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.