Tag Archives: heal

How to fix resto shaman (spread) healing : the best of !

5.4 patch note is out. And unfortunately, the first announced change for resto shaman aren’t very promising :

Healing Rain radius has been increased to 12 yards, up from 10 yards.
Glyph of Chaining now increases the cooldown on Chain Heal by 2 seconds, down from a 4 second increase.
Glyph of Riptide reduces the initial direct healing of Riptide by 75%, down from a 90% reduction to healing.
Riptide mana cost has been reduced by 25%.

Except for the Healing Rain buff (which is OK, but won’t help much, except for that guy – Dessa, I’m looking at you – who always stand just outside the blue circle. Maybe he’ll stand inside it now… Maybe), the rest doesn’t feel good. It seems like they’re trying to use glyphs to solves our problems, which is in total contradiction with what Blizzard want the glyph systems to be (glyph aren’t mandatory, and that’s why every advantage is either minor or come with a trade-off).

Anyway, I could write about that for a long time, but that’s not what I wanted to write about today (if you’re interested, I already wrote a post about it on eu forums). I know that this is only early PTR, blahblahblah, but if we don’t tell what we think early, then its to late. I also saw many shaman stating that Blizzard has absolutely no clue how to fix our problems. So, if it’s true, here are the best of the suggestion I read (plus the ideas that sprouted in my own brain after reading some). Continue reading →

More thoughts about Resto Shaman, healing, and saving people

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What I thought would be a short reaction to some things I read on MMO Champion turned out to be a pretty long post in the end. There’s a TL;DR in the end, but really, all the good things are in between.

As you might already know, I’m not quite happy with the resto shaman toolkit this expansion. The spec isn’t in a great shape in 10 man, and especially in all these ToT fights where the raid needs to spread out. People asked me : “Why do you keep raiding as a resto shaman, if it’s that bad ?” At first, I didn’t know why, but I knew I didn’t want to play something else.

Healer spec score for 10 man normal (all parses)

At some time, I tried a few raids with my disc priest. But it didn’t ticks. I didn’t know what it was at first, but I didn’t love it as much as I loved my shaman. As I didn’t have the time nor desire to gear 2 characters, I just let my priest aside and kept raiding on my shaman. And I began practicing auto-persuasion so that I don’t feel useless because I barely healed more than tanks. So I looked for what I can bring to the table, and how I can prevent people from dying.

Because in the end, healing isn’t about numbers, it’s about preventing people from dying.

So I revisited my gearing, talent and healing strategy with this aim in mind. I first thought at what I can bring to the raid :

Huuuge raid healing cooldowns. Ascendance doesn’t always provide big numbers (you won’t make full use of it unless you’re able to cast freely and have Healing Rain ticking on a few people). But in 99% of cases, the raid can’t die if I can use Healing Tide Totem ! (Well except for the tank, who could be stomped before I can hit the button, but that’s not the most recurrent cause of deaths in current raids). Spirit Link Totem is quite tricky to use to it’s full potential, but when the stars align it is amazing.
Life saving direct heals. Healing Surge criting for 200k + 60k Ancestral Awakening on a low health raid member is quite huge.

And of course, I already knew my weakness too well : I don’t have any tool to efficiently heal a spread raid.

Work for realistic goals, and trust your team mates for what you can’t do.

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Healer design retrospective

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Back in BC, Holy paladins were stuck into casting 2 different single target heals for every needs, including when they needed to heal many different targets. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and added diversity to the paladin healing rotation : they now use a variety of single and multi target spells, and are encouraged to alternate between holy power generating spells and holy power consuming spells.

Back in WotLK, Disc Priest tended to use a single single-target spell to blanket the whole raid with shields. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and improved the disc priest toolbox. They now have many efficient multi-targets spells, each with different goals, being effectively healing the raid or creating preventive shields on many characters.

Back in WotlK, Resto Druids spammed a single-target hot to heal the whole raid. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice, so they forced the druids using a variety of spells to benefit from their mastery, while providing them new spells to deal with different damage patterns.

Back in BC, Resto Shamans used 2 to 3 different ranks of the same spell (needing different buttons on their action bars) to heal different damage patterns on the tank or stacked people. Shaman were also the only class capable of efficiently healing aoe damage, and thus surpassed all other classes for this purpose. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and made Chain Heal less efficient to bring Shaman in the other healers range. They also gave shaman new tools to respond to their single target and stacked healing needs. Today, shaman are stuck using an inefficient single target spell (Healing Surge, mostly) to heal raid wide damage when the raid isn’t stacked (that is, at least one on two fights).

