The premise: Resto shamans are in a pretty decent place in 25 man content, although they still lag behind in certain fights. Playing a resto shaman in PvP is generally pretty competitive, and in some cases, almost overpowered. In contrast, we are almost universally the worst healing option for most 10 man fights. You can kill a boss with a resto shaman healer, but sometimes you have to ask yourself, would it have been easier if I was just playing another class?
The support: On what basis do I make these statements? A bit of personal experience, a bit of anecdote, and some solid data from WoL. Lets start with the data first, since everything else is pretty unconvincing. Here are the numbers from an average of the top 200 healing parses from 10 man heroic bosses, from State of DPS. On just about every fight except Chimaeron, resto shamans are solidly in the rear (Holy Priests aren’t looking so hot either, to be fair). In some cases, it’s a pretty minor difference. In others, however, a 2k HPS difference between a skilled and talented resto shaman and a skilled and a talented resto druid can be the difference between a kill and a wipe.
When you look at 25 man heroic content, the numbers are a bit more balanced, although resto shamans still end up on the bottom overall. Based on what I have been hearing around the internet and in-game, I’m actually surprised that the 25 man numbers look as bad as they do. So, perhaps the changes I suggest below will help out 25 man resto shamans as well.
Personally, I feel very underpowered as a 10 man healer right now. In 25 mans during Wrath, I was used to being consistently one of the top healers in the raid. I felt extremely important to the success of the group. I know that when I didn’t heal well, people would die, and when I did heal well, people would live. Now, I struggle to even get close to the output done by our resident Resto Druid. He is also a really solid player. Yet, I feel that no matter how well I play, I have a very hard time being as valuable to the team as he is right now.
The source of the problem: Resto shamans shine on one heroic mode fight: Chimaeron. Why is this the case? It is because we can generally (a) stand in one spot for most of the fight, negating our lack of instant cast options, (b) abuse the heck out of Healing Rain during Feud phases and (c) actually get a lot of benefit out of our Mastery ability, since the raid is constantly at low health levels. In no other fight do we have this perfect confluence of shaman-friendly healing. We either have to constantly be moving, the raid is too spread out to take advantage of our Healing Rain, or the raid is generally above 50% health, reducing the impact of our Deep Healing. We are reduced to mostly spot healing with our single target spells. In 10 mans, even Chain Heal becomes hard to use effectively on most fights.
The proposal: Buff our single target heals. Healing Rain is already a solid solution to grouped up healing. Chain Heal still feels underpowered at times, but buffing it will help 25 man raiders much more than 10 man raiders. By making our single target spells hit harder, you can give Shamans a useful niche in the raid: the spot healer. It’s not a fun spot in the raid for most of us, but at least we can feel like valuable members of the team. We have already been reduced to this role in 10 mans, but it would be nice to be really good at it, so I don’t feel like rolling a resto druid to help my guild through heroic content.
Buffing our single target cast-time heals (Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge) should not do much to upset the PvP balance. My sense is that we are generally very strong in certain arena comps because of Earth Shield, Riptide, and most importantly, our ability to dispel magic debuffs while healing at the same time through Cleansing Waters. The impending nerf to Cleansing Waters supports this hypothesis. Getting off a long cast time in the arena is pretty tough to do with all the interrupts, stuns and CCs flying around. If it does present a balance problem, then simply increase Healing Wave and GHW, leaving the faster Healing Surge alone.
The alternate proposal: Of course, what I would rather see happen is to give shamans a viable mastery mechanic. It is clear that mastery works great on Heroic Chimaeron. I had expected it to work more effectively on other heroic mode encounters, but even in this level of content, people do not stay at low health long enough for us to really see an impact.
I will acknowledge that “life saving heals” are hard to track on the meters. Perhaps our mastery is keeping people alive so that other healers can top them off. However, I’d argue that the opposite is just as likely. Our heals on low health targets simply “pad the meters,” giving us a bit more initial healing done on people that are likely to survive anyway. What generally saves lives from a raid healing perspective is the ability to crank out a large amount of HPS when needed, to keep the raid topped off and out of imminent danger.
Thus, I would really like to see our mastery mechanic changed. It’s fairly clear to me that the key to sustained HPS in the current raid environment is either the ability to get HoTs rolling on multiple players (Druids) or the ability to get sustained throughput on more than one target (Paladins). So, the most obvious solution might be to give us a mastery closer to Holy Priests. I feel like the ability to roll HoTs on the raid in ICC through our 4-piece bonus is what really made us strong healers in that content.
However, I think a more unique possibility would be to allow our mastery to increase the effect of Ancestral Awakening. Since I have accepted that our best role at the moment is generally to use our single-target heals to spot heal the raid, why not improve that ability with our mastery? It seems like that was the goal with our current mastery, but it just doesn’t work well in practice. So, what if mastery increased the percentage heal of AA? If we got to the point where AA crits were healing a second low-health target for 50% of the original heal, that would greatly improve a shaman’s ability to raid heal in 10 man content, where everyone is spread out.
