Trees Rock (for now)

Let's be honest. Shaman healing is brutal this expansion. It's stressful, horribly reliant on replenishment, and just not fun. Five-mans are awful, raids are a combination of boring and stressful, and the mechanics are bad.

This may be due to burnout from all the healing I did in Burning Crusade, but regardless, I have come to loathe shaman healing with all my heart. I'd rather retire Salanthe and never play her again than heal anything else.

There are a number of factors that make healing awful for me. Mana regen tops the list. I find myself running dry incredibly quickly if I don't have replenishment. This is what makes five-mans particularly miserable. In raids, my heals are not fast enough or don't hit hard enough to make a difference. Not to mention a number of fights in both five-mans and raids in which standing still is very, very bad or very hard (e.g. Heigan, Sapphiron (sort of), Loken, Keristraza).

As a result of my disillusionment of the shaman class due to aforementioned problems, I leveled my druid up and healed my first Naxxramas run on her. I am testing her out to see if I can find a healing class that doesn't send me into an emo rage everytime I try to heal something. I have to say, despite being quite undergeared compared to everyone else in the raid, Miothe the tree did very well.

I wish I had taken screenshots of Recount after the run, so you'll have to trust that I'm telling you the right thing. My raid composition was no different than what it is when I heal on Salanthe. I duo-healed Spider, Plague, and Construct quarters with a resto shaman (I'm fairly certain that some of my frustrations with raid healing are due to the fact that the two healers play the same class and spec). I topped overall healing for the night by a slight margain and some fights went much better than they typically do when I'm healing on my shaman (Anub'Rekhan and Gluth, most notably).

Overall impressions are definitely favorable towards the druid, although I am not passing official judgment until I can heal Kel'Thuzad. That fight makes me want to delete the shaman, so it will likely be the watershed for the druid as well.

Mana efficiency was not an issue. I do need to break myself from the Burning Crusade lifebloom dependency and tweak my healing overall, but there were no glaring problems or stumbling blocks. Unless you count the two trash wipes, which may have been prevented if I were on my shaman. My AoE damage panic healing is definitely not as effective as it is on Salanthe.

There is one thing I miss about shaman though - dispelling. A shaman can cleanse three things (poison, disease, and curses) with one global cooldown. This is a huge advantage over a druid, particularly when you consider that druids rely on heavily on instant-cast spells, so it seems much harder to devote a global cooldown to cleanse than it does on the shaman.

I am quite nervous about the changes to mana regen that are coming in the Ulduar patch, 3.1. Shaman will emerge largely unscathed, but druids will bear the brunt of it. Since mana efficiency and regeneration are one of my major complaints about shaman, I am very afraid that druids will end up the same way.

I will definitely continue to report here as I continue this experiment. Next time I'll use Recount or WWS to back up my claims, too!

(This post was inspired by Aurik over at /hug.)

Tossing Heals - Talent Builds by Salanthe

I was invited to my first Naxxramus run a few days ago as a healer, so I was forced to sit down and think seriously about what talent build to use. I've been kicking some ideas around since I first saw the new shaman talent trees, but I haven't posted anything worthwhile yet. Here's my attempt at it and I'd be very interested in some feedback.

After looking over the shaman talent trees, it looks like Blizzard tried to increase a shaman's effectiveness as a main tank healer. Talents like Riptide, Tidal Waves, Healing Way, Earth Shield, and Improved Earth Shield complement each other very well to make a shaman good at single-target healing. This is particularly useful for five mans and has made us, in my opinion, very good five man instance healers. A glyph that works well with this style of healing is the Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave.

There are also a number of talents that work very well to increase our effectiveness as raid healers. Earthliving Weapon, Blessing of the Eternals, and Ancestral Awakening work to spread healing across as much of the group as possible. There are a couple of glyphs that assist in this style of healing, such as Glyph of Chain Heal and the Glyph of Earthliving Weapon.

Blizzard gave shaman some very good tools for main tank and raid healing. We are effective at both instead of specializing in raid healing. Even our Tier 7 set bonuses benefit both styles, rather than promoting one over another.

Talent point distribution is a problem though. While it seems as though Blizzard has made every effort to prevent a shaman healer from being pidgeon-holed in one style of healing, we end up choosing one style through our talent builds. Thus, I've come up with a couple talent builds - one for AoE/raid healing and one for main tank/five-man healing and by using the corresponding glyphs that I mentioned previously, you can optimize your abilities to fit each style.

