While this thread has diverged a little away from the primary topic of 'Best Practices' for healing and into the realm of debating the current state of Resto in PvE-- I personally welcome the discussion, because seeing where we might be lacking helps us see what we can do to optimize under the circumstances...

First time through Ulduar and our guild spread out on XT(10man)... I was abysmal on the healing charts and the raid leader asked why. (Our holy priest obliterated the healing meters) We talked it out and decided that stacking the melee and the ranged allows me to Chain Heal the tantrums effectively-- and forces the dps to pay attention instead of putting strain on our healers...



I actually have a question related to both best practices and to the state of healing shaman in Ulduar;
While in both 10mans and 25mans I feel capped. My total throughput doesn't get as high any other the other healers. All of my heals are limited to a number of targets in a given time. My max Chain Heal will tag 3-4 targets for at most 15-20k healing if each jump crits... My LHW will tag a single target in 1sec for 4-6k, doing half as much effective healing as Chain Heal in the same period of time... My HW will be hasted to 1.4s and crit my target for 12-16k, doing about equal healing as CH, but only to a single target and for more mana.
Chain Heal remains the most efficient heal I can use when I'm able to get 2+ jumps...

My question is, is there something I'm missing to help boost my healing beyond stacking haste until I oom myself in less than a minute? I could probably drop some mp5 in favor of more spellpower/crit/haste/int, but I don't think it will make the difference that I'm looking for.
Our priests and druids are not target capped on many of their spells and only limited by mana management... Our paladins can rock 10k EHPS for 10min with illumination and Divine Plea, barely having to use any mp5.

I'm feeling kinda left behind as other healers continue to increase in their output, while I'm still limited.

I've been pretty discouraged recently. Let me preface this by saying that I am not a long-time Shaman, or even a long time healer; up until a year ago, I was a Warrior(pre-Burning Crusade, of the DPS variety, throughout BC, of the Tanking variety). As a warrior in PvE, I was always competitive damage, and was the "Best" single-target tank up until I switched to my shaman last May. As a Shaman healer...I just don't feel like I can be competitive in the current situation. The only way I feel it would be possible is if I completely outgear and outplay the other healers, and at that point I'd still be better off if I was playing my Druid.

Just depressing for me. I still enjoy my class, but i'd like to be able to be competitive. HPS isn't everything, and as a Shaman, I spot heal wonderfully. The problem is that there are some fights where being an amazing spot healer isn't enough.


I really don't think haste is the way to go anymore, especially for a 10 man. In a 10 man, it's going to be very rare for you to get full use of a chain heal, simply because there are times when you really can't spread out. Haste doesn't affect Riptide, and it doesn't affect LHW very much once LHW is hasted.

Don't get me wrong, Haste is good, but i'm at the point where I feel we definitely benefit more from spellpower, or maybe even crit.

I have no idea what you mean there. You mean that haste doesn't affect LHW due to tidal waves? Not sure what you meant but haste increase HPS of LHW by about 2x what crit does per rating point due to being GCD capped and haste reducing the gcd. Haste is about even or better per rating than spell power for LHW.

stassart,

I'm not certain your charting of top20fights was spot-on accurate.
Normally the top raid dps charts are dps stacked raids, which means fewer healers, more dps.
Judgement of light with more dps in the raid will do more healing.
Is your reporting showing that JoL is the top healer, not that paladins are top healers?

With Tidal Waves, LHW is base 1.05s. With *any* haste on gear or WoA totem, 'waved LHW is below 1s. Neither Tidal Waves nor haste rating can reduce GCD below 1s.

Hence, haste is close to useless for 'waved LHWs.

Wrong. Take the example of no haste gear or buffs. GCD is 1.5s, waved LHW is 1.05s. RT-LHW-LHW takes 3 GCDs, or 4.5s. Even though the spell casts faster than the cooldown, you have to wait for the cooldown to start your next cast.

Now say you have 20% haste. LHW now takes 0.88s, but RT-LHW-LHW now takes 3.75s -- still 3 GCDs, but the haste has shortened the cooldowns.

Right, which is proved by your shaman_hep reports you've posted.

As I have pointed out before, and even had it included in the resto wiki not to mention the other people who posted here let me repeat.

Tidal Waves does NOT effect THE GCD.
Haste reduces the GCD.
therefore: HASTE INCREASES LHW THROUGHPUT.

Would you still recommend gemming for Int if you typically run 10-mans which don't always include Replenishment sources? I run both 25- and 10-man, but I'm curious as to whether this would change your gemming choices.

And while we're on the subject of stat preferences, I take it you generally prefer crit over haste, given that the rest of the stats are comparable? I've run shaman_hep on the last couple of parses I've collected, and the results are typically ambivalent (both haste and crit are just slightly above 0.5 HEP). My guild had me go DPS for the last few months and now that we've lost a couple of our healers, I'm heading back to resto and want to make sure to target my upgrades appropriately.

