There are 4 ways that haste can help provide throughput to a resto shaman:

1. You get extra ticks for HoTs at the haste breakpoints.
   • According to the guide at the beginning of this thread, the hps gain from reaching a breakpoint is less than you might think even in ideal situations. And if you refresh a HoT, that tick doesn't matter at all, further reducing this benefit. Sometimes you refresh HoTs, sometimes you don't. So the true benefit to reaching a breakpoint will be more than 0, but less than the theoretical maximum -- which isn't that much anyway.
2. HoTs tick faster with more haste.
3. Cast times and global cooldowns are reduced, allowing more casts in the same time.
   • These second and third benefits scale linearly with haste; with 1% more haste you will get 1% more ticks or casts in the same amount of time. You will also spend 1% more mana, but this cost can be offset by telluric currents.
4. Any extra ticks or direct heals that haste allows will give more opportunities for helpful procs like earthliving and equipment bonuses.

In short, and without getting into the math behind things, reaching haste breakpoints does help a little bit -- but that doesn't mean that haste between breakpoints is useless. More haste is always better, whether it helps you reach a breakpoint or not. But to belabor the obvious, more crit is also always better, and so is more mastery.

Every time I crunch the numbers I find that haste, crit, and mastery all improve healing throughput by similar amounts. Unlike some dps and healing classes, there isn't one secondary throughput stat that's significantly better or worse than the others. For an indirect proof of this allegation, note how many posts there are promoting one or another stat. There's no consensus, and people advocate the stat that fits their own healing philosophy and style.

Yea I wasn't trying to make the case that everyone should reforge into crit, I was just trying to get a consensus if my math was kosher. I agree they all seem to be +/- less than a percent difference in throughput from each other when I run numbers. I had put together a list of BiS items on the wow healer forums and there was several other shammies being very negative about crit, one even saying crit gear had no place in a BiS discussion. It just seems that alot are just having a knee jerk reaction to crit back when it wasn't as desirable a stat prior to the 200% crit heal fix. Then when I provided math to back up my analysis it was generally met with more wishy-washy 'you should hit the 2005 breakpoint b/c it is good' sort of talk.

And I guess I should qualify my statement when I said 'Haste provides no additional benefits between these two numbers.' I meant in terms of your hots haste will provide no additional benefit. Sure you're hots will tick marginally faster, but at no real throughput increase unless you can perfectly clip your hots to take advantage of that. And I think my numbers indicate that while yes you will get more casts and lower GCD with the haste points between those breakpoints, the crit you could have had will be just as good, if not just a hair better.

Shamans being negative on crit is a sad aftermath of Jynus' crusade against crit in his original 4.0.3 guide on the US forums I'm afraid.

As for this statement, the source is still there, but was recently challenged on the german forums to have been misinterpreted in the first place. I'll try to get that information available.

Regarding crit versus haste and TC mana returns: it depends on your point of view. If you're spamming LBs for an extended period of time (like Yor'sahj), then haste rating is, point for point, better than crit rating: running my spreadsheet with average stats and no raid buffs, adding 1000 crit rating increased net MP5 returns from 3892 to 4059, while adding 1000 haste rating instead increased them from 3892 to 4173. With raid buffs, 1000 crit rating increased the MP5 returns from 6093 to 6313, while 1000 haste rating increased them from 6093 to 6533. (The only thing I haven't included support for is the 3% increased crit damage from the Burning Shadowspirit Diamond, but even then, it wouldn't make up the difference.)

However, if you've got a finite number of LBs to toss out during a fight because there's limited windows of time when you don't have to heal, and assuming more haste won't let you fit in more LBs during those windows, then crit rating is better. In other words, crit is better for burst TC, haste better for sustained TC.

I feel bad for beating this dead horse, but again, it depends on your healing style and the fight.

Thanks for the clarification. I had sort of figured as much. There is likely some point where X haste would get you an extra lightning bolt per fight given Y downtime in Z chunks, but like you said playstyle is going to be a much larger factor in that than stats.

