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Thread: Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm

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2010-12-22 12:37 PM
Carighan Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm
Keyboard Turner
Hello! This is my revised and re-written guide to Restoration Shamans, originally from before patch 4.0. It has a
#1
slight focus on someone new to Restoration, but it is intended to be useful for extra tricks or scaling numbers or
talent-ideas for everyone, new & seasoned.

One caveat right at the start: I will not talk about actual numbers much (meaning stat-weights, HPS-
throughputs, such stuff), as I think the Cataclysm-balance is still too young and too shaky to talk about specific
per-number instead of per-design considerations. We'll see how it evolves over the first handful of patches I say,
Join Date Nov 2010
and in the meantime it's just easier to focus on the concepts behind various talents, stats and their impact on
Posts 8 your gameplay. That, and it's easier to read for someone genuinely new to it all.

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Contents
1. Why a Resto Shaman?
2. My tools
3. Talents
4. Glyphs
5. Item Stats
6. Lost synergy
7. Healing Roles & Handling (not yet written, sorry)

1. Why a Resto Shaman?

A very common question on any healer forum is which class someone should choose for their new healer. In
many situations however, certain healer-abilities excel more than others so it is virtually impossible to say which
is best suited "in general". Plus in Cataclysm the general setup of heals is being made more similar, so any non-
healing or utility-healing abilities are much more defining than they were before.

So if I had to sum up why you want to play a Resto Shaman, I'd tell you this:
• You get a ton of utility. Totems can provide 7 raid-buffs, you can snare, you can interrupt, you can
Thunderclap single targets, you can AE snare, you can purge, you provide Heroism and you can self-
ressurect.
• Your dispel heals with a talent. This is fairly unique among the healers - Priests have a glyph for a similar
effect but it only affects their magic-dispel and it isn't quite the same power.
• With Ancestral Swiftness in Enhancement, you enjoy a passive +15% runspeed and can instantly morph
into wolf-form to avoid AEs or get away from other players faster.
• You provide an entire group of players with an important mana-regeneration boost via Mana Tide Totem.
• Your heals are extremely well-rounded. You get strong single-target heals with a further strong lifesaving
component from your Mastery (you heal more the lower a target's health is), you got an efficient spammable
Chain Heal and you can drop Healing Rain for more wide-spread group healing. As long as you're healing
single targets or clustered groups you'll feel right at home!

2. My tools
So assuming you decided you want to join the ranks of Awesome Healing (tm), what do you actually have to

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make that happen?

Costs all include 3/3 Tidal Focus, so you'd have to add ~6,5% to all manacosts if you were to not have it. That
being said you want Tidal Focus, so it makes sense to include it's cost-reduction.

Healing Wave (HW)

1981 mana - scales with ~30,5% of your Spellpower.
This heal is your bread&butter spell. Small, cheap as dirt, you can spam this all day long. Do exactly that
whenever you got nothing else you need to cast, fill up with Healing Wave

Greater Healing Wave (GHW)

6607 mana - scales with ~80,5% of your Spellpower.
As slow as Healing Wave but much much costlier and more powerful, this is the heal of choice when a single
person has taken a whole lot of beating and needs to be healed up.
Generally reserved for tank-healing purposes, if spammed with the benefits of Tidal Waves the raw healing
output becomes scary.

Healing Surge (HS, although some still call it LHW from it's old name, Lesser Healing Wave)
5946 mana - scales with ~60,5% of your Spellpower.
Pricey, somewhere between Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave and damn fast, this is the heal you want to
use whenever someone took unexpected damage and can be expected to take damage again in the near time
(so healing up with the slow Healing Wave is just not an option).

Earth Shield (ES)

4183 mana - each heal it produces scales with 15,2% of Spellpower
The signature spell of your Resto line-up, it helps smooth out damage on a single target and increases your
healing on it by 15% via a talent. Always use it on someone, ideally a tank. Always use it!

Riptide (RT)
2202 mana - direct heal scales with 23,4% of Spellpower, HoT with 7,5% per tick.
Your 31 point talent. Solid heal with a HoT part, it procs Tidal Waves and synergizes with Chain Heal, making it
an extremely potent ability. As it's really cheap, you can rather carelessly use it on whoever has taken some
damage. In fights where you need Chain Heal usage, keep it's synergy in mind so you don't end up accidentially
eating all your Riptide effects.

