Totem Talk: Restoration shaman healing post-patch 4.0.6
by Joe Perez 
Feb 15th 2011 at 5:00PM
Last week, we talked about preparing for patch 4.0.6 and all the changes that were going live. People didn't quite know what to make of the patch; they were either terrified about it or eagerly awaiting it. Since then, I've been looking at the various opinions on the changes in regards to our healing. Some people have been loving the changes, while others still aren't quite sure what to make of it.
It has officially been seven days since the patch has come and gone, and I thought today we would talk about how things look a week later. While today celebrates the one-week anniversary of the patch, today is also probably one of the greatest days of the year for me. I put another notch on the totems today, and that means I'm going to get to collect some epic swag!
Has our healing really improved at all?
This really is the big question burning in everyone's minds right now. Has shaman healing really changed all that much? If you read the official forums, you're going to get a lot of mixed views on the topic.
The patch buffed our mastery, our Greater Healing Wave, and our Chain Heal. I think those buffs honestly helped out quite a bit. Before the patch, my own 25-man healing was hovering around 8k HPS, topping out at 10k HPS. After the patch, I hit a new all-time high on the Valiona and Theralion encounter in The Bastion of Twilight. The healing team consisted of myself, a restoration druid, a discipline priest, a holy priest and two holy paladins.
I'll be honest -- when I saw that, I had to pick my jaw up. Pretty significant boost compared to the week before. While not every single fight was like this in numbers, it shows what a few minor tweaks can do.
If you'd like to see the spell breakdown, here are the top three healing spells on that fight:
If you'd like to see the spell breakdown, here are the top three healing spells on that fight:
Healing Rain, Chain Heal, and Earthliving came in the top three. They were followed up by Healing Wave, Earth Shield, and Greater Healing Wave. Admittedly, on that fight I pushed Chain Heal pretty hard, but I had many opportunities to use it in a 25-man environment. Now, this is no different from how I healed the fight the week prior, but it's a pretty good proof that the buff to Chain Heal was just that -- a buff.
Greater Healing Wave has come into its own as a Hail Mary heal. Before the patch, Healing Surge was healing for just a hair below GHW. This, combined with HS's shorter cast time, meant the big brother wasn't seeing much action. After the patch, though, it has really differentiated itself from its quicker companion. I've logged heals in excess of 87,000 with GHW on lower-health targets. Part of this is due to the buff that GHW received; the other part is the tweak that mastery received. While only a slight tweak, it has helped keeping those lower-health targets alive. While I don't have an exact number to quantify the change with quite yet, just through normal healing, I've noticed those lifesaving heals have gotten bigger.
As other healers gain more gear and learn encounters, the HoT from Earthliving will decrease as more people are being healed or more damage mitigated. It's hard to tell exactly how we're going to scale in the upcoming content and level of gear, but for right this moment, we're in a good spot. Other shaman healers have reported that Earthliving seems to either be proccing more or healing for a little bit more than before the patch. It seems as though we may have possibly gotten a little ninja buff, but there's been no confirmation.
Greater Healing Wave has come into its own as a Hail Mary heal. Before the patch, Healing Surge was healing for just a hair below GHW. This, combined with HS's shorter cast time, meant the big brother wasn't seeing much action. After the patch, though, it has really differentiated itself from its quicker companion. I've logged heals in excess of 87,000 with GHW on lower-health targets. Part of this is due to the buff that GHW received; the other part is the tweak that mastery received. While only a slight tweak, it has helped keeping those lower-health targets alive. While I don't have an exact number to quantify the change with quite yet, just through normal healing, I've noticed those lifesaving heals have gotten bigger.
As other healers gain more gear and learn encounters, the HoT from Earthliving will decrease as more people are being healed or more damage mitigated. It's hard to tell exactly how we're going to scale in the upcoming content and level of gear, but for right this moment, we're in a good spot. Other shaman healers have reported that Earthliving seems to either be proccing more or healing for a little bit more than before the patch. It seems as though we may have possibly gotten a little ninja buff, but there's been no confirmation.
How is that new Mana Tide?
This is probably the biggest change we received in the patch. The developers made a few tweaks to Mana Tide Totem that caused a pretty big scare among the members of the healing community. Here's how the changes wound up in the end.