Is that really so though? If Haste is mana-negative relative to HPS, then Mastery is neutral and Crit is mana-positive. If we broadly consider throughput to be equivalent regardless of secondary weighting, Crit still offers up benefits in the form of reforging spirit into throughput stats.

I think we can do the requisite calculations to see which throughput stat is truly the best and I've tried to below. It would be nice if someone could point out where my calculations/thoughts are wrong. We already have breakpoints for Mastery vs. Haste/Crit, which are admittedly a little bit incomplete when it comes to 4.3. In addition, I'll borrow the methodology from Hamlet/Aanzeijar's post and do some calculations with a pretty standard scenario: AoE, no FI, RT, 12.5% haste, 4 jump CH, using Burning meta. For the purposes of simplification I've made base crit = 0% and base mastery = 0. The spell macro is HR, RT, CH x 4.

+100 Haste is equivalent to 129.22 HPS over the time frame, assuming 6 target Healing Rain. +100 Crit is equivalent to 105.74 HPS. Via Resurgence the MP5 benefit is 31.58. At 7000 Intellect, 31.58 MP5 is worth roughly 45 Spirit. Since we've established that both Haste and Crit translate to > 1 HPS per rating point (even when I pretend to have 0% base crit and 0% crit from Intellect) 45 Spirit, if reforge-able necessarily translates to more than the 23.4 HPS difference.

The calculation is doable for Mastery as well, but we approach it from a different angle. The same MP5 benefit remains. Mastery is more effective than Crit < 65% for AoE, and < 43.5% for single target. If we substitute, point for point, the MP5 benefit converted into Spirit converted into Crit, then those values drop to < 48.8% for Mastery to overtake Crit in AoE situations and < 18% for single targets. Obviously this is best-case and not indicative of anything in the real world. It is important to note, however, that when encounters are considered one by one that the lower values become less and less prevalent, especially after factoring in Maw of the Dragonlord, which will crit and is unaffected by Mastery.

There are a few caveats that change things:
Healing Stream Totem will not crit, but is affected by Mastery. However, the amount of healing that HST accounts for is usually less than Maw in a 25 man setting, and the Mastery portion even lower still (since it scales with health and Crit from Maw does not).
Haste affects neither.
Mastery over time diminishes its own effectiveness. The consequence of this is that it shortens the window, in say, fights like Ultraxion, where Mastery is more effective than Crit at the end.
There is the TC consideration, where Haste > Crit >>> Mastery.

The assumptions are made since base crit should be irrelevant to the ratio of HPS/Stat vs MP5/Stat. I've redone the calculations with my own gear (7107 Intellect, 10042 SP, no buffs other than WoA, 1268 Haste, 1490 Crit, Burning meta):
+100 Haste is 161.46 HPS. +100 Crit is 108.25 HPS. The difference is 53.21 HPS. The MP5 difference is 40.48 MP5, which at 7107 INT translates to 57-58 Spirit. Both Crit and Haste translate to > 1 HPS per secondary stat, so ~57.5 spirit reforged is necessarily better than 53.21 HPS.

I want to add that while Haste looks better than Crit here by quite a bit throughput-wise, this represents nearly best case scenario since the timeframe is 1 "rotation" while if projected into infinity in a normal fight Haste runs into the problem that 2 out of the 3 spells are bound by cooldowns. This is why my first reaction when reading Jessamy's comment ("Every time I crunch the numbers I find that haste, crit, and mastery all improve healing throughput by similar amounts.") is that it's true, but Crit has the additional benefit of being a regen stat and via the magic of reforging you can convert regen into further throughput.

This is true. 7k Intellect is the number for the 31.58->45 Spirit conversion, while at 8k Intellect the conversion is to 42 Spirit. Considering that the HPS difference is 23.4 in the example, however, I think the amount of Intellect needed to totally inflate the value of Spirit to where it's equivalent is unattainable. In the interest of being complete I input 12k Intellect, into my spreadsheet, and the Spirit equivalent was 35 Spirit, in exchange for 29.3 HPS.

