Couple of questions and I'll appreciate any input.

Now I'm generally #1 in effective healing for any particular boss fight in my guild however I'm also almost always on the brink of going OOM as a fight ends. I know it's not necessarily to be oom as a fight ends as long as my job gets done, however I worry because had a fight gone on 1-2 more minutes I would basically of been useless for those last minutes. I'm also kind of worried because I seem to be doing everything possible to keep my mana up, pots of course most of which being fel mana pots and regular ones for quick top offs on my mana or an instant return when in mana when I really need it, trinkets, spellsurge, and water shield which I feel I'm especially good at keeping up with the help of power auras(I actually gained 17k mana from WS tonight over 12 vashj attempts, 17k mana was behind mana tide netting me 30k over the attempts). Other then occasionally forgetting to pot as early as possible or drinking pots a little late when the cooldowns up I can't really see ways to change there, except maybe some way to add a sound when the cooldown is up, sounds through Enhancer(totem timer mod) have helped me get better about remembering to re cast totems.

I guess the question is really is this normal for a resto raiding shaman? I've read and can see from gear that once shamans get to about 150ish or a little more mp/5 they start mainly gemming/gearing for more +healing and sometimes int rather then mp/5, which I find odd as I'm pretty close to that much mp/5 and I feel like it's not enough. This fear of mine mainly comes from the fact my guilds been working a lot on Vashj lately and each time we're getting close to p3 I'm completely on cooldown with almost everything for mana and I'd be going into what seems like another really mana intensive phase of the fight with usually only about 40-50% mana. I'm also aware of the effect spriests can have, but ours are not the best in the world and when I do have one which is pretty rare as we usually only have 1 per raid, I rarely get to see the true effect one can have .

Second question smaller question regarding talents. As 2.2 approaches I'm trying to find 3 points that I'll be able to put into Focused Mind that way my 8/0/53 spec completely supports my pvp and pve needs. The best spot to take them from to me seems to be out of Healing Grace(-15% threat on heals if you forget the name of it like I usually do). Generally if there is a situation where I'm getting agro it's usually either early on trash pulls or when cc breaks which is to be expected, which is okay and not something +/- 15% threat would really change or a situation where it's okay or I'm supposed to have agro like Al'ar or Morogrim. Can anyone past my level of content(killed Al'ar, working on Vashj) comment on whether or not they feel this talent is necessary or very helpful? I also realize it helps quite a bit in 5 mans but those are mostly a thing of the past for me. Most of my other talents seem pretty standard except possibly improved reincarnation which is a personal preference, my ankh is more often a battle res for me rather then wipe recovery and I l really like coming back up not completely useless.

Going OOM depends greatly on your guilds DPS. The more dps they have the less you go OOM. Its somewhat normal to be low at the end of a fight otherwise you're bringing too many healers or you aren't donig your job. I'm assuming you are using alchemist stone? Between mana tides fel manas with alchemist stone and other sources of regen you really should be good on most fights (I never had a spreist in my group till the first few times on Najentus but we kill him fast enough healers don't need them now). If all your healers are being stressed look into either fixing your raid dps or getting healers shadow priests. I'd say very few fights absolutely require healers to have spreists tho.

On vashj If you're healing the melee in phase 2 (assuming you guys do it they way we did) you will be spamming chain heals like crazy keeping everyone up but phase 3 other healers can pick up for you a little since the beginning of phase 3 isn't too hard on mana. My guild is 5/5 MH 6/9 BT and I've never had healing grace since those points have always been needed on other things. You can def do fine without it. I sometimes get heal aggro early on trash but eh.. its not a big deal.

As soon as i won [Fathom-Brooch of the Tidewalker] on last raid i've tried to do some math on results o got.
what i've managed to count:
those are data from 2 full raids and 1h on some heroic.
So... if im recasting Mana Tide every CD it gives me (<MP pool>/250)mp5 +44mp5 from mana spring (with 2xT4, 37mp5 without), so generally Effective mp5 from this trinket (always equipped) would be 30-40 mp5, with avg 35mp5. Proc rate is very high, inner cooldown on first was pretty long for me, but i've found that this trink procs practically always in every 45sec.

