This thread is intended to serve as one-stop shop for restoration theorycrafting discussion on anything that does not require a more specific topic. For basic theorycrafting data, forumlae, sample talent builds, BiS gear lists, and other frequently asked questions, please refer to the excellent Theorycrafting Think Tank (TTT) article maintained by Skyhoof. The TTT article contains concrete, proven information that is widely accepted as fact by the community; this thread complements the TTT by providing both a space for discussion thereof and a place to present new data/theories for community feedback.
Topics outside the scope of this thread include:
* Specific topics that have their own threads (Dual Wield/Chain Heal, Spreadsheets, 3.1/PTR discussion, etc.)
* Extremely simple questions (refer to the sticky at the top of the forum)
* "Rate my spec/decide my gear" questions
Topics within the scope of this thread include:
* Healing strategies for specific encounters
* Data and calculations regarding ability effectiveness, bugs, anomalies, etc.
* Merits and demerits of certain talents/glyphs at the margins (backed up by data/calculations, not speculation)
* Other discussion related to playing a resto shaman not covered above
* "What am I doing wrong?/What could I be doing better?" questions that include WWS reports
Well I will give it a start then, this is how i heal Drake Tank for Sarth 3d heroic.
Basically glyph'd LHW and pay attention to how close your melee is to tank. If it is close enough and your tank has the Hp to survive a CH cast do it, else LHW spam, I also like to riptide him always before a CH because obviously why not. Here is the WWS of our last kill Bastion Sarth3d I didn't do horrible in this kill but usually so a slight bit better, hopefully this helps somebody as I think shaman are perfect Drake Tank healers for 3D. My advice to healing as a shaman is simple, know where people are and if they stand alone never CH, soon as you get use to fight and where people are you should climb meters.
I'd recommend against giving any kind of advice to help one "climb meters." Healing is not DPS. Your goal should be healing the right person at the right time for the right amount. (Then do this as much as needed.) It's more important to use your GCD to throw up a flame shock than to snipe a heal that someone else already has covered.
I'd recommend against giving any kind of advice to help one "climb meters." Healing is not DPS. Your goal should be healing the right person at the right time for the right amount. (Then do this as much as needed.) It's more important to use your GCD to throw up a flame shock than to snipe a heal that someone else already has covered.
It's almost never correct to use Flame Shock or any kind of dmg spell as a healer in a min/max scenario. The time and mana effectiveness is terrible, you will always get a better result using your time and mana to keep a dps/tank alive a bit longer than trying to do damage yourself. There are some exceptions in fights where the healing requirements changes a lot in different phases, but damage requirements only have one "phase". For example on Sarth3D it is reasonable to have some healers dpsing on Tenebrom in the start. This is niot the general case though, since in most encounters where there are parts with low healing requirements, such as thaddius or kel'thuzad phase 1, the dps requirements also have different phases, so doing more damage in the easy phase will not help in the hard phase.
I also like to riptide him always before a CH because obviously why not.
I posted some numbers here, that show a small loss in overall healing, due to the HOT being consumed. Even if the healing is a net-zero, I'd rather keep RT off cooldown.
Last edited by Vuldunobetra : 03/06/09 at 10:48 AM.
It's almost never correct to use Flame Shock or any kind of dmg spell as a healer in a min/max scenario. The time and mana effectiveness is terrible, you will always get a better result using your time and mana to keep a dps/tank alive a bit longer than trying to do damage yourself.
Agreed in a min/max scenario, but how many fights in the current content require you to do think this way? Unless you're trying to heal Naxx25 with 3 healers or something silly like that, I see little to no reason why you should not have GCD's left. Sure one could spam heal all the way, just in case someone somewhere might take damage, but this will result in mostly overheal. Even on a fight like Sart 3d, which is by far the most healing intense, dropping magma totems on the adds helps a ton.
In the current content I would suggest healers try and dps where possible rather than get 75% overheal from boredom. I know I try and do so. Flame shock here and there makes the content fun again.