Restoration for main tank / five-man healing or this if you don't care about threat reduction. This is the jack-of-all trades talent build. It promotes a more dynamic and exciting healing style, where you rely less on chain heal and more on Riptide, Healing Wave, and Lesser Healing Wave to get the job done. Earthliving weapon is icing on the cake and not the bread and butter of your healing.

Restoration for AoE/raid healing (aka the Earthliving build). This is my favorite talent build because I am enamored with the elegance of earthliving weapon. It is designed for chain heal spam and spreading the earthliving HoT over as much of the raid as possible.

Your choice between builds depends on what sort of healing you do most frequently and what meshes well with your style. Shaman can be main tank/single-target healers or AoE healers with either talent build.

Finding a Groove

Learning to be an efficient restoration shaman post-3.0 is not easy, at least not for me. I'm happy with the small changes I made to my gear and mostly happy with my spec. It's the spells that are giving me fits. Hence this post will be a more of a flow of consciousness entry while I write about some of my experiences and observations post-3.0. I don't have any answers yet; so don't look to this as the end-all, be-all of post-3.0 restoration shaman.

Now that the Armory seems to be partially functional, I can show you some of what I did with Salanthe, including changes to her gear and spec. Here's the link to her Armory page. First thing of note, I obviously don't heal with her Riding Crop equipped (at least not all the time; mistakes have been known to happen). I use the Redeemer's Alchemist Stone instead.

The most notable changes I made were to Salanthe's gems and I switched out a few pieces of gear to give her more spell crit. I re-socketed nearly all her blue sockets with Dazzling Seaspray Emeralds for the intellect and mp5. This was done experimentally and I'm not certain if it was beneficial or not. My reasoning was this: Pre-3.0, I stacked a lot of +healing so that I could down-rank more efficiently. With the removal of down-ranking in 3.0 and the important of spell crit for mana regeneration, I thought that I could accomplish two things at once by re-socketing. Intellect improves both healing (through talents like Nature's Blessing) and improves spell crit. By using those green gems, I also retain some much-needed mp5, particularly since some of the gear pieces I switched out traded mp5 for spell crit. As I said, I'm not convinced that this was a wise change, but it seems logical.

I also traded in a couple of my staple pieces of gear for some fancy new pieces. Pre-3.o, I was using the Band of the Eternal Restorer, Earth Living Bindings, and the Sun-Touched Chain Leggings. I replaced all those to gain more crit. I feel confident in replacing the bracers and legs, particularly since it gained me the elemental T6 2-piece set bonus, but I'm less confident in the ring. The proc was really quite nice and I'm not certain that losing the both the proc and the mp5 was worth the gain in crit.

Salanthe's spec feels quite solid to me, although I regret not having talents such as Ancestral Fortitude and Healing Way. I feel it was necessary to pick up those other talents, however.

The one thing that has been troubling the most about raid healing post-3.0 is healing itself. Pre-3.0, I was consistently at the top of the healing meters and out-healing the other shaman by a significant margin. Post-3.0, I am typically sitting below the top 5 healers, while the other shaman are still at the top.

You've heard me go on about how meters don't mean much as long as the raid is staying alive and I still hold to that, but the meters are worth paying attention to because they can point out problems and areas for improvement. The fact that I am performing so much worse than I did previously while the other shaman are maintaining their positions demonstrates that I am not performing to my full potential. I have a few ideas to explain the disparity, but nothing concrete.

One possible explanation is my obsession with over-healing. Pre-3.0, I compulsively down-ranked to conserve my mana and to control my over-healing. Post-3.0, I cannot down-rank at all, so it is possible that I'm not spamming heals in response to either one of those concerns. Examining the meters in more detail, the other resto shaman are still casting chain heal 90% of the time, while I have dropped to casting it about 75% of the time.

It is also possible that I am still struggling with finding an appropriate spell rotation, while the other shaman have found something that works for them. Asking them what they do would certainly illuminate that issue. I tend to try something new every raid and every fight in order to determine what seems to fit the new talents the best, which is quite possibly the wrong approach. One other difference between me and the other shaman is that I seem to be under-utilizing Riptide. I try to keep it up on the MT so I can bomb-heal them with chain heal if necessary, but I'm finding that difficult to time and I'm struggling with concerns of over-healing. It's just frustrating to me that I haven't found my niche yet in raid healing.

