It would seem that healing as a resto shaman now has more than one effective strategy. Grayrest's LHW thread was a good display of just how effective LHW can really be, but it doesn't really delve too far into a general style. There are other schools of thought, however, and I wanted to get the information in writing.

As of writing this thread, my current gear does not reflect some of the Resto Think Tank post thoughts, and I will be writing as if the various things I believe to be true from my personal experience and armory match the TTT as much as possible, and diverting as necessary.

To crit or not to crit
For starters it looks like Resto heal styles boil down to this main point. This doesn't mean crit is trivialized or unnecessary in one style and laser beam focused in another, but rather that crit is valued significantly higher between them. If this is not obvious, allow me to point out the following:

• Pro - There is at least one thread based entirely around LHW that extols the virtues of crit.
• Pro - There are now 3 different talents in resto that trigger off of a crit heal and 4 talents that improve crit where there was previously 1 and 1 respectively.
• Con - Many posts and the TTT still reference Chain heal as the fulcrum of shaman healing, which benefits much less from crit than our other heals.
• Con - The HEP thread has crit as the lowest effective healing stat available.

So what? Well, crits are a weird bunch. They are not reliable enough to count on for specific heal throughput per cast, but they are reliable enough to consider their averages. They can be terrific if your target has a larger deficit than the base heal, but nearly useless if you overheal. On the other hand, if we were to ignore critical strikes altogether in our play style, then we can focus on gear stats much easier, and we don't have to worry about our overheals nearly as much.

Please remember that the following numbers do not reflect effective heals, only total throughput

Some math on crit (skip a bit if this is old news to you):
A critical strike heal is 150% of normal heal.
Ancestral awakening (assuming full heal), is 30% of that that 150%, or an additional 45% of the original, so...
1% crit means 1% of normal heals will add 95% more HP. This means out of every 100 casts, 99 are normal and 1 is 195%. If you add all those heals up, you have effectively added .95% to your total heal output. This increase actually goes down as you increase crit%, since each previous crit you already obtained has raised the average value!

@ 49% crit: (49*1.95 + 51)/100 = 1.4655
@ 50% crit: (50*1.95 + 50)/100 = 1.475 or +.0095, a change of .648%
@ 51% crit: (51*1.95 + 49)/100 = 1.4845 or +.0095, a change of .644%

Each crit percent raised the value by .095, but the relative change from the previous value is progressively smaller. This last bit of info about the increase % from crit is actually very interesting math, but not very useful in determining which stat is better. That usefulness is derived from the increased in average HP per cast, which is a static value.

Spell power equivalency for rank 9 LHW with Tidal waves, Purification, Ancestral Awakening, and LHW Glyph bonus:
.95% of base = 1720*1.1*1.2*.0095 = 21.57 HP avg.
1 SP = 1.1*1.1*1.2*(1.5/3.5)*1.81 = .976 HP added per cast.
.95% of .976 = ~.0093 HP added per SP
Average added hp per 1% crit = 21.57 + .0093*SP.

So at 2000 SP, each crit% would grant ~40.17 healing for LHW on average.

So what about crit rating comparison?

To get 40.17 HP out of SP for LHW, you would need 41 SP.
For 1% crit you need 45.9 crit rating.
so, by simple division...
1 SP = 1.12 crit rating for LHW @ 2k SP

With math already done at 2000 SP:
What does this chart tell us?
Crit is significantly better for LHW, RT, and HW than Chain Heal. If your play style or role utilizes significantly more CH than the other spells, Crit is your last choice in gear stats and talents.


Riptide, LHW, LHW
So we've established that crit matters to your play style, even if "matters" means you don't need it as much. What do we cast and when? If you are like me, you are more likely to hit Riptide, LHW, LHW than any other healing sequence over a given 3-4 second period. this does NOT mean you avoid other spells altogether, however. If there is more than 1 target in close proximity to others who can use a heal right now, then it is likely that Chain Heal is still the better choice, because of the mana efficiency. So..

Scenario 1: Constant raid-wide damage
Chain heal. Cast it, cast it hard, cast it continuously. If someone gets too low to wait, hit Riptide or a TW hasted LHW and get back to spammin!

Scenario 2: Discrete burst damage to various raiders
Riptide, LHW, LHW, Water shield. This seems to be the most common scenario I have encountered so far. There are plenty of times when enough people have damage to warrant a chain heal, so that can easily be mixed in. What about when RT is on cooldown and TW is now spent? You have many options here!