Looking at that, you can see some things that look good right from the start and other things that don't. First of all is that the ability has been opened up to the entire raid standing within 40 yards of the totem. Removing the group-only restriction is a big boon and allows us to be moved anywhere within the raid without having to worry about what group we are stacked in.Summons a Mana Tide Totem with 10% of the caster's health at the feet of the caster for 12 sec. Party and raid members within 40 yards of the totem gain 400% of the caster's Spirit (excluding short – duration Spirit bonuses).
The second thing is a boost from 350% spirit to 400% spirit. That additional 50% is fairly substantial when you consider that it will scale as our spirit stat rises.
On the flip side, it now only gives back mana to the raid based on our spirit totals. No longer will it check each individual and adjust its total. While that isn't bad by itself, now you have to look at the part that says it excludes short-duration spirit bonuses. The wording here seems a little bit open-ended and has left people very confused as to what exactly this means.
The shaman community has been hard at work trying to find out what exactly will give our MTT a boost. So far, here's what is being found to affect it.
- Heartsong Enchant
- Darkmoon Card: Tsunami
- Jar of Ancient Remedies
- flasks and elixirs
- food
- T11 restoration four-piece bonus
- spirit Enchants
Things that will not affect it:
Basically, any trinket that has a random spirit proc or onuse effect will not boost MTT.
As it stands right now, if this remains unchanged, this isn't at all bad. Looking at it now, it really only goes to show that Blizzard was trying to make sure we couldn't really break the mana regen model with a spell and some trinkets. We made a call out to punish the trinkets, not the shaman, and it looks like Blizzard did just that. The spirit trinkets are still pretty useful, and if you use them every cooldown, they will still give you healthy boost to your regeneration.
A little more spring in our step
So far, the patch has been treating me very well. I've gotten a little more spring in my step while healing, but it really is just a little bit more. Druids and paladins are still pretty high on the pecking order, and they are recently joined by discipline priests who are now showing some pretty astounding results. There's still a gap between us, and while that isn't so bad in and of itself, many are still quite concerned.
I think the majority of the community concern comes from the silence from the developers on the topic of healer discrepancy. While the changes contained in the patch have definitely moved us in a positive direction, I don't think we're close to being done quite yet. I expect over the course of the expansion that not only will our healing will be tweaked a bit more, but the other classes will get some adjustments.
How has your post-patch 4.0.6 healing experiences been so far? Any new concerns? Anything that was a concern that isn't now?
Totem Talk: Restoration will show you the basics of endgame resto shaman play as well as how to find the expansion's best reputation gear for resto shaman and tips for easier leveling. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful!Filed under: Shaman, (Shaman) Totem Talk
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
squig_masta Feb 15th 2011 5:31PM
So as a general rule, consumables (food/flasks) ramp-ups, and enchant procs stack with manatide, but on-use and proc trinkets do not?
I'm surprised they let Mending go through, but the rest are pretty cool.
Joe Perez Feb 15th 2011 6:20PM
More or less. Seems that everything but on-use and proc trinkets are working. Anything that is considered "permanent" or long lasting works.
Yomamma Feb 15th 2011 5:47PM
Have you had a chance to do any testing in a 10 man environment. Also, should we reforge some gear around to boost up our mastery? I'm just very worried about my Shaman. I love playing him as a main, but I just don't know where he stands right now. I sort of feel like if I moved over to my priest I will be helping out my guild out by being able to heal that much more.
Firestyle Feb 15th 2011 6:00PM
Yes, I think the bigger discrepancy is in the 10 man environment, and stem from being unable to use our less powerful AE heals as often (either due to spot healing more, given healer availability, or just due to target range conflicting with spell range).
Joe Perez Feb 15th 2011 6:08PM
10's are a bit trickier right now, but from the beginning it has been a challenge to work CH into the rotations on 10's. Same room size, less raider essentially. That said if you can coordinate with your group you can achieve similar results and numbers. The trick in 10s is really communicating what you need people to do, like when to group up. I've been using healing rain as my marker having people collapse to the blue circle. They'll usually get close enough that I can let chain heal do its thing and go from there. From a healing perspective 10s are indeed harder, but with some simple communication it isn't as bad as it could be, and we can still take advantage of our recent tweaks.
