So let’s start with the best stuff first …

The Parts I Loved

When it comes to the characteristics of Tier 15 that I really liked, there are a number of small things that instantly come to mind, from the number of bosses (remember: Firelands had only *7* bosses; ToT has 12/13), to the raid weekly (never before have I looked forward to giant floating exclamation points), to Gary the Homicidal Gastropod (who makes every class wish they had Life Grip with which to torment their teammates). But, overall, three things really stand out in my mind as things that ToT did well:

1. Raiding on an epic scale – I’m a sucker for raid instances that make me feel like an outsider in someone else’s domain, and Throne of Thunder instantly drew me in with its gorgeous mogu-meets-titan design and overscaled architecture. In contrast to the confines of Mogu’shan Vaults and the rapid-fire succession of Terrace of Endless Spring, Throne of Thunder was a long winding journey through the home of our newest mortal enemy. When I finally made the climb up to Lei Shen’s platform, (Yes, I want to use the teleporter. Yes, I’m sure. Will you just &^%#*@! port me already, for the love of Thrall?!), I was overtaken by the idea that the throne room was straight out of the instance that a large majority of players cite as the pinnacle of PVE content. Sure, we never approach the levels of sheer size that were the courtyards of BT and Ulduar, but Throne of Thunder was an impressive place to spend these last couple months.
2.  Variability in encounters – Along with the unique scenery that provided the backdrop for each boss encounter, possibly the biggest praise that I have for Throne of Thunder is that the encounter design really mixed things up every step of the way. And although I wasn’t a fan of some of the hard mode encounter “twists” (pink dinos? REALLY?), in most cases they felt like the logical progression up in difficulty from normal mode. The encounter design team did themselves proud with fights that mixed up personal and raid responsibility, with interesting and challenging mechanics. (Bonus points should be awarded for Ji-Kun forcing raiding guides to actually endorse backpeddling).
3. End Boss Quality – While T14’s Big Baddie, Sha of Fear, was a bit tedious as a 21-minute 2-phase encounter, I think HM Lei Shen hit all the right notes, managing to be epic-feeling and challenging without making you spend over a quarter hour per attempt. Like HM Rag and HM LK before it, progression was a series of gates—once you work through the timing on phase 1, then you focus on making it out of the transition alive, then you focus on the timing in phase 2, then the next transition, and so on and so forth. And although I thought Lei Shen might have overstepped the line a little on positioning demands (there were times I know our RL felt a bit like a choreographer), I appreciated the emphasis the encounter placed on spatial awareness and communication. Raw output/Patchwerk fights are fine for boss #4 or 5, but when it comes to the end encounter, I want something that demands finesse. Lei Shen, in my book, delivered.

The Parts That Didn’t Thrill Me

Of course, with the good comes the bad. And as much as I try not to be a backseat designer, minor quibbles aside, there were a couple of things that I found quite disappointing about the tier (from a raiding perspective; healing issues are another topic for another day):

1. Resto Shaman balance – You knew this point was coming the minute you saw the title of this post, but I’m going to mention it anyways … #1 on the list of things that tarnished my affections for the tier was healer balance, especially when it came to Resto Shaman. Small disparities I can understand, even ones to the tune of 5-8%, but when a class gets a +20% buff to their AOE healing, that’s a huge sign that … and do read this in a strong US Southern accent … someone done fucked up. No matter how you frame it, no matter the concessions I make about hindsight being 20-20, given the characteristics of the encounters and the PTR logs, it should have been easy to identify that Resto Shaman, and our niche toolkit, would be ill-equipped. If we had not had the single most powerful throughput cooldown in game (at that point), you can bet that those shaman who weren’t benched and were actually brought in for progression by cutting edge guilds, would have been nowhere to be found.
2. Legendary drop rates – Let me premise this by saying that I, for one, have really enjoyed the legendary questline thus far—the effort has been substantial but the rewards for sticking with it have been commensurate with the time investment. But when T15 introduced not one, but two back-to-back drop-based legendary collection quests, I knew I was gonna have a bad time. Sure enough, despite earning Exalted with Shado Pan Assault at the start of May (meaning: I was in for almost every boss kill since Week 1), and being on the Legendary quest since the first day of 5.2, I obtained my legendary meta two weeks after the rest of my guild. So, while some people were able to pick up their cloaks when 5.3 launched, it will be another several weeks (maybe a month, if really bad luck strikes), before I collect mine. That kind of variability stinks, especially when the legendary questline has been predominantly governed by player effort.
3. Release timing – While I think it’s commendable that Blizzard has been meeting their self-imposed goal of delivering content more frequently, I know that a number of us in the raiding community were surprised at how quickly Throne of Thunder was pushed from PTR testing to Live. At approximately 6 months post-MoP launch and 5 months from HoF/ToES release, patch 5.2 was at our door, leaving a number of raiders to wonder what the rush was all about. Furthermore, 5 boss/day PTR schedules and the quick succession of NM/HM and 10/25 man testing meant that a number of issues that were identified during those tests went live a couple weeks later. Mistweavers’ Revival dispelling players on HM Jin’rokh and Primordious, Durumu’s maze effects being almost indistinguishable, bugged Bone Worms on Ji Kun trash keeping everyone in combat, players being teleported beneath the world in Dark Animus, Expertise bracers being coined by a Disc Priest … (/sigh) … they were all there on PTR, and then on live. So, while I realize that no game is without issues, I do think that Throne lacked some of the polish that I’ve come to expect from Blizzard. I do hope, in that regard, that ToT was reinforcement of the design policy that Blizzard had held for so long—it’s ready when it’s ready.

Something Lost, Something Found

Unfortunately for the competitive raiding world, despite its laudable qualities and similarities to oft-recalled tiers, Tier 15 wound up claiming even more of our PVE brethren. And as we saw more 25-man teams, some big names among them, crumble under the increased weight/tension of maintaining cutting edge progression, and I saw my friends list grow a little bit more dim, I started worrying about my own raiding shelf life. I wondered, is that eventual burnout in the future for me too? Is it closer than I know or do I still have a while before I finally call it quits?

To be fair, I’ve been raiding a long time now. I’m going on 7 years of raid weeks, Tuesday resets, faction reps, instance farming, of having people I don’t know bark orders at me about where to stand, and of being excited about the color purple. Granted, it’s less time than someone who began their progression career in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, or AQ20, but it’s a long time nonetheless. And after such a disheartening start to the expansion with one of the most combative guilds that I’ve ever been a part of, followed by the untimely end of my first and only experience playing Alliance, I wondered if the universe was telling me that it was time to hang up my spurs. And in a last ditch effort to keep myself from giving up before yet another trial period, yet another round of ingratiating myself with a whole new set of people and a new healing team, and yet another set of transfers for my alt army, I decided that I wouldn’t spend T15 with my homepage set to WoWProgress.

And while I admit that I didn’t go entirely cold turkey, it was an amazing thing to spend a tier free of worrying about the impact of a couple hours, a day, a week. I realized that somewhere in between the top rankings that I had been striving for, for so many years and at such great cost, and the casual PuGs that I started out in, and which inspired such frothy Vixsin-rage, I could find something called … fun. Even after all these years, after all the stress and all the drama, raiding can still be fun. Burnout may be an eventuality, it may be coming for me next week or it may be another three years down the line, but, as I discovered, that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy myself in the meantime.

Keep in mind: This guide is written from a HM perspective. Some mechanics, like Lurkers of the Night and Nuclear Inferno, are not present in normal mode. So you can skip over any points related to them.

Why use a healer?

As with most encounters, the number of healers that you stack your roster with is based on the maximum incoming damage that you expect to face during a fight. And on HM Twins, that massive damage comes during the Day phase, when Suen gains stacks of Blazing Radiance (which increases her damage done) and casts Nuclear Inferno. But, during the rest of the encounter—specifically Night and Dusk—the damage that goes out on the raid is pretty mild and limited to infrequent bursts due to Cosmic Barrage and Lukers’ Darkness barrages. So, during these times, healers are usually tripping over each other for something to actually heal. Combined with the fact that the DPS check on HM was pretty tight, this means that healers were and are ideal candidates to launch themselves into the alternate phase to summon the aid of the Celestials. And healers with constant run-speed boosts—eg: Shamans’ Ghostwolf—are even more ideal since they can complete the run in record time. AND, healers with the ability to self-dispel the sleep clouds (ie: via Tremor Totem) that you have to dodge while running from statue to statue are even better. Sorry fellow Resto Shaman, but you’re perfect for the task!

Why you need the Celestials’ help

Each of the four Celestials, whose statues are placed around the outskirts of the room, offers your team a unique buff that will help in overcoming some of the brutal attacks delivered by the Twin Consorts. The aid of the Celestials can be called upon one time each during each the two segments of the encounter, so you have 4 usable buffs during day+night (when you’re fighting the bosses individually) and 4 usable buffs during dusk+night/day (the final phase will be based on which boss you kill first in dusk). Xuen’s and Chi-Ji’s buffs last for 20 seconds while Niuzao’s and Yulon’s buffs last for 30 seconds, and the buffs cannot be active concurrently. (Statues will be unclickable until the current Celestial buff expires—this is important to remember since it will impact your timing). Other than that, you can activate them in any order and at any time.

So here’s what each of the Celestials can offer you:

• Xuen (tiger) – slows time, making it possible to dodge both Cosmic Barrage and Tidal Force
• Yulon (cloud serpent) – health and mana regen, sufficient to act as a partial cooldown during Nuclear Inferno (will need to paired with something else)
• Niuzao (oxen) – increases maximum HP by 50%, another raid CD
• Chi-Ji (crane) – summons cranes to attack any hostile mobs (did ~15M per summon on Suen, for our kill)

Showing off your running skills

So, your raid team has decided on an order for the Celestials and you’re prepped and ready to run. But what can you expect once you’re phased in? Once you click on one of the Celestials’ statues and get placed into the Constellation phase, you have ~30 seconds in which to complete a constellation. In order to achieve “completion” you will need to run a path through the appropriate stars (orbs) that appear in the phased constellation zone. The layout of the stars will always be the same; the path you need to trace will vary based on the Celestial you’re summoning. You’ll need to know these paths beforehand, because there’s not much hand-holding once you get phased in.

Some quick facts about the run:

• After clicking the statue, you will be ported to the middle of the room. All constellation paths will be relative to your ported location (which will be on the northwest side for Xuen and Chi Ji and on the opposite side, southeast, for Niuzao and Yulon). The paths do not need to be rotated to account for these different starting positions.
• The path you need to trace will be dictated by the statue that you clicked. So, tracing a constellation for Xuen after clicking Yu-lon’s statue will not work.
• When you are ported in, a reminder of the proper path will appear above your character in a light blue outline. Because it appears briefly and traces the path quickly, I strongly recommend having constellation diagrams showing on another monitor or on a piece of paper in front of you. Here’s the “cheat sheet” that I used (which also shows off my awesome freehand drawing skills–just look at that lopsided circle, brilliant!):

Twin Consorts – Constellation Running Cheat Sheet

• Phasing in does not remove any active debuffs (like corrupted healing), so be aware of your HP if you enter a constellation run with this still applied.
• As mentioned above, once you’re ported in, you have 30 seconds to complete the run. Most runs take about 12-17 seconds to complete (in ghostwolf form, which is +30%, with the Pandaren Step enchant), leaving a small window of time if you botch the pattern and need to restart.
• As you run through the stars, you’ll receive a “confirmation” that you successfully triggered the marker through the leveling sound (DING) and the marker flashing bright blue on your screen. You’ll also see your path illuminated in a line behind you. If you happen to make a mistake and trigger a star out of order or that is not included in the constellation path, the star will flash red (instead of blue) and you will need to start again. (Do check out the “Bugs” section below, because there are some issues with this).
• Upon completing the constellation, if you’re lucky enough to not get the phasing bug, you will be popped back into the same phase as your raid team after a couple of seconds. Use that window of time before you’re phased out to move someplace safe (NOT the middle of the room) so that you don’t zone out on top of other players.
• (Hard mode only) When you’re zoned out of the constellation phase, you will instantly be targeted by all nearby Lurker adds, so be prepared to use a CD to survive if you’re zoning out with less than a minute to go before Phase 2. It was not uncommon in our first attempts for me to die instantly upon leaving the constellation realm after getting hit with 4-8 concurrent barrages. (Remember: the later it is in the night phase, the more Lurkers will be spawned, so the more concurrent barrages you’ll take). What stopped me from dying at that point was using a damage reduction CD and getting additional ones from teammates (I use Astral Shift and get Safeguard and Life Cocoon as externals).