Five-man healing is much more interesting and fun with the new talents though, and I find myself preferring them to 25-man raids now, while it was the other way around pre-3.0. I find that shaman are much better equipped to handle 5-man damage than they were previously and it's much more fun to heal with the variety of spells and procs we have to manage. It is much more difficult to control those things in 25-man raids, at least for me. In 5-mans, I feel confident of the changes to shaman healing, while I am very uncertain of them when I'm healing 25-mans.

There is one small observation I would like to make. If you read this blog regularly, you will know that I also have a 70 restoration druid. She is significantly under-geared in comparison to my shaman, particularly for pve. (Her Armory is here, for reference.) I respecced her and have been healing quite frequently with her post 3.0, including some of the same content as Salanthe. In doing so, I've made an unsettling observation: my under-geared druid is much easier to heal with than my very well geared shaman. Mio feels much more in control of 5-man healing than Sal does and I find that very disconcerting. The instances I've run with both druid and shaman with the same group of people were heroic Magister's Terrace (which I'd never healed before on Mio) and AQ20.

I'm not sure what that observation means, but it concerns me a great deal, particularly when comparing their gear. I cannot say if this is a personal preference coming into play or if it really is easier and better as a druid or as a shaman. I can say that even in my gimped state, I am still out-healing druids in our 25-man raids, and our druids are very, very good. I'm not sure what to make of that observation, but I'm throwing it out there in case others have some comments or observations.

On a lighter note, I've been messing around on my warrior again. I pulled her out for some Headless Horseman summons the other night and renewed my bond with her. There is just something so refreshing about playing a dps warrior (fury, for the moment) after healing 99% of the time. And pvp is still fun on her, despite being stomped repeatedly by level 70s in Alterac Valley and Eye of the Storm (Zgu is level 67). Go, go little warrior!

HoT Me, Baby!

After a few days of battleground healing on my newly resto druid, part of a Karazhan run, and a regular Old Hillsbrad run, I'm finally starting to get the hang of druid healing. I just wanted to jot down a few observations and comparisons between shaman healing and druid healing.

First off, I find druid healing to be a bit more complicated than shaman healing. Shaman cast one heal after another. All you need to keep track of is who has aggro, who needs a heal the most, the end of your cast time, and how much raid-wide damage is occurring. These things allow you to prioritize your heals, both in terms of who is most in need and what rank you need to use, and also when to start your next cast. It's fairly simple, particularly with add-ons like Quartz (large cast bar to help you time heals) and Healbot.

With druids, you have to keep track of aggro, damage, global cooldown, and the timers on your HoTs. The last is most complicated, because a shaman only needs to know when they can cast the next heal, while a druid needs to know when to refresh the two or three HoTs they have up on their targets.

I'm finding that global cooldown (GCD) timing is very difficult. When latency and timing work out just right, the HoTs just roll off my character without a pause. As with my shaman however, I find myself clipping the end of my GCD (or previous heal if on my shaman), so my next heal ends up being slightly delayed because I tried to heal too early. I'm not quite sure how to combat that problem, since I use add-ons like Quartz and Lifebloomer to keep track of that stuff. It may be the one thing that holds me back in healing.

Adjusting to the timing and style of druid healing is not easy. I'm probably wasting a lot of mana keeping unnecessary HoTs up, since I don't have a good sense of how much they heal for. In the 5-man I did, I found that once I applied a full set of HoTs (lifebloom and rejuvenation) on the tank, I could just stand there and watch them work, so there's more down time with druid healing than with shaman healing. In a way, it's more passive, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I've also switched to Grid and Clique on my druid, since Healbot wasn't working very well for druid healing. I think that once I get the system tweaked, I may switch to it on Salanthe as well. I like the versatility and the interface is a bit simpler than Healbot. Jury is still out, though.

I also adore tree form and being able to jump and move while casting heals. When I was healing Karazhan, I had to take my hand off the keyboard during the Shade of Aran's Flame Wreath, or I would have been moving.

I still need a lot of practice to get the hang of druid healing, but I am definitely enjoying it. I'm so glad I respecced my little druid to restoration!

Patience is a Virtue

A few days ago, I wrote about how the shaman class lead was leaving the game and how I wanted to be the class lead in his place. I didn't know how to broach the subject with the guild leader though.

