Resto PvE Cast SequenceFollow

Hello all,

Going to be hitting 80 soon on the shammy and I have decided to go resto. Just wanted to know what cast sequences you guys use to heal 5 mans, 10 mans, and 25 mans if you do use one. Since resto shammies aren't the "mash CH button" healers anymore (or are they ;)) I'm curious to see what you all prefer to heal with.

Is there a rule of thumb in certain instances/raids tank/dps %hp etc... on what to use or do you guys wing it?

Are there spells you prefer to not use because they are not mana efficient?

How does your rotation differ in groups as opposed to raids?

Did your choice of glyphs affect your rotations?

Thanks-

I wouldn't say Lesser Healing Wave is the last spell you would want to use. If you have the glyph which increases it by 20% on the target who has earthshield then it is prolly more mana efficient to use that. It's tough to say you just really have to get udsed to it. If your in a 25 man your raid should be organized and you should be the only one healing the rest of the group with chain heal. It's your most mana efficient heal. It's prolly noty worth you getting the 18% Healing Way stack just for the fact that you will never be main heals on the tank.

In a 5 man raid i usually wait till their at 75% ish and hit them with a riptide and just lesser heals. Your the only healer in it so letting them get down to 45-50% just to use healing way is probably to risky. Lesser Heal with the glyph rocks. It's onl;y 2 points for ICH which increases it by 20%. I suggest getting that and using it every chance u get. Mine is criting at a little bit over 8k and i have about 1850 SP(unbuffed) right now so. You got 8k -4k-2k. 14k worth of heal as where my Healing Wave hits for 10-11K and costs more mana.
Theirs no rotation its healing your not DPS. The above response was 100% right, it's all about anticipation.

But yes obviously if someone is real Low on health u would want your bigger heal but if u cant use lesser. I use it pretty freely, i don't really have a big problem with OOM.


Edited, Mar 2nd 2009 5:27pm by Retardedin

Druid tank here.

What is the best way for a shammy to keep a tank up at the beginning of a multi-mob pull where the tank is taking lots of damage ?

I ask because I recently tanked H CoS with a resto shammy healer with almost 1900 +healing. I noticed at the beginning of pulls, I often got down to 25% health, which I thought was odd. Then, on a pull with 4 elites, I died with the healer at full health and 80% mana and no mobs beating on him. My gear is good enough (35k health, 32k armor, 40% dodge) that I had never died because I was supposedly losing more health than the healer could replace.

I asked him later what the deal was, and he said he didn't have enough big heals to keep me up.

If I run into a similar situation in the future, I would like to be able to tell the shammy how to keep me alive. Thanks.

It honestly sounds like you just had a really bad player behind the wheel of that Shaman. Assuming you are sufficiently geared, if he couldn't keep you alive with 1900 SP then he wouldn't be able to keep you alive even with 10000 SP.

First, put Earth Shield on the tank. Second, apply Riptide at the first sign of damage to get the HoT rolling. After that it's just a simple matter of casting Healing Wave/Lesser Healing Wave/Chain Heal when and where needed. If your tank is really taking that much damage in a heroic (or in any situation in which you expect heavy burst) it's often best to start pre-casting Healing Wave. If the damage comes, just let the spell go off. If not, cancel it and start casting it again. Repeat as needed.

EDIT: There is one other thing I thought of. Make sure you're allowing the Shaman to lay his totems before the fight starts and pulling the mobs within range of the totems. Taking ~6 seconds to run up and lay totems after a pull has already started can sometimes be very costly when you're the one responsible for keeping the tank alive.

Just to put it in perspective, I have about 1900 SP myself and I am having absolutely no trouble healing my friend, who is playing an entry-level heroic tank (meaning all of his gear is 75-80, pre-heroic), even through the more damage-intensive heroics.

Edited, Mar 3rd 2009 10:27am by Gaudion

With the 20% glyph it has a place in the ******** and any shaman who doesn't think so doesn't know their class every well.

With my current set up, including crit calculations and healing way procs, the rotation: RT/LHW/LHW heals for an average of 19,694 which comes to 12.12 hpm.
It gives me 4900 heals per second, uses 2022 mana per five seconds and I can spam it non-stop for 49 seconds until OOM.

RT/HW/HW heals for 28,531, 12.28 healing per mana, 6628 heals a second, and consumes 2698 mana per 5 seconds. All seem better until you get to the fact that I can only spam that non-stop for 36 seconds until I'm OOM.