Second trinket would be always [Alchemist's Stone]


Another trinket i could use instead of [Fathom-Brooch of the Tidewalker] is [Pendant of the Violet Eye], but with that is just like with Major Dreamless Sleep Potion - it's effective only on few encounters:
(note: i've never tried this trink, can't make it to drop ;] , but talked with some shamans that did and did math on it)
to use earlier mentioned Pendant effectively i have to spam r1 Healing Wave for 20 sec. that gives me as much MP i can get from it, but to do so i have to have a chance, and dont let any1 to be killed in exchange of restoring my mana for 20 seconds.
So for example, when Pendant can give more mana than Fathom-Brooch?
Hydross: after adds are killed i'm using Major Dreamless Sleep Potion, then Phases changing, adds are killed again, and it's time to use Pendant and spam r1 HW on myself or even on tank. as shaman im responsible for healing offtanks, and after adds are dead they dont need to be healed for almost next minute.
Leotheras: just before Whirlwind hide somewhere and spam r1 HW while Pendant is activated.
etc etc.

Alse as i've mentioned before: Super Mana Potion isn't enough for me, if i can i'm using Major Dreamless Sleep Potion (make sure no1 dispell it ), Fel Mana Potion (this is just a blessing on Fathom-Lord encounter), and ofc Super Mana Potion.
Important thing is that effect of Major Dreamless Sleep Potion is cancelled while taking damage, or beeing effect of some aoe... that's why it can't be used on such bosses like Morogrim - there is no damage, but cast Water Shield and it will go off in about 10 sec, same effect that makes shield to proc will cancel Sleep Potion effect (btw, Water Shield is best source of mana on Morogrimm).

That's basically what i do to save as much mana i can for whole fight, another thing what i do is downranking Chain Heal to R3, with 1,8 (~2k on raid buffs) +healing i can easily downrank CH to 3, so it costs me 135 mana less, and heals for avg 1k less (including all 3 jumps and bonus from +healing after rank/cast length nerf).
When used with good timing downranked Chain will be most mana effective from all possible sources of gaining mana, ofcourse... there are encounters, or even trash where r5 is needed, despite that - downranking when you can will give you pretty much mana, specially when you don't have SPriest in you group.

Add some energy management from items, use enviroment effects (Morogrimm+Water Shield), encounter structure (Dreamless Sleep Potion, Fel Mana Potion, trinkets), downrank Chain Heal when it's possible and u won't ever go OOM on static (for your group) fights.

PS: sorry for my english, my grama and writing is terrible ;]

I'm a big fan of the Pendant - not only because of the larger initial mana pool (and consequently larger mana tide recovery), but the cooldown is exactly the same as our totems. I'm quite often put in the tank's group, so it's important for me to keep my totems refreshed. Popping the trinket and then tossing down my totems and another Earth Shield if necessary usually nets me a few mana beyond what the totems cost.

I'm a bit further behind in progression than you are Yessia, so YMMV, but healing assignments quite often make a big difference. If I'm allowed to go on raid healing, I find my mana lasts a lot longer since I get the occasional O5SR mana ticks and CH's an inherently more mana-efficient spell than HW. It usually nets me the #2 effective healing spot thanks to the awesomeness of rolling Lifeblooms on the tanks, but I'll take the epeen hit if it means I can still excel and have more than enough mana reserves in case things start to go south.

I'm doing fine on mana while raiding. My guild is at about the same stage as yours - working on Vashj, 3/4 TK. Unbuffed, I have 170 mp/5 + fathom-brooch and while I drink potions on some fights, I don't usually need to chain pot. I almost never have a shadow priest, and while I'd appreciate one on certain fights like Vael, I don't feel I really need one.