Chain Heal (CH)

3744 mana - first heal scales with 32% of Spellpower.
Loses 30% of it's healing every jump, jumps 3 times.
Your answer when a group of clustered characters take damage, this spell is highly efficient if it gets to jump
around. It requires a good feel for where to aim it, as it's jumping range from char to char is limited to ~12y.

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Alternate which target of a group of players you cast this on to smooth out healing, and remember it procs Tidal
Waves and can consume Riptide for extra healing.

Healing Rain (HR, or just Rain)

10130 mana - each tick scales with 8,3% of Spellpower.
This is ground-targetted, and then creates a weird-looking light blue ground target with some liaht healing going
on inside it. Due to the nature of it's healing it cannot directly save anyone, but the overall healing effect if
people are all stacking up for it is very potent, especially as it gives you a good chance to proc Ancestral
Fortitude on someone inside it. The procchance of Earthliving Weapon sadly is reduced, so there is no mass-ELW
-potential in it. Still, if you got the mana and you got the bunched up group of people, this is a very powerful
heal to fire at them - and you can continue casting while it works, too!

Earthliving Weapon (ELW)

HoT-proc scales with 5,8% of Spellpower per tick.
Your weapon enchant of choice grants you a sizeable amount of +spellpower - if limited to healing spells only -
but more importantly it gives you a 20% chance to proc a free HoT onto someone you heal, doesn't matter how
you did it specifically. This is rather strong as it means you constantly have your heals "echo" and fix the last
few points of damage on their own.

Unleash Elements / Unleash Life (UE or UL)

1640 mana
A new ability from Cataclysm, you can now produce a fairly small direct heal (but it's cheap!) on a single target
as long as you have Earthliving Weapon on your weapon. More importantly however this effect increases your
next heal spell by 20%, which is quite the pacemaker for our healing.
Just keep in mind that you don't necessarily want to use it just as it comes off cooldown.

Cleanse Spirit
3280 mana - heal scales with 14,1% of Spellpower per point in Cleansing Waters
Yes, it heals for enough to be counted as an actual healing spell! Provided you took the Cleansing Waters talent,
which is entirely optional but rather unique in that it allows you to counteract a widespread-applied DoT via
dispelling it, instead of having to worry about the mix of dispelling and healing other healers have to do.
Keep in mind though that it will not heal for anything if there's no debuff to be dispelled.

3. Talents
Instead of giving you example specs - as I don't like that conceptually - I'll list you which talents to consider
"Necessary" and which to consider "Optional".

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So what you are then trying to do is make yourself a spec which has all the necessary talents, and choose which
of the optional talents you personally like most with your remaining points.

Necessary: Tidal Focus, Spark of Life, Improved Water Shield, Nature's Swiftness, Nature's Blessing, Ancestral
Healing, Soothing Rains (after lvl83), Improved Cleanse Spirit, Ancestral Awakening, Mana Tide Totem, Tidal
Waves, Riptide.

Offspec: Improved Shields, Elemental Weapons, if you can manage Acuity.

PvP: Nature's Guardian, and Cleansing Waters and Ancestral Swiftness become necessary instead of optional.

Optional:
• Ancestral Resolve: this can be a very nice nearly-passive 10% reduction on all damage you take, since
you'll be casting pretty much nonstop. Nothing fancy, but fairly good for it's cost.
• Totemic Focus: Only useful for the extended duration for Mana Tide Totem and Fire Elemental Totem. Still,
+40% mana tide is nothing to sneeze at, you'll notice this if you have it.
• Focused Insight: Allows you to shock during a short lull in damage to produce a much strong heal effect a
moment later. Interesting, if pricey at 3 points. This has very useful applications in most 5man and some raid
content in that there's always moments where you run instead of heal.
• Cleansing Waters: Makes you the dispeller of your raids. You do it cheaper, you do it better, the downside
is that everyone will want to designate you to do it. Still, fairly unique among the healers, and very powerful.
• Telluric Currents: If there's a lull in stuff to heal, you can not only nuke some but instead of spending
mana, you regenerate it. It's pretty cool for what it does, mileage varies heavily with fight ofc.
• Blessing of the Eternals: Quite powerful, and many consider it necessary. Does what the tooltip says.
Good, but can be skipped for other talents.
• Ancestral Swiftness: Another talent many would consider necessary. It grants you +7% runspeed and
some slight stats over what you can get from enchanting (as the enchant is 8%), and more interestingly
allows you to instantly Ghost Wolf. If you keybind it well you can very very quickly escape AEs or run to
specific areas, provided ofc you don't have to use RT/UL/ES/Cleanse or Spiritwalker's Grace along the way.
Very powerful and versatile, however all AEs will be balanced against someone only having the 8% runspeed
from enchanting, and hence neither the passive runspeed nor the wolf will ever be required.
• Totemic Reach: Only useful if for whatever reason you're the one always supplying the melee totems and
you want to have full mobility during the fight, this'd make it much easier to keep totem range on the melee
team. Other than that it's not necessary.