Lastly, here’s a fun fact that helped me orient myself in the room: each of the Celestials is located at a cardinal direction! The stairs in the room are not on a North-South axis; rather they’re rotated 45 degrees so that each of the statues is perfectly positioned at the following points:

• Chi-Ji: North
• Xuen: West
• Yulon: South
• Niuzao: East

“Bugs” to be aware of

Things don’t always go as planned when you’re running the constellation path, and occasionally you’ll encounter something that might be slightly disconcerting. Throughout our attempts and, ultimately, our kill, there were more than a couple situations that left me wondering “omg, did I screw something up?!” Thankfully, some of these just appear to be quirks of the encounter:

• When you’re ported in, if you move almost instantly, there’s a chance that you’ll become unphased for a brief moment, and the Lurker adds can and will target you for multiple barrages. I died several times upon entering the phase by simply getting nuked during that brief window of unphasing.
• Stars will occasionally flash a bright red instead of a bright blue. The bright red is intended to indicate that you done goofed the path. However, this can sometimes be triggered by passing through the same orb twice in quick succession (like running through it and then looping back). In that instance, don’t fret. Keep running the path as you would.
• Upon completion of the constellation, you will sometimes not hear the emote from the Celestial Protector you summoned. This does not mean that he was not summoned; if your raid leader doesn’t scream “Have you completed the [expletive] constellation yet?!” then you’re fine.
• If you’re unlucky enough to not hear the emote, then you’ll likely also not be phased out of the realm upon completion of the constellation. Simply wait for your debuff to expire and you’ll be automatically kicked out. Use this time to annoy your teammates by set off their BigWigs or DBM proximity meters while you’re stuck in the constellation phase.

(Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to reliably reproduce any of these oddities, so I’ve no way of knowing if they were problems on my end, nuances of the fight that I simply didn’t understand, or actual bugs in the encounter, but I figured I’d include them just in case someone else experienced them as well).

Timing and order

Being a good constellation runner is all about one thing—timing. Because incoming damage and even boss mechanics can be mitigated through the proper use of the Celestials, timing the buffs granted by the Celestials is critical, and oftentimes doesn’t leave much room for error. Naturally, I can’t speak to your guild’s chosen timing, but I can leave you with a couple tips from my own experience:

• Use Yulon’s and Niuzao’s raid buffs wisely and remember that they constitute a full minute of cooldowns on the raid.
• Be positioned near your statue ahead of time—especially during the night phase, since it can take a while to run around the outskirts of the room (which you’ll have to do to avoid chaining Cosmic Barrage into anyone).
• Make your raid aware of the fact that it is possible to be targeted by Ice Comet while running to or standing at a statue location. It stinks, but it is definitely not an insta-wipe in either NM or HM.
• (Hard mode only) The most dangerous part of the fight as the constellation runner is the later part of the first Night phase. As I mentioned above, when you complete a constellation and zone out, you will be instantly targeted by nearby Lurkers and will oftentimes receive an immediate 4+ Barrages, which can kill you almost instantly. So, use a cooldown when you’re coming out of the constellation phase. Likewise, be sure to time the completion of the constellation that you’re using on the Night -> Day transition to occur just *after* the transition. If you pop out a couple seconds ahead of the transition, the Lurkers’ barrages at that point will kill you.
• (Hard mode only) Celestial timing during the day phase should be staggered around Nuclear Inferno. You will need to contribute to healing during each of the Inferno channels, so don’t think you can use that time to do a constellation run—the raid needs your HPS.
• (Hard mode only) Also, when it comes to timing in the day phase, you need to run straight to the next statue as soon as a Nuclear Inferno is finished casting. You do not want to be caught completing a constellation run right before or during an Inferno cast. You will die a very crispy death.

In regards to the order that we used for our HM kill:

1. (Night) Xuen at the start (to line up with Suen’s Tears of the Sun—we discontinued this in later kills since it seemed to be causing issues with Suen’s casts)
2. (Night) Nizao with 1:00 left until Day
3. (Night) Yulon at the transition to Day (summon lined up with the exact phase transition)
4. (Day) Chi-Ji after first Nuclear Inferno
5. (Dusk) Xuen before the first Tidal Force
6. (Dusk) Yulon before the second Tidal Force
7. (Dusk) Nizao before first Cosmic Barrage
8. (Night) Chi-Ji as soon as available

A last bit of advice

Twin Consorts is a great example of a fight where a seemingly inconsequential task can have a valuable impact on the outcome of the encounter. The constellations aren’t difficult to run, nor that time-consuming, but they will take up the majority of your time during the fight. (For reference’s sake: I did about half the HPS of our top healer on the kill). Keep yourself alive through any means necessary (especially on hard mode), pay attention to the timing that your guild has chosen, and be proactive with your positioning, and you’ll make the fight that much easier on your raid. Best of luck to you!

Admittedly, it’s oftentimes hard not to get caught up in the debate, especially if it’s your class that’s in the spotlight. And sometimes, as you’re trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire, you come up against a question that, in the weeks since 5.2 launch, many Resto Shaman have been struggling with, and which was posed to me via email:

 “I do have a question for you about morale when playing a resto shaman. I find it hard not to get upset or angry with my class when reading all the negative posts, benching, forum issues and class weakness/under-performance that currently surround the resto shaman. It seems to happen every tier lately and really can be quite disheartening. What would you say to a raider who lets this kind of stuff get to him but doesn’t want to switch classes?” – Dreadfox

As you might have guessed if you read my post several years ago during Firelands—Life in Group 6—class balance and I have a somewhat … tenuous? strained? frosty? … relationship. Unlike some top-end players who oftentimes switch “mains” based on the needs of their raid team, I still cling (for better or for worse) to the distinction that I made back in BC: Vixsin is my main, and all my other healers, no matter how much I play them, are my alts. While I’ll happily heal on my other characters for the purposes of guild progression, and have done so in the past, I will always be the most comfortable on my shaman and the most proud of my achievements on her.

And so, I do oftentimes struggle to remain positive in light of overwhelming negativity about the class, whether it’s from the forums, the community or even from my guildmates. I won’t lie; the first few weeks of Throne of Thunder, where Resto Shaman were arguably not the strongest of healers, were tough. A 20% buff to our AOE spells emphasized how much our design had missed the mark. (And I thought that 15% Purification buff we received at the start of Cata was the worst it could get!)

But, there was something slightly different in my perspective this time around (versus in Firelands, almost 2 years ago), something that helped me bolster my defenses for the rough times ahead. So, in answer to the question above, here’s what keeps me afloat when things start to seem bleak.

Perspective

I want to get this one out of the way first, because by and large, perspective is hard to come by when you venture onto forums (and blogs, natch). And it’s even harder to gain when someone links a Raidbots graph, which although it oftentimes gets panned by developers, is actually closer to the “global” perspective of performance than the community has ever been before.

Anyway, back to the point about perspective … You might not realize it, but Raidbots provides you with a number of ways to look at the data set that it’s able to pull from World of Logs, and the default option (the one that is consistently linked and referenced in many “I’m underpowered” posts) is oftentimes a capture of the top 100 parses for the classes listed. Now, while you might argue that the top performers of a class are just as valuable a metric as any, the point remains that you’re looking at players and conditions which are, by definition, out of the ordinary. In fact, when it comes to top healing parses, you’re often looking at results which are either engineered to favor someone in particular, where someone was deliberately pushing max HPS, where a mechanic was intentionally gamed (think: Diffusion on Megaera) and/or where some aspect of the strategy went awry.

It’s also important to remember that, firstly, class performance is going to vary by raid size and by difficulty, and secondly, when you’re looking at aggregate performance over an entire tier, the values can be incredibly skewed based on incredibly high or incredibly low performance on a single encounter. In regards to the former, to give you an example of just what I mean, I took all of the Raidbots “Overall DPS” values for today, dumped them into one table, and then color-coded each parse category from red to green (red being the lowest value in that parse category and green being the highest value):

Raidbots HPS Comparison for T15 as of post date

So, as you can hopefully see, there’s no one healer dominating in every single category. Looking at the above, you could say that Disc priests *tend* to be doing well, while Resto Druids and Resto Shaman *tend* to be doing poorly, but if you made a blanket statement on either of those cases, you’d obviously be incorrect. Further, and this relates to my second point, it’s important to remember that the values in the table above represent an aggregate (median) HPS for the entire tier. This means that if there’s a fight where a class does incredibly well or incredibly poorly, their overall HPS is going to be skewed because of it. Similarly, if WoL isn’t parsing a fight correctly, or guilds aren’t making logs public (and a number of top guilds don’t), their performance values won’t be represented in the data. So, in sum, all of this isn’t to say that the numbers presented by Raidbots are wrong or misleading, simply that it’s up to you to understand the context and how the values are derived.

Support

The second thing that you should be able to rely on when things get rough is support.* Although it hasn’t always been the case, in T15 I’m lucky enough to have a guild leader and healing teammates who recognize the benefits and the limitations of every class. They’re not going to cut me any slack when it comes to performance (and, rightfully they shouldn’t, because the guild is about progression, not keeping my ego suitably fluffed) but they also understand that every class has strengths and weaknesses.

So, in my case, will be things that shaman are great at, things that we’re not-so-great at, and things that we bring that may not necessarily show up on meters. Yes, I hate this argument as much as the next player out there, but it is true–meters still cannot capture all of the benefits of a class. Ancestral Vigor is a great example–10% health may not seem like a big deal but it can oftentimes be the difference between life and death. That’s 10% HP to keep your raid alive during Megaera’s Rampages or tip the scales of survivability during Iron Quon’s Fist Smash. It’s 10% more HP on a tank who’s otherwise getting 1-shot. In other rough terms, that’s ~1.3M additional raid HP if you’re able to have it stacked on a 25-man team which is also about 50% of the throughput of one Healing Tide cooldown. And the same argument could be made for things like Misdirect, Power Word: Barrier, Smoke Bomb, and a litany of other class abilities that have zero HPS or DPS values, but a huge benefit when used correctly.

* Notice that I’m not talking about forum empathy here, because threads talking about class imbalance rarely are successful and most times become an argument of who’s worse off. Other classes join in, “yeah, but you have [x]” arguments fly, and no one emerges with a positive outlook.

Stubbornness

I’m sure my mother could write a novel about the ways in which my stubbornness has led to more problems than solutions, but when it comes to performance I am consistently someone who believes that all it takes is sufficient willpower. I’ve met plenty of very gifted gamers over the years, some of whom have absolutely blown me away with their raw talent, and all of whom have convinced me that when it comes to being blessed with innate skill—I am not one of those people.

And yet despite my struggles, which if I had simply conceded defeat would have had me s-keying out of fire along with Donald, I’ve managed to secure a spot on every healing roster I’ve aspired to join, all the way up the ladder. Because while I may not be innately gifted, I have a stubborn streak that keeps me subscribed to the idea that, I think, Randy Pausch expressed perfectly:

The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

So, when it comes to being aware of class balance issues but not letting myself be completely restricted by them, a little bit of pure stubbornness goes a long way.

Separation

Lastly, what keeps me going despite the ups and downs of class balance is the appreciation of the fact that as much as I like to think of myself as a Resto Shaman, I am, more importantly, a raider. And the qualities that distinguish a great raider are qualities that transcend class—awareness, adaptability, communication, problem-solving, attentiveness, and execution. Playing a flavor-of-the-month doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility of being a good raider any more than it keeps you alive while you stand in a fire.

Believe me when I say, that a great way to close the divide between your own performance and the performance of your teammates is to stop focusing on what you can do with your class and start focusing on what you can do as a raider. I’ve made up some pretty big disparities in the past through very simple techniques like:

• Timing cooldowns better or more aggressively
• Being more precise and meticulous about movement (knowing where players are going to be before they get there)
• Paying more attention to damage patterns and visual cues of incoming damage (like actually watching the movement of my teammates instead of my raid frames)
• Knowing more about the fight and its nuances (research, research, research)
• Tweaking my raid frames to show more information (like debuffs, tank swaps, personal cd’s, etc.)
• Executing special assignments (add kiting on Vashj, dispel management on Kalecgos, Sinestra and Spine, or most recently, running constellations on HM Twins).

