Restoration Mastery and You!

     Shadowscale over at the wonderful shammy blog Pheshamanal made this post about the state of restoration mastery in the game. I think most resto shamans, including myself, agree with Shadow that our mastery stat is quite horrible. Here's my 2cp concerning the state of what's supposed to be our shiny new stat.

     Before any discussion begins I want you to go read this part of Vixsin's Life in Group 5 resto shaman guide. If you're not already an avid reader of Group 5 I highly recommend it. While Vixsin is less critical of mastery it is still weighted near the bottom of the stack in stat weights. In my opinion Blizz should have designed it to be near the top if not the most desired of the secondary stats. I commented at Pheshamanal that it feels like we were given poor quality socks for Christmas instead of a shiny new toy. Lets do a little mastery comparison between the healing classes:

Druid

• Symbiosis: Increases the potency of your healing spells by 10% on targets already affected by one of your heal over time spells. Each point of Mastery increases heal potency by an additional 1.25%

Paladin

• Illuminated Healing: Your healing spells also place an absorb shield on your target for 8% of the amount healed lasting until cancelled. Absorb increased further by mastery rating.

Priest

• Discipline

          Shield Discipline: Increases the potency of all your damage absorption spells by 20%. Absorption
          increased further by mastery rating.

• Holy

          Radiance: Your direct healing spells heal for an additional 10% over 6 sec. Healing increased further 

          by mastery rating.

Shaman

• Deep Healing: Increases the potency of your direct healing spells by up to 20%, based on the current health level of your target (lower health targets are healed for more). Healing increased further by mastery rating.

     Is there anything that sticks out to you when looking at the comparison? The sore thumb for me is the fact that our talent is the only one that is dependent on factors beyond our control. Druids are the only other class that require a condition to be met before their mastery is active but they have control over when it is active. I guess active is a bad way to explain ours as you get a bonus from deep healing even when the target has high health but it's effectiveness greatly diminishes as you get closer to 100%. Having done some very unscientific and rudimentary testing on my own, basically reforging for mastery then reforging for crit, that crit more than outpaces mastery in HPS, HPM, and Water Shield(Mana Return) procs.
     Shadowscale suggested making mastery tick a small AoE heal off of riptide. I really like this idea. Increase the amount of healing with each point of mastery up to a certain % of the riptide heal. This keeps it scaling with gear and adds a useful, but not overpowered, AoE heal to the shaman arsenal. Some ideas I had that didn't seem quite as good as Shadow's riptide idea were:

• A damage reduction buff to Ancestral Healing or a seperate form of reduction
• A hot like the T10 4 piece bonus for chain heal
• Riptide or NS or SWG cooldown reduction
• Increased crit chance after using Unleash Elements

     All of these would be increased/decreased by adding more mastery. Mastery is a brand new stat and as such I think we all should expect it to be a little rocky for some folks until the ins and outs of it are nailed down by the devs, but it's a problem that should be corrected quickly (especially since this is a subscription game and you are paying for the play experience). Mastery for the resto shaman, in my opinion, is broken at this point. If it's not a stat you desire on your gear and you're reforging away from it then Blizz hasn't gotten it right yet. I have faith they'll get it right sooner or later I just hope it's sooner.

Thanks to Shadowscale at Pheshamanal for his original post on the subject.