Agreed in a min/max scenario, but how many fights in the current content require you to do think this way? Unless you're trying to heal Naxx25 with 3 healers or something silly like that, I see little to no reason why you should not have GCD's left. Sure one could spam heal all the way, just in case someone somewhere might take damage, but this will result in mostly overheal. Even on a fight like Sart 3d, which is by far the most healing intense, dropping magma totems on the adds helps a ton.
In the current content I would suggest healers try and dps where possible rather than get 75% overheal from boredom. I know I try and do so. Flame shock here and there makes the content fun again.
Another way to look at it is that mana you're left with at the end of the fight is just as bad as overhealing. In most Naxx fights, you can afford to DPS, which will help a lot with the quick-kill achievements, but in higher end fights, you won't often be able to waste GCD's, but you can improve your throughput with haste and spell power.
I run a phenominally overweighted haste build just because mana is very much not an issue. I have an MP5 set that I almost never wear for when Ulduar comes out, but the only fight I ever have mana issues on is Sapphiron, and usually only when doing Hundred Club. And even then, usually it just means I pot, and still never run out. Therefore I can frequently afford to DPS, and while it's not a huge benefit, it's still something, and it can make achievements easier, and let you get through Naxx runs faster.
On 3 drake it is infinitely more useful to help dps than to spam heals on people at full health. The fight is basically all about dps, if you have enough and can kill shadron before vesp lands then it is a pretty trivial fight. Even if you can't when you help dps it helps you get closer to that point which just makes the fight easier. Just don't use CL because it is much more inefficient.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
The fact that a fight is all about dps does very rarely make it correct for healers to be dpsing. In 90% of the cases it would be even better to have a healer respecc dps, or invite more dps in the first place. Only if you absolutely need a certain amount of healers for one part of the fight but not for the entire fight can you afford to have healers dpsing. On top of that, in most of those encounters, the phase where you have healers dpsing is not linked to the "hard" phase, and dpsing in that easy part isn't going to help with the fight.
I am generally too cautious about mana to DPS in the fight and when I do damage it generally goes 2.5k > miss > miss > 2.5k, so 10 seconds of casting for 5k damage.. 500 dps, it's pretty negligable I believe especially considering during the 'nuke Tenebron down before Shadron lands' our DPS have BL and all Shaman pop Fire Elementals.
I am generally on healing the drake tank (who tanks both Shadron and Vesperon). I heal him with ES and use Riptide > HW > HW > Riptide. I feel that LHW is better used as the 'spot heal' on a raid member when they get chain damage from the meteor things. On top of that, due to the amount of moving in the fight my Chain Heals generally don't hit me than 2 targets, and sometimes I have to move before I finish the cast all in all I find Chain Heal to be a rather lackluster heal in this particular fight.
I actually find that chain heal works wonderfully for 3d sarth, so it could just be raid composition and individual awareness of where 'not' to stand that makes the difference between which healing spells are more effective to use. For our group we have a warrior tank on sarth, a bear tank on the drakes, and a pally tank on the adds. If my memory serves me correct, our other resto shaman will ES the adds tank and spot heal throughout; whereas I will throw chain heals off the bear tank, which in turn takes care of the melee. The only time I have had trouble personally with chain heal not being the smartest heal to cast is right before the flame wall and then shortly after it, because people are more spread out and are still running so the chances of it being able to bounce properly are considerably lower. If your casters are also mindful enough to at least stay somewhat near each other and not be spread out all over creation, then chain heal is also more effective at that.
Seems to me however that most caster classes (or lets just say ranged classes to be general) don't understand how difficult they make it for us to heal them when they keep themselves so far away. Even in heroics there's always that ONE ranged that likes to stand waaaaay off to the side, so where a single chain heal could top everyone off, we have to cast a chain heal, and then a lhw (even tho its not a big deal to do so) to top them off.
So if one had this problem of ranged being too far apart for chain heal to work as intended, maybe enlightening them about how chain heal actually works would do the trick. Then they would be more aware (or at least we could hope they would be) of where 'not' to stand.