Vashj's a pretty mana-intensive fight for me too so far. We've only gotten her to p3 a couple times, but about 50% mana at the start of p3 seems reasonable. As your guild gets better at p2, the mobs will die a bit faster, everyone will take a bit less damage and you'll use less mana healing in p2. Also, p3 seems pretty fast - while you'll be casting a lot of heals, p3 just may not last long enough for you to run out of mana.


A few thoughts on what you can do to help with mana:

If you don't already have it, get the fathom-brooch from Karathress. That's an effective 27-28 mp/5 right there. (It can proc for 30-40 mp/5 in some fights, but usually it's just in the high 20s which is still pretty amazing.) mp/5 from the fathom-brooch won't show up in armory profiles, so if you are just browsing the armory, there's a pretty huge actual mp/5 difference between a shaman with 150 mp/5 and no brooch, and a shaman with 150 mp/5 from gear + 28 mp/5 from the fathom-brooch. And if you feel you still need more mp/5, gear for it, there's no law that says you are not allowed to go over 150 mp/5 as a shaman.

Consumables, of course. Flask of might restoration for 25 mp/5 + blackened sporefish for 8 mp/5 + superior mana oil for 14 mp/5 = an extra 47 mp/5. I only use all three on learning fights like Vashj, for about any other fight this would be overkill for me.

How are your other healers doing? Are they close to you in healing done, or are they lagging behind? Is their potion use comparable to yours? Are they running low on mana at the same rate you are? In other words, are they not healing as much as they could be and are you covering for them? I find it very noticeable whenever a couple of our better healers are missing - suddenly there's so much more for me to heal and I run out of mana much faster.

Downranking spells helps too, of course. If you are currently using ch5, just try replacing it with ch4 for one boss fight and see whether it helps you with your mana and whether you even notice the difference in the amount of healing you do.


Healing Grace seems like a fairly reasonable talent to drop. I wouldn't want to drop it since I like the extra buffer on Morogrim and Al'ar but on most fights it won't make much of a difference (admittedly, I have no experience on fights past Solarian). You can also try dropping improved reincarnation just to see whether you are ok without it. Improved reincarnation used to be one of my favorite fun talents but I dropped it a couple months ago and I can't say I really missed it. There were a couple times when I wished I was able to pop with more health and mana, but overall I don't seem to die enough to make improved reincarnation useful to me.

so the Resto Shaman community recommends stopping mp5 at about 150? wow, i cant say i agree with this, but then again i never did the math.
i just love my mp5, and will aim for as high as i can get, maybe im a little to in love with is, but its just so great that i can out heal any other class in my guild and still have lots of mana at the end of a fight.
The only times iv come close to running out of mana is at the end of VR, when im solo healing 5 melee, thats a little rough, but with a spriest and an innervate i can do it fine

dont be afraid to call out for an innervate, a shaman has more use for it then any other healer, you have less ability to regen mana then the other classes and all your abilities helps out the people around you

Shaman get very little from innervates due to not stacking spirit. Sure its not a sin to get them but in the case of VR a holy preist using cirlce of healing or PoH and an innervate would gain far more (esp if the preist has bangle and earring yeilding like 10k mana back).

Also what is the point of having tons of mana left over at the end of the fight? If you have a spriest in your group give it mages so they can dps harder. If you stacked rediculous mp5 think about trading some of that mp5 for +heal so your healing / s goes up. If on some fights you find yourself needing the mana just pot more. You can alwyas pot to increase your mana (with alchemist stone is usually enough) but not increase your healing.

Hmm I'm at the same position of working on Vashj, and I have to say I don't understand how you can have mana issues. I usually get by on just the super mana pots from pvp (not even major), I've maybe had to use a better pot (the ones from rep in SSC or drops in TK) about once/twice a week or so. Nor do I flask for any encounter, although I get the feeling I may need to for vashj once we can actually get past phase 2 successfully, but at this point we die way before I can run OOM. Once you become religious about dropping grounding everytime for your tank and he stops getting hit by that big nasty nuke that stuns the healing on P1 vashj becomes alot easier at least in my experience.