(This isn't directed just to Sixthy, btw, would love other opinions as well.)

For me, the problem (if there is such a thing) with shamans is that CH is outdated. Our tank healing and spotting are both good enough, but our aoe healing is subpar comparing to priests and druids, especially given that we are more of a one trick pony compared to them.

Personally I think that alot would be solved by making CH a 2s heal (scaling the healing done back appropriately). Frankly the 2.5s, making it (for me) 1.85s with WoA and 4p t8 is still too slow, and I already dread the day where we have to give the 4p bonus up. Unless the damage is consistent or can be predicted reliably, alot of the damage will have been healed before a CH lands, by priest and druid aoe and spotting.

The other point is that CH is too big on the first jump and too small on the 3rd and 4rd (for the cast time of the spell). It's nice in some situations to be able to throw a decent sized heal on the tank, which bounces to the melee but I don't, and I doubt many shamans do, heal that way consistently - also the tank is out of range of the melee alot of times, making it useless. We would be much better off if the reduction in healing per jump was 0.75, though I am guessing some would argue otherwise.

Earth Shield SP Value
I'm curious if it still holds true that Earthshield will heal at whatever your spellpower is at when its cast. I ask this because I will usually jump into Shadow Crash during the General fight to cast my earth shield and then hop out and it will scale back up to full power. I don't have any on use trinkets with which to test this out in any other situation, but I had noticed that HST also changes how much it heals along with your current spellpower and not just spellpower when cast.

Yes. Earth shield healing depends on the amount of the caster's healing spell power at the time it is cast. So you have been gimping your earth shield quite a bit by jumping in the Shadow Crash. I noticed that ES does about 65% of my healing during that fight. Don't gimp it!!!

I stack up [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] before Vez with healing stream and then I put ES on the tank before the pull. But that trinket is useless during the fight because you cannot keep the stacks up. I also suggest donning pure SP gear for the fight since ES is so important. I don't have 4p t8 yet, but I still lose my 4 set bonus on t7 because of the power of ES (and rip tide to some extent) on that fight--the SP from the non-set items I have is better in my experience.

Edit: Also, I'm not sure where you're getting changes to ES effectiveness when it procs due to current SP and healing stream totem. We'd need to see some data, but I think it's been tested already.

What I was saying is that I jumped in shadow crash to try it out on our first attempt and i put an earth shield on the tank. the first hit it did healed for something horrible low. the second i got the debuff off of me it went back to normal amount of healing so no I do not gimp my healing especially when I am able to do it between swings. I was asking this because I think that maxim of shaman healing needs to be retested because shaman may be wasting their on use trinkets to simply toss on an earth shield.

Edit: Just went and tested it, the sp at time of cast still holds true. However any shaman looking to conserve mana during this fight this is certainly an option. However if your raid know what they are doing there should be no problem keeping up mana wise with the saronite pools

I noticed my last post didn't truly add to a best practices dialog. So this time, i'll add in some best practices.

I've noticed that on my guild's hard mode attempts, we have to re-affirm with the guild how to stand near each other so AOE healing can actually hit more than one target. That's not just important if I wanted to use chain heal, but it's required for CoH, PoH, WG and so forth as well.

Also learning the names of debuffs and using them to your advantage is fairly important.

Steelbreaker he casts "static disruption" which increases by 75% the damage they take from nature sources. If you change your raid frames to show who has static disruption, you can easily see who needs to be fully topped vs. just healed.

When Hodir gains FrozenBlows, everyone takes damage, just heal them all.
People standing still get "Biting Cold", sure it's their fault for standing still, but if you see someone with that debuff you know that in the next second they will take damage. You don't really need to know if they have freeze on them or not, since you can't remove it, but if they still have biting cold a couple seconds later they need to be yelled at over vent as well as healed.

XT-002, Light Well, if someone has this debuff, people near them take damage, but they should be running away. If you target them, cast a single target heal. If your strategy includes clumping by groups and you see a mage get light well, you can cast chain heal on the other mage who stands near them.

This happens a lot in Ulduar, where knowing debuffs, and tracking them in raid frames gives you a huge advantage to knowing who is going to be taking damage soon and who is in the most jeopardy.

Edit:
I apologize if i have some debuff names wrong in the text. Hopefully i get off my lazy butt and write some of that info directly into comments sections of bosses on wowhead.

Again, I want to stress, there are ways you can help predict where big damage is going to be coming in, in Ulduar. Get better at knowing this stuff and you'll do better.

