Healing Way vs. Healing Focus vs. Elemental Weapons
Today we’re going to look at talent builds.
In my opinion, the resto talent tree is still too bloated. This means we can’t make fun decisions depending on our play style. Spending points in the resto tree leaves very few options if we don’t want to compromise our healing output. This is something I hope blizzard is going to address in Cataclysm. I would love to have some spare talent points to choose between utility talent A and utility talent B without leaving out mandatory talents.
Holy priests have some degree of flexibility. If you love to spread HoTs, you can go with Empowered Renew, and add a little instant heal to your HoT. If a priest just doesn’t use Renew all the time or his play sytle wouldn’t profit from the instant heal, he can go with Body and Soul, a very fun utility talent (running speed boost for whomever you shield). The cast time reduction of our big heal, Healing Wave, is at the very beginning of our talent tree, so it just wouldn’t make sense to not take the talent, especially considered how bad Totemic Focus is. Priests on the other hand can absolutely play without Greater Heal (if they like it that way) and instead go for spell damage reduction, which is something I love for progression fights.
But what about us shamans, do we have some flexibility as well? Not really. Most of the times it boils down leaving out one of this three talents:
- Healing Way (Talent Build): The reason why someone would leave out this talent are pretty obvious: you don’t heal with Healing Wave ever. This isn’t bad. Many Holy Priests don’t remember where their Greater Heal Button is as well. Small heals have numerous advantages, they are fast and they are cheap. If your play style is excluding Healing Wave, this is where you want to save your points. I personally still use Healing Wave frequently. For me it has two purposes: A) Precasting a big heal when I know predictable damage is going to land (aka Fusion Punch) and B) upping my HPS while single target healing (aka my co-healer on the tank is incapacitated). In that scenario, additional 25% healing is very valuable. I have no illusions though. Even if I use Healing Wave frequently, I still use CH, RT and LHW a lot more, making this talent brilliant while casting HW, but only very mediocre over the course of a whole evening.
- Elemental Weapons (Talent Build): If you decide to go with Healing way, you’ll obviously have to lose points somewhere, most of the time that’s Elemental Weapons. This isn’t really a big loss, after all it’s just 45 SP we lose, right? What’s 45 SP compared over 3000k buffed SP? Well it isn’t all to bad. I’m sure all of us will have a higher healing output with this talent than by taking Healing Way. So the question should be: do I want a tiny little bit more SP for all my heals, which will add up to a lot of healing over a whole evening or do I want a lot more healing for HW, so I have a strong HW when I need it (which most probably isn’t often enough generate a very significant amount of total healing over an evening but provides a very strong HW whenever we decide to cast one).
- Healing Focus (Talent Build): Leaving out Healing Focus is a tricky question. Skyhoof over one EJ recommends it. High-End Raiders seem to do fine without the talent. But most of us have some kind of irrational feeling, that not spending talent points in reduced spell pushback will end in the raid dying. What most people forget is the fact, that this is mainly a PvP talent, where you’re constantly getting hit. They also forget that a paladin’s Concentration Aura makes the additional benefit from this talent very tiny. And they also forget, that often raid damage doesn’t lead to spell pushback (Mimiron spell pushback was nerfed). Still, I can’t get myself to raid without this talent for testing purposes. So if anyone raids without Healing Focus, please do comment and tell me how that’s working out for you. I’d be especially interested in fight like Heroic Twins (Vortex).
To make a long story short: At this point, talent builds come down to personal preferences. No matter how you spend your talent points, it won’t have a big impact on your play style, healing output or survivability. Which is in fact, a pity, I’d love to see more variety in resto shaman builds.
Out of curiosity I checked the Arsenal and had a look at some 50 Resto shamans in high-end guilds (yes, guilds which do fine in wowprogress). If they had multiple pieces of iLvL 258, I looked at their talent build. That’s what came out:
- 24 Shamans didn’t take Elemental Weapons, but included Healing Way and Healing Focus in their build. This seems to be the most popular talent build right now.
- 13 guys would pass on Healing Way, this isn’t surprising, taking Elemental Weapons over Healing Way make sense the less you use Healing Wave.
- 9 high-end raiders without Healing Focus? This really keeps me interested in the possibility of dropping point out of this talent. I’d be really interested to hear first hand experiences of successful heroic raiders without Healing Focus. Not so much interested in all the “omg this is crazy talk we need healing focus!!”-comments.
