I actually think it is - in the long term and for certain fights.
First of all if you use the IED for meta gem you need 2 yellow gems anyway and the +10 haste is best choice for that at T6 level.
And if you do the HPS math haste gets better (relative to +healing) the more +healing you already have. So +haste just gets better and better the better your gear is.
I dont know what relative values are right but 1=2 healing isnt far from the truth at high gear level - especially if you are teamed up with a shadow priest.

And most importantly imo haste just rocks for certain fights where pure speed is gold like at Bloodboil or RoS. Much better than having more +healing instead.

Remember though, just as the HPS value of Haste increases with +healing, the HPS value of +healing increases with Haste.

I think the point is that HpS increases in a linear fashion with additional +heal or additional haste, but HpS increases exponentially when both haste and heal are increased. This can be seen from the equation for HpS containing both +heal and +haste variables. As an example, this is the equation for HpS (first hit only) using Rank 5 Chain Heal (Totem of Healing Rains equipped and Purification Imp. CH talents):

(1291.62+0.9429*x)*(1570+y)/3925 = HpS, where x=your +heal stat and y=haste

This equation is not perfect as it assumes no lag/perfect casting (i.e. 24casts/min. unhasted), but I think it works fine to show how both variables affect HpS. You can take the left half of the equation and put it into a 2-variable graphing program (Functions of Two Variables) to visualize how each variable differently affects HpS. Set x from 0 to ~2500 and y from 0 to ~350. HpS will be on the z-axis. For a static value of haste and variable number healing, the line is linear. For a static value of healing and variable value of haste, the line is also linear. If you increase both haste and healing, the line is curved (i.e. exponential). Both increase HpS obviously, but haste increases it "faster". The more +healing you have, the more your haste will increase your HpS.

The equation was derived by combining a couple equations. Healing per second:
HpS = (Average 1 hit)(#casts/min.)/60sec

For average healing of Rank 5 CH (with ToHR equipped) on the first hit:
(891.5+87+0.7143x)(1.2*1.1)=Average Rank 5CH, one hit

How many casts per minute, where y = haste:
Casts/min. = 60(1570+y)/(2.5*1570)

EDIT: Added an "*" in the first equation so it would work in the program I linked and fixed the Casts/min. equation.

Yeah, that is true.
But with haste your spells hit faster and I guess we all agree that healing a target for 4000 every 2 sec. is better than healing it for 5000 every 2,5 sec. HPS is the same (in this simple example) but the speed saves your targets from death quite often. And that is why haste mainly is so good imo (besides increasing HPS more than relatively more +healing imo).

Why 3? 2 HEP is a reasonable average of HPS increase (esp when you start having 200-300 haste). If you read the post I linked you can see that it exceeds 2 in some cases but I doubt there is a realistic gear set that would call for a 3 HEP value. You can make the argument that its not purely about HPS that the heal arriving faster might mean a greater chance for preventing someone from dieing, but its rather hard to quantify this not to mention the increased mana consumption / s is an argument to offset this.

If you feel it should be a HEP of 3 I'd like to see some math on that.

Haste is awfully hard to characterize though. Simply put, saying your HPS increases with haste is easy. However, it's definitely at the cost of mana. Also, it's completely wasted if you don't chain cast like crazy.

Having seen every encounter available thus far in the game, and given what my shadowpriests can do, I'm comfortable with how much haste I can wear versus what ranks I can spam. For instance, I know I can spam rank 4/5 CH's for about 6 minutes with 220 haste on Brutallus, but I've ended the last 2 weeks with less than 20% of my mana. (Yes, I have a spriest, but he got Burn'ed and so mana regen was slower than I'd like during the duration of it.) I also try to wear very little haste on Felmyst as that's a much longer fight and I get very little mana regen during the air-phases. Additionally, if I can afford it mana-wise, I'll save the pot timer for a protection potion.

