XT-002 hard mode kill - WMO parse.

#0 - June 5, 2009, 8 p.m.

Here is the WMO parse from our (first) XT-002 Deconstructor hard mode kill last night.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-wKLEI94kLiTEnH6r/sum/healingDone/?s=9940&e=10544

Name Class Amount HPS
Healmaster Priest 2751459 14.10% 4722.3
Sixcubes Druid 2708565 13.88% 4674.7
SnowiÃ¯e Paladin 2433826 12.47% 4177.4
Jekias Priest 2216126 11.36% 3751.5
Bazull Shaman 1902982 9.75% 3400.6
Kja Shaman 1892017 9.69% 3299.4

Both priests were holy, on raid healing. Sixcubes is a trial druid with no 4pce, raid healing. SnowiÃ¯e was tank healing. Bazull was raid healing, and I was assigned to gravity/light bomb targets (especially during tantrum) and raid healing.

As far as ideal conditions go for resto shaman wanting to use chain heal goes, this fight is good.

But I'll let the WMO parse do the talking.

I really don't understand how people can (GC cough) suggest resto shaman are fine in PvE. The meter speaks for itself for our lack of healing.

If we had our main resto druid online, or another priest, myself or the other resto shaman would have been sitting outside the instance, no questions asked. Druids and priests drastically outperform shaman. Bring the player, not the class, right?

Ghostcrawler:

Q u o t e:
Looking at a 10 minute Ulduar fight with a very competent Resto shaman, I see 100 Chain Heals, 80 Lesser Healing Waves, 36 Riptides, and a couple of NS'd Healing Waves. (Like many heals, HW isn't going to be attractive until hp / mana matters.) I'm not going to out this player for you to Armory him, so you can say he needs to L2P if you want. :)

Different shamans heal differently, but we find the assertion that CH is dead to be a little overblown. There are some improvements we can make to Resto, especially for PvP, and they still seem to need mana (or at least MP5) more than some of the other healers, but we really don't think Chain Heal is in a terrible place. If you're on tank healing duty, you're going to CH less. If the raid damage comes at predictable intervals, then priest and druid AEs may stomp on yours. But when your groups are tight and the damage is coming in constantly (Thorim for instance, though that is not the fight I referenced above) then CH is a great spell. We'd rather see shamans mixing up their heals as above than doing 90% of healing from the one spell.

You are correct in saying shaman cast chain heal a lot. Not because the spell is really really good, but because its the most effective heal we have... and yet it still sucks, but we cast it none the less. Chain heal (/shaman) simply does not compare to other aoe healing (/all healing).

Us shaman have been neglected pretty hard for years. We didn't even get any new icons in the last patch.

Please help us.

Ghostcrawler

#30 - June 5, 2009, 6:43 p.m.

Thanks for the parse.

Q u o t e:
Wait, i thought healing was supposed to be less spammy and more deliberate now? GC knows, he designed the things!

That quote referred to a design goal, not a summation of the current experience.

We want healing to be less spammy and more deliberate, but that won't work until overhealing matters. To get to that point, mana regen has to matter but the risk of the tank dying in two boss hits also has to be chilled out.

Ghostcrawler

#126 - June 7, 2009, 12:20 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Way to show your face, but completely avoid the point of the thread. You did that like a true politician.

YOU are the one that can make the "chilling out" happen, yet you don't. Players do not design the encounters, YOU DO!

Of course we do, but as many players above pointed out, the changes we'd need to get to that spot would cause a lot of upset players in the short-term. We nerfed regen a little, knowing it probably wasn't quite sufficient, and there was quite a bit of name-calling in this very forum. We'll get there, but it's important not to freak out too many players in our efforts to eventually make things better.

I will note that nerfing regen doesn't affect PvP as much as you might think because even 5s have far fewer buffs from other players and PvP gear typically doesn't have much in the way of regen stats.

Yes tank avoidance would need to come down along with many other long-term changes, but from a healer point-of-view what we'd like to achieve is a clear distinction between your bread-and-butter heals and your emergency heals. The latter are typically made expensive to discourage their casual use, but when you have the mana for it and the tank always requires those big heals, there is no reason not to use them. It may be that mana costs are not the best way to balance spells. Maybe it's cast time. Maybe it's cooldown. Likewise, maybe we should have more fights where say 5 players take damage at once rather than the whole raid. Then the smart, instant heals wouldn't be quite as attractive in every situation.

There were some good aspects of the healing in vanilla, but we're not eager to go back to the days of /stopcast macros and healer rotations (meaning someone sits out for OFSR regen while a fresh healer steps in). That's not what we mean when we say that the risk of running OOM has to exist.