- 2 guys didn’t have Ancestral Awakening. Working on Anub’Arak Heroic, probably?
- 2 guys decided to not max out Thundering Strikes or Tidal Mastery and instead take Healing Way, Elemental Weapons and Healing Focus.
You can read into this whatever you want. I’m pretty sure though, that the differences between all those specs is pretty marginal.
Tip for 3.3: If you feel like respeccing, there’s one thing that might bring some variety to your talent build: Snatch some points away from Tidal Focus and go 2/2 Improved Reincarnation. Reincarnation is a decent talent for progression raiding and learning new encounters and gets a huge boost in 3.3. The talent will reduce the cooldown to 15 minutes (down from 30, it’s 60 on live) and of course still adds 20% additional health and mana, which can help survive some random AoE.
That’s it for today. I’d love to hear some reasoning behind your own talent build.
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Quick Armory has a talent stats tool that has some interesting information. Take a look at Restoration Shamans:
http://quickarmory.com/stats/?c=Shaman#Restoration
67% of 8000+ resto shamans put some points into Elemental Weapons.
57% put some points into Healing Way.
78% put some points into Healing Focus.
The most popular single spec is 0/16/55 with Elemental Weapons (20%)
Next is 0/13/58 with Healing Way instead (10%).
Finally is 0/16/55 with EW, HW but no Healing Focus (10%).
Nice link, actually I didn’t know this site. Very nice contrast to my little small sample Armory survey. I think it’s interesting that more high-end raiders seem to prefer Healing Way, while the broad mass of resto shamans prefer the SP boost provided by Elemental Weapons.
But as I already said, I think we should read to much into this statistics and we shouldn’t talk the differences between the specs bigger than they are. In fact, the differences are really marginal.
Running with standard 0/16/55 (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#hZ0xxIZx0euIxoxkrIRt), I am considering dropping Healing Focus for Enhancing Totems, which would result in raid wide +20something sp.
I know that as a priest, I scoff at any PvE healing spec that has damage mitigation or anti-pushback talents in it. Healing Focus, Blessed Recovery, Martyrdom — they all tell me that the priest has no faith in his tanks, and is bleeding off healing abilities for survival abilities. For PvP, they are essential. For PvE, they are an insult to the tanks.
Actually, disregard it, FT doesn’t stack with ToW.
I’ve skipped out on Healing Focus since Ulduar was released.
The only time I have ever found it to be a problem for me is in fights with a bunch of tiny little adds, and Faction Champs.
Haven’t made it to 25m ToGC though so maybe things would change there.
Well, given the content I am running, my build is the 0/13/58. Running 10M content only needs you to be prepared to compensate for any missing buff OR role. If there are no paladins, or another aura is needed or I can be simply out of range, I WANT to have Healing Focus.
As for Healing Wave, I am strongly for the idea of Shamans being hybrid healers – both tank and raid healers. So I do want to have that talent as well. Arguably, HW is long cast spell, but once you get into the tankhealing routine, you will learn to use it when needed and you will do it so naturaly and squeeze the most of it.
I can’t really have two healing specs – most of the time one of the three healers on starting raid setup “should” go dps in favour of speeding the encounter up, as well having three skilled healers on some of 10M encounters pretty much mean they got slightly bored – so I need to put all these points into Healing Focus and Healing Way.
I strangely never considered Elemental Weapons as viable option, even if I had those points spare, I’d prolly put them to one of the Totem enhancing talents.
Drug wrote:
“At this point, talent builds come down to personal preferences. No matter how you spend your talent points, it won’t have a big impact on your play style, healing output or survivability. Which is in fact, a pity, I’d love to see more variety in resto shaman builds.”
I actually like it, as we discussed on PlusHeal the diversity comes from glyphing your shammling, which again for me, is great. Just 4 slots in inventory for full-spectre healing effectivity. I don’t think we need more diversity in Restoration tree. I think more interesting talents that wouldn’t be simple to choose between outside the tree would be interesting. You know, something that could actually compete with Focus or Way or Weapons.
My problem actually isn’t just the restoration tree. It’s something I see in a lot of talent trees. I also remember blizzard talking a lot about that an planning to change this in the future.
