I’ve recently started using AMR to help me with selecting my gear in M+ and Raid. I’ve generally agreed with and found that the raid gear suggestions make sense based on recommended stat priorities, and what other top players are using. However, for M+ I am finding huge disparity in what the community is going with and what AMR recommends. I recognize that this a simulator, so at the end of the day it is going to give stats that make sense with the inputs/actions of the simulator, and how it is setup. But, this is leading to even more confusion on my end as it seems like mastery is being way overvalued for my resto shaman class for M+. I’ve even noticed when playing dungeons with AMR recommended gear that over prioritizes mastery that my overall performance has taken a dip. All of the top players are utilizing builds with high versatility and either a priority of haste for dishing out damage when they can, or crit if they want an overall better healing build. My understanding of shaman mastery (Deep Healing) is that it is great when people are generally lower health for most of the encounters, but this may not always be the case in M+. While mastery certainly can help in cases where players are dropping low and need to be topped, a lot of times in M+ you need to keep the team relatively topped up while dishing out damage when you can. Does the simulator account for this? I’ve tried playing with the toughness level, but it always seem to recommend mastery regardless. I’m pretty new to AMR, but I believe I’ve setup the best in bags for M+ correctly. Any tips, or comments are appreciated. Thanks.
Right now the script we are using is a really hard healing fight, so it will favor mastery because of that. If you adjust the slider enough towards DPS, it will start to dump mastery for other stats, but you have to go more than half way towards DPS.
Mastery, point for point, is just an insanely good stat for resto shaman. I look at it like this: When there isn’t a ton of healing to do, your healing is kinda “meh”. When there is a ton of damage and you really need healing, it is amazing. So yeah, in the situation where everyone stays high health and you just want to top people off… you’ll have to cast a few more spells. But you will be able to save people when it matters. I have a hard time seeing a downside to this strategy for gearing a resto shaman for healing.
Once damage comes into play, then you will want to shed a lot of mastery.
Okay that makes sense. But for me I have to essentially suggest an “All DPS” build for it to even consider lessening mastery (perhaps I’m doing something wrong but my M+ setup is in top priority spot over raiding setup). Regardless, it still puts me in a tough place to consider deviating so harshly from what most high rated M+ resto shamans are recommending and playing for stat priority. I know that these players are likely playing the class quite a bit differently from me in terms of dishing out way more damage and healing more efficiently than I do, but I still think that overvaluing mastery could be dangerous to overall play in M+. Versatility is just such a good overall stat for increasing survivability and damage/heals as well which is important. I just don’t really see myself using the recommendations given by AMR for M+ based on how great this deviance is from what I’m seeing as a general consensus elsewhere in the community.
For healing in particular, I believe it is safe to deviate from “the community” - there is a lot of fuzz in what it really means to be good. As long as you all live and time the key, your build is good. You can use the “customize” tab also if you want to push the optimizer away from mastery.
Also keep in mind that it can feel like here at AMR we are the one sole voice recommending something different than everyone else… but in reality there aren’t very many people actually doing theorycraft. Maybe a couple people tops, and then everyone just copies that one thing because it worked for them. You’d really only be deviating from one idea. Most people I talk to about healing have solid results following our gearing advice.
I must agree with you: at 190ilvl AMR brought me to 57% mastery and 5%haste that means a lot of proactive healing which isn’t always possible and not easy to play for the general player, last week in m+ with bursting and volcanic and random stuff from encounter it’s been really hard.