"If there exists an event where you consistently need" players to use the abilities their characters have? I don't get it.
Brohg, I think he's probably from one of those guilds where every event is done in 20 min or less (instead of the hour long raids I see at least). High DPS means less need for more (or longer) healing.
If you need to constantly use summon water and food there is something wrong! Not all abilities were created equal.
he is, but we still need alot of healing on certain events no matter how fast they go... Arx Mentis 1 coming to mind obviously. personally I prefer to use twinheal + surge as others have said, then followed by Reckless, Reckless, Recourse. I leave Recourse in even when healing tanks as it will bump the Shaman's HP back up after using Reckless', and is basically a 2nd heal over time to have running on the group incase they take dmg while you're focused on tank healing. Arx 1 you could have twin'd surges on the raid the entire time until magio's are dead, a few of the squishier melee might live to see the boss.
I think, trendwise, the relationship may be the opposite? Raiding forces with high dps build their rosters with as few tanks and healers as they can get away with, such that the quality/output of those matter more individually.
@Sheaffer, a number of guilds at my level (rank 30+ on the list) will typically see 45-60+ min raids. Over time that whittles down but Argin Hiz, ToR (for those who have beaten it, lots of us still can't), WK2, Bixie 2, Neriak2 (if you include the 1st phase and the 25 min for Prince combined) and so on. Don't need to tell us to play better, change strats, etc. I'm just listing the nature of the game at this point. @Brohg, think we're talking about different things. I'm talking overall healing needed in terms of total heals cast. If a fight lasts 30 minutes against one named versus lasting 10 minutes only, the amount of overall healing that needs to be done will be longer on the longer fight. the mob hits the tank for the same amount (but more time is tanked off disc and for longer, necessitating more time spent healing).
Have you ever looked at most of the Top 5's rosters? I think you might be pretty surprised, given what you just said.
I love multi-binding. It has helped me massively improve my personal performance, and has helped me be able to be more responsive to general raid conditions instead of staring down a spell bar. I have been binding for years now, and it is nearly impossible for anyone to outparse me who doesn't, even with some "oops/death" along the way on my part. With that said, I don't always use the exact same "bind," for every raid or event. It also depends somewhat on assignments and the quality of the raid group. In AE heavy content I will Gift + Rain unless I am assigned to a particular tank who would struggle to survive with that gap in healing. We have all been there, when you know the tank will die if ANYTHING wrong happens, be it lag spike or buff request. The better the raid group, the more likely I am to Gift + Rain. The incidental healing helps, and for total amount healed, it is worthwhile unless there is literally no other damage occurring on the raid, which seems rare these days. The point of AE healing is to make it so other healers can focus on their other jobs without having to deal with low amounts of damage. It is about the team effort. However, if you are in a raid group where lots of the healers are very low performance, and the only thing they will do is heal inconsequential damage on their groups (like people still die in their groups but they won't heal anyone not inside it), I will do less or no AE healing, so I can focus on the critical job of healing main and off-tanks that wouldn't otherwise be happening. That said, my bind is pretty flexible, but all the aforementioned heals make their spot on it. My primary raid group is pretty low DPS, so I do sometimes have mana issues going full out all the time. I try to delay using Spiritual Channeling as much as possible since it is my "fail safe" if I get really unlucky, like repeated deaths etc. For Tower of Rot, I actually use spell canni in my bind for example, whereas I don't usually do that on other events. On Plane of War, I spent huge amounts of time emergency healing my group, dodging the targeted AE's and such so I don't get in a very steady flow of heals on the off tanks. But even then, using a multi-bind was useful. It would cast the biggest fastest available heal when I was able to help, and let me cast the biggest fastest available heal on all the people in my group taking sudden damage so I could get back to the off tanks quickly. I guess the point I am making, is yes, set up a bind even if you don't always use it. Yes, get familiar with your spells and plan to push your limits. If you are not casting something almost constantly, you have more potential to milk. What spells you pick should make sense based on the event, but it should be obviously about healing. Honestly, shaman are about the worst class to jump to "DPS" mode. We don't get good sustained DPS, we get even less as far as personal burns go, swift dots are crap on raid targets and dots in general require too many spell gems and fight with necros/others for debuff slots. Even clerics get twincast and some nuke boosting activated AA which we do not.