All this is while I am usually 1st or 2nd in effective healing, and pretty good about keeping my ES and totems up. There is one very good priest in my guild (who flasks and pots quite alot) who tends to beat me most of the time in situations where I can't CH as much as I'd like, but apart from him all other healers tend to be quite a ways down from us usually while we're fighting for the top spot. We usually run with 8 healers with none of us getting an spriest (except for the other resto shaman who's very poorly geared and usually in mage/lock group).

The only time I remember having mana issues was having to solo-heal a complete damage specced warrior tanking the priest on karathress and having to interrupt as well - while doing that I did run into some mana trouble, but after I had the war moved to my group for GoA/frost resist/healing stream totem things got noticeably easier and again I barely had to pot (healing stream healed about 50K, ES another 50K that fight, vs. about 300K for me! ).

Do you use alot of LHW all the time? Are your CH overhealing alot or not jumping? At the end of the day if you're doing tons of healing then all's well, but in general I think if you're well geared then if you're forced to pot all the time then most likely you're overhealing more then neccesary or using inefficient heals. Having said that though, if you're top of the healing and people start dying if you don't overheal as much then just go with it.

The thing I find that really helps me is getting a decent amount of +healing (about 1.8K buffed) using HW 7 or max rank HW along with CH almost exclusively. If you're potting like a maniac, and using all your other mana regen things (trinkets, tide, etc.), then relatively speaking you're not getting that much of your mana out of mp5. On the other hand your +healing increases the effect of the mana gained from other sources, so the more you're potting/tiding/using mana trinkets, the more use that +heal is. This is why I think people are saying that 150 (or whatever you want) mp5 is enough and you should try to stack +healing. With a full stack of healing way and my +healing I find that my HW 7 hits fro about 2.6-2.7K which is actually enough to make a difference in saving the tank most of the time, while costing very little (especially with the SSC -24 mana totem).

Having said that practically speaking you just don't have that many choices between mp5 and +healing - usually there is a set of gear that is just flat out better, royal gems are the best anyways (although +18 healing has been tempting to me lately), and so in the end all you get to choose is to have a +81 healing enchant (easy choice for me since I'm in the MT/melee group usually), and maybe a few items.

And yes as far as talents get rid of healing grace, like you said it's at most a repair bill saver on trash.

Edit: Oh and as for giving shaman innervation... no way. Not unless your priests/druids can't get rid of their mana for some reason.

Thanks for all of the feedback, looking over all of the possibilities suggested here I think the biggest issue my guild is having is probably a lack of dps for where dpsers in our guild are at gear wise and also probably me covering a bit to much in healing compared to the other healers, I also used about twice as many pots as any other healer over the night of attempts last night. So I guess in a way this makes me feel a bit better, I'll also be bringing these issues up with my raid leader and hopefully some problems can be fixed.

As far as gear goes, SSC has been pretty cruel so far to resto shaman, 0 for 11 for boots on lurker and 0 for 6 for trinkets on fathom lord, I'm up next for either as soon as the RNG stops screwing me. Those will definitely help me quite a bit, Pendant + Brooch is my planned set up now(I'm JCing + Engineering so no stone ).

Also good to hear healing grace isn't really necessary at any point later in raiding, I really don't think I could justify 3 less points anywhere else in the tree and I'm going to love having a 1 purpose spec.

In the end the choice between mp5/healing comes down to whether or not you have a shadow priest in your group imo. I am always in a group with 2mages, a warloc and a shadow priest. I have trouble using all my mana on most fights, with chain mana poting/runes and vt, with the exception of mother, i never have mana problems. I have gone from using a balance of mp5/healing to pure healing/haste gear. With 2400 healing, focus meta, the bm haste trinket(very good trinket imo), and over 160 haste gear i can pump out 3.6k chain heals in ~2.2 seconds. I also leveled LW to get drums of battle for the 30 secsonds of 80 haste for the group(buffing the shadow priest is just buffing your mana), and all haste is just getting better in the nxt patch, if it comes out. This change has vastly improved my raid healing. Only for mother will i change in a more regen based set of gear as shadow priests are not as powerful here, for obvious reasons.