High HPS or DPS is a good thing, but consistently solid raid performance is going to trump it nearly every time.

Standing Strong

Ultimately, I think perhaps the reason that the question posed at the start of this post:

How do you stay positive in light of class negativity and poor performance?

resonated so strongly with me is for two main reasons. Firstly, because it’s a question that I’m forced to battle with as someone who has created such a specific image for themselves in game and in the community. Search “Vixsin” in Google and my blog comes up as the #1 result, suggesting that I am tied to the game as much as I am to the class. So when something affects Resto Shaman, it’s difficult to divorce myself from it because it’s a part of my identity.

But secondly, I think it’s an important question because it highlights how we often we let comparative performance influence, or even dictate, our enjoyment of WoW. For example, I have a blast in BG’s when I’m winning, typically by heal-botting another geared player on an absolute rampage. But, the flip side of that “fun” is that it requires that someone else be losing (and likely not enjoying the game as much as I am). And yes, I enjoy topping meters by a mile on an incredibly OP class, even when it means that other healers have to feel underpowered (as many Resto Shaman have since 5.2).

The fact is, there will always be a Flavor-of-the-Month spec, one that’s dominating in PVP or PVE, healing, dps or tanking. Perfect class balance simply isn’t obtainable in a game as nuanced and complex as WoW, which means that someone will always be on top and someone else will always be losing. So the pessimists have it right in that regard. But if you base your enjoyment of WoW on “winning” the balance game (being the OP class of the hour), then you have a mere 2.9% chance (11 classes, 3 specs ea. / 4 for druids) to “win” at a game you can’t control or even influence. And I don’t know about you, but I think those are pretty shit odds.

So what would I suggest? Don’t try to win the balance game. Be stubborn, nurture a broader perspective, hone your skills as a raider, and find a group of people to play with who like playing with you. And in the end, stick with whatever class you enjoy playing for the simple fact that you enjoy playing it. The best successes, in my opinion, are the ones you have to work for.

But, fortunately, Patch 5.2 doesn’t contain any groundbreaking changes for Resto Shaman, but rather some slight modifications to our toolset. So those of you who might be worried about having to make significant changes to your gameplay as you launch into Throne of Thunder—don’t fret. There will be some slight tweaks to make as a result of these changes, but the core of Resto will stay quite solid. To help you get an idea of what to expect, I’ve put together a handful of tidbits about class changes, what to expect in the actual raid instance, and what gearing options will become available.

Resto Shaman Changes

Most of the changes that are being put in place for Resto Shaman in 5.2 are actually changes to the class as a whole and not just our spec. (Patch 5.2 Notes can be found here). I’ve divided this section into two parts—changes that should make you sit up and take notice and changes that you should make note of but which won’t have that big an impact on your gameplay. So, let’s get to that first category:

• Stone Bulwark – buffed to offer 25% more absorption. SBT was a favorite of mine in Tier 14, especially on fights with continuous damage,  and will likely be even more a favorite in the content to come because of its unbeatable efficiency.  With a solid increase to the absorption effects, this totem should help shaman survivability a tad and provide you with a mini CD for frequent heavy hits.
• Elemental Mastery – cooldown decreased to 90 seconds. The impact of this talent is that it will now be possible to line EM up with Ascendance and Healing Tide, provided that you stagger them appropriately. For HTT, this means you’re going to be gaining a handful of additional ticks, and for Ascendance, it means that if you pre-cast and EM-powered HR, you’re going to net a ton more blanket healing on the raid. The downside of this change is that you’ll be trading in the passive 5% haste from Ancestral Swiftness, which means that you’ll need to tack on at least 2,168 more haste to meet the first breakpoint for Earthliving (if you were already above the 871 haste mark).

Now, onto those changes that, while noteworthy, won’t have as significant an impact on your gameplay:

• Nature’s Guardian – will now preserve your health increase, making it a pseudo-instant heal similar to priests’ Angelic Bulwark, triggered when you drop below 30% HP.  With  ~450k HP, Nature’s Guardian will result in a 112,500 heal on a 30-sec CD, making its max contribution over a 6-minute encounter (assuming it procs on CD, which it will won’t likely do) 1.35M healing done. HOWEVER, (<- note big caps here), it is unlikely that you’ll see that level of performance, so overall, SBT is going to be the better-performing option.
• Healing Rain – Mana cost reduced by 15%. If you were a shaman who was dropping HR on a very regular basis (say, every 12sec), this means that on a 6-minute encounter you’ll have an additional 116,370 mana at your disposal now. While not a huge change to shaman mana or throughput, on the premise that every little bit counts, this is a welcome change heading into the new instance.
• Conductivity – received two changes aimed at making this talent more attractive to Resto Shaman. First, the talent no longer requires that the target of the GHW, HS, or HW be in the HR; so your heals on a ranged target will still be distributed to those players in your HR. Second, the amount distributed has been increased to 30% of the healing done. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to have Restos flocking to the talent, because it’s still unlikely that it will rival the throughput of the powerhouse of that tier, HTT. (To put it in perspective, if one drop of HTT yielded 3M healing done, I would have to do 10M combined healing from GHW, HS, and HW in a 3-minute window, for Conductivity to yield the same throughput).
• Ancestral Guidance – now copies 60% of the amount healed to 3 nearby targets. This constitutes a 150% increase (120% v. 180%) to total throughput for the talent. Unfortunately, AG’s 2min CD creates an awkward alignment with complementary cooldowns like Elemental Mastery (1.5min CD) and Ascendance (3min CD), making it a talent more suited for situational use (a la HM Tsulong) that permanent integration into your arsenal. That being said, it’s on this list because I wouldn’t be surprised to see some good applications arise in the upcoming tier and beyond.

What to Expect in Throne of Thunder

So, beyond the shaman stuff that is coming as a part of 5.2, what can you look forward to in the newest Zandalari raid instance? Well, although the experience is nothing like the first time you exited the sewers of Black Temple and stepped into Supremus’s courtyard, one of the major things you’ll notice about Throne of Thunder is that it is HUGE. The daily quest zone surrounding it is huge, its exterior is huge, and the zones and rooms within it are huge. And once you get past the scale, the second thing you’ll notice is that it’s bloody gorgeous. Like the rest of Pandaria, the art design and detail of the instance and all its themes is just downright impressive. (And my crappy screenshots don’t even do it justice).

Okay, okay … on to the practical stuff. Based on my raid testing experiences for both NM and HM, 10s and 25s, here’s what Resto Shaman can look forward to in this new 12-boss (plus one bonus!) spectacular:

1. Lots of spread raid healing. I hate it, you hate it, (okay, maybe just I hate it), but it’s going to be a big part of our world in 5.2. Most of the fights that I tested had mechanics that required or strongly encouraged players to spread out (splash damage = strong encouragement). Even in 25s, this will equate to more single-target healing making its way into your rotation. It also underscores the importance of high HST uptime, since our efficient single-target heals, GHW and HW, are notoriously slow even with the benefits of Tidal Waves and we still don’t have the regen to support a straight RT-HS rotation.
2. Lots of healing, in general. While I wasn’t able to get a feel for the entire length of most encounters (since PTR testing is generally engineered to assure that you don’t kill the encounter), I think it’s fair to say that ToT isn’t going to hold many fights that feel like the main platform on Sha of Fear—healers won’t be in any danger of nodding off. Raid damage is fairly heavy in NM, which makes Healing Rain a pretty valuable staple of our rotation, and it only gets more intense on HM, where you can pretty much concede that HR should be down 100% of the time if you want to maintain competitive throughput. Which makes it especially wonderful that the fights also have …
3. Lots of movement. Spread/collapse mechanics, dodge-the-bad-stuff challenges, fixate-kiting, maze-running, Alysrazor tornadoes, Rhyolith fires, Vezax’s shadowcrashes, and a host of other things will keep you on your toes. So, part of the challenge of this tier will be finding smart ways to stay stationary for longer, making the most out of Spiritwalker’s Grace, and properly placing your Healing Rain so that it isn’t just a pretty blue circle out in the middle of nowhere.

In terms of performance, with healing meters bouncing all around during testing and almost every healing class being on top at one point or another, it’s difficult to guess where the ultimate shakedown of classes will be. Resto Shaman started out strong in the early days of 5.0, but we saw ourselves slowly sink through the progression of the tier, as absorbs got stronger and more players became adept at using them. But, with the reduction of Spirit Shell stacking and the integration of more constant-damage mechanics, I do feel like it’s anyone’s game at this point. Druids felt especially strong during HM testing, so I’m really looking forward to seeing them in action.

Gearing

The majority of the loot that you have to look forward to with ToT will be collected from the bosses in the instance, but a new faction–the Shado Pan Assault–will offer you some useful rewards as you progress. So, with Valor NOT being transitioned to Justice points at 5.2 launch, you should be in a position to pick up a couple of valor upgrades in your first week (or so) of raiding. Joining the likes of BC’s Ashtongue Deathsworn and Cataclysm’s Avengers of Hyjal, reputation for Shado Pan Assault will be gained through raiding. Trash will, presumably, offer some reputation up to possibly Honored, at which point, further rep progression will only be achieved through bosses (if Blizzard stays true to the Firelands rep model).

The Kirin Tor (Alliance) and Sunreavers (Horde) will also be putting in an appearance in the new zone, and will be the source of many of the new daily quests. However, with the rewards offered by these factions capping out at 496ilvl, their pieces will really only serve to augment gaps in your current gearing or catch characters up before they make their way into the new raid zone. (But a fancy Direhorn mount will keep this faction relevant even to those of us who won’t be using it for gearing).

We’ll be picking up some new bonuses in Tier 15 as well, trading GHW, HS, and HW buffs for … well … more of the same … but different! (lol):

• Tier 15 2pc: HST will gain an additional 25% healing on a second target. A straight throughput gain and something worth breaking your T14 4pc for, this bonus will be a boon to our lowest overhealing spell. In raid testing with the t15 2pc, I was consistently seeing HST as one of my top heals for every encounter.
• Tier 15 4pc: Non-critical hits of our single-target spells–GHW, HW, RT, HS, and UE–will have a 50% chance to trigger to trigger AA. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m still very much against this set bonus because of the incredible variability it sees in application. But, there’s no denying its helpfulness in an instance where raids are consistently spread. I’ts worth mentioning that the bonus will devalue crit rating (something most PVE Resto Shaman are favoring these days) but not to the point that you need to consider alternate gearing strategies.

In terms of other gear, we have some interesting trinkets to look forward to, tier with lots of haste and plenty of sockets, and even a healing fist-weapon (oh the transmog options with that one!) But, that’s a topic for another day. Suffice to say that as you make your way into the instance, you’ll want to continue prioritizing primary stat upgrades (Intellect and Spirit) over any secondary stat changes.

The Thunder King Comes

Regardless of timing, I’m quite excited to see all that Throne of Thunder has to offer the raiders of Pandaria. Blizzard set a pretty high bar for themselves with Tier 14, but with a substantial amount of bosses (remember: Firelands only had 7!) and some interesting and unique fight mechanics, ToT will, for good or for bad, definitely be a tier to remember.

Something I obsess over in the weeks preceding a new patch and then promptly forget about until progression is mostly done, set bonuses are the one-size-fits-all Snuggy of the raiding world. Designed as an answer to a question that hasn’t yet been asked (and might not ever be), the implication is always that more pieces equal more power. But, as any class would point out, set bonuses don’t always hit the mark. And naturally, that’s to be expected, because designing something that helps every player equally is a nigh impossible task.

That being said, I do think there’s still valuable information that can be found in the tier solutions of the past. Resto Shaman are not a particularly complex class–we were long known as 1-button wonders–but in recent years we’ve seen our class splinter a slight bit due to the impacts of raid sizing on our “niche” strengths. And it’s in that regard that I think the decisions of tiers past become important in figuring out just how to give us a helping hand going forward.

Learning from Tiers Past

Since the start of Wrath, when a distinct effort was made to pull us away from Chain Heal spam, Resto Shaman have had two very distinct toolboxes—one that favors single-target spells and one that favors AOE spells. This is not unique from the divisions that exist in other classes between their AOE and single-target toolsets. A druid healing a tank might use less Rejuv and more Regrowth, while a Priest healing a raid will use less Flash Heal and more Prayer of Healing. But what makes shaman unique is that it’s not only assignment that determines our healing style, but also the design of the fight and the raid size.