Furthermore, how many of us are casting non-stop? If we're not doing that, haste is wasted. I'd say that if you're not constantly just spamming like mad, you're wasting your hasted advantage. On top of that, if you stack +healing instead (as your +healing will be lower in haste gear), your average HPS and total healing for the night probably will be higher.

My opinion is that haste is definitely better than +healing IF the encounter requires it, and if you have a spriest. Like someone said earlier in this thread, haste kicks butt on RoS/Gurtogg, but that's only 2 out of the 9 bosses.

Bottom line is, everyone needs to figure out what works for them for the group they're in, and the encounter they're on. Going back to Habanero's question, it's also why I think the 2 to 1 number makes sense. Going 3:1 throws everything out of whack. Going 3:1 would imply we all need to get the +haste S4 weapon to use 100% of the time. The +haste battlemasters would probably become the 3rd to 5th best healing trinket for us. And we'd all be around +1800 healing with 500 haste.

I don't ever have a shadow priest and I'm obsessed with haste. I think I'm at 170ish atm and I solo heal slashes without much issue, it just requires you to not play like a retard and mash high ranks when your targets are at high hp. I pretty much stick to rank 1 chain in Sunwell, uprank on higher buffets/slashes/gas novas/shadow nova, but otherwise the higher ranks are largely overheal and is just a waste of my mana pool. I plan on getting the S4 weapon if nothing else to just dick around with it, because every fight sans Kalecgos where I get stuck on MT the haste is invaluable.

I don't really agree that haste is only useful if you are casting non stop. How many times after burst dmg have you throw a heal lost the mana for it and the tank/raider died without getting it? This has happened a fair amount to me I think simply having a shorter cast time can be quite handy for getting to all the people who need heals even if the HPS isn't an increase. Sometimes burst aoe dmg can mean rapid healing follow by periods of standing around. I think haste is beneficial in these cases too not just non-stop spamming.

You're still not being consistent though. The whole point is to strike a balance between the healing/haste stats. Judging from your gems you're either consciously or unconsciously doing that; you have a lot of shadowsongs gems in your gear, more than required for your meta. If you're truly obsessed with haste, you probably can keep your meta, break your socket bonuses and go beyond 230 haste at the cost of around 80 healing and 20 mp5. Furthermore, you would swap out your Tidewalker trinket for either the battlemaster's haste trinket putting you at 270+ and or use the scarab for its haste procs.

Also, the rank 1 thing is definitely nice, but it's definitely dependant on how your strat works. I prefer not healing the soakers until the 2nd MS which is definitely doable without a ton of overheal using a higher rank, and the rest of the time we spam "like retards" on the tanks for obvious reasons. Of course, we also give our highest hasted shamans spriests, so indeed it's a luxury not having to worry about managing all 5 ranks to completely minimize overheal.

No, I agree with that. But the point I was trying to make is that even though HPS scales faster with haste than +healing, it's assumes chain casting. The problem with that is we don't exactly do that all the time and so ironically, you might actually get better effective HPS from stacking +healing in practice.

However, yes, landing a critical heal to save a death is something haste is great for, but I probably see much less instances of those since we usually trend towards running with as many healers as the fight can allow rather than the minimum.

I challenge you to name a fight in Sunwell where you are not chain casting much of the fight.

Every Sunwell boss that I have seen (we are working on Twins right now) has near constant AoE raid damage. The only boss with a break on the raid is Brut, and even there Shaman are told to chain cast on the tanks when not healing the raid to get AF to proc due to the high burst that Brut can put out.

I will always get socket bonuses if they aren't stamina, all of the stats are useful. I just switched the pyrestones for lionseyes in my gear selection. I also still look at stat weights and sacrificing 37/5 for 40 haste is in no way worth it to me. I actively seek it but I'm not going to cripple myself to use it.

Obviously it's all going to depend on your raid/group comp, I was just saying that managing higher levels of haste is still possible without an ideal group.