I have even tried to destruction potion on my potion cooldown. With the patch i will be below 2 seconds chain heals. I think i calculated haste to be about 2healing per haste point, making it very valuable in a shadow priests group.

Hey everyone, I'm a relative resto nub, as I've been enhancement through SSC and TK and just respecced resto for Hyjal/BT as a) we need more raid healing, and b) my guild just lost a dedicated healer due to RL.

Anyway...my question to the veterans ::cough:: Gurg ::cough:: is this: are there any special macros you guys use, besides stopcasting, for heals and/or resto utility that I may find useful as well?

I currently have a couple macros for poison and disease cleansing in addition to stopcasting macros for the heals I use (LHW, HW rank 12, HW rank 8, HW rank 1, CH rank 5, and CH rank 4). Oh and that makes me think of another question...are there other ranks of the heals I should be using? I suppose that once I get a little more +heal--I'm at 1624 unbuffed right now--I may switch to CH rank 3 for longevity if necessary, but I'm not sure how badly mana will be an issue (160 mp5, but I'll be in the melee group...aka no shadow priest).

Back to the macro point, here's my poison/disease macro (the code for the two is the same, just replace each instance of "Poison" with "Disease"):

/cast [target=mouseover,exists,help,nodead] Cure Poison; Poison Cleansing Totem

It's pretty simple but I find it highly useful, and plus it saves on keybinds. I have the poison cleansing macro bound to mouse click 4 (M4), and the respective disease one is bound to shift+M4.

As for HOW to heal, in addition to having spells bound to easy-access keys (1-5, shift+1-5, etc.), I use the stopcasting macros in conjunction with Click2Cast and Grid. Does anyone have any suggestions on what else I can try or just what works for you? I'm looking for any insight you guys may have and would appreciate anything.

And one last thing...I apologize if these questions have been asked before in this thread or in another thread; if so, please provide a link. Thanks in advance for any help!

~Jendryn

The only macros I use are

1) A macro to shock (and another for purge) my focus if I have one or my target if I don't (useful for karathress and pvp for interrupts, also if you want to FS striders on Vashj)
2) A macro combining disease/poison cleansing in one (i.e. /cast poison cleanse /stopcast /cast disease cleanse), mostly to save me another keybind
3) A macro to automatically use my prayerbook when casting a heal

What I should do but haven't done yet is a macro to equip different totems as I'm casting different heals for added efficiency, since each totem only benefits one spell (CH, LHW or HW). If someone could save me the trouble I'd appreciate it .

However you should probably use HW rank 7 over 8, it is quite a bit more efficient (Check out Dr.Damage to know the hpm/hps of all ranks of your spells easily - I forget the difference now but there was a significant hpm difference between 7 and 8 IIRC). If you find there are alot of times where it's hps is just not enough perhaps go with 9-10. Personally I just use 12 and 7.

You can try mousing over, personally I never understood the point, apart from for using it with cleansing spells and perhaps druids with all their instants. If I moved my mouse over on top of the raid frame there is practically no extra effort in clicking it, and it lets me start a heal, check something else out and more easily get back to see if I need to cancel the heal or not without having to look at my raid frame.

Coriolis, can you post your Poison/Disease macro?

I've tried to make one previously and not had much luck.

I'd like to see your 1 macro too, the one for earth shock on the focus target.

I tried this myself once by just putting a simple "/equip totem's name" line in front of my heals in my macro's but everytime you equip a totem it will put you on global cooldown, and waiting 1.5 seconds to cast the heal I want when I'm going back and forth a lot between heals isn't worth the benefits from the different totems.

If you put the equip line right after the cast line then the GCD for equipping will take place during the cast and you will still get the benefit of the totem. This is the same effect as swapping a weapon during a cast. However, if you include such a line it will cause problems if you are cancel-casting during the initial 1.5 seconds of the cast. This can trip you up if you want to quickly change from one heal to another, and it tends to crop up during more frantic moments. I have great success with such macros for 5-man content, but I'm somewhat leery of using them in a situation where timing is more crucial.

