Ti'tahk, the Steps of Time

Hi guys

My 10 man casual (currently 2/8HM in DS, but we only raid a couple of hours on weekends) guild was lucky to have this staff drop the first week, however the two caster dps in guild did not want to pick it up to use as one already has legendary and the other has nearly completed it. Thus they designated it go to me so I could buff everyone else. Fair enough I guess. But I have found myself wondering though whether the proc is worth it for certain hardmodes, where people are spread out and/or moving often, and healing is quite intensive.

Here's my armoury link http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/thaurissan/Zeebubs/advanced

As you can see I had to drop HT12 4 piece in order to bring my haste back to over the 2005 cap (the weapon I was using before was Heroic Rag mace w/ Heroic Shan OH). I probably should equip the raid finder T13 helm I picked up this week but I'm still mulling that over at present (next raid isn't until Saturday morning so I have time to figure it out). All up I think I went from pushing about 19 mastery down to my current 17.66, and lost about 1% crit. Though, I'm pretty sure I gained a good chunk of spell power.

I'm wondering if the community has any thoughts on using this staff over the MH/OH combinations available in DS, whether you guys feel it's more situational if I want to buff 3 others plus myself (i.e. close together fights such as Ultrax, Spine, vs fights where procs will be wasted such as Zon and Yor), or if the personal buff of 1928 haste is pretty win.

Apologies if this post is TL;DR material for some people

MH/OH combos usually yield more stats then a staff. Thats the way it always has been. I know the mace off Madness is nice, especially since it does not seem to have a limit to how many people it can heal in the cone. Its definitely something you'd want to pick up when you get the chance. I think the mace with an offhand would yield better results as a healer.

If you want to stick to buffing the raid, the staff won't kill you.

For what it's worth, I'm using a raid finder version of the Maw from Madness that I picked up to toy with (I replaced my heroic Rag mace), and the mace at the lower iLevel is ~5% of my healing each raid. Our priest with the normal version of the mace has it run between 5-10% of his healing each raid. That's a fair bit of "free" healing.

Even after the small int loss and the ~100 spell power loss taking the raid finder "downgrade" I've been happy enough with it to keep using it, and intend to upgrade to the normal version when I have the chance.

We've done H Morchok on 25s, and are currently working through Zon'ozz - and my experience so far has been that any amount of extra healing is extremely beneficial (although, I've heard the Maw proc can cause issues on the purple ooze on HM Yor'shaj. I think I'd probably let a DPS toy with the staff and go for the (seemingly) higher throughput mace. It's hard to turn down healing that doesn't cost my blue bar anything!

Our Holy Pally had picked up Maw on this week's clear and after looking at his logs from the couple of FL bosses we did after I didn't think it could pull those kind of numbers (it was only averaging about 2% of his healing), though reading the tooltip closer, the key must be good positioning to make full use of the effect. Thanks for the info on this

I actually raid on a second druid (same name but Worgen, I missed being alliance), so I hopefully I'll be able to pick up Maw on one of the two before long and be able to compare things to help with my decision.

Unfortunately I don't feel like I made good enough logs for myself to scruitinise this week because I was literally being sick throughout our raids all weekend (it's a miracle we managed to kill two new hardmodes!).

How are you finding healing H. Zon'ozz out of interest - it's pretty brutal on 10 man, is it really challenging on 25's as well?

Well, part of the reason that the mace is powerful for druids (and I believe pretty insance for resto shaman as well) is that it has a chance to proc from each tick of our HoTs, so it's easier for us to maximize procs with it. (Here is my log from last night, if you are interested: www.worldoflogs.com/reports/o6yyms86w58hsdqj/details/0/ - it's many Zon'ozz wipes and a N Zon'ozz kill, Yor'shaj kill and Hagara kill, I'm not sure why it's showing multiple pulls for some of these, something seems a little off, but the kills are accurate).

As for healing Zon'ozz...it's painful. I am pretty consistently struggling with keeping people up during the black phase. In my opinion, it really puts a spotlight on the current issues with our toolkit in that the encounter requires significant burst healing - and rejuv, nerfed WG and SM just aren't sufficient to effectively keep people topped up with the amount of damage seen in that phase.