New Resto Shaman would highly appreciated if someone could help me

[Ishkur 0]

Hello fellow shamans,

I'm a freshly boosted shaman. Never played one before but I am keen on healing with him. I've been asking new raid to let him in and they allow it.

I'm there as a resto shaman and I'm pulling very low number/ranking compared to both warcraftlogs and askmrrobot. I know my gears and enchants are not the optimal but I feel like with a solid rotation/priority I should be able to do better before concentrating on gearing.

I did some research (mainly through google and chainheal) and I did try to maximize Riptide, Healing Stream Totem and Elemental Blast. As well as keeping uptime on Earth Shield and using Chainheal as fillers, but the numbers are way worse than I've imagined it would be. 

I'd highly appreciated it if someone could help me with some pointers in resto shaman.

Character name: Dianny

Here are the logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/qczpPJdwTXZG4ayN#fight=34&type=summary

My armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kiljaeden/Dianny/simple

 

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post. Any feedbacks and criticism are highly appreciated.

 

[Pandacho 286]

Hello Ishkur.

I looked at your Armory and logs and can say that 95% of your problem is extremely low ilvl and a 'wrong' gear.

You don't have set bonuses, legendary ring, right trinkets, useful secondary stats, not even one enchant, nor gems. Together with all this, you are trying to raid HFC that is not tuned for 665-670 ilvl and you are healing with other healers that are 30-40 ilvls above you.

There's no way to get high numbers in this situation.

If you have gold and/or alts, I would suggest you first of all to sort out the gear. Buy/craft 3 pieces, upgrade it to 715+10 ilvls of Valor upgrades, go to Tanaan, do dailies, kill all the Rares - get baleful gear and upgrade it to 695+10 ilvls of Valor upgrades, run all the Mythic dungeons both for gear upgrades and Valor, start your legendary quest - 695 ring could be obtained in 7-8 days.

Your spell usage and HST/EB/Riptide maintenance is fine. I personally would change in Talents Totem Projection to Call of the Elements (additional HST) and Ancestral Swiftness to Echo of the Elements for double Riptide (because of its synergy with our set bonuses and High Tide) but this is pretty minor comparing to your gear problem.

Get your gear to at least 700-705 ilvl, and you will see how your numbers are turning into much better. 

This is my resto shaman, if you want some reference and you can check VuhDo configuration and Shamans WeakAuras threads if you are interested in healing frames or spell/abilities reminders.

[Ishkur 0]

Dear Pandacho,

 

Thank you very much for your feedback. I am starting on a path to getting more and better gears. Your comment gave me the understanding that right now my most significant problem are my gears. 

Thank you again for pointing out that my spell usage maintenance is fine. I was worried that it was my playing that wreck my shaman. This gave me the urge to focus more on gearing my toon up.

I will change my talents according to your suggestion.

I've already checked out your Vuhdo Config and WeakAuras prior when researching the class. I've also incorporated some config into my own play but some need to be adjusted for my personal comfort.

I've also read and reread the guides and the shaman forum without signing up.

I've been getting my nerve up for a while before I decided to reach out for help.

I can't thank you enough to spending your time reading my post and reply back to me. 

I will report back again once my gear reached 700 ilvl.

Thank you.

 

Edit: Dear Pandocho, I am wondering about the usage percentage of Chainheal. Is there any percentage I should be aiming for?

Edited May 27, 2016 by Ishkur

[Pandacho 286]

Hey Ishkur and thanks for your kind words - I really appreciate it :)

Regarding the percentages for healers - it's a bit different from dps classes. Healing classes have some, if I can use this word, 'support' HoT healing and Raid CDs that should be used on CD with close to 100% uptime: for the resto shaman it would be Healing Stream totem, Riptide and Elemental Blast (if you take the talent) as a support (you just use these spells on CD - always) and Healing Tide Totem, Ascendance and Spirit Link Totem as a Raid CDs (you should use them on CD too planning in advance - before the fight - from the first raid damage burst and onward).

The choice of actually healing spells like Healing Wave, Healing Surge, Chain Heal and Healing Rain is up to the raid damage patterns in a specific fight and your personal preferences.

