Resto/ Ele Shaman It's all wrong!

I think Mr.Robot has got stats all wrong on Shammy. Everywhere I look IE. Icy Veins the stat priorities don’t line up. My resto spec has my stacking Mastery to the max. But this goes against everything top players are doing. I’m very disappointed in this as I think it is costing me a lot of grief.

This is what I found on Icy Veins about mastery:

Since you already start off with 24% Mastery and because of its poor scaling, it is not a good stat to pursue on gear. Also, depending on the encounter, you only benefit from about 20% to 25% out of 100% potential of your Mastery. This means its listed percentage benefit on your character sheet should be divided by 4 or more in order to understand its real impact.

and if you go to the ### Stat Gain Per Rating section; there is even more reason not to stack mastery.

I’m gonna post this and I think you need to have a read and consider updating the shammy stat priorities.

As I have been using Mr.Robot for many years I really hope they will take this constructively and work on a fix.

Credit to:
Restoration Shaman Healing Stat Priority - Shadowlands 9.0.2 - World of Warcraft - Icy Veins (icy-veins.com)

The Basics of Stats for Restoration Shaman

This stat priority will serve you well for healing :

  1. Item Level
  2. Versatility = Critical Strike
  3. Haste = Mastery

If you are focused on damage dealing and being a [Battle Shaman], use this stat priority instead, especially if you are able to maintain ![Flame Shock Icon] [Flame Shock] on multiple targets throughout the fight:

  1. Item Level
  2. Versatility = Haste
  3. Critical Strike
  4. Mastery

The first priority for your gearing should be to use your highest Item Level gear pieces. These come with a lot of Intellect, which scales your spells, and while Intellect is not generally your best stat when comparing 1 point of it to 1 point of the other stats, these gear pieces will also have an overall larger amount of secondary stats than gear with lower item level, more than making up for the presence of a weaker stat, such as Mastery.

Having said that, there will be a few situations where item level upgrades will not be actual upgrades. Sockets are usually worth a bit more than 5 item levels, Leech on the first 2-3 pieces is worth about 10 item levels, Avoidance is worth around 5 but only in encounters where you take dangerous area of effect damage.

When healing, you want to use your Mana pool flexibly to counteract deadly damage throughout a long fight. Thus, efficient Mana usage is paramount and Haste loses a bit of value.

When healing high Mythic+ dungeons , the damage reduction of Versatility is very important, as it allows you to survive things you usually cannot in the highest Mythic keystone dungeons, and generally reduces the stress to self-heal during high damage periods.

1.1.

Stat Gain Per Rating

In order to get 1% benefit from each stat you need different amounts of stat rating. This means some stats naturally scale better than others, even before diminishing returns kick in from having too much of a certain stat relative to others.

  1. Versatility — 85 rating per 1% damage/healing increase / 0.5% damage taken reduction

  2. Critical Strike — 72 rating per 1%

  3. Haste — 68 rating per 1%

  4. Mastery — 24 rating per 1%

  5. Leech — 40 rating per 1%

  6. Avoidance — 28 rating per 1%

  7. Speed — 21.5 rating per 1%

Restoration Shaman: Getting a Better Understanding

2.1.

Statistics Explanations

Intellect is your primary stat. You should look for this stat in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Spell Power, which increases the power of your heals.

Versatility is a direct throughput increase that also reduces damage taken. It improves nearly all of your abilities, but does not scale as well as Critical Strike for pure throughput. This is balanced by its damage reduction component and better DPS scaling than Critical Strike, making them roughly equal in practice.

Critical Strike increases your throughput and gives a very minor Mana regeneration boost through ![Resurgence Icon]. It is the strongest stat for pure healing throughput, as it scales well and improves nearly all of your healing spells, with the notable exception of going over 100% Critical Strike with a ![Tidal Waves Icon] [Tidal Waves] powered ![Healing Surge Icon] [Healing Surge].

Haste lowers the cast time of your spells and the duration of your global cooldown. Haste also causes your healing over time and damage over time effects to tick faster, as well as increasing the tick rate of your healing totems. When Mana is not an issue, Haste is the best throughput stat, and is always a great stat for dealing damage due to its great scaling. However, in prolonged fights where you need to stop casting healing spells to conserve Mana, you gain more from having more powerful spells, as you cannot make full usage of your Haste as is.