As a result, it’s not uncommon to see a fight where a shaman has a “raid” healing assignment but still defers to a majority of single-target spells. Likewise, it’s not uncommon to see a distinct difference between the healing distribution of a 10-man shaman versus a 25-man shaman, even on the same fight with the same general healing assignment. It’s the ability to easily flow between these two styles, without a significant loss of throughput, that I’ve long regarded as one of the strengths (and fun elements) of the class.

As you would expect, set bonuses have struggled with how to address two very divergent playstyles. In Wrath, although inroads were made to synergize the toolsets, we still didn’t see much overlap between the two healing styles. And so, set bonuses that we might look at today and consider to be beneficial to both styles, were in fact very specialized (with the exception of T7).

• Tier 7 2pc: Your Water Shield is 10% stronger.
• Tier 7 4pc: Increases the healing done by your Chain Heal and Healing Wave by 5%.
• Tier 8 2pc:  Reduces the cooldown on Riptide by 1 sec.
• Tier 8 4pc: Reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 0.2 sec.
• Tier 9 2pc: Increases the healing done by your Riptide spell by 20%.
• Tier 9 4pc: Increases the critical strike chance of your Chain Heal spell by 5%.
• Tier 10 2pc: Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast within 10 sec.
• Tier 10 4pc: Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.

Looking at the above, do you notice how, with the exception of T7, every 2pc bonus buffs Riptide while every 4pc bonus buffs Chain Heal? I have no way of knowing if this is a result of a deliberate design decision to have the sets only address those spells, but I will say that it’s quite the coincidence that it also reflects the spells which served as the core of the of two different healing styles. I remember that from Naxx until ICC, I maintained two very distinct gearsets for raiding that I would swap based on what size raid I was participating in (since, like many progression raiders, I did multiple runs a week to maximize drops, up to 4 a week during ICC). Crit/haste was for 10’s, because there I used RT-LHW/HW, while regen/haste was for 25’s, because there I used CH almost exclusively. (Because we still couldn’t get away from our iconic ability).

But in Cata we saw more spells introduced into the shaman arsenal, and as a result, the lines between those two very distinct healing styles began to blur just a slight bit. HR, our new AOE heal, was useful in some 10-man encounters, while HW and RT saw their prevalence increase in 25-man raids due to both the presence of triage and the design of certain encounters. And, assumedly because of this shift, we saw set bonuses depart a slight bit from the Wrath structure of 2pc for 10s and 4pc for 25s. Cataclysm’s set bonuses, for the most part, were ones that bridged the gap:

• Tier 11 2pc: Increases the critical strike chance of your Healing Wave spell by 5%.
• Tier 11 4pc: Grants 540 Spirit for 6 sec after you cast Riptide.
• Tier 12 2pc: Your periodic healing from Riptide has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.
• Tier 12 4pc: Your Chain Heal spell no longer consumes your Riptide effect on the primary target.
• Tier 13 2pc: After using Mana Tide Totem, the cost of your healing spells are reduced by 25% for 15 sec.
• Tier 13 4pc: Increases the duration of Spiritwalker’s Grace by 5 sec, and you gain 30% haste while Spiritwalker’s grace is active.

Of these set bonuses, I think two are really important to consider. First, Tier 12 4pc is important because of how out of place it was in a series of set bonuses that transcended raid size. T11 2pc’s crit strike on HW? Good for both raid sizes, and especially at the start of a tier that emphasized triage. T11 4pc’s more spirit/regen after Riptide? Great for both 10 and 25s, and for underscoring the importance of Ritpide in any shaman rotation. But a CH-specific bonus? Not only was this bonus out of place in 10’s, where CH is situational and hardly a staple heal, but the bonus also managed to be situational in 25’s—CH’s core audience—because almost every fight in that tier had players spreading out across big environments in response to fight mechanics which had them soaking, fleeing, moving and dodging. (Shannox, Alysrazor, Baleroc, Domo, and half of Rag, 4.5 of the 7 fights of the tier, had me using an RT-GHW/HS rotation … in 25’s!).

In stark contrast to T12 4pc, was a set bonus that I would select as my favorite over all the tiers of raiding:  Tier 13’s 4pc, which gave me a personal Bloodlust every 2 minutes. Power aside, it was usable and applicable in both raid sizes, with any rotation, and during any kind of fight. It was broadly applicable, without coaxing me to use another playstyle or go through contortions to optimize its use.

Tier 14, an Inauspicious Start

Coming off the high of Tier 13 bonuses, I think it’s reasonable to concede that almost anything short of completely OP would have been a let-down for Pandaria’s starting tier. New expansions are always a tumultuous time for players’ sentiments, as they find themselves no longer in easy farm content mode where big numbers rule, but instead back at the beginning once more, questing, leveling, gearing, farming, and learning to play their class again. It’s arguably not a time for flashy or divisive tier bonuses, and that is precisely what we got:

• Tier 14 2pc: Reduces the mana cost of your Greater Healing Wave spell by 10%.
• Tier 14 4pc: Your Tidal Waves ability grants an additional 5% cast time reduction to Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave, and an additional 5% critical chance to Healing Surge.

But the interesting thing about these tier bonuses is that, while arguably beneficial, their applicability to Resto Shamans’ two healing styles was quite disparate. To give you an idea of the differences, I pulled two WoL parses from back in December, one from a run of 10-man HM MSV and one from a subsequent week’s run of 25-man HM MSV. Looking only at data from boss kills, I tallied the total healing done from each source and then grouped it by category—single-target healing, AOE, totem healing and other. Healing done by Earthliving was distributed into the single-target and AOE healing categories based on the ratio of healing done by the category / sum of healing for both categories; Restorative Mists was left in “other”. Ultimately, when the dust settled, I was left with the following totals:

Admittedly, I was a little shocked to see that the percentage of healing from each source was so perfectly aligned, with single-target and AOE healing being flip-flopped between the two raid sizes. And, I was a little more shocked to find that of the single-target healing above, GHW did a similar amount of healing in each data set (5.6M in 10-man and 5.2M in 25-man). But, what I wasn’t shocked to see and what I wanted to highlight here, is the ~10% spread between the two healing styles—a spread that is actually lessened by the fact that 25-msn MSV has two fights (Stone Guard and Gara’jal) where single-target is the rotation de jour.

“But, what about a pure AOE healing fight?” you might ask, because surely on a fight where players are more grouped up and taking raid-wide damage, the healing tools for Resto Shaman in the two raid sizes should be similar. Well, I don’t have quite the options in terms of data sets for that one, but I do have a 10-man HM Vizier kill from the end of December that I can use as a reference. Compared to a HM Vizier 25-man kill a mere 6 days prior, here is the distribution of healing (using the same constraints as above):

As you can see, the spread gets even bigger—8% separates single- and multi-target heals in 10-man, but in 25-man the spread is 14%, with an even more substantial contribution coming in the form of Restorative Mists, which is what is bumping up the “Other” category so substantially. And this is on what, I think, most would consider an AOE fight that favors Resto Shaman.

In the end, the take-away from all of this should be that, these days, if a set bonus is centered on specific type of Shaman healing, then the benefit that the bonus provides in going to be noticeably inconsistent between the two raid sizes.

Tier 15 Evaluation

So, the question of the hour becomes—how should this data and these past experiences inform the set bonuses for Resto Shaman in Tier 15? Well, in light of everything I’ve just blathered on about, let’s take a look at those bonuses again:

• Tier 15 2pc: Your Healing Stream Totem now heals an additional target for 25% of its normal amount.
• Tier 15 4pc: Your Ancestral Awakening now has a 50% chance to trigger on non-critical heals.

Obviously, for shaman who have been taking care to get the most out of HST over the past tier, the T15 2pc is going to be an easy way to increase its healing done by up to 25% (not accounting for overhealing). As bonuses go, it’s a solid one that won’t tip the scales and will lend a little additional assistance through its smart healing. But, since it was announced, it has been the 4pc that has given me the most cause for concern.

(Note: I apologize for not having logs to offer at this point. I ran some of the testing and an LFR with the T15 4pc, with the intent of having some WoL examples to draw from, but WoL is having difficulties parsing the T15 logs at the moment, so I don’t have sample data to offer outside of screenshots. /sadpanda)

Firstly, I’m concerned because the success and benefit of the 4pc bonus are tied to the use of single-target heals, which as we saw in the preceding section, have very different usage percentages depending on raid size. To give you an example, if I were using the T15 4pc on this week’s HM Elite Protectors kill, my only gain would have been from potential AA procs from the initial cast of Riptide and the 3, yes only 3, single-target heals that I cast. So let’s do a little math:

1. First, let’s look at how much the T15 4pc gives you. Assuming 20% critical chance, this means that on any single-target spell I would have an 80% chance to score a non-critical heal, which would then have a 50% chance to proc AA, which would net me a 30% heal based on the original amount. So, 0.8 x 0.5 x 0.3 = 12% increase on non-critical heals.
2. Next, let’s look at how much of my healing in this example could have procced that 4pc. Riptide did 3,482,933 healing. Assuming that 25% of that healing done was by the initial cast and that of that portion, 20% were critical strikes, this leaves us with 3,482,933 x 0.25 x 0.8 = 696,587. Add in the three single-target heals I cast, none of which were critical strikes, and you have 818,485 total healing which could have procced a non-crit AA.
3. This leaves us with 818,485 x 0.5 x 0.3 = 122,773 potential non-critical AA healing, which would have been a ~0.3% increase in my healing done for this encounter. In other words, I could get that same amount of throughput through the use of a single healthstone charge.

Now arguably, in this particular occasion where I am wearing the T14 4pc, that set bonus did absolutely diddly-squat for me as well. But, that’s kinda my point. Inconsistent application is going to be a given when considering healing assignments and, more importantly, varying playstyles. But inconsistent application of a 4pc set bonuses shouldn’t have a potential zero value when you’re healing “the way you should be” for a given encounter. If a paladin doesn’t have Beacon on a target and loses out on his set bonus for an entire fight, that’s not an “alternate playstyle”, that’s just lack of understanding of the class. If you’re not using Thunder Focus tea as a Mistweaver, or Rejuv as a Druid, that’s not an “alternate playstyle”, that’s just poor utilization of the tools of the class. But using a universally accepted raid-healing Resto Shaman rotation and missing out an entire set bonus as a result? I have to raise an eyebrow at that.

But, my second cause for concern, and what seems to me to be the obvious rebuttal of the example above is … what if the reason that we’re seeing our set bonus tied to single-target healing is because we can expect to see a significant amount of single-target healing across both raid sizes? Honestly, that idea worries me a lot more than missing out on a bonus because I’m using a CH-HR-RT rotation. Because, if that’s the case, then it would mean that we’re looking at another instance where spread raids are the default condition and Resto Shamans’ gimped-as-all-fucking-hell spread raid healing (in other words: single-target healing) is left to handle the load.

And, although I’ve seen only 6 of the 12 of the fights in 10-man, what I’ve seen in the large majority of those encounters are mechanics that encourage and/or force you to spread out in order to mitigate incoming damage. In that regard, the 4pc was helpful (I have screenshots of my meter showing AA between 8-12% of total healing done), but truth be told, it wasn’t enough to keep me from trailing noticeably behind other healers when players were spread. It was incredibly frustrating to be casting a GHW after raid damage went out only to see an Uplift, PoH, Cascade, WG, or LoD go off, and know that it was the far more efficient solution than the one that shamans have been working with since those early days of Wrath.

Conclusion

Thankfully, I don’t think we’re going to have to wait all that long to get a more complete picture of the performance of T15 across Resto’s very distinct (and applicable, natch) healing styles and across both raid sizes. 10-man testing has been plentiful thus far, although the recent forays into 10-man HM has me wondering if devs are trying to set new records for The Amount of Things that Can 1-Shot You. And the heartening thing, for those 10-man raiders who have made it thus far in this post, is that I do think the 2pc and the 4pc will be noticeably helpful.