There are some other, more quirky setups. For example you could skip most of the Enh offspec to get
Convection and Elemental Precision (to power up Telluric Currents / Focused Insight) and get a few points in
Elemental Warding along the way. However both Improved Shields and Elemental Weapons are very strong so
while I'll encourage you to experiment, don't expect a miracle from such Elemental-heavy offspecs. They

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probably work awesome in some specific encounters where there's a lot of lull alternating with some really brutal
healing, but in average situations they're too specialized.

4. Glyphs
Prime glyphs are easy, there's no choice involved here. You want Riptide, Earth Shield and Earthliving, and
only in really really bad cases of mana-troubles you'd want to exchange the Riptide glyph for the Water Shield
one.

Major glyphs are tougher. Most of them add utility or interesting semi-healing effects, so the choice is largely
personal. Get them all and experiment with swapping them frequently, even per-encounter. For example in a
purely physical fight the Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is wasted while in multi-element encounters with
blanket AE damage it's probably the strongest one.

Glyphs to consider (and experiment with) are: Chain Heal, Ghost Wolf (assuming you have Ancestral Swiftness),
Healing Stream Totem, Healing Wave, Hex and Totemic Recall. For PvP Frost Shock and Stoneclaw Totem add to
the pool of useful glyphs, while Totemic Recall is rarely of use there (totems get killed by other people, not
yourself).

Minor glyphs are entirely your choice. As nothing here is fight-critical there is no use investing much thought
into which is better suited or not, pick whatever sounds cool to you. :)

5. Item Stats
This is rather tricky, as good data about Cataclysm is tough to come by. The general rules apply however so I'll
do this in a rather non-math fashion.

Intellect
The stat which is never wrong. No matter how much better the raw output from Haste or Crit can be, or how
much you like Mastery, Intellect-upgrades are never a bad thing.
You gain 15 mana and 1 spellpower per 1 Int, and 1% spellcrit every 650 Int.

Spirit
Only necessary as far as you need more mana. One often overlooked effect is that the more spirit you have the

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less Healing Wave you want to cast compared to more inefficient but stronger heals so there is a sort-of ripple
effect which increases your healing once you gain more spirit.
The ratio is rather complicated and also depends on the square root of your Int, so let's skip that. Use the mod
RatingBuster if you're interested in detailed numbers on spirit-regen, much easier.

Haste
Usually your strongest stat for raw throughput (by a fairly large margin even above Intellect), it heavily
increases your output and reaction time, but also makes you burn mana faster.
It has an additional benefit in that every once in a while, one of your HoT effects (Riptide, Rain, Earhtliving) gain
an additional tick during their duration, making that amount of Haste a very viable "gearing goal".
In short, Haste should provide you with a lot of throughput, but at a questionable cost. Take note of the HoT-
synergy though and check whether you are close, then it is always worth pushing to that level. (see below)
To get 1% Haste you need 128 Haste Rating.

Crit
A lot more interesting for Shamans than for other healers, this is usually better point-for-point than Intellect, but
it depends on your gear and your healing role. Not only does it increase your healing output, it increases the
number of Ancestral Awakening (more and even intelligent healing!) and Improved Water Shield procs (more
mana return). It also increases uptime on Ancestral Healing. Very strong stat, but somewhat gimmicky.
To get 1% Crit you need ~180 Crit Rating.

Resilience
If PvP is your game, then you need a whole lot of this. A whole lot. For PvP you should seek your priority stats
somewhere between Resilience and Mastery as both work extremely well in a PvP environment, adding some
Crit to keep the Ancestral Healing buff up on your targets. Did I mention you want a lot of this, yet? Once
damage on you goes down enough you are able to keep yourself up despite the extremely high reliance on
casted heals, you don't have the luxury of a lot of instants or HoTs like the other healers have.
To get 1 point of Resilience you need 276 Resilience Rating.