Note : This post is based from my current knowledge and remembrance of other healing classes. I didn’t make research just for it. So it may not be exactly accurate. However, its aim is to be an overview of the situation. Also, I didn’t talk about Holy priests because back in Vanilla/BC they were the most versatile healer, even if they’re not in as a good shape today (again, compared to other healers).

The morale of the story

Overall, Blizzard did a great job at designing healers over time. I remember a day when if you wanted to do timed Shattered Halls (needed for Tempest Keep raid attunement) as a resto shaman, your best chance was to go there with a paladin tank. Now you can do about any content with any spec.

But I’m pretty sure everyone out there is afraid of shaman becoming OP again as they were in Sunwell, and are afraid of making them better than other healers, even in their niche : stacked aoe healing. Since then, shaman were more in range of the other healers, occasionally dipping way below when the fights required a lot of spreading (mainly Ulduar, Firelands and Throne of Thunder).

In MoP, up until today, our emblematic spell, Chain Heal, was our worse spell. It healed for just as much as Greater Healing Wave, for about the same mana cost, had a longer cast time (as CH doesn’t benefit from Tidal Waves), and ran a high risk of only hitting a single target, reducing healing done by the spell by 60% (a lot of bosses hit boxes are so big that a Chain Heal doesn’t jump from the tank to the melees)

Today shamans’ main aoe healing spells were improved. This improvement may make shamans extremely good at healing a stacked raid (the 20% Healing Rain buff is pretty huge on an already strong spell, it may all be Sunwell again : shaman very powerfull in their niche but stuck in there). I understand why these improvements were chosen right now instead of more complex changes. But these don’t solve the true problem : shamans doesn’t have any suited spell for spread raid healing. They are forced burning their mana using an inefficient single target spell (Healing Surge) to aoe heal, or helplessly watching the other healers do the job. This isn’t fun. Healing should be about using the right spell for the right job. For a shaman healing a spread raid, our only right spell is a 3 minutes CD talent (Healing Tide Totem). We need something to fill this hole, be it via a new spell, a glyph or a revamped talent (Elemental Blast, I’m looking at you !). I just hope it comes in 5.3…

How to get the most out of Resurgence ?

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With the crit and Resurgence changes in 4.2, there are a lot of possibilities for gearing as a resto shaman. You can choose to gear for haste, or mastery, or crit, or a mix of crit and mastery. Depending on your choices, your need in spirit will change too, as the more crit you have, the more you can reforge spirit off your gear.

Reforging for haste or for mastery like we did in 4.1 is the easy way. We won’t talk about it here. But what if I want to take advantage of the buffs to crit ? Let’s take an example and see what happens.

Let’s imagine a shaman with about 2500 spirit and 6000 intel, 950 haste rating, 16 mastery (~1450 mastery rating) and 23% crit (~730 crit rating) raid buffed. This shaman feel good mana wise, based on her spell usage.

How many Spirit can I spare ?

I explain in a precedent post than 1 spirit give you about 2 to 4 times as much mana than 1 crit rating. Well, lets go further. Let’s imagine the worse case, where this shaman cast Healing Rain on CD, and else mainly use Chain Heal (hitting 4 people, because this shaman is very wise!), Greater Healing Wave and Riptide. This shaman spend 2 seconds every 12 seconds casting a spell not giving any mana thanks to crit. Else, he’s casting spells giving on average 45 mp5 per 1% crit. That’s 37.5 mp5, let’s round that to 40mp5, because really, who cast Healing Rain on cd for the whole fight ? That’s exactly 1/3 of what you’d get by reforging all this crit into spirit.

Or, better said: Each time you gain 3 crit rating on your gear, you can safely reforge 1 spirit away.

What if I reforge for crit above anything else ?

Now, this shaman is very smart and always ask Mr.Robot when she has some complex reforging to do. (That is, more complex than reforge everything to haste).

If I want to make Mr.Robot reforge for crit, I can choose these stats weights :

Spirit : 90 until 2500 (enter your own amount of spirit, taking into account your average procs and on use effects like Darkmoon Card: Tsunami)
Haste : 60 until 12.5%, 20 after
Crit : 55
Mastery : 20

Optimize, and look at your stats. While doing this I gain a bit of intellect (because I have suboptimal enchants, booh!), and gain 885 crit rating, or 5.06%, at the expense of 5.42 mastery.

Ok, now I have almost 300 spirit I can safely remove out of my gear!

Let’s do the optimize thing again with spirit cap at 2200.

Mr.Robot managed to remove 280 spirit from my gear. Instead, I get 40 intel, 0.80 mastery, and 0.40% crit. For free! Because you didn’t need the spirit anymore.