But it remains to be seen if: a) it’s going to be enough to bolster a chronic, nagging, and insufficiently addressed weakness, and b) if the weakness will also manifest in 25s, where more specialization is possible due to larger healing teams. With 25-man testing forthcoming in the weeks before 5.2 launch, we shall see. And I’m hoping that developers will either have sufficient data to substantiate changing the T15 4pc bonus to something a bit more well-rounded or sufficient data to wave in my face while saying “We told you so”. If it’s the former, then I’d hope for something that harkens back to T11 and T13, and draws on the overarching nature of those bonuses. But if it’s the latter, then I’d hope that someone, somewhere makes a small note in the margin or maybe underlines one that already exists, saying that Resto Shaman desperately need to be rid of the yoke of being the “niche clumped up healer”. Because if more AA splash is the answer to our “spread raid” healing problems, then that should be sufficient demonstration of the gap in our arsenal, one that I’ve been pointing and yelling about long before I wrote this post in the months leading up to MoP.

Either way, I’ll be looking forward to the time ahead and the amazing instance that will house the next progression push. Because come hell, high water, Garrosh, or single-target raid healing, I’ll be there when the doors open.

So, I decided to take the “Advanced Resto Shaman WoL queries” post that I had been working on and give it a little bit of a twist by not only going through some (not all) of the best practices for Resto Shaman, but also to give you a way to isolate that information in WoL via Expression Editor. And while this post won’t give you wild new insights into the class and it’s not going to delve into theorycraft, what it should do is reinforce your priorities as a Shaman healer and lay the groundwork for solid healing output. (Because yes, every one of these points is key to higher HPS).

Note: if you’re new to Resto Shaman and their evaluation on WoL, I’d strongly recommend this excellent post by Jasyla of Cannot Be Tamed, Evaluating Resto Shaman on WoL, as a primer. 

Second Note: For some reason, copying and pasting the following queries into Expression Editor will generate an error, however if you manually type them into the WoL field exactly as they appear below, they will run correctly. I’ve no clue why this is–sorry! Totally fixed–the queries should be possible to copy/paste now. You guys are awesome. 

Best Practice #1 – Drop HST on CD

Gone are the days when Healing Stream Totem was a set-it-and-forget-it totem and gone are the days when it healed an entire party. In MoP, HST constitutes a single-target smart-heal on a 30-second cooldown, and an incredibly powerful one at that. Because of its smart-heal nature, HST almost consistently holds the title for lowest overhealing spell in a Shamans’ arsenal, and can, if dropped regularly, snag a top 3 spot in a Shaman’s effective healing done. In Tier 15, this totem will be even more powerful by virtue of our proposed 2pc bonus, which, at the moment, provides 25% additional healing on a second target for every HST drop. So, get in the habit of dropping this totem on CD—don’t cast another CH, don’t wait until after you do this handful of things, just DROP IT NOW, RIGHT NOW—and be sure to tap into Call of the Elements to eek out a couple additional drops every fight.

How to find this in WoL:

Pop open Expression Editor for the fight in question and run the following query:

spell="Healing Stream Totem" and type=TYPE_CAST and sourcename="Vixsin"

This will display all the times you dropped HST during the fight. For the rough number of times that you should have dropped it, take the fight duration and multiply by 2. If you have more drops than that number, you’re doing well; if not, consider adding an alert or warning to your UI to alert you when HST is off of CD.

Best Practice #2 – Unleash Life before Healing Rain

While in Cataclysm we had Focused Insight-buffed Healing Rains, in MoP, Resto Shaman can boost the power of our highest throughput spell through the use of Unleash Life. Casting UL immediately prior to dropping an HR will assure you an additional 30% healing done on every tick, which, given HR’s high cost, assures that you’ll get the most out of that substantial mana investment. Unfortunately, with a 15-second cooldown, Unleash Life doesn’t align perfectly with HR’s 10-second cooldown (plus ~2-second cast), meaning that you’ll have 2-3 seconds pause after your HR expires before you can pair the two again.

How to find this in WoL:

Since there’s no combat log even to show what consumes UL’s buff, the easiest way to verify that you’re using a UL+HR combo each time is check the application and fade of every Unleash Life. To do this, use the following query in expression editor:

sourcename="Vixsin" and ((spell="Unleash Life" and (fulltype=SPELL_AURA_APPLIED or fulltype=SPELL_AURA_REMOVED)) or (spell="Healing Rain" and type=TYPE_CAST))

If you’re using UL+HR correctly, every HR cast should be preceded by an application of the buff and succeeded by the removal of the buff.

Best Practice #3 – Chain Heal through RT targets

A quality of life change that draws inspiration from Resto Shamans’ T12 4pc, in MoP Ritpide is no longer consumed by a primary hit of Chain Heal. Instead, any CH’s that are cast on a target with an RT hot will receive a 25% boost to healing done without consuming the remainder of the hot. So, if there’s a fight where you know that you’ll be using CH to counter heavy raid damage, make sure you have RT hots on your assigned targets or on one player in a local cluster (eg: melee, ranged). If you’re a Vuhdo user, you can utilize Clusterfinder to identify targets which will make the most of your CH. And for the rest of us, it’s advisable to get very familiar the positioning of an encounter to ensure that your RT-powered CH doesn’t wind up with a single hit. Because there’s nothing sadder than a CH veering into nowhere to hit the offtank in the corner (and I speak from experience there!)

How to find this in WoL:

Another best practice that will take some log-diving, finding out if CH was cast on RT targets entails reviewing both your RT and CH targets for the fight to find the overlap (or lack thereof). To do this, use the following:

sourcename="Vixsin" and ((spell="Riptide" and (fulltype= SPELL_AURA_APPLIED or fulltype=SPELL_AURA_REMOVED)) or (spell="Chain Heal" and type=TYPE_HEAL))

Best Practice #4 – Use Ascendance or Healing Tide in conjunction with Spirit Link

Now official card-carrying members of the Raid Cooldowns Club, Resto Shaman have two main throughput CDs to offer their teams this expansion (Healing Tide and Ascendance), along with one sometimes under-appreciated damage reduction CD (Spirit Link). But, it’s really the through the combination of our two types of raid CDs that you start to see some impressive results, especially when you pair Ascendance+SLT with raid-wide damage on a stacked raid. While the pairing of HTT and SLT is still a damn solid combo, the reason that I’ll always advocate Ascendance+SLT is because of the complementary functionality of the two spells—SLT takes lots of damage spikes and spreads out the effect to everyone in range, whereas Ascendance copies lots of big healing numbers and distributes that effect to everyone in range. The net effect is lots of little additions and subtractions of health, which means that your Restorative Mists is able to see a much lower total overhealing than it otherwise would because of that HP shuffle.

How to find this in WoL:

Finally, an easy query! Just plop this into Expression Editor and see how your cooldowns lined up:

spell="Ascendance" or spell="Spirit Link Totem") and type=TYPE_CAST and sourcename="Vixsin"

Best Practice #5 – Don’t overwrite your Riptides

Something that first appeared on my radar because of Cata’s 21-second duration on Riptide (glyphed), this best practice stuck around in MoP for one main reason—clipping your RT hots significantly decreases their effectiveness. (Resto Druids can attest to this—clipping your Rejuv hots is a big no-no). With its 18-second base duration and 6-second cooldown, your overlap on that last RT cast won’t be as much as it was in Cata, but an overwrite still will clip (generally) 2 ticks of Riptide from the end of the hot if you’re only rolling RT on two targets. If you’re using Glyph of Riptide, preventing clipping even more important since the glyph removes the front-loading of the spell’s HPS, making a clip a greater percentage of healing lost.

How to find this in WoL:

Simply use the following query in WoL to see how many times you refreshed RT on a target:

sourcename=”Vixsin” and spell="Riptide" and fulltype=SPELL_AURA_REFRESH.

If the result comes up with no results, you know that you never lost out on RT healing due to a refresh.

Best Practice #6 – 100% ES uptime on your primary target

A shaman rule of thumb that’s existed since the days of Earth Shield being a 41-point talent, shielding a primary target has always been a function of asking “who’s going to be taking a lot of damage?” But, since the introduction of Nature’s Blessing in Cataclysm, Earth Shield has also been a way to boost our single-target healing on one specific player. Now that Nature Blessing’s bonus is baked into the spell, increasing shaman healing done to the target by 20%, ES is critical to ensuring that your single-target healing spells are doing all that they can. (Note: ES is not shaman-specific, so your healing on a target that has another Resto’s ES will still receive the bonus). Because of this boost to healing that ES provides, the question in MoP isn’t so much about who’s going to be taking the most damage but rather, “who am I going to be healing the most?” Oftentimes, the tanks are the logical conclusion, but don’t be afraid to cast your ES on another target (eg: Tsulong), or swap it between tanks when your assignment changes.

How to find this in WoL:

There are two ways to look at ES uptime in WoL. The first is to go to your player page for an encounter and look at the Buffs tab, to see ES’s total uptime. Secondary, if you’re interested in seeing who ES was on at a given point in time, you can head over to Expression Editor and use the following:

spell="Earth Shield" and (fulltype=SPELL_AURA_REMOVED or fulltype=SPELL_AURA_APPLIED)

Bonus Tip – Heal your Unleashed Fury target

Contrary to what you might think when you read Unleashed Fury’s tooltip and completely contrary to the buff granted by Unleash Life, which is on the shaman, the buff provided by the Resto variant of the level 90 talent Unleashed Fury is ON THE TARGET PLAYER. And given that this is a talent that I’d strongly recommend taking in 10s and 25s, at least until you become comfortable with the timing of Primal Elementalist on certain encounters, it’s important to understand that if you Unleash Fury on Player A and then heal Player B, you will not have consumed the Unleashed Fury buff on Player A. And this means there’s the distinct possibility that you’ve not been benefitting from Unleashed Fury at all.

How to find this in WoL:

Running the following query in Expression Editor will reveal the timing of all of the gains and fades of the buff:

spell="Unleashed Fury" and sourcename="Vixsin"

If the time in between gain and fade is < 10 seconds, the buff was consumed. If you see the buff fade 10 seconds after it was applied, then that’s an instance where your level 90 talent was wasted.

So, what’s a raid team to do? Well, if you were a raider during ToGC and forced to handle one very distressing healer mechanic, I’m sure you already are quite familiar with what I wanted to talk about today—PC-style assignments. But for the uninitiated and those looking for a refresher, read on!

The Background

(Feel free to skip this if you have fond memories of endless Immortality attempts in ToGC)

To give you a little background … this solution for healing assignments (healing or dispelling) is one that was popularized in Trial of the Grand Crusader on HM Anub’arak, as a solution for handling Penetrating Cold in the final phase of the encounter. During this final push, Anub’arak would apply Leeching Swarm to the entire raid, which would do half the player’s current health in damage and heal Anub for the amount of damage dealt. Thus, in order to mitigate Anub’s potential incoming heals, the common solution was to leave players at as little HP as possible such that an equilibrium of incoming healing and outgoing damage could be achieved through passive healing like Healing Stream Totem or Vamp Embrace. Yes, this meant that in that final phase, players were sitting a couple hundred hitpoints away from death.

To make this final phase really stressful, Anub’arak continued to apply Penetrating Cold to 5 randomly-selected players in the raid. (He applied Penetrating Cold in his first phases as well, but it wasn’t a big deal since players were likely close to topped and not taking damage from any other sources). But in this last phase, since Penetrating Cold would hit for several thousand a tick, on players who were sitting at less than 1k HP, it would spell death if they weren’t healed before the first tick occurred. The challenge of this came from the fact that the debuffs were applied completely at random, so healing assignments had to be done on the fly and have zero overlap, lest you lose a player to Penetrating Cold’s first tick. (This was the common cause of guilds failing their Immortal run for the week).

Thus, PC-style healing assignments were borne.

Setting up PC-style Assignments

So what is the benefit of PC-style assignments?

The clear identification of dispel or healing targets given a completely random application of a debuff.

When is it useful?

Any time, really. But it’s particularly helpful when group assignments, class assignments, or even player assignments leave gaps in coverage or can result in an overload on a particular healer.

 What does it require?

Step 1 – Raid Frame Configuration. For PC-style assignments to work, the members of your healing team all need to be working with the same set of information in front of them. This means that their raid frames need to be organized in the exact same way,  such that the 3^rd person in Group 4 for one person is the same as the 3^rd person in Group 4 for everyone else. You may take it for granted that your raid frames look like everyone else’s but remember—WoW’s default frames don’t make a group distinction, Vuhdo typically puts your character in the top slot of your group, and by default Grid sorts players alphabetically. Don’t believe me? Of course not, that’s why I have some screenshots to illustrate. This is the same raid group displayed in 3 different raid frames:

WoW’s default raid frames (with tanks showing)

Vuhdo basic layout

Grid Custom Layout

Looking at the above, tell me, who’s the third person in Group 5? Per Grid, it’s Magnetic. Per Vuhdo, it’s Zatoichy. And per WoW’s default frames, it’s Minxs (my alt resto druid). So yes, this first step is critical.

