After doing my callings and world quests in resto spec for six months, now that I’m in 220+, I decided that it might be faster to do them as an elemental shaman as I have caster stats anyways.
After a few days it seems to me that things are even slower now. In resto spec chain lightning deals 2.2k damage each target, while lava burst does around 5.3k. For some reason, the damage of these baseline abilities in elemental are lower, chain lightning is 1.2k while lava burst is 4.6k.
While elemental has damage cooldowns and additional skills (that I rarely use as barely anything lives that long anyways), it seems extremely unfair that the healer spec deals significantly more damage with baseline spells as its damage dealer counterpart.
Whether restoration shaman should deal less damage or elemantal basline spells should deal more is another whole other topic.
Technically none of my stats (besides versatility, but it is 7% on both specs) decrease or increase the damage of said abilities.
I strongly suspect that in 9.0.5 when they increased the base damage of resto abilities by quite a large percentage, they forgot that the dps spec uses the very same skill and those were not buffed, creating this very iffy situation.
Most of healing specs are dealing higher baseline damages than their dps counterparts because they simply don’t have offensive CD. Also, it’s unlikely healing specs are using dps conduits/what ever system.
That’s another topic but most of spells are dealing damages only because there are 583949 damages multiplier.
The base values are higher because the kit isn’t as optimal. You don’t notice it too much in a world quest situation and I’d agree, respeccing to a DPS spec when it uses the same items as your healer one isn’t usually worth doing.
However you try it in a situation like dungeons or whatever and you’ll see it doesn’t compare. For starts most healers have balls aoe damage and if they have aoe damage it’s usually very minimal, example here you have no earthquake, no stormkeeper, no fire elemental, no mastery procs, no earth shock.
Yes your LBs may hit harder but the damage if the shaman in a situation that calls for it is formed of so much more, but in world quests yeah, you don’t really need more than a couple of Lava bursts.
Base values for resto shaman have been higher than base values for ele shaman for quite some time now.
Most of it is due to ele shamans mastery effectively increasing its base value.
Also ele shaman chain lightning hits 5 targets, while resto shaman chain lightning only hits three.
It’s been like that for quite some time, and quite intentionally so.
Remember azerite traits? Igneous Potential increased the chance to gain a lava surge procc, for all three shaman specs. Resto has had an extra 23% chance while ele and enha had “only” 18%
It’s also like that for many many other specs and spells.
Vivify, as an example heals a fair bit less as a mistweaver, than it heals as a brewmaster.
Anyway, back to the “ele spells deal less damage than resto spells”.
You’re only looking at the numbers. You’re forgetting, mainly, that the mastery of ele shaman, baseline, increases every spells damage that can procc it, by effectively 12.75%. (15% chance to deal 85% of the damage again)
So, while in resto spec, chain lightning deals 2.2k damage to 3 targets, in ele spec, it deals 1.2k damage, to 5 targets, with a 15% (+ mastery) chance of dealing 85% of that damage again, which means an ele shaman chain lightning deals 6.765 damage on average, while a resto chain lightning deals 6.600 damage on average.
Not to mention that ele shaman generates maelstrom using their skills, which allows them to cast earthshock or earthquake.
So in total, I do believe the issue lies with only looking at the numbers, rather than stuff such as combination of numbers, masteries and other abilities / passives.
I’m fine with Vivify’s number being higher in tankspec than it is in healspec and I’m fine with Chain Lightnings number being lower in ele spec, than it is in resto spec, even if it seems weird or unintuitive. In the end, as long as the dps spec has the highest dps out and the heal spec has the highest heal output, numbers don’t really matter.
I’ll add to this, that the one Class/spec I hate doing Callings on is my Elemental Shaman. It just feels horrible to do, it takes longer than any other of my Toons (WW Monk, Fire Mage, Prot Pala, S Priest), and I probably even die occasionally.
But when in Instances, it’s one of my favourites to play.
Yeah you see the same with healer values compared to DPS. Ex. Enh healing surge heals for higher base than resto, and brew and WW have higher vivify.
However they cannot spam the heal. Also in MW case the value is lower due to gusts of mist. Example as brewmaster my vivify heals for about 2.4k ATM at 178 ilevel as MW it heals for 1700ish plus 700 from my mastery and another 1.2k if I have RM on the target which is frequently the case.