I think you arrived at your conclusion in what is somewhat of a roundabout way. Haste translates directly into extra casts, where 1% extra haste will give you 1 extra cast every 100. It is somewhat muddied by the fact that Haste is multiplicative, but we can agree that it's slightly less than 100 casts. If we say that Crit takes over 100 casts to do so, that is right in line with my consideration that for TC, Haste > Crit >>> Mastery.

I think you are missing the point. Mana at the end of a fight doesn't matter, so looking at a sterile which one gives you more casts over a fight mentality isn't of much use. If you have less than 20 seconds at 916 breakpoint or less than 12.4 seconds at the 2005 breakpoint, crit is going to benefit you more than haste. You will get more mana back over those casts giving you more mana in the thick of the fight. I think that is of much more importance than if you are going to get an extra casts every 80, 90, 100, etc over the course of a fight.

Futtër writes on the german forums on the topic of focused insights mechanics:

Since the setup is not easy to obtain (being goblin, having 2100 static haste and access to a heroic trinket), I suspect this will be more of a theoretical excercise.

I'm using my amazing moderator privileges to bump this thread and keep it on the front page.

I recently switched up some reforges and equipped Bottled Wishes to hit the 7 tick HR, for me 2892. I had been paying attention to my cast time on CH, and it was down to 2 sec exactly with me sitting at 2899 haste. Just playing around I took off the haste trinket and saw that the cast time changed to 2.06 sec, which didn't seem right. Doing the math as I understand it, the 3.58% haste I get from Bottles Wishes should give me about .09 not .06. And just to make sure it wasn't a cap or anything I popped lust and my cast time went under 2 sec, down around 1.7 or 1.8 something, I can't remember the precise number and servers are down right now or I would check. Is there anything I am missing about this situation that would be reducing the effectiveness of haste? Or do I just have the math wrong?

Your base spell cast speed was 2.45 sec for CH before you hit the 2899 haste rating mark, which reduced your cast time to 2 secs. Thus if you remove Bottled Wishes, then your haste drops from original 22.637% to 19.06%. Using the formula for calculating new cast time (new cast time = old cast time / (1+ %haste/100)) you get 2.06 secs, where your old cast time is 2.45 secs so the math is fine.

Guys I am at a lost here. How important is Elemental Precision in the ele tree if you pick up Telluric Currents in the resto tree?

The simple answer is that without elemental precision you stand to miss 17% of the lightning bolts you cast. I can't recall if the numbers have been run previously or whether there's a link to someone who has already mathed out the exact difference in terms of mana gained per cast before and after this talent. Suffice it to say, I talent into it 2/3 (I have sufficient spirit that 2/3 is enough to hit cap my bolts) because the piece of mind that every bolt i cast will hit and will give me mana back makes it all too worthwhile.

Spec'ing into elemental precision is also a choice of not spec'ing into ancestral swiftness, so please keep this in mind. Not 100% of shaman agree 1 way or the other, but I would suggest if you choose to spec into elem prec. as I have, to enchant your boots with lavawalker to minimize the loss of passive movement speed.

However you look at it, your choice to spec into either of these is a reflection of you as a healer and your preferences. There are fights that favor one over the other, such as Deathwing reg and heroic are amazing for lightning bolt spamming for mana back. I got nearly a million mana back on my first DW HM kill from that alone. Hagara HM frost phases however, some might find the extra mobility and instant ghost wolf casts to be overwhelmingly more important and useful.

End of the day, try it for yourself and see how you like it. I prefer every bolt hitting every time, and don't miss the instant ghost wolf in DS.

Adding on to this.

There is only a 5% difference between lavawalker and ghost wolf (unglyphed). In DS Heroics, Lavawalker is probably better than instant ghost wolf.