Mastery - Deep Healing

The mathmagicians from EJ has more or less agreed it's impossible to fully quantify. If you heal someone low on
HP, this is your best healing stat (assuming you got haste to get the heal off in time and spirit/intellect to be
able to cast it, ofc). If you heal someone already rather high in HP, it's your worst healing stat.

And that's the entirety of it. It's something you need to personally choose. No one can tell you which amount of
Mastery is "best", it's not really mathable. If you feel comfortable with little more than the base amount, more
power to you. If you stack it to kingdom come and revel in the lifesaving functions your heals have, more power
to you.
To get 1 point of Mastery and hence 2,5% Deep Healing, you need ~180 Mastery Rating.

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If you want some fast&dirty&crude rule, use Haste (if close to 916) > Intellect ~= Crit* > Spirit > Haste, with
Mastery being outside the system and Spirit having a minimum you need to satisfy first. There is also a very real
background to getting swap-pieces (usually Crit vs Mastery) for slots to capitalize on fights which have everyone
on high respectively low health a lot.
* Crit: Crit has higher value if you are still hurting for mana and/or are unhappy with your Ancestral Fortitude
uptime on tanks. Once you feel good about those, drop it lower.

6. Lost Synergy
The four effects Deep Healing (our Mastery), Focused Insight (the talent), Nature's Blessing (the talent) and
Unleash Life (the baseline ability) sound as if they affect whatever you do, especially at first glance. Some
specifically mention direct heals, some don't, but all in all especially if you are a newcomer you could think that
if you cast Unleash Life your next healing spell will heal for more.

Intentional or not, this is not the case!

Specifically, each of them only works for a certain amount of things:
• Healing Wave, Healing Surge and Greater Healing Wave are always affected.
• Deep Healing does not affect:
- Riptide's Heal-over-Time effect
- Earth Shield
- Earthliving Weapon procs
• Focused Insight does not affect:
- Riptide's Heal-over-Time effect
- Earth Shield
- Earthliving Weapon procs
- Healing Rain
• Unleash Life fails to affect:
- Earth Shield
- Earthliving Weapon procs
- Healing Rain
• Earth Shield's +15% buff with Nature's Blessing doesn't bless:
- Earth Shield (hrm... that'd be funky, anyways ;) )
- Earthliving Weapon procs
- Healing Rain
- It affects Riptide HoT, but it only checks the moment it's cast, so retroactively casting ES on a target the
HoT is running on does nothing for you

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(excuse the weird formatting, the forum code bugs out a bit here)

Some of those are rather intuitive, some aren't. Hope it helps you a bit with judging stats and talents. Mind you
that none of these make any of the effects inherently weak. The most important thing to take away from this is
this:
Mastery affects Healing Rain! Despite what 90% will tell you, it does. Drop yourself to 5% HP, cast it while no
one else is around to stand in it, check.

7. Healing Roles & Handling

There are generally 4 different roles you can find yourself in as a healer: You can be the sole healer, such as in a
5man, you could be a tank healer, you could be a raid healer, or you could be a specialized healer.
I'll go over them one after the other in that order, as most of us run into the biggest problems as the sole healer
of a heroic 5man team at lvl85.

There is also the role of a PvP Healer, but lacking sufficient Cataclysm PvP exposure I don't think I can talk much
about it's pitfalls. In general concept it's not unlike being the Sole Healer, just that predicting the flow of the
fight becomes rather complicated.

Sole Healer

For simplicity's sake I'll assume this means a 5man and not a specialized raidfight where the healers can only
heal one at a time.
As the sole healer, you obviously need to have everything covered. As you'll usually lack full raidbuffs, and/or
might have other obligations like Binding Elementals or interrupting, this requires some heavy triage.

The first really important thing is: Stay cool. People don't need full health, not even the tank. You want to
(eventually) top the tank back off, but the rest of the group will be fine with Healing Stream Totem (which can
tick for 1100+ easily now, so don't underestimate it).
The second big problem follows directly from it: You cannot safe a group which does not want to safe itself. This
is tricky, and can net you negative comments if the people who are taking needless damage also refuse to
accept it's their fault. But they have to do it themselves. DPS especially is responsible for their own HP!. Heal
them back up with Riptide / Healing Stream Totem, but unless there's a fight-mechanic involving heavy bursted
AE damage, you're not there to make them survive. They got Blink / Deterrence / Recuperate, let them use it.

