Hi all, I'm a returning player and still trying to get my head around the new stats. As a healer that is soloing 70% and group healing 30% what stats should I be trying to increase through infusing and re-forging? Potency gives a very poor increase per *other stat* so as a healer....what stats are of no use to me and what should I be trying to raise? Any advice gratefully received.
You want to look for gear and mount tack and adorns with Potency. If you will be tackling touch content, also invest in a set of Bardings of Health that you can swap in if you find you are too squishy. Look for gear, adorns, familiars, mounts with Ability Doublecast. As for reforging, most folks reforge as much AbMod as possible into DPS. Even casters. I have to defer to the healers on this one, though. It will be helpful for soloing for sure. Use the Overseer Feature intensely. Get old charged Legendary missions from the overseer merchants, run those as well as your 10 missions per day. This is where you will get recipes for a lot of the good adorns you need. Nowadays, a lot of Heroic-quality gear is rewarded from the overseers in your daily missions.
Your primary focus is always going to be potency, as you want as much of that as you can possibly steal. That being said, there are far better stats to reforge into. Turning ability mod into DPS mod is king right now. You want to make sure your jewelry pretty much all comes with ability mod and no dps mod. If it already has dps mod on it, you won't be able to reforge into more of it on that item. Pieces in which you can not get DPS mod, I would reforge those into strikethrough, accuracy, and recovery speed all to 100. remember, haste and casting speed have no benefit after like 200 (to allow for debuffs and still be at 100). You don't need to go hog-wild on multi attack, unless you really care about getting that last 20% for a guaranteed 3rd attack you can keep it around 1500. I would also suggest cloak, neck, and waist slots have ability doublecast on them (you can try flurry instead of you are melee healer, but I can't verify it's effectiveness). If you want you can click my character sig below and check out what I work with so you can get an idea what you want to work toward. If you are a caster healer (Fury, Defiler, Templar) you are still gonna want to do some auto attack damage, either with your primary weapon or crossbow. Do not use a wand in ranged slot because wands do not benefit from the melee stats like crossbows do. Wands are basically just mute/essence fodder this expac. Hope I was able to help some, best of luck to you
Many thanks for the replies. It really is an absolute minefield. How on earth are you supposed to work out, from scratch which setup is best for your playstyle. I guess suck it and see is now the path they wish you to take. At least, thanks to your guidance I will be heading in the right direction.
To be honest, I got where I am on my healer by asking people who knew more than me as well as trying things out on my own. I constantly reforge and rearrange stats to try and get the most I can out of my healer, and while my circle is small, I am well-known and respected as a decent healer in it. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works for you, and sometimes you will feel like nothing works the way it should and want to give up. Don't. I was in a spot like that last year, and had I done that, my healer would not be where she is today. Don't be afraid to fail, and learn from it when it happens I don't know what healer you play, but feel free to send me a tell (Isle_of_refuge.Ellundra) or a PM here if you want to talk more about it Best of luck to you.
Probably the best way is to ask in General chat "Who is the best {classname} on this server?" Take note of the names. Contact them in game and ask if they might have some time to advise you a little on your class. Likewise, if you are in a group and see someone doing a great job as that class, ask them, too.
Heals have been capped for several expansions so people telling you to look for potency.. Well, maybe if you want to dps too. Ill go out on a limb here and say stamina and whatever generic stat the current expansion has (i.e resolve) unless they change it in the next expansion.
You are correct in that heals cap out quickly... they have pretty much been capped since I don't know when. But potency affects a far greater amount of things than just heals. Suggesting it is not an important stat is bad information. Also suggesting that healers don't do damage is bad information as well. We may not parse at the top (depending on your group), but any extra damage between heals only serves to help the mobs die faster, which is the goal in the end. .
you only need to have resolve up to what the mob you are fighting requires. any resolve beyond that doesnt boost you in any way. also you need potency, crit bonus, crit bonus overcap, fervor, abmod and if you are melee you want dpsmod, wdb, wdb oc, and strikethrough and accuracy. stamina kinda comes by its own
Join a guild that is helpful, especially to new people. I've found most people to be helpful and will give you a lot of tips for your particular class. Eventually, you'll get into asking about AA specs and looking at someone else's can be helpful. Sometimes folks will look at a high end raiding spec for help, but you have to be careful there. Gearing will impact your stats, so just be aware that a high end raider may have a particular spec because they've got the gear to bypass AAs that might prove valuable to you. I tend to look at a cross section of specs when I look at a class and get a feel for what they specced in and why. You'll notice some common themes across classes. As mentioned, ask lots of questions. There are a lot of players willing to share their knowledge. Have fun!!