Isn’t that beautiful ?

And if I want to keep some mastery ?

This time we’ll use the same stat weight, 55, for both crit and mastery. Such Mr.Robot will try to give you as much crit rating than mastery rating. If I’m not mistaken, this should reduced the diminishing returns as much as possible.

Optimizing, we get these new stats :

This time, we get 2.03% crit at the expense of 2.42 mastery. That’s 341 crit rating, and 110 spirit I can reforge away.

With spirit cap at 2390, I reforged away 95 spirit to gain 0.5 mastery and 0.3% crit. Again, for free.

And what about Mana Tide?

Well, I lied. The 95 and 280 spirit I loose could have been useful with Mana Tide. How much mana is that ? If I drop my Mana Tide while my 4T11 is up, 95 more spirit would grant 125 mp5, or 425 mana over the duration of the totem, and 280 spirit would grant 380 mp5, or 1292 mana (again, with 6000 intel raid buffed). See if the other healers in your raid miss the mana, but you shouldn’t notice the difference with your own blue bar.

How is that useful ?

Well this fiddling with Mr.Robot to reforge away unused spirit is useful each time you feel fine with your mana and the crit rating on your gear increases. Be it because you get a new piece, or because you want to reforge some haste or mastery to crit.

I’m a partisan of having only the mana that I really need, and that all the mana I have at the end of the fight is wasted spirit. Some will say that by having more spirit, you can use more expensive heals, and thus spirit is always useful. I personnally think than less spirit and more throughput stats will always make for a more fun an interesting gameplay, and for a better result most of the time, more spirit being only useful when something goes (really) wrong.

I’m also of the opinion that feeling how much spirit you need is like choosing clothes. If you try the bigger size first, you may think it fits and buy it asap, without knowing the smaller size would have look better. If you instead try the smaller size first, you really know if you need the bigger size. For spirit it works the same way : you’ll know if you don’t have enough mana, but you never really know if you have to much.

So, for 4.2, I reforged crit and mastery at the same level, reforged the excess spirit away, and I’ll see how it works.

PS : Beware, Water Shield uptime seems hard to manage as it stand right now, making resurgence unreliable. You may still need the excess spirit until somethings is done to fix Water Shield.

Resurgence: Crit Rating as our New Regen Stat ?

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With 4.2 Improved Water Shield is gone. Instead we get Resurgence:

While Water Shield is active, you recover mana when your direct healing spells have a critical effect. You regain 2293 mana from a Healing Wave or Greater Healing Wave critical, 1376 mana from a Healing Surge, Riptide, or Unleash Life critical, and 764 mana from a Chain Heal critical.

(Spell description from the PTR thanks to Alacranmex from Stand in a Blue Circle)

But, how much mana is that?

I did a bit of math about that, and I found interesting facts :

1% Crit will always save you the same amount of mana for each spell, no matter how much crit you already have.
The mana saved by crit will change drastically depending on your spell usage. 1% crit will save you about 1.37% mana on Healing Wave, and only 0.17% mana on Healing Surge.
Casting Healing Surge with Tidal Waves up reduces the average cost of the spell by 300 mana, or approximately 5%.

So I made a chart of the average mana saved per spell cast for 1% crit, and I added the mp5 value of 1% crit for each spell (at about 1100 haste rating):

	Avg mana saved per cast	Cast time	mp5 equivalent
Healing Wave	21,37	2,3 s	46,45
HW with Tidal Waves	21,37	1,6 s	66,77
Greater Healing Wave	18,19	2,3 s	39,54
GHW with Tidal Waves	18,19	2,3 s	56.85
Healing Surge	9,96	1,4 s	35,59
Riptide	12,36	1,4 s	44,14
Unleash Elements	12,78	1,4 s	45,63
Chain Heal (4 hits)	19,31	2,3 s	41,99
Chain Heal (3 hits)	14,49	2,3 s	31,49

As a comparaison, at 2300 spirit and 6000 intel, 180 spirit will grant you about 120 mp5, 2 to 4 times as much as 1% crit or 180 crit rating. If you want spirit equivalent for your own values of intellect and spirit, you can look at this regen calculator from Zusterke.

So, you won’t reforge spirit to crit yet if you’re looking for mana regen only. As to know if crit will become a better throughput stat than haste or mastery, that’s another story…

Want to know more about Resurgence? Continue with How to get the most out of Resurgence?

