Burning Crusade Resto: +heal and mp5 explenation (BONUS: Insightful Earthstorm Diamond OP)

[Dynamsi]

Hello everyone,

it is well known that if you want to be a healing shaman you have to get your mana reg over mp5 but may players wonder how good mp5 is compared to just +heal bonus and this question isn't answered easily.

To explain the different influences of these 2 values to your healing potential i calculated the healing done till OOM. Both +heal and mp5 rise this value but in a different way. While + heal just scales linear with your healing spells mp5 gets more valuable the more +heal you have.
Haste is another important factor for a healing shaman and to make this short you should stack all the haste you can get your hands on since this is the best stat to increase your heal per second and it also scales with more +heal. But when casting faster you will also use more mana so haste will lower the healing done till OOM.

To make it easier for you to choose the right items for your gear lvl i plotted the +heal equal to 1mp5 for different total + heal numbers





the first plot shows the +heal equal to 1mp5 when you spam your casts. The second one is a more realistic scenario with casting heals about 2/3 of the time (setting totems, disspell, movement while fights and so on). If you are interested in the calculationts behind the plots i can post them later, but for now i think that's not really important and i try to keep this as easy as possible to understand.
In this plot healing way is NOT included for healing wave, this means with 3 stacks of healing way +heal is 18% more efficient than shown in the plot (resulting in 18% lower +heal per 1mp5 for 3 stacks).
Also Haste is not included but its influence is also easy to see. The faster you cast the lower is the mana reg per cast when spaming, therefore the curve lowers by the amount of haste you have (curve times percentage of haste you have resulting in a lower +heal per 1mp5 value)

Why did i chose this 3 spells?

chainheal rank 2 is the most mana efficient direct heal the shaman has. i use it a lot for moderate trash and general in situations with low to midrange dmg

chainheal rank 4 is the rank every shaman should use the most since it has high HPS potential with moderate mana efficiency its the go to spell for most bossfights in raids

healing wave rank 12 if you have to burst heal a single target eg in heroics this is the spell u usually use its not efficient at all and only is somewhat ok on mana efficiency with 3 stacks of healing way

It is not possible to do this calculation for earthshield since it does not have a fixed runtime.

OFC you will use lesser healing wave and maybe lower ranks of healing wave as well but i chose to not include it in the plot since they all fallow the pattern of the healing wave rank 12 curve.

you should use chainheal rank 5 for burst phases but that's about it. rank 5 is less efficient than rank 4 so the graph would be lower in the plot.

just as a small healing guide: in raids about 70% of your heal should come from CH rank 4 about 10% from earthshield and the rest from other CH ranks and single target heals.



Insightful Earthstorm Diamond:
As an example how to read the plot. the Insightful Earthstorm Diamond meta gem has a 5% procc chance (used to be 2% not sure which one is correct for outland atm) and it restores 300 mana when it proccs. This means in 5 sec you can cast 2 chainheals with 0 haste so you have 6 chances to procc the meta gem overall a 30% average chance that the gem proccs within 5 sec. this results in 90 mp5 if you spam chainheal or 60 mp5 if you cast chainheal 2/3 of the time (gem proccs also from setting totems, earthshield and literally every other spell even crafting)

Assuming you have 1500 +heal on your gear and no haste spaming chainheal rank 4 the 90 mp5 mana reg of the Insightful Earthstorm Diamond meta gem is equal to 243 +heal (2.7 +heal per 1mp5)

For the same gear with 1500 + heal and no haste what happens when you cast only 2/3 of the time? The meta gem produces 60 mp5 average due to less proccs but also your mp5 gets more valuable because of the lower number of casts and the result is that the meta gem procc is still equal to 240 + heal (4.0 +heal per 1mp5)

As you can see the Insightful Earthstorm Diamond compensates perfectly the weaknesses of mp5 and this is even more true if haste comes into play.
-> This meta gem is the single most important item you need for healing (not only shaman) its better to get a hunter helmet with a meta socket than a blue healing helmet!

I hope you can understand my explanations and it will help you to gear your shaman :)

Happy healing

[Shiggs]

Can you give any insight on CH rank 1 vs rank 2? I've heard conflicting reasoning between the two and was wondering what your opinion was for rank 2 over rank 1.
Thanks!

[Dynamsi]

Sure rank1 1 is slightly more efficient than rank 2, but you gain a lot of HPS when using rank 2 over rank 1 since more of your +heal is considered for rank 2. and even rank 2 uses that low amount of mana that you can cast it for a really long time without running OOM.

In my opinion rank1 just doesn't heal enough to be useful in an endgame scenario.

[Shiggs]

Thanks! I'll try r2 for a while and see how it goes. :)