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Meanwhile, your priority lies in balance and proactive thinking. Be aware of how much health everyone needs
5s/10s/20s from now, so you know when to cast heals on who. Try to be as far ahead as you can so you can use
Healing Wave and Riptide more instead of having to rely on Healing Surge and Greater Healing Wave.
When fights involve big AE damage, ask the group to stack close to the melee (even Hunters can go really close
now), so you can fully utility healing rain and continue to heal the tank while it ticks (or help with Chain Heal
where necessary).

But remember: Proactive thinking and most importantly independant DPS healing/defense is what wins fights in
the role of the sole healer. It can be annoying that you can't it "yourself", but a good group will feel worlds
different from a bad one.

One last thing: Timers for Hex/Bind can be very handy if you need to CC while healing. /focus is also very good
for that purpose.

Tank Healer

As a pure tank healer - usually in a raid - your priorities lie in steady healing, availability of emergency tools,
good contact and solid reaction with heals.

Steady healing means you want to always be spamming Healing Wave when not doing something else, and
keeping Earth Shield and Riptide up. Yes I know this usually applies in all circumstances but it's importance is
bigger here, you need that steady and dependable income of healing to properly "see" when the tank is actually
taking extra damage.

Emergency Tools are few and far between for us, but on-use trinkets and Nature's Swiftness provide us with two
good tools to briefly increase our healing output. More importantly, your reflexes with Spiritwalker's Grace can
make or break tankhealing. You can freely move while casting, for 10 seconds. Whenever a tank gets tossed
around unexpectently, or has to relocate, we Shamans can keep up the healing anyways. Experience is key
here, the more you practice when and how to use Spiritwalkers, the better. Use a very easily reachable key- or
mousebinding for it, so you can always hit it in the blink of an eye.
(Mine is on Shift+R, and my fingers rest on ESDF with the pinky on the shift-key)

"Good contact" is mostly a single golden rule: Never stand at 40y range! Never. One step of the tank, and you're
out of range. In the world of tankhealing this can easily spell death, even if it was a brief moment, your heal
aborts, you need to move into range, then recast. Given the current haste levels this lull in healing will cause
other healers to see a problem, spike heal your tank, so their targets drop. The cascading effect can easily kill
people.
A good rule of thumb is that while tankhealing, you want to stay in Flame Shock range of a target. :)

Lastly, your reaction ability massively impacts how long your mana will last. If you are able to do all "spike"

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healing reflexively then you are free to cover the tank with HW + RT + ES and save tons and tons of mana.
Good examples are bosses which pump out heavy tankdamage on very slow swingtimers (Chimaeron comes to
mind). This is mostly practice, but try to play conservatively whenever you get away with it, this gives you
practice.

Raid Healer

Raid Healing is potentially the simplest role to understand, but it's usually the toughest to pull off. We got four
basic tools which except at raidhealing, those are Chain Heal, Healing Rain, Healing Surge and Riptide.

Two things are important: Riptide and Chain Heal (if it bounces 3 times) are fairly efficient. Healing Rain and
Healing Surge usually ain't.
Healing Rain's strength is that you can do other stuff while it's running, Healing Surge OTOH is lightning-quick.

This gives the following setup for covering raiddamage:

Random but light damage? Riptide and Healing Wave.
Random, fast, burst but rare damage? Healing Surge, ideally after Riptide so it crits.
Light and spaced group damage? Let people stand together and CH.
Light but steady group damage? Let people stand together and use Rain, then cover with Healing Wave.
Heavy and bursted AE damage? Let people stand together, Rain while running into the stack (Swiftness or
Spiritwalker's), then CH into the group on top of that.

Mind you, options #2 and #5 run you out of mana really really fast.

Specialized Healer

This is basically everything else.

There's a lot of fights which have healers in very specific roles. I can't really give you a good advise here, it
depends entirely on the fight. If in doubt, communication is the key.
Remember, when assigning healers, Shamans except at versatility (so basically we don't excel :P), but our big
achilles heel is that both of our multi-heals need proximity. If there's a job of healing 3 people who stand at
different ends of a room, that's sooooo not something we should do. :)

Afterword

I hope you enjoyed reading this guide, more importantly I hope it helps you decide whether to play a
Restoration Shaman respectively helps you improve your setup and gameplay if you're struggling with that.