Circle of Healers – Cataclysm Edition

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Ouch it’s been a while since I last posted here. IRL is tough and I don’t have a lot of motivation to write in my reduced free time. Plus, I spend about a month trying Rift outside of raids, so I didn’t have a lot to say. Anyway, Bati from Holy Nova Now! launched this Cataclysm edition of Circle of Healers a few ~~days~~ weeks ago. I finally managed to answer all the questions :

What are the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Zahia, resto Shaman

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

10M raids, and of course 5 mans, as everyone have to run 5 mans nowadays.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

Healing Rain ! It has a nice animation, and coupled with a few Chain Heal it makes a wonder in filling these health bars.
Continue reading →

Click-casting or mouseover macros ?

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When healing for the first time, you certainly don’t use mouseover macros or a click casting mod. You just click on an unit frame to select your target and then cast your healing spell with your normal keybinding (or, worse, by clicking the spell on your action bar). This method can work when you begin healing, but it isn’t the most effective. In fact, you have the choice between 2 alternative methods that can greatly increase your reactivity and your awarness.

With both methods, you don’t need to select your target in order to heal. That mean you can keep the boss, or your MT (or even the hunter’s pet if you ever wish to) targetted at all time, allowing you to do a bit more than just healing. If you’d like to use your new “pewpew-while-in-a-healing-spec” talent, interrupt, or do a bit of offensive dispel, this post might greatly help you.

Click-casting

With the click-casting method you’ll need an addon that allow you to bind your spells directly to mouse button. For instance, you could choose to cast Heal when you shift-left click on an unit frame or to cast your dispelling ability when you middle-click. This method is certainly the best for you if you mainly click your spells instead of using keybidings. Personnaly, I don’t like it as you have to hit a modifier for most of the spells, and thus it takes longer than hitting a single keybiding : you’ll need to hit shift+click instead of you hitting “2″. Moreover I find it a bit harder to heal while moving with click-casting.

There are 2 types of addons that allow click-casting.

Vuhdo and Healbot are raidframes addons that allows you to click-cast if you want to, but you won’t be able to click-cast on other unit frames. For example, you might need to click-cast on your current target if it isn’t in your raid group, you’ll have to keep that in mind if you choose Healbot or Vuhdo as your click-casting addon. Also, raid-frames often doesn’t show up correctly when you get disconnected while in combat, and having your mouse-binds broken too can become a problem.
Clique is a standalone addon whhich allows you to click-cast on any unit frames you’d like to. It is often used by grid user as grid doesn’t offer an integrated click-casting solution.

Mouseover macros

Mouseover macros allows you to cast spells on the target you’re currently mousing over by hitting a keyword biding without having to select it. You doesn’t need any addon to make these work. It works on any unit frames, no matter if you’re using an addon or not, and when mousing over characters in the world (except on yourself). If you’re using mousover macros and with a little bit of training you can even heal using nameplates if you need to. This is what I use and in my opinion it has 2 main advantages : it isn’t addon-dependant, and you can easily bind your main spells to single keys without having to use modifiers¹, making your reaction time shorter.

To heal with mouseover macros, you just need to replace each of your spells by a macro like this one on your actions bars :

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, help, exists][] Heal

What it does :

#showtooltip	show the spell’s tooltip instead of just the name of the macro, and show the original spell icon if you choose the interrogation mark as your macro icon.
[@mouseover, help, exists]	If you’re currently mousing over a friendly unit, cast on this unit
[]	Else, cast the spell as normal. That means that it’ll try to cast the spell on your current target. If you have “autoself cast” activated in the interface option, it’ll cast the spell on yourself if you doesn’t have a target. If not, it then show you a glowing hand.

Copy this macro for each of your spells (replacing “Heal” by your spell name obviously), and you’re done.

If you had your spells bound to your keyboard before, switching to mouseover macros should be a very smooth transition. You don’t need to learn new keybind or do something you didn’t do before. You just won’t have to do something you did (clicking your target before casting your spell)

There is one main inconvenience for mouseover macros : you need to create macros for each of your spells. That can be a bit boring when you play a lot of healing alts, as when you’re used to it it’s hard to heal without it. And, if sometimes you want to change the langage of your wow client, all your macros will be broken.²

I hope I succeeded in convincing you to try click-casting or mouseover macros. You can even use it if you’re a dps: it’s great for Misdirection, CCing your focus and all the other spells you don’t cast on your primary target. If you’re not sure which one is the best for you, try both. Be aware that whatever you choose, you’ll need a short time to adapt. Don’t give up! Once you’re used to it you’ll love it.

Of course I do use modifier, but only for “secondary” spells. Not for the one I need to use all the time ↩
That’s why I’m basically stuck to my english clien forever, even if sometimes I’d like to switch to the french client to read quest faster ↩