1. Refresh water shield
2. Start a chain heal
3. Refresh any totems as necessary
4. Refresh/cast Earth shield

"Well DERF DERF DURNITOL all you did was name shaman abilities, I'm not an idiot!" Well I made the above list because without TW, HW and LHW simply aren't as awesome as we'd like. The cast time reduction is so very important that using the above abilities is often better than using a cast time/cooldown on anything else. The general exception to this is healing your Earth Shield target with glyphed LHW, usually the MT who would need a heal anyway.

Scenario 3: Tank healing
This is where things can vary. Sometimes raids take AE damage, sometimes the tank is off somewhere else. sometimes both. I usually CH the raid then LHW the tank (with my Earth Shield on him), possibly a riptide on the tank too. I don't like to waste TW, so I will generally LHW another raider as necessary.

This style means that crit is important to you for 3 reasons:

• Throughput
• Improved Water Shield
• Ancestral Awakening

I think Riptide, LHW, LHW style is the best way to go, personally. It has more versatility and likelihood to effectively heal every target that I want healed within 40 yards of me. This style is VERY efficient for overhealing if you watch your raider's HP deficits closely. I am nearly always the most efficient healer in a raid, but not always the highest total healed.

Spec, stats, gems, glyphs
Spec:
0/13/57+1 - get all the crit talents, and improved your water shields.

Gear stats to watch out for:
Despite the fact that I think crit is good, it is still not as good as mana or spell power. I don't like using exact numbers for HEP because they do vary, and you really have to feel it out to know what you are lacking in. That said, here is the basic premise:

1. SPELL POWER is king. Pound for pound, you get more effectiveness out of SP than any other stat. An 8k LHW doesn't mean squat if you can't cast more than one, however so....
2. INTELLECT is your power stat. You get .6 MP5, .18 SP and .3 CR per int. Good stuff! This is your primary stat for mana issues. It's not BETTER than MP5, but it's usually easier to get. With the exception of low healer Heroic Patchwerk, I have never had mana problems in any fight as long as replenishment is available.
3. CRIT RATING and HASTE RATING are so close that it needs explanation. Get haste until a TW hasted LHW is under 1 sec. Then get crit rating, and lots of it. If you feel good about your crit rating, get haste! If you can get HW under 1 sec with TW, egad!
4. Take MP5 if it just plain destroys Crit rating. As a general rule, if the rating value is about 2 times more than the MP5, than the rating is better. You need to use good judgement here. Do you need 1% more crit if you are at 30% already, or 25 mp5? Odds are the MP5 is better.

Gems:
I like to balance my stats in gems usually instead of pure stats, but here is my list.

• Meta - Insightful Earthsiege Diamond. Can't beat it. See the TTT.
• Red - Luminous Orange (SP and INT) or Runed Red (SP)
• Yellow - Brilliant Yellow (Int) or Luminous Orange
• Blue - Royal Purple with SP and mp5 is probably best, but some people like Stam here instead. If you are depserate for mana, get Dazzling Green (Int and MP5)

Glyphs:
Water Mastery - don't be resto without it!
LHW - I don't think I need to explain this
Mana Tide totem - we are sacrificing a lot of innate mana recovery to keep critting. That 4% extra focusing while focusing on INT makes a big difference.
Water shield. - again, don't be resto without it!


Despite how much I like critting, and I'm at like 35% raid buffed now, I am starting to see the need to tone it down for mana and haste a bit. 30% may be the right balance for current content. Also of note, despite the fact that Ancestral Awakening looks terrific on paper, my experience with it is that it produces 5% of my total healing on average, no matter my stats. I am looking for a way to maximize this, because you would think it scaled better with crit percentage. I may need to adjust LibHealComm to add in my crit% to each heal so I can estimate hp needs more.'

Edit: Added raw and glyphed LHW to the SP Equiv. chart. Added Grayrest's explanation of crit increase

For your crit equivalency, I'm not seeing where you're taking your current crit rate into account. Adding 1% crit will only grant that .95% HPS increase when you're at 0% crit. When you're at a 50% crit rate, there's already a 50% chance that the spell will crit regardless of whether you add that 1% crit, so the effective hps increase is considerably lower. As I posted in the LHW thread, I get crit rating at about half the effectiveness of SP for throughput for LHW and the number should be considerably lower for RT because only half the spell crits.

I'd like to see some numbers on a Riptide, LHW, LHW, CH combination. I'm interested in seeing how well CH compares to HW/LHW when it receives the bonus. Practically it makes sense because very rarely is there only 1 person to heal.