Of course, this might be a horrible idea. Maybe it makes us too reliant on crits. Maybe it results in a lot of overheal. Maybe it would make us as good at tank healing as Paladins, which is just not allowed. 
What do you think should be done to make resto shamans more competitive PvE healers, without making us Arena gods? Or am I just making too much out of minor differences in the healing meters?
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Welcome back Wugan! I definitely agree on our single target healing being very weak. The only way I feel like I have a chance at keeping up at it is to spam Riptide-HS, which is just brutal on the mana. Outside of us having few instant casts, both HS and HW have lower base healing than the priest and paladin comparables, and GHW (which I rarely use) only beats out the priest’s Greater Heal. I’m not sure how the coefficients compare, but it puts us at a second disadvantage.
I’d love a change to AA, especially because it’s currently coming in so low on healing meters now. People in 25-mans are reporting it as less than 2% on some fights, and I’m getting it somewhere around 6% in 10-mans. Using it as a mastery wouldn’t really work unless it affected CH as well, otherwise our mastery becomes worthless for 25-man content. Even with that change it still wouldn’t be great as it wouldn’t affect ELW, HST, ES, or riptide ticks, which accounts for a lot of healing in 25s (>50%).
I don’t have experience with healing 10s, really. We did a few at the very start of Cata, and it was HARD. But it was hard for the other 2 healers with me, as well.
I think it’s important, when looking at Chimaeron healing for Shaman to not only just look at how our Mastery works, but also our other healing mechanics, because it comes together in one big giant gimmick-fest for us, and a lot of that HPS on the logs is not realy, effective, healing that matters at all. Seeing us excel at Chimaeron is meaningless on every other fight.
Our Mastery is tailor made for healing people at 1%, but it’s important to remember that anything after 10,001 hp is useless for the majority of the fight.
In that context, the super-sized heals Mastery gives us, if we’re using Surge is all a waste, since HS is over 10k to begin with. It’s great for making Healing Wave big enough, but by the same token, the equivalent heal to HW for other classes also heals for over 10k without mastery, always, not just at 1hp.
Looking at our H:Chim kill logs (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-wttsinkqv0nxxt9j/details/8/?s=2897&e=3347)
I did not have my lower-mastery, higher-regen set on for this as I remember, so I’m guessing I was sitting a little over 16 mastery, about 49% possible from Deep Healing, so definitely a high Mastery case.
My average Healing Surge hit is 23k–just over half of that Mastery-superpowered pointless. (This is 4-7k over the avg. hit of the equivalent heals of others on the same kill–as much as 4600 inflated gimmick HPS.)
My average Healing Wave is 10009; JUST enough to get the job done; though I will admit I do cast it on a not-1-hp tank a fair bit just for safety, bringing the average down. (Our Paladins’ Holy Lights averaged for around 10700.)
Beyond that, Blessing of the Eternals is a guaranteed trigger healing people who need it on Chimaeron. So I’m going to land a heal on someone to get them over 10k, and everything over that is wasted. Including the entire Earthliving that just procced on them. We see that 29% of my healing was from earthliving. And it’s at 5.1% overheal. A rate which that spell will NEVER EVER see anywhere else, usually somewhere between the 50-70% overheal range.
About 1/3 of Riptide’s healing is from the HoT, and like EL, pointless overheal.
And lastly, Healing Stream totem did 970k healing. I sit in a tank group, so that’s possibly less useless than HST anywhere else, but by the same anything over 10,001 doesn’t matter token, something that did roughly 12% of my total healing is largely unimportant.
In 4.1, the pointless healing from HST/RTHoT/EL will shoot up even more on Chimaeron when they start scaling with Mastery.
The healing from Rain/Chain is largely from the feud phases, though I do throw Chains out during the regular fight when my target is safe for the purpose of catching who I can. Their high presence in my overall healing compared to their low amount of time I actually use them just furthers the idea that Shaman take a huge hit when they can’t Rain/Chain effectively. Like most 10man stuff.
Sorry for the diatribe; I just see Chimaeron held up so often as an example of Shaman being OP, or Mastery being too good, or used for judgment on how Shaman heal or should stat weight *anywhere* else. I’m not saying you’re doing this, but it seemed like a good place for my soapbox. Chimaeron should serve to be the example of how we excel only because of mechanic gimmicks, or “everyone stand in the rain”.
In a theoretical world of triage healing, the way we go SUPER-SAIYAN on people who are at really low health is a really great idea, but in the actual implementation of the raids, we’re still not really attaining the kind of triage model that makes our mechanics as valuable as they’re designed to be. Low health players will be targeted by all the raid healers. Middling health targets are both in no immediate danger and where we start to lose our effectiveness and efficiency. People get topped off and then EL/RT tick away as overheals.