I just find it rather annoying to have to cast multiple heals when one chain heal would be more than enough.
On another note....
On the gluth fight... I am never really sure how I should direct my heals. So to start off... I don't run a regular resto spec atm, I am DWResto, more for testing purposes than anything else right now. So what ends up happening is that CH off the MT is foolish since it will never bounce to anyone else. And melee takes little to no damage for most of the fight so CH is mosty OH if I cast it on them. If absolutely necessary I LHW to top off whoever, and even that ends up being mostly OH as well. Our trees generally will take care of our kiters, and they are almost always out of range of me anyways. The only time during the entire fight that I am able to do effective healing is after decimate. So, I guess my question boils down to this: Any recommendation from anyone (preferrably someone who has tested the DWResto spec and is aware of its pros/cons but any advice is well accepted) about how to make the best of my time before or between decimates. Would this be a situation where I could stand to do a little dps to help out, or should I just sit back and be prepared for any "oh crap" moments?
I suppose it depends on your healing setup, but priests do noticeably more dps than any of the other healers due to having the cast time reduction on smite in most of their healing builds. If I'm bored, I'll toss out the occasional flame shock/LvB combo since I've gotten lazy about glyphing between specs and tend to run LHW/LB/FS as my glyphs but the tree really does hinge on Lightning Mastery. I tried for most of BC** to make a dps/healer work and nothing without LM works.
** Incidentally, if you're interested in a dual role dps/healing build, your best options are Ret with 8 in holy (for between fight switching) and Disc+Searing Light (for switching in one fight). Alas, these aren't really useful now that dual specs are coming.
I'm curious how useful everybody finds the Riptide HoT. There are a lot of people saying it's useless, but I generally find that riptide is roughly 20-25% of my total healing and the HoT is the majority of that. This surprised me at first, because I mostly use Riptide for the TW buff, so the hot healing is more or less pure bonus. The hot doesn't save anybody, but it does do a fairly effective job at topping people off. Is anybody else seeing numbers like this, or is it just my healing mix?
Debating what to do with your time when neither healing nor dps is "needed" is rather pointless. If you like to see yourself on top of the healing meters, spam chain heal on people with full hp (main tank). If you like to speed things up marginally and see some damage numbers, throw some lightning bolts. If you like to watch a movie, tab out...
The fact that a fight is all about dps does very rarely make it correct for healers to be dpsing. In 90% of the cases it would be even better to have a healer respecc dps, or invite more dps in the first place. Only if you absolutely need a certain amount of healers for one part of the fight but not for the entire fight can you afford to have healers dpsing. On top of that, in most of those encounters, the phase where you have healers dpsing is not linked to the "hard" phase, and dpsing in that easy part isn't going to help with the fight.
The fight I referenced is exactly the kind of fight where you can afford to dps for one part but you have to heal for the other part.
If you notice we kill Tenebron as Shadron lands and Shadron as Vesperon lands which trivializes the fight. This is mostly due to me and other healers tossing in dps when there is little damage bouncing around. There are some deaths later on in the fight (someone @ 50% from twilight torment and then getting hit by double meteor is cool) but I pretty much completely stop helping dps after shadron dies. You'll also notice from that video that even though I wasn't very mana conservative at all (I could have tided twice and there was a pretty decent portion of time when I had water shield down) and I gem/gear almost completely for haste I still was fine on mana. On most fights as long as you don't use CL there is no reason you should run oom if you're careful about it.
Ulduar on the other hand may be a whole different story.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
At the same time, I think there's something more important to consider. Maybe I'm preaching to the wrong crowd here, but with the changes away from spam-style healing and the changes to a single spellpower stat for both DPS and healers.... it's a way to keep us entertained. Obviously, if you're just learning the content and getting geared up, your focus should be 100% on healing. For many people, though, this is the n'th time we've done this content in as many weeks, we're used to the encounters and have plenty of GCDs to spare. I realize it's a bad fight to use as an example due to its low healing requirements, but I find it a bit of a bright spot in an otherwise boring Naxx25 run to see those 9-10k Lava Burst crits on Thaddius.