In a longer fight where I need to heal less for longer, using LHW makes sense.

Healing Wave without tidal waves proc, with AA is going to heal an average of 10,703, for 12.27 heal per mana.
Lesser Healing Wave with AA and ES is going to heal an average of 6,285, for 12.02 heal per mana. And is going to land in 1.34 seconds for me, instead of 2.23 for HW.

There are numerous times where I need to toss a fast heal on a tank and riptide is on cool down. In those cases, LHW is the ONLY correct choice. It is fastest, most efficient heal for those cases.

There is a whole lot about that post that I want to personally test and comment on where math fails at practical application, but before I say any of that I think you should go back and recalculate all of that with an additional 18% to your Healing Wave output numbers. Glyphing LHW for an extra 20% but not giving HW the 18% from Healing Way is not a fair comparison.

I'm still old school and use HW alot. I see no reason not to use it unless the target is taking damage so fast you don't have time to get it off. That's a judgement call. glyphed lhw is badass, and you should be using it when you don't have time to get HW off on the tank (or dps). Healing Wave simply is the best spell to use when the target (single target) is at 1/2 health or less and aren't (or no other party member) in imminent danger of dying. And this includes a tank with earth shield on. If you have time, why cast 2 LHW's (which take longer than 1 HW) rather than 1 hw? My biggest complaint is healing way doesn't last long enough, so it is a below average talent, but does have it's uses when the tank is taking heavy damage and requires more than 1 hw. But often riptide and 1 hw are enough, which means healing way fades before you have to use healing wave again.

But so many fights have splash damage (not to mention most dps are death knights) I find myself just spamming chain heal, even in 5 mans. But sometimes the tanks are not geared as well as you'd like, and chain heal isn't enough to keep them up. You need healing wave. Unless their health is so pathetically low you don't have enough cushion to cast HW, you should use this over lhw imho. As long as you aren't asleep (or just lazy), and are on the ball, you can anticipate when you need to cast healing wave and get it off in time. 22k health doesn't go away that fast!

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 2:24pm by thrashering

Healing way is a wasted talent for a raiding Shaman. Shaman are almost NEVER the MT healer, and when we are, on fights like Patchwork, we aren't the only healer there. The Tank is getting spammed from the paladins, hot'ed by the druids, shielded by the priests, etc.

Raid healing is going to be about spamming CH, with fast uses of Riptide and LHW on various other targets, including sometimes tossing supplemental heals on the tank. When we are helping heal on tanks, it is almost always on longer boss fights, where duration is just as important as output. Spamming HW might do more up-front healing, but if you're OOM before the fight is over, and your healing is actually needed, the fight will not end the way you'd like.

Even when talking about doing 5-mans, the 18% of Healing Way (if spec'ed) comes at the expense of time. You have to be ahead of the damage curve to make use of Healing Wave over Lesser Healing Wave. In my experience, healing this way resulted in so much over-healing, that it became clear I was (a) wasting mana and (b) wasting talent points.

To suggest that one must account for the 18% bonus of healing way is to suggest that it is an essential talent for a resto shaman. For a raiding shaman, this is simply not the case.

In actual parses of combat logs for healing equivalence for Healing Way, the following is a typical result from an Uld 25 run prior to dropping the points -- largely due to these types of results appearing consistently (note: I've seen values from under 2 effective healing points to a bit over 7, but the average is between 4 and 5 consistently):

Healing Way talent points: 3
Applied or refreshed 226 times.
Combat added effective: 54922, added total: 232790
Combat Healing Wave hps increase: 144.2836
Combat HPS increase: 5.1602, per my point: 1.7201
HEP: 14.8021, per my point: 4.9340


Comparatively, by changing those three points over:

Elemental Weapons talent points: 3
HEP per point: 15
Total HEP: 45

15 points of EFFECTIVE healing versus 4.9.


The big issue is that in a raid situation, the time it takes to cast a HW over a LWH means a great deal more over-healing on single targets in general.

"Healing Wave": <lots of data snipped>
Overheals: (63.87%)
<lots more data snipped>


"Lesser Healing Wave": <lots of data snipped>
Overheals: (33.06%)
<lots more data snipped>



Edited, May 5th 2009 2:23pm by kingpatzer