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I apologize for any bad grammar or wrong choice of words, english is not my mother tongue. I also apologize for
any bad formatting as this is the first time I post such an extensive post on these forums, and I had to adapt the
formatting from the sticky I got on the official forums. Further, I wanted to actually use links to the mmo-
champion database for the spells / talents, but it gives me an error message that I need to post a few times
before I am allowed to link. Which makes sense, even though being links to the own database and on a forum
meant for submission of guides, well, should probably be exempt. Anyway, if this gets unlocked in some way I'll
re-edit the guide and add spell- and talent-links.
Lastly, I dedicate this post to Healing Stream Totem - our silent and always unloved healing companion,
quietly providing 500-550 HPS per person and saving tons of mana and groups everywhere. We know you're the
real hero of every heroic and raid!

Last edited by Carighan; Yesterday at 06:08 PM. Reason: Correction about Haste, I apologize. I'll investigate some Haste-heavy setups
once I find time, see how it plays.

SQUEAK.
--(The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

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Yesterday 12:50 PM #2
Volitar Very nice well rounded guide
Mechagnome

Elemental Shaman Protection Paladin

Join Date Nov 2009

Posts 609

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Yesterday 12:53 PM #3
bonovoxpsu hm. i WAS pretty sure FI affected the riptide hot... I'm no longer spec'd into it so I can't verify.
Field Marshal
Join Date Jul 2008
Posts 80
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Yesterday 12:57 PM #4
Simonzi Very well written guide. I like how you go into detail of trying to give some insight into how to heal, not just how
The Patient
to gear, what spec to choose, and what stats are good. While I know you said you weren't focusing strongly on
numbers, one part I did want to get some more info, or ask what your basis is, is your feelings on haste.

Originally Posted by Carighan

Haste
Usually your strongest stat for raw throughput (by a fairly large margin even above Intellect), it heavily
Join Date Aug 2009 increases your output and reaction time, but also makes you burn mana faster. Still, rule of thumb is that
Posts 334 stacking Haste gives you the largest healing benefit.

...

If you want some fast&dirty&crude rule, use Haste > Intellect = Crit > Spirit, with Mastery being outside
the system and Spirit having a minimum you need to satisfy first. There is also a very real background to
getting swap-pieces (usually Crit vs Mastery) for slots to capitalize on fights which have everyone on high
respectively low health a lot.

Which is quite the opposite of what most other guides \ blogs are saying. One of the best being Vixsyn's Life in
Group 5 blog, which just wrote an article about how bad haste has become for us, past the first extra HoT break
point (http://lifeingroup5.com/?p=1760). And like the article says, and goes into more detail, it comes down to
horrible scaling. You can add 500 haste into your gear, and get hundreths of a second off your cast time. Not
even tenths, hundredths. Which is just horrible scaling. Your "Haste > Intellect = Crit > Spirit" mantra sounds
like what it was in ICC, but nowhere near what it should be at this point.

Again, love the guide and the way it is written, just want some more of your opinion on something you said that
differs from what everyone else is saying pretty much

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...simonzi/simple

Originally Posted by Crokey

You know you just wrote 7 paragraphs about some people you have never met, playing a computer game in a way you disagree
with?

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Yesterday 01:11 PM #5

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Carighan Hrm, that is interesting, and I need to go and investigate that. The numbers I based that on were indeed based
Keyboard Turner
on ICC, albeit with the new system (like the preface says the guide was originally for 4.0.1). The thing is that I
did not expect the scaling to 85 - which affects all ratings similarly - to dump Haste to the end for any but the
obvious reason of lacking mana to utilize it.

The numbers used in the blog you link are sound, but make me wonder to what end Crit and Mastery hold up to
a similar evaluation. The loss of rating -> percentage is just as brutal for them. In fact Haste fares slightly better
at 3,9x the amount needed for the same percentage versus Crit and Mastery at 4,0.

Join Date Nov 2010 Hence my logic - albeit I admit untested as I am currently trying to go down a Mastery-heavy Crit-supported
Posts 8 route for testing how well this holds up in raids, since Mastery is so impossible evaluate on paper - was that
Haste's raw healing-output contribution is unmatched. Whether that makes it a wanted stat is questionable with
the current mana constraints, but it nontheless does what it does.