First off you should get clique, it's a great mod, and basically lets you bind actions to buttons+mouse clicks. I have alt+left click as LHW, alt+middle click as HW, and alt+right click as chain heal, all max rank. I have shift+left click to cure poison and shift+right click to cure disease. The only buttons I really press in pve are the buttons for totems, and downranking HW to rank 8 or rank 1. Everything else I do through clique. I don't downrank chain heal or LHW at all.

I use LHW when somebody needs heals right away or just to quickly top someone off before some damage is about to happen, and in both of those cases I'd want the most possible healing done. I don't downrank chain heal ever really. If I'm solo healing a tank I'll stick with healing wave, max rank or to rank 8, depending on incoming damage. The majority of the fights you can get away with just using chain heal, because most of the time the damage going around hits more then just one person, or everybody isn't fully topped off.

I also don't use any stopcasting macros, I just move a little bit in one direction to cancel. Generally for fights I'll watch grid with an aggro red dot in one corner, and an incoming heal dot in another corner, and heal who needs it. I precast heals if someone gets the aggro dot, specially if they are squishy. I generally always let those heals go through, even though most of them do get wasted. Every now and then it saves someone, so I'm okay with wasting some mana for that.




For times like this, I'd just use /focus and watch that way. If you need to cast earth shock or something, make a macro to stopcasting, and hit your focus with earth shock rank 1.

Exactly, but that's when you use your focus. I set my focus to aran (or the priest at karathress) to interrupt him. That way I never have to worry about who I'm targetting. As for tank switching I'm just more used to watching target of target of target rather then that.

My macros are really rather stupid and self-made, I'd assume someone will be able to make better ones for the same purpose but here goes:

/cast [target=focus] Earth Shock(Rank 1)
/stopcasting
/cast Earth Shock(Rank 1)

This casts ES at your focus, and if you can't/have no focus at your target. For pve (especially aran where moving can be a problem) you should probably include another /stopcasting on the top to stop your current heal, for pvp that may or may not be a good idea. As for disease/posion I use just:


/cast Remove poison
/stopcasting
/cast Remove disease

Although now that I think about it I'm not quite sure the disease part of it works since I made it recently and the only time I've had to use it is on collosi in ssc and it jumps so quick that I'm not sure I got it. Let me check on that or someone more knowledgable about macros can perhaps just correct me and say it's wrong.

And it's too bad about the totems I noticed I could switch them infight for fights which change from aoe to single target healing but I didn't notice the cooldown doing it manually.

Yeah, that won't work - you can only use /stopcasting to chain spells in a macro only when the first spells don't invoke the global cooldown, and Remove Poison does invoke it. It's more for adding in Nature's Swiftness for a single-button instant cast type of thing, or, with a single spell, clipping an earlier cast to beat lag.

As for using my focus target for watching, sure, I could do that, but then I'd need another addon to display my focus target.

In my experience, it does not work for the disease cleansing portion if you make the macro like that. Unfortunately i haven't found a way to make it work in a single macro without modifier keys.

Except that you don't actually cast the first spell unless the target is poisoned - since they changed all cleanses to be uncastable on ppl who have nothing to be cleansed. Again I have to make sure once I get home but I do know that my focus macro will cast on my current target if I have no focus, i.e. if the first spell fails and it is a instant spell. However it is a different reason for the spell failing and that may matter. And yeah it's useful to make the same type of macro for NS.

As for bars x-perl has frames for focus and target of focus, and ecasting frames (I think that ws the name) shows casting bars for focus targets, and your current target.

If you try to use the macro on a target that is diseased and not poisoned, it will return a message saying 'Nothing to dispel.' and it won't attempt to cure the disease. I've tried many variations of this, and to date, have not found a working method of getting the macro to cure both without a modifier key.

Quartz also works quite well for monitoring your/your target/your focus target's cast bar as well as healing way and earth shield durations/charges/stacks currently on them.