Clerics even keep healing through their dps burns, it's pretty sweet. Shm yeah not so much. Need at least a whole other spell bar to devote to half necro dps, and ~no burn capability.
I don't have TDS yet, so I can't speak of raiding past CoTF. My guild has cleared all of CoTF except the final raid, which we expect to clear once we start raiding seriously again after the holidays. I'm maxed AA and have all T1 COTF armor. We don't have 20 clerics on raids (we're lucky to get 4 sometimes TBH) So your experiences may not be the same as mine if your variables differ. First, go parse Snow Leopard. Tell me if you find something different, but I found the added DPS minimal. I rarely use it on raids. It just doesn't add enough DPS for the long cast time in all honesty. With my guild's situation, with the lower numbers of clerics, I'm better off throwing heals. Second, I never use any DPS spells (nukes, DoTs) on raids. Simply not worth the spell gems for how little DPS our spells do. Go ahead and DPS if your raid is overloaded on healers but don't expect to show up on parses. So on raids, I'm healing and debuffing. Debuffs do not (usually) take much time to do. I don't bother with malo unless a mob is really resistant as our 30 mages use their malo spells. Chanters have better cripple. So all I'm doing (usually) is slowing. Turgur's lasts a good long while, so it doesn't take up much of my time. I'm usually in a melee DPS group as the lone healer, so my first job is to keep them up and click epic, 3rd spire, etc. when they disc. I have found though that if I use Gift + Surge, most of the melee DPS get hit with it and I rarely need to use single shot heals to do the job. So most of my time gets focused on tanks. I keep fatigue and growth on them and then just roll my multibind. I bind them all to 1 key, and just roll Gift --> Surge (which usually takes care of my melee DPS) --> Reckless (all 3 versions) --> mending. Rarely does it get all the way to mending, but I use it if nothing else is up. On heal parses, I was always about at the top. About 2 or 3 of the clerics and 1 other shaman would get top on parse depending on how much the randomness loved them that particular fight. With how strong our healing is, and how piss poor our DPS is, I honestly have no idea why anyone would ever cast a DPS spell as a shaman on a raid unless you literally have nothing else to do. Even then I personally would heal tanks, just in case one of the tank healers lagged or went LD or got eaten by something.
the sad part ... there is certain melee - who like to post here .... who will want this spell cast at all times cause they feel there dps is so important they need that extra 300 dps cause 200-300 k dps isn't quite enough
Whats even more sad is they actually think anyone even buys the new ranks of this. On my shaman I Dont think i have bought that spell since like HOT. Because an empty space in my spellbook is probably more productive.
It's more productive than dots or, like, Spear in a fast pulling group, or versus raids with fast-changing targets. The individual damage boost isn't a ton, but it runs a full minute & multiplies by the number of melee, going even while the shm does other things. The cast time is quite... lamentable, but the spell isn't a waste
I can't tell if you're being obstinate or ironic or just using hyperpole in service of a point. There's no laziness involved in trying to get the most dps out of one spell cast per minute so that you can still devote 55 seconds out of that minute to "real" duties. I'm not claiming it's any great shakes. What I'm saying is that it's pure snobbery not to find time once a minute to keep it going. (Twice a minute if you get to cast it on another tank/etc group without a shaman, but then it gets to be twice as not-bad)!
Brogh, I disagree with your opinion, though i see no flaws in the logic. You are correct in saying that added dps is good, no matter how small. I prefer to throw heals because dead people don't usually help on raids. But you can certainly argue that if no one is taking damage and tanks aren't dying, then your heals are meaningless. I just have a hard time judging when I can stop or limit my healing and do something else, so I play safe and heal.