Joe Perez Feb 15th 2011 6:11PM
It's hard to say whether you should reforge into mastery without seeing your other stats and your healing results to date. So far, the passive mastery gained just through normal gearing has been pretty effective. The problem with our mastery is it really requires targets to be low on health before it really counts. It's sort of like an inverse buff. The lower the health, the greater the healing, but our job is to bring their health totals up, so the effectiveness is limited. I would honestly say not reforging for it and just passively gaining it should be enough until you start getting into fights were everyone is constantly at lower health totals for basically the entire fight.
Xayíde Feb 16th 2011 8:57AM
Like Chimaeron?
I'm not a healer but just a passing reader so feel free to vote me down if I say something stupid, but it seems to me Shaman mastery is great for that fight. Actually it looks very good for progression fights in general.
Skest Feb 15th 2011 6:09PM
Whilst you 12k HPS is great, it's only possible using a healing style that is totally unviable in 10 mans.
I more or less never use Healing Rain, unless it's a fight I can afford to throw mana away like Magmaw, and even then it's not that great because the Holy Pally pops Radiance and the Holy Priest drops Sanctuary and everyone is healed up before half of Rain's duration is up.
I know we scale well with the size of the raid and with the difficulty of the fight, but I'd like to be able to do competitive healing on the entry level 10 man raids too.
Disc and Resto Druids seem to have gotten a nice buff from 4.0.6 but with the healing style available to me I haven't gone up by more than a couple percent, well within the margin for error.
Joe Perez Feb 15th 2011 6:18PM
I'd argue that isn't entirely true. Holy Radiance is an aura spell, with a 1 minute cool down and 10s duration. It's not raid wide and still requires people to be in range. Sanctuary I assume you're talking about Chakra sanctuary, which increases AoE and renew healing by 15% . Sure they get a boost, but it's honestly not that much better than what we can do.
I'd argue that 10s is all about coordination. If you can get people to spread out just enough and to still stay withing range, you can still post solid numbers. Also try to keep in mind that the healers job isn't just to top the raid off anymore, but is to stabilize the raid and prevent death. Our tools are uniquely suited to do that better than just about anyone else. But that's a topic of a different post.
While I'm sorry to hear your percentages haven't gone up that much, I'd have to ask what type of group you're running with and what your healing team is.
zshikara Feb 15th 2011 6:49PM
If you stack mastery as a resto shaman like you should be then this patch was awesome, but if you stack crit (seriously, its a waste with the crit to actual % ratio right now), then you probably won't like it so much.
Remember mastery > crit in any situation as a resto shaman.
Zankoku Feb 15th 2011 7:04PM
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Zankoku Feb 15th 2011 7:07PM
As Joe points out, Resto Mastery is inverse benefit, as in if you are doing your job as a healer and healing, the value of mastery decreases as your target gets to higher health. Currently, Chim is the only raid boss that our mastery really shines.
Angus Feb 16th 2011 1:49AM
Mastery: If target has to be kept at high percent of life, not great. Anyone healing your target also devalues your mastery.
Crit, if you crit and overheal, oh no! Oh wait....
Improved water shield does what? Oh, on a crit it gives you mana.
Ancestral healing reduces the damage they take, oh after a crit.
Ancestral Awakening, oh hey, it needs a crit to get a free heal.
In the worst case scenario where you crit, someone still gets a heal, you get mana and the person takes less damage.
In the worst case for mastery, it just plain does jack all.
I am still surprised they didn't make mastery be "The lower percentage the target is in health, the higher your crit chance."
exogenesis. Feb 15th 2011 7:00PM
Relatively new resto shaman (hell, new shaman in general!) here. Mine is level 62, so I'm a bit off endgame strategies and such, but I've been healing BC instances satisfactorily - aside from when my game lags out and catches up to at least one person dead - and I was just wondering when I should switch from using Healing Surge.
At the moment, Healing Wave, for me, has pretty much become redundant, as I realised that the HS tooltip was entirely misleading - "an inefficient heal" despite the fact it heals faaaaar more than Healing Wave - and I use HS and Chain Heal, with the automatic Earth Shield and Earthliving healing. I noticed up there that you don't use HS that much. Does that mean that I should swap Healing Surge for Greater Healing Wave when I am high enough to train it, or wait until higher levels? (I'd ask my guild, but there aren't that many healing shaman, and not everyone is reliable. :P)
Zankoku Feb 15th 2011 7:12PM
"Inefficient" means that if you spam it, you will OOM. At my gear level, I actually gain mana by casting HW, based on casting regen and IWS procs.