Mastery , represented by ![Mastery: Deep Healing Icon] [Mastery: Deep Healing], allows you to heal for more when targeting low health allies. Since you already start off with 24% Mastery and because of its poor scaling, it is not a good stat to pursue on gear. Also, depending on the encounter, you only benefit from about 20% to 25% out of 100% potential of your Mastery. This means its listed percentage benefit on your character sheet should be divided by 4 or more in order to understand its real impact. For example, if you have 100% Mastery listed, this means you will usually gain, at most, 25% extra healing for your spells, on average.

Leech allows you to passively self-heal for a percentage of the healing or damage of each spell you cast. Due to its great scaling and the prevalence of enemy mechanics that hurt everyone in the group, it ends up doing a lot of free healing that would, otherwise, need to be covered by Mana from yourself or the other healers in your group.

Avoidance 's exact power depends on the encounter mechanics, but is often the decider on living or dying against extreme damage abilities in very high keystones. The damage it prevents is also very helpful in a raid setting.

Speed slightly increases the speed at which your character moves. This can be useful when trying to dodge encounter mechanics or when repositioning with your group, but is not as noticeable as other stats.

Once again, a thread created alluding to any one optimisation site being the only one that any player should ever take notice of… IcyVeins offer advice, just as AMR does.

Now; depending on how long you’ve used any given advice source, its’ credibility will have matured for any given user BUT… if you go to a different source with a closed mind &/or looking for an accepted way of working to be reinforced, quite frankly “you’re doing it wrong”.

As I’ve said in similar threads that use this approach, no single advice/optimisation site is CORRECT - that mantle is exclusively reserved for… BLIZZARD.

Do you know the deeper thinking behind WHY IcyVeins arrived at the methodology they use?
Are there people that work at IcyVeins that are open to discuss how they arrive at their recommendations the way that @yellowfive & @Swol do, here?

One thing to be aware of is that AMR have designed their own custom simulator to reach the conclusions they offer on their site; as I do not use IcyVeins, I have no way of knowing what systems they use to arrive at what they recommend… could be purely annecdotal, could be simulation based.

I maintain that a better way to approach a query of this nature is to ask why there is disparity, rather than announcing that the site you’ve used to offer an opinion on how to optimise your game style is “wrong”… no they’re not, they offering DIFFERENT advice - simple as that.

Sites like AMR & IcyVeins will - or at least ‘should’ - only ever be seen to OFFER advice, not TELL you what to do… like with any other ‘second opinion’, you can take on board what is offered, reject what is offered… or assimilate it into your current knowledge & adapt where appropriate.

TL; DR…? Sheer weight of volume of any one sites’ user base is not a gauge of validity. I don’t doubt that the dev’s here are grounded enough to not see threads like this in as challenging a way as ‘could’ be interpreted by this thread title, but it doesn’t help a case when “X is right; Y is wrong” is the core of any discussion.

I’m completely aware of the advice on resto shaman mastery given by the other guide sites. I disagree with their assessment of it.

Saying that you will only realize, on average, 25% of the character sheet gain to your healing from mastery is making a very large assumption that people in your raid will remain, on average, around 75% health. Maybe that will be the case for some people, but it is not the case for a lot of people.

Resto shaman mastery is an incredibly powerful stat, if you need the healing. Our model that we create our advice based off of assumes you are doing an encounter that is very difficult to heal, in which there are many points in the fight where multiple team members drop to low health and need to be healed up quickly. Deep Healing is so, so good for this.

I think resto shaman mastery is basically the perfect healing stat. When you really need the healing (people are low health) it has insane value per point of stat. When you don’t need that much healing (people are high health) it is kinda “meh” per point of stat. That sounds like a good value to me. I’m ok with my opinion being different than the opinion of the person writing the guide for IV. I’m ok with more players preferring to follow the advice on IV. I think my advice is good advice - the many players who follow it have told me that the results work well for them.

The argument against mastery is more: I want to be able to do more of the “top off” healing and also contribute DPS. If DPS is a factor, then yes, reduce the value of mastery (we have a slider on our gearing strategies that lets you do just that). If you want to be more of a “top off” healer… that’s cool, get less mastery. We offer advice for the most difficult of healing situations, not farm situations. Topping a healing meter on farm is a game in and of itself.