Do note, however, the distinction between your team’s raid frames being organized the same way and everyone using the same healing add-on. There’s no need for your entire healing team to switch to one specific type of addon; you simply need to ensure that the configuration mirrors everyone else’s. So your Healbot devotees can stay with Healbot (and continue to endure the teasing), your Grid fans can stick with Grid and its eleventy-billion supplemental mods, your Vuhdo players can stick with Vuhdo (and make fun of all the Grid users), and your obstinate Vanilla-UI-is-fine-for-me guy can continue to maintain that he’s a better healer because he doesn’t use addons. You get the point–don’t change the addon, just change how it looks.

Let’s go back to using my own raid frames as an example (this time from a different raid):

I currently have my frames set up in Grid’s default layout, which organizes players alphabetically by group, from left (Group 1) to right (Group 5). Although this is generally the most common raid frame layout, remember that it is not the order that those players would appear were I to open WoW’s own raid frames, which allow players to be placed in any available position in any group. Vuhdo, WoW and Healbot can all be configured to this same layout, so your raid team can use whatever mod they’re most comfortable with.

Step 2 – Creating Assignments. After you have your team’s raid frames set up identically, here’s the basic concept. Let’s say we know that during the course of the encounter 5 debuffs go out every 30 seconds. Using PC-style assignments, we’d set up the following:

• Target 1: Vixsin
• Target 2: Holytyg
• Target 3: Solique
• Target 4: Star
• Target 5: Galapanda
• Floater: Evilkami

Step 3 – Handling Assignments. Note that the above assignments are not group-based and they’re not player-based, but rather require healers to identify the target number in order to determine their assignment. That means that once debuffs go out, healers quickly look at the raid, count debuffs starting from the top of Group 1 until they hit their assignment, and dispel (or heal) accordingly. This would look like:

Meaning that our assignments would be:

• Vixsin – Drarcane
• Holytyg – Ovid
• Solique – Nartas
• Star – Meec
• Galapanda – Warfighter

Because Evilkami’s assignment was “floater” it’s his job to pick up any assignment that a healer can’t respond to because they’re stunned, out of range, dead, etc.  A “floater” might not always be necessary, or even possible, depending on the healing requirements of the fight. But, it’s a good practice to build some redundancy in your assignments if you can.

In cases where dispels or bomb heals are less critical, you can easily assign targets on a 2-to-1 basis, resulting in, for example, the following assignments

• Targets 1+2: Vixsin
• Targets 3+4: Star
• Target 5: Holytyg
• Floating: Solique, Galapanda

In the above case, you’d likely design assignments so that your hot-based classes were floaters, thus assuring that each target receives direct heals from their assigned healers and a buffer of healing from hot classes. And by reducing the number of assignments, you decrease the likelihood of your healers not being able to adjust to the RNG of the fight.

Step 4 – Loot Purples. The end result of perfectly-assigned healing given random debuffs? Shiny purples (and in the case of ToGC, horses).

The Easy Answer

I’ve interviewed with a number of guilds over the years, and through them all, I’ve responded to a variety of questions, ranging from my personal feelings about Lady Gaga’s unmentionables to technical class questions like the difference between Unleash Rockbiter and Taunt. Along the way, I’ve picked up a few favorites, including this one:

You have a debuff that goes out on 5 random players in raid. There are no indications of who the debuff will be on before it is applied and it can choose any dps in the raid; it will not choose any of your 5 healers or either of your 2 tanks. The second it’s applied it reduces the player’s HP to 10k, a second and a half later it will tick for 20k, meaning that in that 1.5secs, the player has to receive one instant-cast heal for at least 20k. Because of the way the debuff is designed, incidental healing will not contribute, so targetable AOE heals will not work, nor will totems, ground-based AOE, etc. Because the player is stunned, they cannot healthstone, and the damage cannot be mitigated by any immunities or damage transfers (BoP, HoS, SLT). On the assumption that every healer has an instant-cast that will do over 20k, how do you decide which healer will heal which target while assuring that there won’t be any overlap or confusion in that critical 1.5sec window? One death will wipe your raid.

If you read the above question and said to yourself, “Hey, that sounds like a time to use the PC-style assignments that Vixsin just described!” then give yourself a pat on the back, because that was the right answer and one that (I think) won me a trial position in that particular guild. And while I don’t think it’s likely that a debuff like the one in the question above will ever make it into the game, the point is that if you could use a system that allows you to clearly know an assignment in the first second a random event occurs, why wouldn’t you?

With PC-style assignments, the overall effect is that your healers know their assignment and the coverage every time. (Likewise, you know where the problem was if a target dies). And in the event you have a healer stunned, incapacitated, or otherwise, other healers can cover those targets easily and quickly. Sure, PC-style assignments won’t cover your basics (eg: you heal tanks, I’ll heal raid), but in the event that Blizzard throws your healing team a curveball (like Protectors of the Endless, like HM Sha), it’s an excellent tool to have at your disposal.

First Impressions

It’s been a long time since my Realm First! achievement, but I still remember the feeling of being positively overwhelmed with my “to-do” list in that first week of raiding—Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, Heroic dungeon farming, Valor capping, farming in general, etc. And the list kept growing in the subsequent weeks, expanding to Shado Pan dailies, leveling alts to 90 so I could have more farm plots, completing LFR weekly, capping valor, capping conquest points, and more. So, it wasn’t surprising to me that many of the complaints about Pandaria, especially those voiced in the first month of release, cited the sheer number of things to do, including dailies, as an issue for players.

At the time I agreed with many of the complaints (despite writing an article that attempted to argue the counter-perspective. Sneaky, right?). But now, looking back, I can’t help but think how short-sighted those complaints were.

As I sit here at the end of T14 progression, instead of feeling slightly adrift and looking forward to the next content release, I’m struck by how much I have left to do in game. And to me, that’s an amazing thing. We’re almost 4 MONTHS into this expansion, and not only did I just finish raiding progression (more on that in a moment), but I still have a long list of to-do’s. I have reps that I can round out at my leisure (August Celestials, Anglers, The Black Prince), a new lore-based quest line to continue (5.1’s Landfall—which I’m really enjoying), mounts to farm/collect (I just picked up Cloud Serpent riding), more farmland to expand (on my 4^th character to 90—I can’t get enough of the Tillers), challenge modes to try out (I haven’t done any to date), cooking quests to complete, Brawls to fight, and a host of heroic dungeon and scenario achievements to try my hand at. I actually thought to myself the other day—I hope 5.2 doesn’t launch until April, so I have a chance to get some of these things done before we have to start progression again. Let me restate that …

I. A hardcore progression raider. Without being coerced or threatened into doing so. Hoped that raid content was delayed. So that I could do more “causal stuff” in game. (Except pet battles, ‘cause f- that).

To me, that’s a huge change in how I relate to this game. In previous expansions, it was all about when the next raid content would be released; the time in between progression and patch launch was time where you showed up for raid and then logged off or onto alts for the remainder of the week. Raid guilds were a flurry of activity for the first month or so, and then a ghost town on nights other than Tuesday after that. (Okay, I’m exaggerating slightly, but you get my drift). Downtime was regarded by many as the downside of progression raiding, the undesirable effect of playing at a hardcore level. And yet now, several months of downtime is something I’m hoping for. And it’s not because I’m trying to rack up obscure achievements or talk myself into going back and grinding old reps to exalted because I’m out of ideas—it’s because I have more than enough options strictly in current content. True, those options aren’t all true “end-game progression” but the fact is that they’re there, they’re not afterthoughts tossed in at the last minute, and they are (with some exceptions) quite engaging. In that regard, I think Blizzard could, in all fairness, turn to all of its subscribers and, with a knowing smile, say “we told you so”.

Raid Release and Content

When it comes to my primary joy in game—raiding—my expectations of Pandaria were kind of a mixed bag. From what I had experienced on the Beta, I knew encounters would be challenging and I knew that the variation in mechanics would keep them from feeling too repetitive (even in the near-trashless instance, Terrace of the Endless Spring. Seriously, how awesome is it that this didn’t feel like another ToGC?) But, there were two big unknowns about raid content in Pandaria: first, how would the staged release feel to hardcore guilds, and second, would the hard modes really set the bar high for the rest of the expansion or would they feel like Naxx 3.0?

With regards to the staged release, it was something that I objected to right off the bat. Having raids delayed one week after launch was, in my opinion, an unnecessary constraint on a raiding community that had been chomping at the bit for new content for the past 9 months and it was too much of a insertion of limits into players’ definition of playstyle. And while, yes, there was some breathing room in those first few days after I hit 90, all the raid delay did was swap week 1 goals with week 2 goals, with no overall net impact to the stress of launch. So, instead of rushing to level and gear my main in week 1 and my alt in week 2, my alt resto druid, as well as Vixsin, were leveled and entry-level raid geared by that first Sunday. In retrospect, I think the points and objections that I raised then, about the week reprieve from raiding, are still ones that I’d support today.

That being said, I do think that the staggered release of raid content was a great choice by Blizzard, and I’m happy that they stuck to their guns on that point. Although the implementation of raid content bore a striking resemblance to the gating that we saw in Icecrown Citadel and Tier 10, the end result was much different. While it made little sense for that singular instance, with three Tier 14 instances, the segmented progression allowed guilds to ease into the raiding game without having to juggle all three instances at once (at least for the first month). The unfortunate thing is that while I think this style of implementation did protract content and provided some logical structure to progression through the instances, I don’t see it being as successful if it is re-utilized at a later point in the expansion because of the hurdles in momentum that it creates.

Moving on to my second major concern about Pandaria raid content—where would hard modes set the bar? Interestingly enough, I’d say my answer to this question shifted over the course of T14. HM Mogu’shan, through bursting with interesting encounters that did indeed remind me of Ulduar, was also an inauspicious start to hard mode content. The first worrisome discovery was the low number of healers necessary for each encounter—the standard was 5; the lowest, on Spirit Kings, was 3. It was reminiscent of the fights we saw in Firelands, where teams who carried 6-7 healers on their roster were forced to bench 50% of their healing team, or transition them to dps, as a response to the low healing constraints of the encounters.

The second discouragement was that, despite encounter design that I really enjoyed (Spirit Kings’ high mobility requirements, Stone Guard’s tank coordination, and Elegon’s phasing), almost every HM encounter hinged on maximum cooldown usage, with moderate healing filling in time between heavy burst.  This meant that my healing became not about a series of good choices for the duration of the encounter, but rather about a small handful of choices regarding when to drop Healing Tide or pop Ascendance. By the end of MV, I was genuinely concerned about the HM’s that lay just around the corner.

However, all of my worries were put to rest the moment that my teammates and I, like many other progression guilds, met The Stonewall, otherwise known as Imperial Vizier Zor’lock. A fight that was nuanced, and equally about raid coordination and personal decision-making, I will count this as one of my favorite encounters of my raiding career (post to-the-left-to-the-left! hotix, of course). HM Garalon was also a favorite of mine this tier, with both its strict enrage timer, and its ability to take what is, for all intents and purposes, a tank-and-spank fight, and give it a little twist. Unfortunately, I don’t think the fights in between Vizier and Empress offered the same level challenge, both in terms of healing and dps constraints. Amber Shaper was a pleasant reintroduction of Gorefiend mechanics, although I don’t think any guild out there gets truly excited for insta-wipe vehicle-based encounters.

But end bosses are typically what raid content difficulty is based upon and I think HM Empress and Sha of Fear set the bar in just the right place for an expansion’s first tier. In some regards, the design elements we saw in HM Will, which was a snooze-fest to heal, carried over to HM Sha. But whereas Will maintained the same plodding pace for the entire encounter, HM Sha stepped things up a bit in Phase 2 and subtly introduced increasing amounts of panic into your stay in the Elemental Plane of disorienting-monochromatic-design. I love encounters which require specialized jobs and random teams, and I think HM Sha did a good job at this without making it seem “gimmicky”.