Considering our current 4 piece gives SWG a 20% haste + 5 seconds buff only increases the benefit of lava walker. It is probably better to drop the 2 points in instant ghost wolf for something else.

Since well handled DS heroics allow for a decent amount of time to be spent casting lightning bolt's you might as well drop it into the hit talents to improve mana regen.

I think there is another important aspect of the choice to take Elemental Precision. I think most shamans take Acuity regardless of your opinions on crit, so to get 2/3 in Ele Pres you still need to sink another 4 points into the Elemental tree. I don't know about you but my points are pretty tight. When I used to run Ele Pres I had to drop points in Elemental Weapons and Improved shields. I just don't think losing 40% on Earthliving and 15% on Water and Earth Shields is a very effective trade off. Sure you are going to miss 17 out of 100 casts, but I think in most of the situations where you can spam LB that number isn't going to make or break your mana pool. If you can squeeze the bare minimum out of the Resto tree you only have to give up one of those two, but I run a pretty tight spec with 33 in Resto, and personally I wish I had 1 more point in Resto to top off Ancestral Resolve...I just can't spare the point. Your thoughts may differ though, but I think in any situation you can't take both Elemental Weapons and Improved Shields if you elect to take Elemental Precision.

Could you go 1/3 Elemental Precision if your a space goat?

Can you hit the spell hit cap? Time for napkin math!

I've got an alliance shaman alt but I'm a bad so I had to go to Spell hit - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft to find out with Heroic Presence - Spell - World of Warcraft you still need 1639.14 (rounded to 1640 from here) hit rating to reach the cap. If you only take 1/3 Elemental Precision - Spell - World of Warcraft, you're going to need 4920 spirit to be at 17% spell hit as a space goat.

Is 4920 spirit reachable? I'm not in full bis gear and not all my gear has spirit on it pre-reforging and I'm at 3068 spirit before my HotU is proc'd and 3948 after it's at 10 stacks. That's still almost 1000 spirit shy (about 3% off the hit cap still) and honestly, I wouldn't stack another 1000 spirit over haste/crit/mastery.

TLDR: No, you can't reasonably hit the spell hit cap as a space goat while only taking 1 point in elemental precision. You would need to stack 4920 spirit, which although may be possible I would not advise it.

Also, whats better 2/2 Convection (Damage spells use 10% less mana) or 2/3 Concussion (Increase dmg done by LB, shocks by 4% which is at 2/3)?

As resto going for the sniper build.

When 1,6% of your LB damage > 10% of the LB mana cost, roughly. If you use more damage spells regurarily (shocks for FI, or nova), convection stays better longer.

First question:

Eh, I am searching over and over but really don't see any good information about using SLT with Anti-Magic Zone.

Guildie asked me question: about is it possible that in theoretical situation where using AMZ and SLT together runs a huge risk of the totem with some small dmg tics destroying the Zone before the big hit hits?

I found some ideas about how WoL is interpreting all on:

World of Logs &bull; View topic - A way to disable spirit link

but I am really not sure after all (doh! where is my cofee?).
Any ideas?

EDIT: got the source from where my guildie took it, some DK blog:

Note also that dmg taken from a shaman's "Spirit Link Totem" is absorbed by the AMZ and can break it, and so the two should not be used together.

Source: [4.3] Unholy Death Knight 101

Second question (SOLVED):
that bothers me around, perhaps somebody can help.

Well I set my haste at 1271 rating (9,93%). When I am using t13 4set bonus/hero (should be +30% haste) it’s jumping to 42,90% (if we calculate that on rating its 5491,03 so just after 5486 cap).

That's strange, if we calculate it just like it’s stated in tooltip +30% it should be 1652,3 haste rating (12,909%).

Which is correct? What am I missing?
I was trying to dig it here and there but haven’t got luck to find it.

(ps. asked that some time ago on LiG5, got diff gear now so don't look on what's in armory).

EDIT - THANKS for PM!