Well, tonight she asked me. So I am now an officer of the guild and the leader of the shaman class! There are officially five female and six male officers in the guild. How unusual is that?!

I also got to inspect a WWS parse of tonight's raid, so I have a better idea of the healing differences between the new resto shaman and me. It seems as though he is a more reactive healer and doesn't manage his mana as carefully as I do.

For a while, I thought he was making liberal use of nature's swiftness to emulate haste. I knew he was casting more heals than me and that's hard to do because I am always casting. Upon examination tonight, I noticed that he uses lesser healing wave much more often than I do and he uses a very low rank healing wave to top people off. He also uses a higher rank chain heal than I do, though I can't tell if he uses rank 4 or 5 (I use rank 3).

On the other hand, I am a very steady healer. I stick to chain heal rank 3 and up-rank (use 4 or 5) depending on how much damage the raid is taking as a whole. I rarely cancel heals once I've started them because I gamble on them actually healing something by the time they land, which is also why I down rank so much. Why waste a lot of mana on over-heal? I almost never use lesser healing wave, with the Supremus fight as the notable exception. The only time I use healing wave is when I'm healing someone after a rez or pulling a "Hail Mary" heal off on the tank.

So the difference between us is due to healing style. There are positives to both methods, certainly, but we can both learn from each other as well. At this point, I think the one thing I will try to adapt from his healing style is some of the reactivity. I am a little slow to cast heals sometimes, partially because I'm already healing someone else. I'm also not as good at positioning as I should be, so that's something to work on.

It will be very interesting to see how the new resto shaman does when he gets his two piece T6 set bonus. We're already neck-in-neck on the healing meters.

WTB Threat Reduction Ability, PST

For the first time since I joined this guild, we raided without our guild leader and main tank. I was hesitant to log on this evening - afraid of wiping a million times with no progress. It turns out that the new people were surprisingly competent and things went rather well. I died a LOT, but it was because I kept pulling healing aggro.

Let me tell you, no amount of threat reduction is going to save an over-geared shaman, even if she downranks twice (my primary heal is Chain Heal rank 3, max rank is 5). You slap one of those around the main tank and melee before the tank has a good hold and you're going to get aggro. This is problematic because a shaman doesn't have any abilities to reduce aggro. Save your jokes about reincarnate, please.

We, as a raid, didn't wipe until we moved to Black Temple and we struggled a little with Gorefiend because the new people didn't know what to do or how to handle the constructs well. Despite the lack of wipes, I still ended the evening with over 100g in repairs. I was quite annoyed. If I had some way of fixing that, I would, but sometimes the tank just needs a heal.

Additionally, this new resto shaman is very, very good. He can beat me on the meters, but only if I end up dead or I don't position myself well (meaning folks are out of range). Otherwise he sits just below me. When his gear matches mine, I will be hard-pressed to top him. Consequently, I think it's time to step up my healing another notch. As of this moment, I'm at somewhat of a loss for how to accomplish that, beyond making some changes to my gear that I don't want to make yet.

I have lots of bonus healing (2332 unbuffed), which means my mana efficiency comes from downranking. I could increase the amount I healed if I used a higher rank heal, but with that comes less mana efficiency and I'm drinking more mana pots to keep up with my mana usage, since I've traded out some mp5 for more healing. I could theoretically do that - drink more mana pots. I am proud of myself for using about one per boss fight though.

The other thing I could change is add spell haste to my healing gear. I'm not sure where I can add that yet, unless I swap in some gear that's inferior in all stats compared to what I'm wearing. Honestly, I don't think the trade-off is worth it. Not only that, but the more spell haste I have, the faster I drain my mana.

Beyond those two things, there's not much else I can do. My internet connection is very solid and I have very little lag. I use Healbot for healing, so my reactions are quick. I have the add-on set up to cast 3 ranks of chain heal, one rank of lesser healing wave, and 2 ranks of healing wave with a click of my mouse. It's very efficient. In other words, there's not much I can do from an interface standpoint.

I need to do a bit of research to see if there's some way I can increase my healing efficiency, mana usage, and overall healing numbers without changing my gear. There has to be something I can tweak, because gear alone cannot explain the difference on the meters between the new resto shaman and myself. I think I need to ask him what add-ons, if any, he uses.

I will report what I find here.