To make it easier for you: during raid wide damage Chain Heal will be better (Iron Reaver, Velhari...), but when specific people or tanks are taking personal damage/debuffs (Gift of the Man'ari on Socrethar,  Phantasmal Wounds on Iskar) - use Healing Wave or Healing Surge on them. I personally almost always use Healing Surge rather than Wave because of lower cast time and 30% crit buff from Tidal Waves but it takes double amount of mana per cast so I wouldn't recommend this for a new healer.

Healing Rain is worth to cast on a group when there are at least 5-6 people in it and your raid is not moving constantly. If you are healing with a resto druid or holy priest, try to cast your rain out of their ground AoE (meaning, if druid casts Mushrooms on melee, you cast Rain on the ranged or vice versa).

There are no exact percents for actually healing spells because their usage is highly depends on the raid damage taken :) Healing is more of an art - you learn a fight and know in advance what kind of damage is incoming and how to react to it.

 

One more thing - I would advice you to use Nature's Guardian rather then Astral Shift in talents because Guardian is a passive ability and will save you automatically from a deadly damage. You have enough on your plate right now to have to manage one more ability (Astral Shift). In addition to being passive, NG has only 30 sec CD while AS - 1.5 min.

[skylinkdave 1]

Hey Ishkur, I'm in a similar situation because I just boosted my own resto shaman, armory link here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/hyjal/Grimcaster/advanced 

As you can see, my gear is far from optimal, as well. I see you have done lots of LFR raiding. This was going to be my suggestion, because that is what I have been doing with my shaman. It's not "easy" but it is a much more lower-stress environment than normal or heroics. Parenthetically, I levelled her from 15 to 60 only by spamming dungeons, and boosted her at 60. It only took a few days, thanks to short queue times. This was the first healer I ever played, and it has been a lot more fun than I expected. 

Since I'm still gearing, my healing is never near the top of the charts, at least not yet. I'm also going to take Pandacho's advice and change Astral Shift to Nature's Guardian. 

If there's any problem I have with her, it's probably what seems to be very slow mana regen in combat, despite having at least a few pieces with spirit and Mark of Shadowmoon on my weapon. Any sugestions? 

[Pandacho 286]

Hi Skylinkdave,

If you'd be able to tell what spells you are using mostly when healing, maybe I would be able to help you somehow with the mana regen.

There are may be a couple of problems with it on the low item levels: 

with the 'wrong' gear your throughput is pretty low because of a relatively small amount of Intellect and Mastery (for example I have 120% of Mastery while you even didn't get to 60%). So casting a spell and seeing that it hardly healed, may force you into spamming heals and as a result into buring your mana fast. 

In addition, some spells are very mana expencive as you know (healing surge, chain healing) and while in term of healing you may be doing right thing when using them in certain circumstances, it will still burn your mana in a couple of minutes. 

One more thing - you should go OOM in about 2.5-3 minutes when healing a raid actively - nothing wrong with it. Just use channelling mana potions or switch for less mana expencive spells for a bit. 

[Riesen 5]

Hello Skylinkdave! Hope you won't mind some more opinions. =)

 

In addition to Pandacho's post I've noticed on your armory link that you've taken Unleashed Fury as your level 90 talent. Have you tried Elemental Blast? 1000 spirit every 12th second (if used on cooldown) for 8 seconds helps atleast a little with the mana regen.  You also get 500 mastery/crit/multi/haste for 8 seconds. I'd give that a try ! =)

 

Just as Pandacho mentioned, Intellect and Mastery has a huge impact to not spamm spells in order to top people = spend more mana.

With better gear I don't even aim for spirit items anymore.. Just solely rely on Elemental Blast and (if necessary) Mana Potion.

I guess you could take Pandacho's armory link as an example. <-- However, that's only viable when you're comfortable with your mana.

 

Taken a look at your talents (armory) I guess the main question is: are you usually playing with the current talents you have on your armory?

Talents like Elemental Mastery allows you to cast spells faster but that also drains your mana faster. It's also just a mana waste, especially in LFR ..where people barely drop. It will just overheal = you just waste mana. I haven't even found that spell useful on Mythic.

Without sounding rude, but it seems like most of your talents are more of a overhealing/mana waste than an actual healing output.

If you don't have any logs, you can download addons like Skada/Recount > switch over to 'overhealing' after an encounter and see what % you're at. - There will always be some overhealing, but usually other talents are more "mana-friendly" as a Shaman.