I only ask because i have both 2pce t6 and the badge totem which is reducing the cost of each chain heal drastically and am under the assumption this is still quite efficient even in single target healing as it refreshes TW without the hefty cost of riptide and it allows riptide to run its course in terms of the hot component.

Thanks for creating this thread, Durnitol. My experience with raid healing so far in WOTLK has been very similar to what you described, and it's good to see this discussion started. My strategy revolves around keeping TW up whenever practical (usually via RT more than CH) and use 2xLHW where possible.

Obviously, the absolute maximum theoretical value of Ancestral Awakening is 30% of your effective healing, but only if you have a 100% crit rate, only cast LHW and HW (and RTs for which the HoT never ticks), don't cast ES, and don't use ELW. In practice, our other sources of healing plus the Ancestral Awakening delay mean that it's really hard to push Ancestral Awakening heals much higher in terms of raw value. The best way I have come across is to be aware that the AA heal has a short delay before actually landing, and choose the target for your next heal accordingly (particularly if you have activated Tidal Force and thus can reasonably expect LHW to crit).

Example: Person A (for whatever reason) needs healing now. You activate NS/TF and cast HW, using your last TW charge and bringing him up to full health with a hefty crit. Person B is on 50% health and Person C is on 60% health. Who do you use riptide on? Unless there is some extenuating cirumstance, the correct answer is person C, as ancestral awakening will heal person B regardless of how quickly you cast riptide (this may be partly due to my 350ms latency, but it's hard for me to observe lower latency situations.) If you riptide person B, then not only is there is a definite chance of overhealing person B, but person C will still be sitting on 60%. Ancestral Awakening rewards the shaman who thinks two steps ahead.

Even though the numbers don't look too stellar compared to what they are on paper, I view Ancestral Awakening much like most prot paladins have come to view Ardent Defender: in terms of raw numbers over the course of an encounter, it only provides 1-2% mitigation, but it's the 1-2% that has the highest chance of actually killing the tank and causing a wipe. Similarly, Ancestral Awakening shines in cases where you need maximum throughout *now* or else people will start dying. This also means that Ancestral Awakening causing overheal is not a big issue, because 1.) it means the raid and all of its pets are at full health, and 2.) you were going to cast that LHW/HW/RT anyway.

I've been following both threads about LHW and Crit for a while now and what I wonder is, that even thou its lovely to see all these theories flying around, if it will be viable in the long run. Lets look a bit ahead. Blizzard already said that they see the problem with priests and sometimes druids with their CoH and WG spell and Ghostcrawler clearly stated that they will change it and most likely put a CD in the region of 6 seconds on it.

If I'm not completely out of my mind, that will mean that there is actually some damage left to be healed in the raid. Meaning that shamans would actually be "needed" again. I don't have a problem now either to keep up with a paladin or a druid regarding healing-output (75% CH, 8% RT, rest ES/HW) in most fights in Naxx. What I don't really get is, while this all is useful, I wonder how long we will stay viable single-target healers. I see the point for 10-man's and 5-man but I highly, highly doubt that our primary role in the real raiding environment will suddently become the one of a single-target heal spammer.

.95% increase is per crit%. That's how the math works. If you are at 40% crit, the very definition of the "percent" says that 40 out of every 100 casts will crit.

(40*1.95*X + 60*X)/100 = avg HP per cast, which is the numbers I posted. There is no alternative math. I believe the aspect of crit you are referring to is more about determining if you can get one full crit on your next cast, not averaging out over all casts. That said, I still agree with you on crit value versus SP. As I said in my original post. SP is king. Even INT is way better still.

There is something I wanted to make sure I address, by the way. I do not believe in heal rotations, ever. Sure, typically you want to cast LHW twice after riptide or CH, but this is typical and not absolute. I suppose I just don't like the word "rotation" as it implies a hard sequence of events, whereas healing should be fluid to the situation at any given moment.

(40*1.95*4000+60*4000)/100 = 5520
(41*1.95*4000+59*4000)/100 = 5558
5558/5520 = 1.00688

So a .69% increase for a 1% crit increase. You can't ignore starting crit when doing throughput calculations. While your text says that SP is better, your math shows crit as better than SP for LHW. 1.2 SP = 1 CR for itemization, so CR is better than SP if it's under 1.2.

In regards to your spec I thought I read that Imp Shields did not effect the man gained from a globe that goes off because if Imp. Water Shield. Only globes that go off because something hit you. In my opinion that lessons Imp Shields value greatly.