You are right that I should definitely edit the "crude" rule, since that misleads people. Apologies. Haste-heavy
was the setup I wanted to try after Mastery-heavy, but due to extremely constrained playtime I did not even
finish that "project" yet.

SQUEAK.
--(The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

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Yesterday 01:12 PM #6
Gregwar Thanx for this very interesting guide...
Blademaster
Join Date Dec 2010
Location Belgium just started 3 days ago a shamy healer cause the guild need healers...
Posts 31

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Yesterday 01:14 PM #7
Aleksandru good guide indeed, but all spell are x% of base mana, not an exact amount of mana, i guess he used his char for
Keyboard Turner
this.
Join Date Jan 2011
Location Romania
Posts 8
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Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm
Yesterday 01:22 PM
Zerdroppin
Keyboard Turner
Join Date Nov 2010
Location Prescott Valley, AZ
Posts 3
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Page 15 sur 21
#8
I'd have to disagee significantly with Haste being one of our best stats. Perhaps it may be again when mana is
no longer an issue at all and we can spam heals without dropping below 75% regardless of how hard we try, but
in current gear levels it's preferable to hit the breakpoints for our HOT's for the extra tic's and provides better
utility for ourselves if we go with Crit. Like the poster above me mentioned, Haste scales horribly at this point
because even if we stack it to no end, we'll barely get to the second HOT breakpoint and we wont shave much
off of our cast times.
************
Haste Rating Needed for GCD softcap: 5491
Haste Rating Values Needed for Extra Hot Ticks:
Riptide(no glyph)
1 extra tick: 610
2 extra tick: 3051
3 extra tick: 5418
Riptide (glyphed)
1 extra tick: 262
2 extra tick: 2005
3 extra tick: 3748
4 extra tick: 5418
Healing Rain
1 extra tick: 610
2 extra tick: 3051
3 extra tick: 5418
Earth Living Weapon
1 extra tick: 916
2 extra tick: 3966
3 extra tick: 7016
So to now hit the GCD cap like we did in WoTLK we effectively need almost 5x as much Haste, which is
impossible at this point in gear level.
Thanks goes to Jynus for me taking his Haste rating table. ^ ^
Also, I think many raiding resto shaman would say Ancestral Resolve > Focused Insight. Damage Mitigation of
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Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm
Last edited by Zerdroppin; Yesterday at 01:32 PM.
Yesterday 01:22 PM
The Little One
Field Marshal
Join Date Jul 2010
Location Under your chair.
Posts 72
Yesterday 01:26 PM
Elix
Grunt
Join Date Jun 2009
Posts 16
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/817170-Restoration-Shaman-in-Cataclysm
Page 16 sur 21
any kind is a huge boon. Ancestral Swiftness... well, it's opinion, but the opinion again of most would be to take
it. We can use the change in Boot enchant and I can't stress how many times insta-ghost wolf has saved me.
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#9
Yay! A Shaman Guide! I haven't read past the talents because I have to get to school, but so far I've actually
learned a little bit from reading what you posted on the "My Tools" section, as I've only healed with my Shaman
up to level 60. My only suggestion is that you include the cool downs of those spells in that section as well, it
would be more useful for beginners... and me.
Can't wait to read the rest of it when I get back home, it looks great.
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#10
Compliments
Awesome guide! If you don't mind, I'd like to add a couple of things I typed to fellow shamans in my Guild. I
won't copy my entire post, but just tidbits from it that will compliment this post.
1 - Understand when to conserve and when to blow: For the fortunate of us who've seen the fights so far in the
raids of cata, you always have windows where you can breathe and regenerate mana. Making the effort to
understand when we can spend 80% of our mana knowing that we can gain it all back will be of utmost
importance.
2 - Don't Re-HoT targets already with HoTs on them: Complete waste of mana and this is something that we
took lightly in WotLK. This applies greatly to Shamans and with a 21 second tick time of RipTide, recasting RT on
the same target is a complete waste. You can at any given point have 3 hots ticking through the raid. Don't
waste it on the same target.
3 - Macro Announcement for AOE Heals: Let's face it. AOE Heals are effing expensive so make sure you have a
macro even above your head announcing that the AOE heal is up. You can grab the attention of people around
you to move closer. And give them shit if they don't move to utilize it. We have to re-train DPS to move as well.
4 - Now in the past Mana Tide Totem was something you can easily ask for and the shaman gladly drops it since
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Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm Page 17 sur 21

we hardly ran out of mana. The mechanics have now changed making the totem increase you spirit by 350%.
Keep in mind that with a shaman blowing Spirit Cooldowns, we can get up to 18,000 spirit (Heartsong + JC
Trinket) so keep in mind that it's now higher in my benefit to save it a little to when my CDs are ready. Also if I
warn that it's coming, try to use any CDs you have that boost your spirit.