As a side note, tonight's gonna be the first time I've done Sarth+drakes in a while since midterms have been kicking my ass. Are the debuff auras from the drakes still proccing Water Shield every few seconds and providing shamans with nearly unlimited mana?
As a side note, tonight's gonna be the first time I've done Sarth+drakes in a while since midterms have been kicking my ass. Are the debuff auras from the drakes still proccing Water Shield every few seconds and providing shamans with nearly unlimited mana?
I don't really know if it's the Auras that are causing it, but my gear is more or less horribly mana inefficient, and I've never had a problem on Sarth 3D with mana, except, perhaps, very late in the fight when I was first doing it. Sarth overall is a fight that's far more about effective healing throughput than regeneration. Big, big flurry of healing for the first 2 minutes, then joking over Vent for the last 2.
I always assumed it was the auras, because it only happened when we were doing Sartharion with drakes still up. Literally, I'd be standing still without getting hit and one of my water shield charges would proc. It wasn't from Imp. WS since MSBT popped up +597 mana, so something was hitting me and proccing it. I assumed it was the auras from the drakes doing it, much like the way water shield procs whenever you enter a shop in Dalaran.
I'm not sure what it is on that fight, it could just be all the residual damage flying around and proccing it but it does seem to proc a lot. And yeah it does keep things entertaining, I'm always striving to have the best possible kills and helping dps will achieve that more than standing there with your thumb up your ass or spamming overheal. And some situations, especially if your raid doesn't have much gear yet, healers have to help dps. The main example that comes to my mind is 20 man Thaddius. When we first did it over the holidays we had one healer (me) healing and one druid just throwing hots on the tank. Other than that all the healers just dps'd and we still cut the enrage pretty close.
I'm just asking you to not think about your class so one dimensionally and realize that you have spells besides the healing ones.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
I'm always striving to have the best possible kills and helping dps will achieve that more than standing there with your thumb up your ass or spamming overheal. And some situations, especially if your raid doesn't have much gear yet, healers have to help dps. The main example that comes to my mind is 20 man Thaddius. When we first did it over the holidays we had one healer (me) healing and one druid just throwing hots on the tank. Other than that all the healers just dps'd and we still cut the enrage pretty close.
I'm just asking you to not think about your class so one dimensionally and realize that you have spells besides the healing ones.
In this situation you would have been much better off with the healers that were dpsing respecc dps speccs so they could do double the dps that they can do in their healing speccs. Having them dpsing in healing speccs (and probably gear) is just a worse solution that you can afford to use when the content is trivial.
I repeat again, discussing what is the "best" way to kill off trivial bosses is pretty uninteresting, and i already mentioned sarth+3d as the specific encounter where it's correct for healers to be dpsing. I don't see this type of encounter coming up a lot in the future, but i could be wrong.
In this situation you would have been much better off with the healers that were dpsing respecc dps speccs so they could do double the dps that they can do in their healing speccs. Having them dpsing in healing speccs (and probably gear) is just a worse solution that you can afford to use when the content is trivial.
This isn't true. When just tenebron is down you could easily 3 heal this fight, when shad/vesp are down you probably need like six. 3d Sarth is the only fight that this is really applicable to. Even if it is trivial. Whether there will be more fights like this in Ulduar or not remains to be seen but I don't see why they couldn't.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
This isn't true. When just tenebron is down you could easily 3 heal this fight, when shad/vesp are down you probably need like six. 3d Sarth is the only fight that this is really applicable to. Even if it is trivial. Whether there will be more fights like this in Ulduar or not remains to be seen but I don't see why they couldn't.
I believe we were talking about Thaddius in this case which isn't much of a challenge even with 20 blue geared players. I wouldn't call Sarth 3D trivial just yet, though the 25-man is probably taken down quite easily by most, someone did it with 20 players for example.