Also, Shamanistic Focus huh?

my spec will be resto in before my first Naxx tonight. I just finally hit level 80 and did not really go out of my way to min/max my Enh spec as I destroyed everything in my path frankly without a spec, I just took whatever looked interesting in Enh.

My resto spec, however, is another story....and my question much more valid than your retort.

And I have never heard your comment about IWS and Improved Shileds to be confirmed. Do you have a link to something that verifies that? Since IWS is one of the bigger pieces of the crit LHW concept, if Improved Shields doesn't affect IWS orb consumption, that's a big deal.

I was referring to the spec the OP listed in the post. In no way was I referring to you or your spec.

As for the Imp Shields it was here on these boards that I saw that. I'm leaving the office now but I'll try to find it later.

The main reason I take improved shields is for the buff to Earth Shield more than Water Shield.

@Krim
Actually you cant compare your playstyle with the other of Firestalker.
The Dmg is to low in every raid the get decent numbers in effectiv hps.
Look up in the other topic, where bewnheels hit 4,3 or 4,4k hps while casting chainheal in 80% of the time at patchwerk.
Its a pitty you dont have any wws log. Then we could see the percentage of overheal by each class.
Beside this, the hps value of your priests is very low, but this could be also an effect of an high overheal.

Its pretty obvious that at least at the moment the shaman being a 95 % chainheal spammer is a thing of the past. Nevertheless there are still occasions where your chainheal will be the best choice.
I do not really agree on stacking haste AND crit. Rather build up different setups (which is very viable due to the masses of mail with spellpower now where your competition for loot is almost nonexistant beyond your own class) and choose your setup depending on the encounter. For chainheal spamming I select very haste oriented pieces because crits here won't do any good in general (more likely, they will drive your overheal through the roof). On the other hand crit will be a very very strong stat to use in fights like Patchwerk. It does not only procc all sorts of heals but also ancestral fortitude. Spamming LHWs, Riptides and an occasional HW will keep the uptime of the AC buff very close to 90 % at least.

Regarding AA: I still consider it a rather weak talent, even though it does indeed kick in when needed most. But its througput is weak, its reaction time much too slow (it often happens that it overheals because my direct heal on the target was quicker than the procc) und its nothing to rely on (which is a weakness of crit healing strategies anyway).

Furthermore: if you gear for haste in single target / mt healing situations, you will have to counterbalance it with mana regen stats. I also think that we have to reconsider the still rather mediocre HW glyph at least for mt healing purposes. Quite often tanks will drop due to the simple fact that the mt healer has to throw himself a heal, losing at least a GCD (I mostly riptide myself in such a situation and then throw a HW on the MT.) Nevertheless I do not keep riptide on CD since it is a pretty expensive spell and it doesn't have the instant HPS as LHW. Rather I use it reactively for burst healing purposes (again riptide into 2 HWs is very powerful).

Patchwerk is not the fight you want to use to determine how you should be gearing. It's an amazing benchmarking test for DPS, but for healers there is no thought at all in the encounter. You get your tank, you click on him, you spam making sure your shields stay up, and throw Mana Tide and a potion on cooldown. If you want to build a gear set that you know will give you enough regen to heal for 4 straight minutes, great, but it isn't all that practical.

Malygos (especially 25) has a very good mix of healing situations that let you use your entire toolkit. Phase 1 Malygos lends itself very well to single-target shaman healing to make breaths and explosions easy to deal with (let the priests and druids take care of the minimal raid damage). Phase 2 progresses from chain heal spam, to riptide/LHW topping, and back to chain heal spam for breaths. I'd also throw Kel'thuzad into this mix, but it might be too easy to really draw any conclusions.

Thank you. This math very much displays what I was missing about your point. The increase in heal value, while static per crit%, is less of a % increase to the previous heal value as you add more crit because all the previous crit% already raised the average value!

This does not diminish from my suggestion about spell power being better than Crit still. If we had only one heal spell (LHW), then the math says that yes, as you increase in total spellpower, crit becomes a more valuable stat per added point. At 2000 SP, if you saw 2 potential gear upgrades, saw that one had an increase of 12 crit rating, and the other had an increase of 10 SP, you take the crit rating, if all you ever cast is LHW.

As it stands, we have chain heal, Earth Shield, HW and Riptide as well. Earth shield seems to have no effect from my crit, and apparently works off the target's crit. Go figure. CH can still be up to 70% of my effective healing depending on the fight, and averages to be 40% in Naxx overall. It would be silly to ignore this.

