Jan
My guild is working its way through Icecrown Citadel on 25m and 10m and I recently posted some tips on resto shaman healing to our guild forum. I thought I’d copy them here in case anyone else was interested.
We use World of Logs to study how we’re doing and compare our progress across weeks. I recently took a look at our healers and came up with some notes about what I consider when healing.
Here’s the log from Lady Deathwhisperer from last night (of course I chose this fight because I was the top healer, mwhaha).
1) Keep Earth Shield up!
Keep ES up all the time! Unless it’s a single tank fight and Myr is hogging all the ES glory (I’m Myr, and in your case I mean another resto shaman since I’m probably not secretly raiding with you), make sure you have ES on a tank. LDW is a good example where there are tanks on both sides. Make sure to be refreshing ES in downtimes, if it’s at 1 or 2 orbs left I tend to refresh it if I’m not doing anything else.
2) Keep Water Shield up!
If you are running low on mana you should spend a GCD refreshing your water shield if it’s down (or about to go down). In a hectic fight this might seem dangerous but having no mana is worse!
3) Riptide is awesome and should be used whenever it’s off cooldown
Even without the t10 set bonus (which gives you spell haste after riptide), Riptide procs Tidal Waves which makes your Lesser Healing Wave crit chance increase and your reg Healing Wave cast time decrease. Plus it’s an instant heal with a hot. If you’re tank healing you should be doing Riptide->LHW->LHW or HW if you have the time. On Festergut at 3 stacks I’m doing Riptide->HW->LHW and repeat on the main tank.
4) Chain Heal is pretty awesome
For a while it sucked. But they buffed how much each bounce hits for and how far it’ll jump. If it’s a stacked tank fight then I’m pretty much always chain healing the tanks (Marrowgar is a great example of this). On Saurfang I’m chain healing the tanks as well since they end up switching off and tend to both be taking dmg. When choosing between CH and LHW on the tanks I choose LHW if time is of the essence and they are really low, otherwise I usually CH if I think it’ll hop to at least one other player. Same with healing non-tanks. I always riptide the lowest raid member and will LHW if someone is really critically low, otherwise it’s usually chain heal.
5) Don’t forget your cooldowns
Nature’s Swiftness is now on a 2 min cooldown. I use it early and often in boss fights and trash. Insta-cast HW on the tank in a pinch or for a CH if the raid is taking crazy damage.
Tidal Force can be a savior too! It makes you crit which not only saves whoever you are healing but procs Ancestral Awakening and heals the lowest member of the raid too. If NS is on CD and we’re in an Oh Shit raid damage moment I hit Tidal Force.
Shaman don’t have nearly as many healing spells to figure out as priests (I know, I have one of those too). The crux of being a great shaman healer is figuring out when to use each tool and in what order since we’re so much about procs. Spamming anything mindlessly is rarely the best thing to do, for each fight we should evaluate what kind of damage players will be taking and choose the best tools to fit that situation! If anyone has questions on a particular fight, I’m happy to share my healing strats for it. Enjoy!