Related: Is it best to have a extra dpsers that switch to healing for parts of the fight or extra healers that switch to dpsing for parts of the fight. I guess that basically comes down to how much dps a resto shaman can do in comparison to an elemental shaman, and how much healing an elemental shaman can do in comparison to a resto shaman. I know that the times where i try to dps in healing gear my dps is abysmal, somewhere just over 1-1.2k even when not healing at all. If i put on dps gear i can get significantly higher, like 1.8-2k, but that is at the cost of a lot of healing stats.
I believe we were talking about Thaddius in this case which isn't much of a challenge even with 20 blue geared players. I wouldn't call Sarth 3D trivial just yet, though the 25-man is probably taken down quite easily by most, someone did it with 20 players for example.
Related: Is it best to have a extra dpsers that switch to healing for parts of the fight or extra healers that switch to dpsing for parts of the fight. I guess that basically comes down to how much dps a resto shaman can do in comparison to an elemental shaman, and how much healing an elemental shaman can do in comparison to a resto shaman. I know that the times where i try to dps in healing gear my dps is abysmal, somewhere just over 1-1.2k even when not healing at all. If i put on dps gear i can get significantly higher, like 1.8-2k, but that is at the cost of a lot of healing stats.
Please understand what Dollars is saying before you post. He is talking about healer DPS and you think he is calling sarth 3d trivial. Healer DPS is essential in the beginning because, as Dollars said, if you can help easily get Tenebron down before Shadron it makes things much easier.
@Dollars: completely agree with you; the best attempt we've had on 3d in my guild on 25 is when most of us are doing w.e dps we can during Tenebron.
I cant agree more with handyhoof!!! Overhealing is wasted mana, dps aint never wasted mana...
healing is not beeing the 1 with the highest healing done, but the one with the best healing done, ie acceptable overhealing, and not causing death's cus u /dance or /sleep :P our addons allow us 2 check inc healing on targets ect so no real reason 2 spam heal dps / healers, ofc rather overheal a tank than /mourn em when he's dead :S
Last edited by isseymiyake : 03/10/09 at 2:06 PM.
Reason: bug of a kind! poissibly something i caused! xD
Please understand what Dollars is saying before you post. He is talking about healer DPS and you think he is calling sarth 3d trivial. Healer DPS is essential in the beginning because, as Dollars said, if you can help easily get Tenebron down before Shadron it makes things much easier.
I couldn't disagree more with this. If you need more dps, bring more dps. There is not a single fight currently in the game where healer dps is essential. There are a few fights (Loatheb, Thadius) where the number of heals required is drastically reduced and healer DPS speeds things up, but that is just about it.
The last two weeks we have done Sarth3d with 4 healers without too much of a problem. When using 4 healers it is essential to conserve mana as you are probably going to use quite a bit of it by the time all three drakes are down, making DPS inefficient. With 2 healers on Sarth Tank, 1 on Drake tank + raid and one on Add Tank + Raid it is very important to heal the raid member who need it as fast as possible and get back to the tank asap. An even mix of LHW and Chain Heal seems to work best for this kind of configuration.
I couldn't disagree more with this. If you need more dps, bring more dps. There is not a single fight currently in the game where healer dps is essential. There are a few fights (Loatheb, Thadius) where the number of heals required is drastically reduced and healer DPS speeds things up, but that is just about it.
The last two weeks we have done Sarth3d with 4 healers without too much of a problem. When using 4 healers it is essential to conserve mana as you are probably going to use quite a bit of it by the time all three drakes are down, making DPS inefficient. With 2 healers on Sarth Tank, 1 on Drake tank + raid and one on Add Tank + Raid it is very important to heal the raid member who need it as fast as possible and get back to the tank asap. An even mix of LHW and Chain Heal seems to work best for this kind of configuration.
You're right when you have 3d on farm it's better to just have them respec. Having your healers dps during tenebron probably only really helps as you're learning the fight. We do it anyways because there's no reason for people to respec unless you are going for a record kill or something.
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
03/06/09, 9:31 AM
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