And of those 4 you mentioned 2 there are only certain phases you do not chain cast (and on felmyst haste is god for encaps), 1 is a boss with a lot of movement where taking .1-.2 seconds off a heal can make the difference, and the last is not so much a boss as the new Loot Reaver.

I think that everyone sitting here pushing Haste or Healing are missing the point. There is a balance, both stats scale better as you increase the other stat, both stats are very valuable, especially for Shaman due to our long cast times and high coefficients, and neither can really be "wasted". Yes, are there times where having more haste can lead to down time in healing, sure, but there are times in that same fight where enough haste lets you toss an extra heal at a time and place sorely needed. Are there times that more healing will lead to overhealing your initial target on CH? Sure, but how often on a fight like Felmyst, Kalec, Twins, etc... do you overheal with your 2nd and 3rd jump? Not often.

Agreed. Oh and another thing to note is that if you have the Illidan mace haste is even better. The amount of healing or downranking has no effect on the proc and haste just means there are even more people it can proc in the same time. It feels kinda OP to be honest, spamming rank 1 CH and seeing an extra 200-300 proc heal on the third jump.

More or less Mishael.

I guess while we do have a "generally accepted optimal" gear set that we're all trying to get, the debate comes in on how to optimally gem it. It just seems like the general sentiment on haste is "it's great....buuuuuuut", and that "but" comes at a different point for everyone as well it should depending on your usual groups and strats.

Well, we are OP for PvE :p, but don't tell Blizzard that, lets just keep demanding buffs!

70 Tauren Shaman


Is what I currently feel to be the optimal endgame gear setup(or dropping twins shoulders for t6 shoulders and using k'j helm). Also the meta gem is up for debate, as it only gets better in a haste stacking set-up.


Originally I was pretty firmly in the camp of 22healing gems, etc. etc. However the more I look at it I simply see haste as that much more versatile. In this gear I don't feel like I'm sacrificing enough healing in this gear to make haste not worth it.

You can see in my current gear(2428healing, 370haste, 129mp5+memento) that I'm more or less building to a haste setup. My rational behind the 3x 10 haste in chest and my eventual 3x 10 haste in felmyst legs is that it just provides far more variability in my gear to be able to sub in really big haste pieces when the fight calls for it, and to be able to sub in older pieces with more +healing like my archimonde legs for fights where I might need more staying power.

Fights like twins I use 3pc t2 4pc t6 with mostly haste and my stats drop to 2005 healing / 279haste / 116mp5; I don't have WWS's right now because of issues uploading with the site, but I seem to be putting out more hps than using a more conventional gearset with the added benefit of just getting healing out to your group when 3x get seared. In the case of damage like twins, I feel it's more beneficial to just get out SOME healing just to get in a better spot to get sear damage topped off.

Interesting. I'd imagine the 3pc T2 would really help on Twins given the way damage is done, however, I can't really try that out anymore since I vendored my T2 set during Naxxaramas. (And the GM's won't restore them as it's been too long...sigh)

I'll admit I haven't tried up to 300+ haste as it seemed like overkill everything thus far, but since our gem vendor should be up this week, maybe I'll try out a haste gem set for a couple weeks to test.

As far as socketing 10 Haste > 22 Healing these are my thoughts. If you have 2400/2500 heal and very little haste to go along with it i think it's worth it to get your haste up to a reasonable level. Once you have your endgame gear which is loaded with haste anyway you're going to want to socket with pretty much all 22's. I'm going to replace all my 11heal 5ints with 10 haste in a couple of days when gem vendor opens to boost boost my haste, as I get the sunwell gloves / pants / shoulders etc I'll load them up with 22's.

I'm working on something like this. It will be new sheet in my spreadshhet named 'Healper'.
It will work in the following way:
1) You enter stats (heal/haste/crit/spirit)
2) You enter HPS.
3) Sheet calculates the most manaefficient spell combination to reach this hps and show how much mana per 5 seconds you will spend casting them.