HM Empress was different in most regards, but will also go down as a good final boss encounter in my book. First, although it wasn’t an overly-long encounter it did manage to fit in 3 somewhat different feeling phases. Second, raid damage was the kind that seems insanely high to begin with, but progressively became more manageable the better we got at the encounter. (Hooray for fights that reward execution!) Third, it required some coordination that couldn’t be managed entirely through boss mods. Arguably, not as much as Sinestra, but the theme was still there. Lastly, at 100ish attempts for those pushing the absolute bleeding edge, it seemed the right amount of time and energy for a satisfying end boss kill in a tier that had 3 of them. (Remember: HM Rag took 500+ attempts for Paragon, but was in a tier with only 6 lead-up bosses and one end boss).

This leaves us at the last point I want to talk about …

Healing

At the start of the expansion, when you’re undergeared and still getting used to the practical limitations of your new abilities, healing is always a challenge, and MoP entry-level raid content was no exception. Although heroics provided their standard frustrations–mostly due to Cata-mindset tanks not understanding the concept of LIMITED mana—I was really put to the test upon entering raid content with stats that were significantly diminished from those I have today.

But, as I progressed through normal modes and then through the hard modes in MV, I started to notice a common theme that made those first handful of bosses a much different experience than the bosses we encountered in early Cataclysm.

Triage, was nowhere to be found.

 It had been replaced, as I mentioned above, with burst mechanics that clearly did not allow for players to be less than full health when incoming damage hit. Whereas my memories of Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight involve me telling people over and over again to not worry about topping players off, there’s no possible way I could have responsibly given that advice in Tier 14. The sounds of “top me/us off” were present almost every raid night.

If anything, this is my biggest  gripe about Tier 14 content. Beyond the variable number of healers and the huge shifts in the imbalanced class of the hour (Disc Priests, I’m looking at you here; Monks, you get off the hook temporarily), I miss the concept that smart healing choices won you the game. And I know the intention was that, by removing Intellect from the regen formula and capping healer’s mana pools, we’d be put back into that triage state once again. But try as I did to find those moments of HP juggling, they simply weren’t there.

The one way that I can think of to support this assertion, that our days of triage are truly gone, is to point to healers’ overhealing amounts on progression kills. In Cataclysm, especially in the first tier, you were likely to see healers’ overhealing around 10-20% on a first kill. Healers simply couldn’t afford to spam, in fact we went through a ton of work to break ourselves from that mindset. For Resto Shaman specifically, Earthliving overhealing was a perfect gauge of the level of spam that was present. In those days, Earthliving was recording 15-30% overhealing, indicating that players were slow in getting topped, thus allowing our passive hot to be more effective. But, compare that T11 norm to the Earthliving overhealing percentage for Phase 2 of my HM Sha kill, 55.5%., and you start to get the picture of just how different today’s healing environment is. Even on HM Empress, which has some of the most intense healing requirements in Tier 14, my Earthliving was sitting at 45% overhealing.

If anything, this is what I’m worried most about when looking to Tier 15 and beyond. To have triage absent from an entry tier of an expansion, a tier which should have had all the right conditions for triage to exist (undergeared players, new class mechanics, low stat levels), inspires some concern. Regardless of your opinion of triage, its existence in the early content of Cataclysm meant that healers experienced at least some progression of healing style over the course of the expac—from more mana conservative heals to more expensive ones. And while each healer had a slightly different trajectory between those two points, there’s no denying that we all used more Healing Wave / Nourish / Heal / Holy Light in Bastion of Twilight than we ever did in Dragon Soul. It begs the question, when my goal in a T14 encounter is to have 100% Healing Rain uptime, and that goal is reasonably accomplishable, where do I go from there?

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Despite the ups and downs of these last several months, there’s really only one word that could sum up my impressions of Tier 14—“Impressive”. There are so many things that were done right, from the incredible number of bosses and the variation of encounter types, to the downright gorgeous environments and solid final boss fights, (and even a “healer” fight that was actually fun!) True, I do have some concerns about what lies ahead, but what kind of opinionated, self-important blogger would I be if I didn’t?

Ultimately, I do hope that, in many ways, T14 is an indication of things to come. I hope that we’ll continue to see encounters that test our personal decision-making, that push us to do more than hit our cooldowns, that bring back triage healing, (that prevent my guilds from collapsing), that reward improvement and creative play, that offer a little something extra like Elite modes, that take us out of our comfort zones, and that pull us deeper into the world of Pandaria.

(I’d also like to see some more of these ideas make it into raiding. #6 and #8 made it into T14; can I put in my vote for #3 in T15?! C’MON, PLEEEEEEEEEASE?! Show some healer love!)

The “healer fight” of Tier 14, the Tsulong encounter in Terrace of the Endless Spring affords your Group 5 residents the chance, once again, to see the big numbers of their dreams. The 2-phased encounter, like predecessors Valithria Dreamwalker and Ultraxion, includes in it temporary buffs (1 in normal mode, 2 in hard mode) that boost healers’ output by incredible margins. So incredible, in fact, that last week I saw something I’ve never seen before—a spike in my HPS to the tune of 3.5 million (3,525,419.80 HPS, to be exact). But this post isn’t to toot my own horn, because I’m neither unique nor skilled in achieving that level of output, but rather to call attention to the way in which I did it. Because, I think it could change your outlook on a Talent Tier that, for Resto Shaman especially, has had a clear front-runner for most of the expansion.

(Yes, I’m talking about something dethroning Healing Tide).

After I printed out last week’s WoL Healing Done table with my big numbers, (naturally, so that I could affix it to my fridge for future self-congratulatory-efforts-while-snacking), curiosity got the better of me and I started digging into the parse to figure out why exactly it was that I had managed to strike gold on that particular kill. It’s somewhat of an annoyance to me to have that sort of disparity on the kill after the first kill, so my detective hat was firmly affixed to figure out where I had gone awry.

The Conditions of Performance

For those not familiar with HM Tsulong, the higher difficulty of the encounter is offset by an added buff in the day phase—The Light of Day—which is a clickable, very temporary buff that spawns throughout the room during the day phase of the encounter. Because the number of spawns are limited, the buff is typically given to the highest throughput healers first (monks and paladins, in this case) and then each other healer is afford 1 as well. This buff is provided in addition to the buff granted by Sun Breath (Bathed in Light) which grants additional mana and healing to anyone in the frontal cone.

So, Important Fact #1—there are two multiplicative healing bonuses that occur during the fight. They can be stacked, but because of the randomness of the Light of Day spawn location, it’s rarely located in the breath’s affected area. So oftentimes, you’re left to time the buffs consecutively, so that you can first have The Light of Day and then have Bathed in Light, all while your CDs are active.

Important Fact #2 is that each of the two healing buffs has a 6-second duration. Thus, the window of time in which you need to maximize your healing is very, very limited. With both buffs you can pre-cast to ensure maximum throughput (ensuring that your heal goes off as close as possible after the buff is applied), but even then you can only manage 3-4 spells before ping and buff duration call a halt to your super-sized healing. In between these small 6-second windows is the Night Phase, so you can be assured that your CDs will be up in time for the next Day.

The next Important Fact #3 is that because Tsulong’s health pool is so large, there is zero chance for overhealing on him until the fight is complete. This is important to note because this will not be the case with player health pools which have very definite limits, making maximizing momentary HPS is less important than maximizing HPS over the duration of the encounter.

This leads to Important Fact #4—multiplicative bonuses (in an unconstrained environment) will yield more healing than additive bonuses. So if you have two 1.5 bonuses and a 2.5 bonus, where H is the healing done:

1.5H x 2.5H x 1.5H = 5.625H > 1.5H + 2.5H + 1.5H = 5.5H

Obviously, the margin of difference isn’t as significant when you’re dealing with smaller multipliers, but when you consider that Light of Day offers 1500% (15x) healing done and Bathed in Light offers 500% (5x) healing done, you can expect the effect to be much more pronounced.

Ancestral Guidance in Action

Like most encounters, I started our attempts on HM Tsulong with my buddy Healing Tide firmly in place in Tier 75. But, after doing a handful of attempts where I spread out my Ascendance and Healing Tide (because they don’t stack, so there’s no need to use them concurrently), I simply wasn’t seeing numbers that were particularly thrilling, or that were helping us down the boss in the requisite 2 day phases. Healing Tide was getting in, at most, 3 ticks on Tsulong, and at ~320k apiece (and a large portion of overhealing on the rest of the raid) it was barely contributing to my overall healing done:

[22:34:44.602] Vixsn Healing Tide Tsulong +328210
[22:34:44.602] Vixsn Healing Tide Miickeey +248467 (O: 68558)
[22:34:44.602] Vixsn Healing Tide Star +*257994* (O: 399770)
[22:34:44.602] Vixsn Healing Tide Evilkami +249328 (O: 63728)
[22:34:44.602] Vixsn Healing Tide Vapour +*264991* (O: 402392)
[22:34:46.095] Vixsn Healing Tide Vixsn +*249816* (O: 403800)
[22:34:46.233] Vixsn Healing Tide Tsulong +*674186*
[22:34:46.233] Vixsn Healing Tide Prock +259772 (O: 67812)
[22:34:46.354] Vixsn Healing Tide Holytyg +238623 (O: 72907)
[22:34:46.354] Vixsn Healing Tide Amati +249727 (O: 135133)
[22:34:47.835] Vixsn Healing Tide Tsulong +324140
[22:34:47.835] Vixsn Healing Tide Star +262928 (O: 57611)
[22:34:47.835] Vixsn Healing Tide Drarcane +*241675* (O: 425480)
[22:34:47.912] Vixsn Healing Tide Evilkami +251778 (O: 66692)
[22:34:47.913] Vixsn Healing Tide Fox +248048 (O: 74852)

Total effective healing on Tsulong: ~1.3M (under the 500% buff). Restorative Mists wasn’t faring any better, clocking in barely over 5% of my effective healing on that first night in (which was comprised of 10 fights over 3 minutes long). That’s when I started looking at other options and considered just what I could do with the talent that Binkenstein had cautioned me against underestimating at the start of the expac. So, I swapped out my beloved HTT and shortly thereafter made a discovery that made me giddy:

So, when I started popping Ancestral Guidance and Restorative Mists at the same time, this started happening:

[23:31:02.859] Vixsn Restorative Mists Holytyg +129657 (O: 167860)
[23:31:02.859] Vixsn Restorative Mists Evilkami +0 (O: 297517)
[23:31:02.859] Vixsn Restorative Mists Beast +0 (O: 297517)
[23:31:03.140] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Tsulong +119007
[23:31:03.187] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Hitpoints +52069 (O: 66938)
[23:31:03.187] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Destrian +0 (O: 119007)
[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Awakening Tsulong +1775652
[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Tsulong +119006
[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Firesnake +130908
[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Nartas +95349 (O: 35559)
[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Tsulong +130907

Admittedly, I got a little giddy. But what looking through the combat log for those AG attempts didn’t tell me was how the interplay of direct heals (HS, GHW, RT, HR, etc.), Restorative Mists and Ancestral Guidance was actually working. Had I stumbled upon something worth exploring or just gotten lucky? To answer the question, I needed to take a look at the entire log for the segment of time that the CDs were active, and figure out exactly what was going on … which is exactly what I did. That spreadsheet can be found here.

What you’ll see in that spreadsheet are 3 tabs, with actual combat log events, with a ton of highlighting. What the highlighting shows is, for each heal, the trigger event (for Ascendance or Ancestral Guidance) and the resultant heal. Believe you me, it was no simple task figuring out the cause and effect of every heal. But, in going through the laborious process of trying to identify the heals that trigger AG and Restorative Mists, I inadvertently discovered three other interesting facts about the Tsulong encounter. The first of which arose when I was trying to correlate Restorative Mists’ healing with its triggers:

[23:31:01.859] Vixsn Earthliving Galapanda +0 (O: 4406)
[23:31:01.906] Vixsn Healing Surge Tsulong +*5918839*
[23:31:02.156] Vixsn Riptide Tsulong +*27093*
[23:31:02.531] Vixsn Restorative Mists Vixsn +0 (O: 297517)
[23:31:02.640] Vixsn Earthliving Tsulong +5425
[23:31:02.687] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Solique +275033 (O: 2092503)
[23:31:02.687] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Kynks +209139 (O: 2158397)
[23:31:02.687] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Amati +169608 (O: 2671434)
[… Series of Restorative Mists heals …]
[23:31:03.140] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Tsulong +119007
[23:31:03.187] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Hitpoints +52069 (O: 66938)
[23:31:03.187] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Destrian +0 (O: 119007)

In looking at the above excerpt, (which I edited to exclude 21 lines of Restorative Mists healing to make the review easier), you can see that my first heal to trigger Ancestral Guidance is the 5.9M Healing Surge critical strike. It occurs at 31:01 and the three resulting AG procs occur 1 second later at 31:02. But, the next heal to trigger Ancestral Guidance isn’t the Riptide tick that immediately follows the HS, but rather the Restorative Mists heal that occurs just shortly thereafter, meaning:

This is notably different than the functionality of Restorative Mists, which will duplicate all healing done (except totems) during the buff duration, including hots which were applied before Ascendance was activated. This is one of the main reasons that you should always Unleash Life + Healing Rain *before* you pop Ascendance, so that you don’t waste time casting it while your buff is active. But, as I so discovered, AG will not duplicate healing from a Healing Rain that is already placed (here’s a parse showing exactly that).