Quick Edit:
I’m not being contrary to the other advice out there just for the sake of it. Like eighjan mentioned - I have spent a lot of time creating a very thorough and complex simulation model of healing in WoW in order to test out theories and come up with advice. I’d venture to say it is the most robust model out there. So, my ideas aren’t just some hand waves - they have data behind them.

Guys, I’m not arguing the sites may differ in opinion. It’s a (paid) service. What that means to me is I pay them to do the work so I can play the game. I don’t want to run sim after sim and sort data. I want the professionals the figure out what stat is most important before diminishing returns. I agree with the people saying mastery is great, but what I need to know is where is the soft cap before the known diminishing returns. As far as I can tell and I think its obvious, these are known figures or easy enough to figure out for a company that has time to do it and gets paid to do it. All that being said, the optimizer puts all 4 secondary stats at exactly equal values. No way this is correct!!! And to boot… These is no option even if I wanted to add my own values to calculate Int. into this equation because it is not even included. I realize int. is a main stat, but in order to calculate against other stats I need it to be included on the scale.

The relative value of stats changed depending on how much of each you have, that is correct for the most part. The optimizer inherently takes that into account. There isn’t really a particular value where you see a diminishing return - it depends on the rest of your gear loadout. That is why we created the system we have - the relationships between the stats move around constantly. We wanted a way to just get an answer without having to constantly run simulations.

It is definitely reasonable and possible for equal amounts of stats to be optimal.

Ive stopped using this for my resto shaman and will likely desub soon. Its stat priorities are all over the place and it doesnt even know what the ideal legendary is. It wants to pack mastery for m+ which just makes no sense at all. I shouldn’t have 80%+ mastery for m+ healing plain and simple unless my other stats were obscenely high.

My main issue though is it really really really wants me to use my pvp lego (chestplate of earthen harmony) for m+ and raid healing. Ill believe a lot of things regarding stats and why you think x and y, but if it insists that lego is my best, it doesnt know whats going on.

The pivotal crux of the matter seems to be that you think character optimisers are “telling” you how to structure your character; I would even go as far as to posit that you’ve used other sources way more than AMR, have come here, committed too heavily (paid sub.) & been looking for a way out having seen that the advice offered differed from what you’re used to seeing.

My response would be that if you know how to play your character that well, why do you need any other source of advice? Remember, AMR just gives advice, what you do with it it ENTIRELY up to you… the same as any other source you can to cite.

One of the core methodologies of AMR is that there is no SINGLE stat priority, as can be clearly seen by the stat. graphs that are openly published for any character that has been optimised by the AMR system - if that core philosophy is one you decline to entertain (and taking it as an absolute conclusion), you wasted your time coming here… sadly.

Ultimately, diplomacy is a skill lacking to many people & the ability to make a ‘not for me, sorry’ conclusion & walking away - rather than one of derision/criticism & compensation - is no longer the norm.

Our method for finding optimal gear for healers focuses on a situation where you need to get maximum healing from your mana pool on a fight where multiple people take heavy damage.

If you are in that situation, using the gear we recommend makes total sense. I have been raiding and doing M+ successfully as a healer using the strategies from our site.

There are other ways to gear which will work too. If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t want to gear for maximum mana efficiency, you will want to use the customize features to shift the advice towards your situation.

We provide one default gear strategy that will work well in the most difficult game content. Our system is unique in that we ignore popular trends. We may add some customization presets for people that prefer to be within the current “meta”, but that is not our main focus.

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So youre saying that the lego chest “earthen mantle” is by far the best choice for lego in m+ and raiding? We can go back and forth on which stat is better, and thats fine, but youre gonna stand by the system that thinks that “earthen mantle” is the best?

I stand by our system. I’d have to see your particular case to understand what you are talking about with regard to earthen mantle. When I look at a BiS set for a generic resto shaman, that is not the item it picks.

Looking at it, it might be because its valuing mastery a bit higher than crit. The primal tide core helm (crit socketed), and spiritwalker’s tidal legguards are both crit/vers, while the chestplate of earthen harmony is vers/mast. They are all the same ilvl. So im just assuming its preferring those stats over the items specific usefulness.

That is a possibility. The healer legendary effects are relatively weak compared to your total output.

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