Happy Healing!

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Yesterday 02:12 PM #11

Hellmakerr Very well written guide, and as a veteran Restoration shaman, I'll give you my honest feedback:
Grunt
I didn't learn much. Quite frankly, this guide could have been written at the start of Wotlk, with only a small
amount of changes.

I understand that the purpose of the guide is to "recruit" people to Restoration Shamans, and for that purpose,
I'm sure it's a great guide. However, I had personally hoped for a little more in-depth guide, as I'm trying to be
at the top of my game in Cataclysm. You touched a little bit on it when you were talking about which stats to
prio, I just want more of that kind of information. Since Cata is still so fresh, such information (which stats are
Join Date Sep 2010 best) has been hard to come by.
Posts 24

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Yesterday 02:14 PM
#12
Amdi1
ty for the guide
Blademaster
Join Date Feb 2010
Posts 41
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Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm Page 18 sur 21

Yesterday 02:17 PM #13

scaredandbaked Awesome guide man, I learned alot about resto shamans... thank you very much
High Overlord

Join Date Sep 2009

Location UnderCity, Maine
Posts 122

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Yesterday 02:19 PM #14

Tuuuu Drengen Great guide
High Overlord
Join Date Sep 2009
Posts 157 But haste is bad then? Im stacking haste because im tied of being back to heal slow. For me its important to
heal fast even for a normal Healing Wave

Last edited by Tuuuu Drengen; Yesterday at 02:45 PM.

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Yesterday 02:30 PM #15

KxB Could you explain gemming? I've heard multiple people saying that we still stack Haste, but others claim that we
Keyboard Turner
should stack Spirit. T_T
Join Date Jan 2011
Location Ky
Posts 1
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Yesterday 02:31 PM
Ufin #16
Can you please specify any number i should focus on? For example gem/enchant haste until XXXX then focus on
Keyboard Turner
intelect only ...
Join Date Jan 20111

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Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm Page 19 sur 21

Posts
thanks

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Yesterday 02:33 PM #17

atimuscalamity I would recommend you use glyph of Earthliving weapon over riptide glyph, glyphing for riptide isn't worthwhile
High Overlord
as it doesn't come out as often as earthliving would be (the proc part) and also if you are using chain heal it will
Join Date Sep 2009
Posts 122 eat up the riptide making the riptide glyph useless (unless of course the longer duration means extra heals so a
stronger chain heal consumption) but even then 1 stronger jump vs possibility of 10 targets with an empowered
earthliving weapon.

also regarding haste, haste itself is a great stat especially when you go into raiding but if you stack too much
haste like in wotlk with just all haste gems, you'll be strapped for mana extremely quickly, esp with the high AoE
damage fights nowdays.

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Yesterday 02:41 PM #18

Revelations Worth mentioning that Healing Surge is a better, more efficient spell to cast than Greater Healing Wave if under
Blademaster
the effect of Tidal Waves

Join Date Dec 2010

Location Norway
Posts 28
~ I got a strong urge to fly, but I got nowhere to fly to. ~

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Yesterday 03:05 PM #19

necreus Very nice guide
Keyboard Turner
Join Date Jun 2010 I'd like to add that I found the Telluric Currents talent PAINFULLY underwhelming in current gear level. At the
Posts 2 cost of 1400 mana and regenerating little more than 2000 mana, I found I regenerate mana a little faster just
by standing still and not casting.

Maybe with the right stats you can get more of a benefit out of this, but I find it a heck of a gamble to waste
that time casting when you're low on mana and can even miss for no regen (good chance on a raid boss).

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Yesterday 03:10 PM #20

callar A good guide for a starting healer .
Grunt
kinda missed out on meta's ect any who it sux that our bis gem from wotlk isn't made in this exp or not a new
Join Date Oct 2008
Posts 16 version.
int and restore mana on cast

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