@Gun - Krim said the CH spam did 1.9khps, whereas LHW spam had 4.4. LHW did much better

@Torrential - What sovelis41 said, but is that intended? I don't remember any discussion on Imp shields not affecting imp water shield proc. Also, I got shamanistic focus because I would rather spend that extra 1 talent in it for the random soloing I do than elemental weapons, which is probably the wiser choice.

After some more experience and recount review, I am finding that my overheals are the most efficient of any other healer. This may be an effect of the playstyles of the other healers I run with, but I typically have under 20% overheal, and over half of that is Chain heal. Naturally spot healing is more efficient than raid healing because your chosen target is far more likely to need a heal. Since this style lends itself to more efficient healing, it is plausible that I may be off on mana regeneration/INT numbers. If fights get longer, then efficient or not, the focus on crit for gear does not promote solid healing for terribly long fights.

I've seen you write this twice now and I simply have to call you out on it.

3/3 Healing Focus + (Earth Shield or Concentration Aura) = 0 Pushback - exactly the same as pre-wrath.

We've recently been spending time on Malygos and the splash damage that's thrown around in P2 is horrific for chain healers because every single ~2.2 secs cast becomes ~3secs or longer. And that's with 3/3 Healing Focus on it's own (60% reduction in pushback time). I now yell at our paladins if we don't get Conc Aura for that part of the fight because the pushback inevitably leads to deaths.

Mathematically, the difference between spamming 2.2secs CHs and 3secs ones is significant. Assume for the purposes of simple calculation that the 2.2secs CH produces a not at all unreasonable 5000 HPS. Increase the cast time to 3 secs and your throughput drops to 3666 HPS - a reduction of 25%!

Yes on fights without significant splash damage Healing Focus is a waste of points, but in the current game the fights where pushback is an issue (Sapphiron, Malygos) are the hardest ones and also the ones with the most raid-wide damage, meaning the raid healers can't afford to be losing potentially 25% of their throughput.

Most effective strategy for malygos is to get a focus target frame up. Cast LHW on the main tank (personally i prefer 1 button considering ive got my chain heals down to 1.9-2.0) then switch to chain heal when he changes targets. Doing this put me well ahead of the other shaman in the group that was concentrating on the raid. Due to the cast time on his raid dmg ability in phase 1 my chain heals were landing with insane effectiveness. Since its about 10-15k dmg on all targets very rarely did i see overheal on those chain heals.

You're not jeopardising the tank by doing this as generally all healers in the raid are on the main tank during phase 1 and tbh its a bit of a snore unless dps misses a spark.

I am not exactly sure that healing-percentage is a good way to evaluate Ancestral Awakening for it's "use", however.
While it allows to pinpoint the total healing AA did over the evening, the actual value needs to include reaction time, target-choice and heal-size vs incoming damage.

All near impossible to model but the key point is that AA auto-targets for the most damaged raidmember. Even in cases where only one person is taking damage one can assume that given steady damage on the tank AA will fulfill an important use in keeping it's target alive, simply because it will hit who needs it, when they need it - sorry to paraphrase adverts here.

I realize this is impossible to fully examine on a mathmatical basis but it's nontheless important, AA's "power" for the healer isn't completely accessible from the raw number it produces.

Anyone have (at least) a (ballpark) haste rating number for this for those of us too lazy to do the math and/or guess and check?

Very little assuming WOA. I stripped down to 41 haste and was @ .988 LHW.

With no WoA you are looking for around 200.

I'm at ~500 haste which is about 15% before WoA. This is a 0.8 sec LHW with TW. I might add that I've not actively been trying to get haste gear - this is just what I've picked up.

Oddly enough, I'm running spreadsheet for some number crunching, and it turns out that with 0 haste rating and Wrath of Air down, Tidal Waves makes LHW exactly 1.0 sec cast time.

It would appear that haste rating doesn't help LHW whatsoever if TW is up 100%, which it isn't. The more haste you have, the better HW becomes. On the flip side, no amount of haste or spell changes the fact that ignoring the GCD, the HPS of LHW enhanced by Glyph of LHW and Tidal Waves increases at almost exactly the same rate as Healing Wave without healing way. I find this very interesting that they scale exactly the same regardless of haste or SP.

So in the end, I think you'd rather cast LHW for no reason other than it is more likely to heal for the amount you want, due to it's cast time and HP deficits. In addition, LHW gives you more chances to crit since there are more casts per period of time, which means more Improved Water Shield procs, and better mana efficiency than HW.