Deconstructor hard mode (25) really made Chain Heal look weak in my opinion. We had a 2nd resto shaman in for a few attempts and CH just flat out couldn't keep up with PoH / CoH / WG / etc / etc. Then again, I haven't really been advocating CH throughout all of these discussions; only that shaman are still viable when played correctly. We ended up running druid/druid/priest/priest/sham/pally for the healing setup (as I said in my Freya post - I feel that's about the strongest healing comp you can run). I took over my normal RT / LHW / Tank Spotting / Burst healing role that I always do and kept up HPS wise with both priests and lost to the druids (as I always do - WG is very powerful on the meters but they don't handle burst like we do).

Healer breakdown:



(Xyrm is ret - Ermad is the holy).

My breakdown:



As I said - I can keep up with the RT / LHW spam healing method on low targets (I saved quite a few gibs on the winning attempt - although to be perfectly honest the fight isn't all that hard from a healing perspective. Almost all of the damage is very predictable and only when people make mistakes will things get briefly out of hand). Our priests are not anything close to bad healers, either.

So my stance remains that shaman are still in a good position healing wise if played correctly. I do feel that CH is lacking and needs a complete overhaul - increasing the heal on each jump, reducing the cast speed - whatever it takes. I do feel it's still a viable heal in situations but it absolutely will not keep up with PoH / CoH / WG. But once again, I feel shamans still have a place in each every hard mode in Ulduar thus far - haven't seen Algalon so I can't comment with any certainty there, but I'm sure we'll have our place in that fight as well.

Adapt!

I've got a question regarding resto shamen in 10 man content. My guild is a pure 10 man guild and progressing through the Algalon questchain atm.

We recently got a new resto shaman and during his he turned out to be quite a good healer.
The thing is now, that in our last raids he has been showing a little weakness when it comes to group heal.
For example, when we were doing Iron Council hardmode his task was to help keep the MTs alive, which worked without problems.
But in fights like Hodir or Mimiron I really cannot see what exactly he is doing.

Yesterdays Mimiron healmeter looked something like this:

1. Holy Priest @ 3.8k HPS 40% heal
2. Disc Priest @ 2.2k HPS and 35% heal
3. Resto Shaman @ 1.8k HPS and 25% heal

The Healmeter on Hodir looked quite like the one from Mimiron.

His Gear is better then the other healers, he's completely Naxx/Maly/Sarth 25man geared, the other 2 Healers just got gear out of 10 mans.

His skilltree, gemming, enchanting, glyphing is exactly the one you advise.


I feel that in fights where a high amount of raid dmg is incoming and a lot of burst healing is needed, he seems very disoriented. And this fact really gives the other Healers a tough time.

I read a lot about the resto shaman in WotlK beaing more a MT Healer than a group healer. But I can't really believe that the resto shaman is being pushed into that role this much, to the point that he's getting outhealed by Disc Priests when it comes to heal raid dmg.

After the raid we analysed our logs and saw, that in fights like hodir his #1 healspell is Riptide, which I guess cannot be right. Nearly the same picture in Mimiron P2, here LWH scores #1 but is followed by Riptide with just a few % span.
As far as I know LWH is the most important tool for a resto shaman, also when it comes to heal raid dmg.

Can anyone give me advice, how he should behave when it comes to group heal. I know that CH has become weaker that in was back in TBC but in several fights where people are positioned compact CH still seems to be a mighty tool.

Regarding xt-002 hard mode and chain heal, I think that will largely depend on your positioning setup by your raid leader (much like mimiron p2). If you watch the kill video V AN Q U I S H put up on youtube, that was a chain healing shaman's dream -- they all just stood in one tightly packed group and people who got debuffs ran out.

My role on our kill was chaining the melee and watching people who had light bomb to make sure they didn't die. We ran the felmyst arrangement -- melee, and one group on each side, 1 tank who tanked both the sparks and the boss.

I agree that CH in its current form has few places in the actual raid content, feels incredibly slow and is still too much dependant on raiders clumping up.

However there are still encounters where it's incredibly useful. Freya with 1 elder is a good example. People are often relativly close together, damage is pretty predictable, a lot of different damage sources are flying around (=chainheal is very likely to find viable targets). Spamming CH will let you "win" the meters easily and put out decent HPS. Add another elder, and CH feels weak and slow. Silencing mechanics prevent precasting and the damage from ground tremor just begs for burst healing NOW.

I haven't seen enough hard-modes for a final conclusion, but until now I'd say CH would extremly benefit from some changes and the best place for me is spot or maintank healing,burst HPS or chainhealing the melee pack.

So, I adapt. But will Blizzard adapt? LHW is the only spell that hasn't a totem relic available through PvE content. The LHW glyph is great, but it's not really supporting the LHW spot healing idea. Riptide is great, but to get to his full potential it is very dependant on the HoT not being too much overheal. And in all honesty, I just don't see blizzard planning any significant changes to CH in the near future.

