for each fight (is there a nice breakdown of this somewhere?)

There's honestly not all that much to change. The only two talents I think are really worth bringing up are Conductivity and Elemental Blast. The former is really good on Butcher but mostly useless on every other fight. The latter is extremely good on long fights like Imperator (and fine on everything else too; I always use it).

-Track cooldowns so he can use them more efficiently

This is the biggest one. Even after it's been fixed, it'll still be the biggest one. Utilizing cooldowns and maximizing the uptimes of important effects is pretty much what a resto shaman does.

-Use stronger spells more often (chain heal, healing rain, healing surge etc)

Add Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem to that list. Both can and should be used multiple times during every fight, and he didn't even use them at all on some kills. He needs to get a bit more aggressive with the healing. Also try to plan when to use big cooldowns in advance; use them to prevent emergencies rather than saving them to handle emergencies.

And as a side note, Healing Rain shouldn't be thought of as a "strong" spell this expansion. It's a cheap area effect heal that's pretty much always worth using, even if people are kind of spread out or not taking all that much damage.

[Oxna]

Can someone link examples of a good weakaura for tracking earth shield and healing stream? And any other useful ones?
Thanks

[Sekhmet]

Id suggest to pick the High Tide talent and be heavy with the chain heals + healing rain to blanket heal. Lots of grouped up ppl taking ticking damage is a really good fight for resto to shine.

Mana management is a big part of healing now, both to conserve it, recover it but most of all to use it wisely. Personally, I really like elemental blast for the mana recovery.

[Deleted]

Bump. Here's our imperator kill from tonight. He has improved but I thought I'd still ask you guys about it

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ling&source=10
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Yazam/advanced

[Alltat]

Bump. Here's our imperator kill from tonight. He has improved but I thought I'd still ask you guys about it

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ling&source=10
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Yazam/advanced

Comparing that to my own heroic Imperator log from this week. I managed to do 43k HPS in basically the same gear, so I must be doing something right.

Rotational stuff:
- Assuming you're not using some kind of spread out tactic and that you're not moving further than you have to from each resonance, Healing Rain uptime needs to be improved. He cast Healing Rain 17 times over 13 minutes. I cast it 35 times over 11 minutes. Our ticks per cast were about the same, so his placement is good; he just needs to use it more.
- Chain Heal use looks a bit unnecessarily conservative. He spent almost the entire fight above 75% mana, so there's room to be a bit more aggressive.
- Healing Stream Totem usage is overall good. About halfway through the fight he seems to forget to use it a lot. Good start, but needs to be more consistent.
- Elemental Blast use looks pretty good. Could be used a bit more, but he didn't actually need the mana.
- Earth Shield uptime is lousy. 48% on the kill. Should be 100%, and while you'll rarely manage that in practice, he should be above 90%.
- He seems to be using Unleash Elements more or less on cooldown, which is questionable. It's okay for being mana efficient, but it's a HPS loss in every situation except when moving.

Major cooldowns:
- Two casts of Ascendance is okay. He could have used it on the very first transition too, and it would have been off cooldown. The actual use of it was a bit sub-par: 372k healing done per cast, whereas I got 717k per cast. Looking at his timing, I think he pops it a bit too early during the transitions, and so doesn't get any benefit from mastery. He should wait a bit, then use Ascendance immediately after Healing Rain and go nuts with Chain Heal.
- Three casts of Healing Tide Totem is okay, but again he could have used it early and still have had it off cooldown for the first mage transition. The timing was quite poor, though: Ascendance doesn't work with Healing Tide, so using both at the same time just results in overhealing and no mastery benefits. Each transition phase is long enough that you can chain multiple cooldowns. As a result of the stacking, his HTTs ended up doing 770k healing each, compared to my 1556k HTTs.
- Spirit Link Totem used twice. Same as above; might as well put it to work early too.

Miscellaneous stuff:
- He didn't use Fire Elemental Totem. It's nothing major, but free damage never hurts. Pop it right before the pull and then again when it comes off cooldown.
- He's specced for Astral Shift and did use it, but seem to have forgotten about it for almost ten minutes in the middle of the fight.
- He's specced for Ancestral Swiftness but didn't use it at all. Either he forgot he had it, or he's saving it for some dire emergency that never happens (even during wipes).