For 5mans, HS is good for those quick damage spikes that you are unexpecting, and GHW is good if you KNOW a spike is coming.
Basically as your groups get better at awareness, your healing style will evolve as the need for emergency heals decreases.
Xayíde Feb 16th 2011 9:27AM
What I've noticed is this:
- When someone talk about a healing spell's efficiency, they mean their mana efficiency. That means that an efficient spell is one that spends little mana per healing. If you want to compare two spells' efficiencies, you must look at its mana cost and its average heal per cast.
- When someone talk about a healing spell's throughput, they mean their HPCT (healing per cast time).
Prioritizing spells with big HPCT will increase your HPS but may make you go OOM quickly because usually high HPCT spells have low efficiency.
Another important factor to consider is the spell's TUH (time until healed) which looks at the spells cast time (and duration in case of HoTs). It does nothing to use a slow healing spell like a HoT or one that has a big cast time, even if they have high efficiency and throughput, if the target dies before it can take effect.
For Shamans, I believe (although I'm not sure) it looks like this:
- Healing Surge -> very high throughput, very low efficiency, "fast" TUH
- Healing Wave -> low throughput, very high efficiency, medium TUH
- Greater Healing Wave -> high throughput, low efficiency, "slow" TUH
I couldn't say about Riptide, Chain Heal or Healing Rain, but you get the picture...
What happens in low level dungeons is that the boss fights usually don't last long enough for you to feel the consequences of using inefficient spells, therefore you feel comfortable with only using HS.
If you want to train for endgame while you level though, try being more efficient even if you don't have to right now. Do triage, assess the situation and decide if you need to top someone off or not and avoid overhealing. Use HS only in emergencies.
I am not a healer so I could be talking garbage, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I think I get the theory at least though...
Matthew Feb 15th 2011 7:35PM
Just a little off topic (pvp centered) but now that I have a little bit of resilience, I'm really enjoying being a resto shammie - and I used to play a disco priest so that's saying alot. (When I had zero resilience, I was less than happy, as everything with zero resilience is frustrating)
Glad they made Earth Shield non-removeable. And as bad as our mastery is compared to other healers, it really is handy in PvP when those last second heals count!
Healing Rain is my best friend in PvP. Nothing like it. Placed near the TB flags, encourages people to 'stand in the puddle' as my macro says.
Just my 2 cents. Thanks Joe!
But I didn't notice a change to chain heals graphics, and HW is still kinda leafy.
Amaxe Feb 15th 2011 8:18PM
Don't know if healing has improved or not, but I have noticed on Stonemaul a few times where people were Looking for Healer, "No shaman"
Jackwraith Feb 15th 2011 10:36PM
My experience is largely limited to 5-man heroics. Like Joe, I found that the change to GHW (often critting for 68K+) and Chain were noticeable. However, Healing Wave remains a complete joke as a "base heal". My base heals are Riptide and GHW, with the situational Chain, Rain, and UE thrown in (the latter just to keep experimenting to see if it's actually worthwhile; so far, not so much.) So, yes, improvement has been made.
However, the real issue is one that these changes didn't touch: the lack of cooldowns. When the tank gets into the red on Healbot, my only response is UE (if up), NS, GHW. If it doesn't crit, I'm left spamming GHW or HS as fast as the casting time will let me get them off. And if he lives, then I can't do anything but that for the next 2 minutes. It remains ridiculous that paladins have 7-9 ways of either saving a tank or dramatically boosting their throughput and/or casting speed on all their spells, priests of both specs have 4 or 5 ways to do the same, and druids have 3 and we basically have .5, since NS isn't really a saving spell without 2 or 3 other spells piled on top of it. Despite this being the leading topic on the healer boards for weeks now, no word of even acknowledgment has come down.
Koj Feb 16th 2011 1:39AM
I would agree. Right now it's not simply about healing power; it's also our lack of cooldowns and utility.
Right now the only unique buff a shaman brings to a raid is manatide, and it's by no means the only mana regen ability out there. In the past a little discrepancy in our healing could be mitigated in a raid environment by the buffs we presented in Bloodlust and totems.
The issue I perceive with shamans in current content is that we are an outdated class. The main feature of our class, bloodlust and totems, have been taken from us as unique buffs and we have received nothing comparable in return. We are a utility class without the utility. Until this is addressed, I believe shaman will continue to have issue while we progress further into Wrath content.