My sheet is close to finish atm, now i'm at debugging phase.

Using this sheet you can easy compare two stat sets:
1) Choose HPS needed.
2) Choose stats1: sheet calculates mana spent (MS1) for your HPS
3) Choose stats2: sheet calculates mana spent (MS2) for your HPS
4) Compare MS1 and MS2 and make your decision.

It's concerning manaefficiency gained from heal/haste/crit/spi.

The HEPs for burst healing are pretty nice in Binkenstein spreadsheet.

I can't agree with this. My current math shows that haste increase manaefficiency (decrease mana consumption for fixed HPS), haste do it worse than +heal but definitely doesn't decrease manaefficiency.

Yes you are right. I should have said it does not help as much as +healing. The mana efficiency gained by downranking can outweigh the increased m/s

Using 2500 healing and 87 healing relic

Chain heal rank	Cast Time	Mana Cost	Avg.Heal 1 target	Avg Heal 2 Targets	Avg Heal 3 targets	Heal/mana 1 target	Heal/mana 2 targets	Heal/mana 3 targets	Heal/sec 1 target	Heal/sec 2 targets	Heal/sec 3 targets
370 haste build
Rank 1	2.02	247	2243.07	3364.61	3925.37	9.08	13.62	15.89	1107.87	1661.81	1938.78
Rank 2	2.02	299.25	2630.07	3945.11	4602.63	8.79	13.18	15.38	1299.02	1948.52	2273.28
Rank 3	2.02	384.75	3078.59	4617.89	5387.53	8.00	12.00	14.00	1520.54	2280.81	2660.95
Rank 4	2.02	413.25	3294.53	4941.80	5765.43	7.97	11.96	13.95	1627.20	2440.80	2847.60
Rank 5	2.02	513	3606.05	5409.08	6310.59	7.03	10.54	12.30	1781.06	2671.59	3116.85
200 haste build
Rank 1	2.22	247	2243.07	3364.61	3925.37	9.08	13.62	15.89	1011.09	1516.63	1769.41
Rank 2	2.22	299.25	2630.07	3945.11	4602.63	8.79	13.18	15.38	1185.54	1778.30	2074.69
Rank 3	2.22	384.75	3078.59	4617.89	5387.53	8.00	12.00	14.00	1387.71	2081.56	2428.49
Rank 4	2.22	413.25	3294.53	4941.80	5765.43	7.97	11.96	13.95	1485.05	2227.57	2598.83
Rank 5	2.22	513	3606.05	5409.08	6310.59	7.03	10.54	12.30	1625.47	2438.20	2844.57

We can see that using 370 haste and using ch3 instead of 200 haste and ch4 we get a slightly higher HPS and slightly better healing/mana. The same holds true of switching from ch5 -> ch4.

Hi all:

I've been spending alot of my time playing my 70 shaman lately. I had been specced Enhance, but after being passed over for 10-man raid spots once too often, I thought I'd respec and try my hand at Resto, since it was suggested to me I'd have an easier time finding raid spots.

Well, not only did I have an easier time finding raid spots, but I found I really liked playing the healer, both in PvE and PvP (people in PvP are always so grateful for healing, it seems). So, I'm investing in gear, gems, enchants, etc. as I plan to stay the course with Resto and see how it goes.

My question is this:

I use Healbot (I had it set up for my paladin) and I find it to be very, very mana-inefficient. With group buffs from my Totem, other players, etc., it seems that Healbot continues to use a higher-rank heal than I actually need, so lots of mana is being wasted and I'm often OOM well before I should be. I really like the 3-button set-up available to me through Healbot (left button= lesser wave; centre button= chain heal; right button = greater wave), but wish it did a better job of auto-selecting rank.

Can anyone recommend a course of action? Is there a way I should re-configure Healbot to make it more effective, or is there a different addon that I should be using for 5-man and 10-man PvE runs, and the odd larger instance run or BG?