I get to exist in a world in 25s where Rain and Chain and Earthliving are mighty, and I can play really hard and keep up with the other raid healers. We can be a very powerful force of stabilizing health on a raid as a whole. But I know that is a very different landscape in 10s. The not-so-triage and not-so-many-targets nature of the smaller format raid essentially saps all of our strengths. I do agree with you that our single target heals are definitely our weakest spells. I don’t think buffing them would overwhelmingly change my lot as a 25man raid healer because I do not use that much of them. But it would certainly help the Shaman in 10s. The buff to Purification went like… 95% of the way to bringing our heals in line with the size of what the other healers have to offer, but we have no additional tools beyond our base heals.
I also agree with you that what really defines power and effectiveness in this raid tier is the ability to really pour on the throughput or to use a potent ability on a tank at moments in response to fight mechanics, and that is an area in which Shaman are still completely lacking. We still only have PUSH CHAIN HEAL HARDER and the changes in 4.1 and addition of SLT do nothing to change that. Mechanics like Focused Insight and Unleash Life are like tiny, failed attempts to boost throughput on a small scale. But they’re implemented in such a way that it takes either talent points from other good places, attempts to use offensive spells and deal with high miss rates, and/or have bonuses small enough that the expensive of time spent on an non-healing GCD makes them only give a meager benefit at best, if not neutral or an actual HPS/HPCT loss. It requires a lot more oversight, timing, and weaving of abilities to squeeze the maximum potential out of healing as a Resto Shaman.
I’m waiting to see Spirit Link Totem in action, but I don’t at this point believe that it’s the tool that we need. It’s certainly an interesting mechanic, and has promise to be valuable so I’m not going to turn it down, but in ways it’s also a square peg in a round hole. It gives us a “cooldown” but it doesn’t patch any of the weakest spots. And like everything else we do, I can see it too being far less valuable in a 10man environment.
IN CONCLUSION,
Jadiera can write SO MANY words about Shaman. Sorry about the essay.
Any time a comment is longer than the post, I figure I have done my job of sparking conversation. I completely agree that our “success” on Chimaeron is largely a gimmick, and showcases just how strange things have to be for us to really shine.
Whilst I do manage to keep pace in my 10 man heroic environment against a disco priest and an innervate fed holy priestess ( damn that moonkin best friend of hers ) , I tend to do this through Rt rolling , and spot healing with the occasional topping of the raid when clustering using chain / HR
My role in our raids as splash / utility healer has also lead me to tailor my gear differently to suit that role higher spell power and Crit to supercharge my heals, my regen through water shield , and clever mana tide management to account for a more healing surge focused model, and a heavy addiction to mana potions and my alch stone. I do feel that our single target heals are pretty weak at base level, but I feel that this is intentional and supposedly balanced by our ability to buff those heals using, various toy’s .
Nature swiftness it to make one instant , unleash weapon it and make one bigger , focus insight and incorporate flame shock, for free damage, or earth-shield that target and become a passable tank healer on them.
I’d love to see a buff those spells I love my class , and want it to do well but I’d rather see a buff to the improvements we can do to those spells as the way to bring us back in line for 10 man.
Once it’s all said and done i’m healing my socks off to keep up with the others and keep our raid alive and bringing mana tide , those sighs of relief from the healer channel bind on vent once they spot the macro go quite a long way in making me feel part of the team.
I thank you so much for your post – it expresses quite exactly what runs through my mind at nearly any fight in 10 man groups; it helps me not feeling so damn bad looking at my hps. THANK YOU.
I actually have been healing since Wrath on my Shaman and so far in my guilds 10 man content (We don’t do 25s) I’ve been consistently equal to or above the other healers, a Druid and a Disc Priest, on combined healing and absorbs so I haven’t really noticed this problem. Though I have noticed that I am far more reliant on my single-target heals than anything else. I abuse the hell out of chain-casting Healing Wave to keep tanks and my mana stable at 60%-75% and use either big or fast heals to top them off for spikes. I think the reason I’m so competitive with my healing team is because they lack the 2.5 years of raid healing I have gained and both of them only switched to healers when Cata came out. Of late I’ve noticed them surpassing me more easily and it has wounded my pride a bit. I do try to make myself feel better by saying that as long as the boss dies and we’re still alive I did my job. But when They pull ahead of me by 5%-8% in total healing I do feel like I haven’t pulled my weight.
Which leads me to explain how gimped 10 man raids make me feel. Sure we have NS which has helped me save raid members constantly. SG is nice for things like Poison Protocol or Atramedes ground phase Sonic Breath. But Spirit Link totem is SO awesome but so marginally useful in 10 man content. Maybe I just haven’t gotten to use it to much yet but I can barely get my raid to pay attention when I drop a Healing Rain how can I get them inside this totem’s range at the right time when they’re spread all over the room? Thats just my two cents on it. Its possible I just need to get used to its uses.