My second discovery about Ancestral Guidance came from my attempts to reconcile the number of AG procs with the number of Restorative Mists’ heals. It’s important to note, at this point, that when the game calculates the distribution of Ascendance’s healing, whereby it sums total healing done for a ~0.5 second window and then distributes that value evenly across all players in range, pets are not counted as targets. For example, assume that in a specific time frame you do 100,000 healing and there are 10 players in range, Restorative Mists would heal each player for 10,000. If there were also 4 pets in range, the heal on each player would still be 10,000 but each pet would receive 10,000 healing as well, making the total healing done by Restorative Mists 140,000 healing. (I’d suspect that this is to prevent healing being “wasted” on pets, were they actually included in the calc).

Now, back to attempting to reconcile Restorative Mists’ healing and AG procs. You would expect, given AG’s description and the fact that it procs from Restorative Mists, that the number of AG procs would always be [# of Restorative Mists heals on players x 3], but the problem I was coming up against during my reconciliation was that AG’s occurrences always exceeded the number of Restorative Mists heals … until I started including Restorative Mists’ pet heals in that total. Which led to my second mind-blowing discovery:

(Again, if you’re looking for proof of this in action, check out the spreadsheet breakdown of a log from one of our kills). This is particularly noteworthy because in the Tsulong encounter, Tsulong is counted as a pet. So provided that Tsulong is in range, healing done on Tsulong by Restorative Mists will be more free AG healing on the raid.

My third discovery about Ancestral Guidance, again regarding its interaction with Restorative Mists, really served as icing on the cake during my whole log-diving experience. Per my example above in which the 100,000 healing is distributed among 10 players, making the total healing per player 10,000, a reasonable person would expect to see those exact values in the combat logs. But, if you go into your combat log, you’ll see something a little bit off–Restorative Mists’ healing done on Warlocks, Feral Druids, and Hunters is always more than the amount applied to other targets. For Warlocks and Hunters, the heal is always 10% more, while for feral druids, the heal is always 20% more. So for example:

[23:31:02.812] Vixsn Restorative Mists Tsulong +297517
[23:31:02.812] Vixsn Restorative Mists Roxy +0 (O: 327269)
[23:31:02.812] Vixsn Restorative Mists Solique +0 (O: 297517)
[23:31:02.843] Vixsn Restorative Mists Odas +189671 (O: 167350)

Using the heal on Tsulong as a base, you would expect all other players to have the same 297,517 heal applied. But Roxy, who is a hunter, received 327,269 (= 297,517 x 1.1), and Odas, who is a feral druid, received 357,021 (=297,517 x 1.2). Solique, a Resto Druid, has no incoming healing buff and thus receives the same amount as Tsulong. This is noteworthy because when attempting to balance Restorative Mists’ healing with the trigger heals, the “buffed” healing that these classes received is not factored in to the total, making that additional healing “free” healing done.

Which is the basis for the third discovery about AG:

So for example, take the following combat log events:

[23:31:03.500] Vixsn Ancestral Awakening Tsulong +1775652
[23:31:03.875] Vixsn Earthliving Kynks +0 (O: 4614)
[23:31:03.875] Vixsn Earthliving Fox +5736

This series of heals was summed by Ascendance and later resulted in a series of Restorative Mists heals over 20 targets. Since the total healing done from the above was 1,786,002 / 20 targets, you would expect that each Restorative Mists heal would be for ~89,300. But, in those Restorative Mists heals, most of which were for 89,300, was also the following heal:

[23:31:04.812] Vixsn Restorative Mists Amati +0 (O: 107161)

Demonstrating the effects of ferals’ +20% healing received. This Restorative Mists heal, later in the combat log, results in a corresponding heal from AG, which you would naturally expect to be (107,161 x 0.4 = 42,864). But here are those 3 lines:

[23:31:05.562] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Tsulong +42864
[23:31:05.562] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Palmz +0 (O: 47151)
[23:31:05.562] Vixsn Ancestral Guidance Cazodor +0 (O: 47151)

So again, you can see the AG heal again benefiting from the +10% to warlocks (Palmz) and hunters (Cazodor), effectively letting AG double-dip into plus healing on those select classes. (Pretty neat, right?!)

All of these things combined means that AG + Ascendance can pump out a ton of healing in a very short window, should the right conditions (like those I mentioned in the first section) be in place.

Healing Tide, Dethroned

The ultimate effect of this perfect storm, created by the functional nuances of Ancestral Guidance, Restorative Mists, and the Tsulong encounter, was that I was able to pump out a whopping 17 million healing from Ancestral Guidance on last week’s kill, which made it my second overall contributor to healing done. This is in comparison to the maybe 4 million I could have eked out with Healing Tide, given the same conditions. And although the side-by-side comparison of the two parses only shows a 10k HPS increase between the past two weeks, when you dial down to the details of Ancestral Guidance’s performance within a ~25 sec window and then compare the two parses, you can see the potential gains much more clearly:

In the end, I think that’s what excites me the most about all of the above discoveries and log diving. It’s not that I think Resto Shaman should, en masse, ditch Healing Tide and set about figuring out how to maximize Ancestral Guidance on every encounter, because I absolutely concede that the conditions present in HM Tsulong won’t be experienced again, together, any time soon. We may see traces of them crop up in later tiers in other healer-centric fights. But the point here is that AG has potential, and a lot of it under the right conditions. And to me, that’s a wonderful thing. I’m excited to see something shake up our perspective of a tier which seemed so set in stone and remind Resto Shaman that our class still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Unless you happen to know a Resto Shaman who likes making trinket comparisons …

…

/looks around

…

Oh hey look, a trinket comparison! (The source data, and calculations, can be found here). “U” is used to indicate where trinkets have been upgraded with Valor.  

BIG IMPORTANT NOTE: Average values for random-proc trinkets are calculated using a proc buffer of +5% to activation time to account for the associated proc chance (since none of them are 100%). This should give a more accurate representation of average contribution on random-proc trinkets. Example: Relic of Chi Ji proc timing excerpted below (actual parse). The ICD is 45sec, but in the segment below, the average activation time is 46.5 sec. So calculations which use 45sec will be over-representing the value of the proc. This buffer is not used for on-use trinket calcs–I assume you can click your buttons appropriately and promptly (or that you macro it into a commonly-used ability).

Now, let’s talk about the comparison. First of all, it seems to cover a lot of trinkets, but that’s actually a result of the newly-implemented option of using Valor points to upgrade gear. (I only captured 2/2 upgrades; the list would have been a mile longer if I had included all the 1/2 upgrades as well!) Healer’s choices are pretty limited this tier—divided between Spirit trinkets with Int procs and Int trinkets with Spirit procs (with one exception—Blossom of Pure Snow). Admittedly, more so than my fellow healers, I’ve been sticking to Spirit as much as possible, but with gear levels and stats on the rise, it’s possible that we’ll see a greater preference for Intellect to become more commonplace as we finish out the tier.

That leads into the color-coding that you see in the last three columns (which display the average Intellect and Mana gains associated with each trinkets). The color-coding indicates where the trinket’s values lie in an ordered list. With red representing the bottom of the spectrum, yellow in the middle, and dark green representing the top. What this color-coding should allow you to do is look at each trinket from both a throughput and a regen perspective. The two columns devoted to Mp5 show the base Mp5 on the trinket and then the Mp5 gain when you factor in dropping Mana Tide every 3 minutes. Obviously, this makes the third column is the “best case” scenario for the trinket; in actuality, your Mp5 will likely be somewhere in between the two values (since fight length and MT timing are highly variable). But hopefully, the color coding helps to quickly establish just what would be an upgrade and what wouldn’t based on regen versus throughput.

But what should you take into account when choosing a trinket? Aside from the straight stat gain, there are a couple other points to consider.

Constant stats versus On-Proc

Although common wisdom holds that constant stat bonuses are better than random ones (ie: “What if my trinket procs and I can’t use it?!”), the reality, in fact could be very much the opposite. With burst damage being the design of choice this tier, and shaman’s throughput being so heavily tied to cooldowns, on-use or random procs that align with your big throughput CDs are that much more powerful and could easily eclipse a constant stat gain of lesser proportions. Unfortunately, with the lack on-use Intellect trinkets, intentionally super-charging your Ascendance or Healing Tide won’t be commonplace just yet.

Mana Tide gains

In MoP, it seems that Blizzard has clamped down even more on the Spirit procs that are factored into Mana Tide’s spirit distribution. Random procs, like those from Relic of Chi Ji, are not distributed via Mana Tide making the only way to empower yourself and your team with greater gains from Mana Tide is to utilize static +Spirit trinkets. While I’ve never been an advocate of Resto Shaman being a mana battery, it’s worth noting that your static Spirit trinkets (like Spirit food and flasks) do translate to more mana for both you and your healing team. (Note: I’ve yet to personally verify if Spirits of the Sun distributes via MT, since I only picked up the trinket last night, but I’d highly doubt it).

Upgrading Trinkets

Lastly, with the recent addition of valor point item upgrades, I know a question on every healer’s mind is going to be—should I use my precious valor points upgrading my trinkets?

The answer: yes, but only:

1. After you upgrade your sha-touched weapon (Kri’tak, Imperial Scepter of the Swarm, for example, gains 541 spellpower with a 2/2 upgrade), and
2. Only certain trinkets.

From the table above, we can see that not all trinkets are a valuable investment of points. For example, while the upgraded Relic of Chi-Ji provides regen on par with HM-level trinkets, something like the Jade Courtesan Figurine, falls a little flat. And interestingly enough, an upgrade to NM Qin-xi’s Polarizing Seal, however, would yield a constant Int gain that’s actually greater than that offered by HM Spirits of the Sun (unupgraded).

But how do trinkets fare against other potential valor point upgradable gear? Let’s look NM Qin-xi’s Polarizing Seal as an example. When you upgrade to 2/2, ilvl 489 to ilvl 497, you gain:

Now compare this against the upgrade you’d get from applying those same valor points to a 2/2 upgrade on chest from HM Garalon, the Vestments of Steaming Ichor, (because remember, chest pieces have one of the highest stat allocations, versus something like gloves or a ring):

 (*Note: It looks like there’s some disagreement between the MMO-C database and Wowhead on if the 2/2 chest has 1312 Int or 1314 Int. I went with the MMO-C value).

The gain becomes [20 Spirit + 14 Int] for the trinket versus [64 Crit] for the chest. Since Spirit and Int are both primary stats for healers, they’re going to be slightly more valuable than the higher amount of Crit rating. Thus making the trinket upgrade a “better” stat gain. However, it’s worth noting that even if you chose to upgrade the chest (OMG YOU NOOB!), the stat loss isn’t significant enough to worry about. And, you also need to consider that by the time we have a new tier upon us, we’ll likely have had sufficient time to upgrade a good number of your pieces, including any trinkets you might have skipped (maybe 5 months until the next raid, give or take = 20 weeks = 20,000 possible Valor points = 13 full 2/2 upgrades).

So, ultimately, while I’d caution everyone to spend their valor points wisely, don’t go kicking yourself if you upgrade something you’re going to replace (eg: I upgraded the Darkmoon trinket in anticipation of not getting Spirits of the Sun for months, and what do I get from my token on the first kill? Yeah, the trinket). And remember that you can’t pool your Valor endlessly (the cap is 3,000), so it’s worth your while to spend it on the items you do have instead of letting it rot on something that you might never get.