What’s the problem? A lot of talent trees are absolutely bloated with mandatory talents. Every tier of talents has a nice option to boost your healing/damage output or tanking stats. The talents you don’t take on the other hand, are often fun and would lead to us doing additional stuff during raids.
Examples:
-Safeguard (Warrior Tank, would give a warrior a nice little role where he could help with damage mitigation)
-Body and Sould (Priest, tactical speed boosts are very handy and add another tactical layer to priest healing)
-Power Infusion (Ok this isn’t something a disc priest would leave out, but I think it’s a good example of a talent, which needs you to know the encounter and place this buff on the right person at the right time)
-Imp. Reincarnation (If we take this talent, we use the ability a lot more often)
That’s just some examples. There are a lot of talents, who offer some damage mitigation, speed boost, little temporary buffs on other players etc. I think there should be more talents like this. And there should be less mandatory throughput talents. Most of the time all we do is put our talent into stuff that goes like this: additional 10% to YYY, reduces mana cost of XXX by 5%. If we don’t take those talents, we reduce the output we need in the raiding game.
I think it would be very easy to add more fun, “gimmicky” talents to our trees and let us have the possibility to take them, just by reducing the pure throughput talent points per talent Tier.
Glyphing as well isn’t doing what I want. It’s a nice cheap way to shift where our strengths lies, but it doesn’t change my play style at all (or only very slightly). I drop HST no matter if I have the glyph or not. I often RT, with or without RT glyph. I shield my tank with ES no matter if I’m glyphed for it or not. I like the glyph idea, but nonetheless, nearly all glyphs are just another, rather boring stat modifier.
I have been using 00/16/55(with healing way, not healing focus). The main reason is atm Im low on sp(only sitting at 2750+ bh with flametongue totem). Also the fact the only a handful of fights contain the constant incoming damage to warrant losing one of the other two talents. I used this build in my last ToGC25 twins encounter, and while theirs a ton of raid damage, It didnt seem to affect my cast time. Ill check again the next time we do it.
note. On HTwins its probably best to drop healing way for healing focus.
Anyways, Thanks for the blog!
I dont have points in healing focus and, so far, have had not issues. That being said, I’ve been doing 10-mans only since Yogg. I didn’t notice any pushback on Heroic Twins 10 at all.
That being said, I think it will be more valuable in 3.3 – I’d expect blizzard to make it a little tougher.
As for Improved Rein, agree 100%
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I’ve been running a build without the healing focus talents, and taking both the elemental weapons and healing way talents. I can’t remember what exactly I ended up giving up in order to pull the build off, but I do know that I need to do a serious respec now that I’ve been playing resto for a little while now and I have a better understanding of my playstyle and what the talents really mean.
Thanks for an idea of what some other folks are running drug
I raid w/o Healing Focus. We have gone up to Anub in ToGC25. We brute force our way through Twins and I have to say, spell pushback was not the biggest concern. With Concentration Aura and Aura Mastery available, I don’t give a second thought to pushback. I like the versatility of Healing Way (great in 10mans when running with a druid) and the little extra edge more SP gives me from Elemental Weapons. I’m at 3133 Sp self buffed, so I feel my through put is good, I have 780ish haste, so I feel good in that area, and now that I picked up the Triumph Intellect trinket, I have about 25k unbuffed mana, so I feel great with that. Overall, I think we are in a good place and have not found myself unable to heal anything due to my class.
Healing Focus is really just a terrible place to put points. It’s something that will almost never save a wipe that couldn’t be saved with a little better pre-planning. Generally speaking, if your haste is high enough, it’s not a huge deal. On fights where you might be uber concerned about pushback, you can Earth Shield yourself, such as on FC. TV, the actual Vortex shouldn’t be hitting anyone, so it doesn’t really matter.
The place to look at is Enhancing Totems. Elemental Weapons amounts to almost an insignificant SP increase (like, 50-ish), and thus, is generally just adding to your overhealing. Enhancing Totems is useless if you always have an Enhance Shaman around, but in 10-mans or Heroics, it’s certainly more useful to your group overall than the small SP boost to yourself.
As for Healing Way, the question is where the points would go. I’d take the big increase on Healing Way over the near uselessness of Elemental Weapons and the complete uselessness of Healing Focus anyday. I’d drop Tidal Focus (well, down from 5/5) too if I thought I’d get some better benefit elsewhere, since it’s an insignificant talent as well.