All this isn't horribly bad. Playing a resto shaman is fun and as challening as never before. But I guess it would help if blizzard's perception of the shaman class would match the raiding reality a tiny bit more.

I do feel that we're just about the best candidate for this role - even when I'm in fights that are CH-viable I find myself in the position to just keep topping off the lowest targets, getting AA procs (I've been doing pretty well with LHW crit rates lately, getting around 50% on most attempts leading to pretty good AA healing + mana returns). I feel like in situations where someone may or may not be in a position for a potential gib or of just dying early to excess damage that I can get them topped off without a priest or druid needing to pull of their raid healing duties.

That's not to say that I won't CH if I feel the situation calls for it. I just didn't really need to CH during Decon so there's no point in forcing it when my method of raid spotting / gibb preventing works (not only does it work for saving lives or whatever but it maintains decent HPS as well).

As a side note, when we run multiple shaman I have the other shaman typically raid heal - I prefer if they CH and generally our 2nd shaman will keep up very well HPS wise while primarily casting CH - Decon / Steelbreaker have been the exceptions so far (for my guild at least) where CH just doesn't keep up with the druids / priests.

We did the everyone clump together strat for a few attempts and didn't like it, but our final strat still has good CH positioning - it still just didn't keep up enough to validate a CH shaman over another priest, so we went priest on that fight.

Is there any way to configure existing mods to show how much healing each healer has done on targets under a certain % life? For example, total healing done by Sixthy on targets under 30% life? This might better illustrate or put numbers on the save a life healing ability of fast LHW, riptides, and the smart heals of AA and CH bounces.

I can't tell you just how common this experience is with new resto recruits. They appear disoriented when a lot of aoe healing is needed. Perhaps this is because no downranking forces us to be more reactive healers. However, good resto shamans will know when big aoe dmg is coming out and will precast chain heals. If they are single target healing, they will /focus the boss and wait for its dmg spells to target the tank or another player if they are spot healing. Chain heal should be your #1 heal in phase 2 Mimiron. During Mimiron and a lot of other fights, chain heal is really best for the melee, but in a 10 man situation, you need to make sure CH is viable with positioning since people tend to spread out more. A fight like mimiron phase 2 has constant aoe damage and therefore CH is much stronger than in other fights since it has no CD. On Hodir, Riptide is strong, but really he should be looking for fires to stand by so that he can just stand and chain cast CH on tank which should spread to melee during frozen blows. other than that, I usually CH, jump, CH, jump or HW, jump HW jump depending on my healing role for Hodir.

A good resto shaman will also try to keep HW and LHW hasted with Tidal Waves at all times in case they need to spot heal. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about though about shaman all of a sudden being weak healers. CH is the only aoe healing spell without a CD, and that makes it extremely valuable. I am consistently in the top 3 healers in 25 mans, and I usually top the meters for Mimiron. I feel like an important part of the guild and I feel that my raid spot is secure.

Short answer--holy priest will outheal a resto shaman consistently with aoe heals, especially on a fight where raid aoe damage happens less frequently than their 6 second CD, disc priest really shouldn't be outhealing anyone on the meters persay. In a 10 man situation, resto shamans may usually tank heal/spot heal because they are strong at it.

Haven't looked at prayer of healing lately? It has no cooldown and heals the group of whoever you target, lading for 5-8k+20% more of that if glyphed. 2.5 sec cast time unhasted, affected by serendipity, it can take a priest 4 seconds to heal ~85k aoe damage on two groups over a huge 40 yard range of the target, meanwhile prayer of mending is jumping around automatically, then he has an instant cast circle of healing as well and instant cast flash heals up nearly evey time he would want it.

If find that if I ever cast chain heal I end up, at best, landing just before the prayer does, which yeah is great for my position on the meter but I didn't really do anything useful since that damage would've been healed half a second later by the prayer anyway.

The most useful thing I do is keep earth shield up on the tank and cast riptides/LHWs on low people, maybe doing a NS+HW. It saddens me that I have so little potential compared to priests, who on top of all that even have the totally awesome guardian spirit ability and can dual-spec to disc for highly effective MT healing.

I don't feel useless, especially when I look at the poor paldins who can't really do anything effectively except spamheal a tank, but I do get jealous of the priests. Atleast druids have a fairly unique role in the hots, and they don't have awesome tank-saving cooldowns like guardian spirit or pain suppression to be jealous of.

I guess you could say that CH is the only "aoe smart heal with no cooldown", but rarely do I find myself in a position to cast it usefully. Hodir while standing in a moon beam is a very good place to use chain heal, and I'm able to 'top meters' here, but it also is the only place where I feel it's really useful and doesn't just do overheal or heal stuff that would've been healed right after I healed it anyway, or where raid positioning makes it impossible to use effectively - problems which priests and druids don't have with their aoe heals.

Riptide+LHW spam is the way I'm healing now.