A Look Back at Restoration Shaman in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Restoration Shaman Writer, Theun, offers a retrospective highlighting Restoration’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Restoration Shaman’s Journey Through Dragonflight

Restoration Shaman has had plenty of highs and lows in Dragonflight. This article is going to take a look at how the spec performed throughout each of the 3 seasons thus far, how the spec evolved throughout the expansion, and what are some of the key things still missing that keep Restoration Shaman from being great. A quick disclaimer: a lot of this might sound overly-negative, but the spec has come quite a long way over the course of Dragonflight (for example, for the first time in ~7 years Healing Stream Totem is perfectly fine to take!), however in order to keep this as short as I can, I’m mostly looking at things that still need changing.

• In Season 1, Resto Shaman started off pretty weak in Raid, requiring multiple rounds of buffs (and a miniature “rework” if you’d like to call it that) heading into 10.0.7. In Mythic+ however, it was one of the most popular healers in high level keys. This was largely because you tried to bring Bloodlust in the healer spot, and after 10.0.7, Acid Rain was massively buffed, giving us a huge damage increase in an AoE setting like Mythic+.
• In Season 2, we were featured in the Race to World First with Method running a Resto Shaman for their World 3rd kill of Sarkareth! We were also quite strong in Mythic+ at the start of the season before the 10.1.5 update that introduced the “God Comp”, but obviously fell out of favor after the update (as did almost every other spec not featured in the God Comp). After the introduction of Augmentation Evoker, the need for Bloodlust quickly became redundant in a lot of keys, which was one of the few unique things we brought to the group – more on this later.
• Season 3 was certainly not a season for Restoration Shaman. Even though the spec has been performing quite well in Raid, it wasn’t featured on Mythic Fyrakk until World 55 by Consequence. Currently, Restoration Druid, Discipline Priest, and Mistweaver are the 3 most dominant healers in Mythic+. Larên is currently the #1 rated shaman at World 56.

As we sort of saw from Season 3, numbers certainly aren’t what’s holding shaman back from being a sought-after spec. We still bring a lot of good utility and cooldowns to a group like Ancestral Protection Totem and Spirit Link Totem, and our damage isn’t necessarily lagging behind either. So why is it that we struggle to find a spot in the meta?

Party/Raid Buffs + the Impact of Augmentation Evoker

It’s no surprise that one of the things holding back Restoration and Elemental Shaman from being great, is the fact that we’re one of very few specs that don’t bring a Party or Raid buff like Power Word: Fortitude, Devotion Aura, Mark of the Wild, or the many many others that are in the game. Unfortunately for Shamans, there’s only 1 spec that brings a Party/Raid buff, and that’s Enhancement with Windfury Totem. Without this, they probably also wouldn’t be brought in many cases, as we don’t really offer anything else that’s truly needed. Despite having some truly great cooldowns or forms of utility such as Spirit Link Totem and Ancestral Protection Totem (both of which are undeniably great in progression), or in Mythic+ where we bring countless AoE stops such as Thundershock and Capacitor Totem, or the beloved Wind Shear, it’s clear none of these are strong enough to warrant wanting a shaman.

Personally, I think Raid/Party buffs make the game far too restrictive, and decrease the possibility of classes that you could use in both Raid and Mythic+, but it seems we’re going down this road one way or another. If Raid/Party buffs are here to stay, then there’s no reasonRestoration and Elemental should be one of the few specs left out of the loop.

While Augmentation Evokers release didn’t replace our spot in groups (we are indeed different roles), the utility that they bring to groups did make some of our utility a bit less sought after. For example, Augmentation also brings a Bloodlust-like effect in Fury of the Aspects, as well as brings a knock-up on a low cooldown, just like Thundershock. This isn’t to say that Augmentation stole spells from Shamans, but rather that without a Raid/Party buff, there are other classes that can do exactly what we do – but they also give a Raid/Party buff.

Annoying Interactions

Resto Shaman has quite a few talents and buffs that interact with spells in an unexpected way, and has a few different cooldowns and/or buffs that are annoying to track (even with highly customized WeakAuras). Here’s a quick list of all of the things that sometimes make playing the spec a little bit more annoying than fun.

• We now have 3 different talents (Flash Flood, Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem, and Tidebringer) that reduce the cast time of Chain Heal such that the cast time is less than that of your GCD. This means if any of these buffs are stacked on top of one another (which is quite common if you have talented in at least 2 of them) the cast time reduction is wasted. Flash Flood and Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem by themselves bring the cast time of Chain Heal to less than that of the GCD, which creates many times where you’re just sat waiting on your GCD to finish before you can continue, similar to how Ancient Flame behaved until it was fixed.
• Undulation is a hard spell to track, even with WeakAuras, because you can only ever tell if you have the buff, not how close you are to the next one. This is exacerbated by the interactions with Primordial Wave (which I’ll cover last in this section).
• High Tide is another buff that warrants tracking, but is incredibly difficult to track properly as the WeakAuras we use constantly change and need updating. Having some way to track this in the base UI would be an incredibly helpful change, that way you could see if you have a High Tide proc coming soon.
• Cloudburst Totem doesn’t actually collect all healing that the shaman does. It collects healing from Ancestral Guidance but only collects the initial burst of Ascendance and not the redistributed healing. It also sometimes collects healing from things like set bonuses, but not all set bonuses – for example, it does store healing from our Season 3 set bonus, but not from our Season 2 set bonus. This actually plays a pretty big role in how good or bad the spec can be numerically.
• Primordial Wave has a lot of interactions, and every single one of them work differently. The general cadence that should buff the cleaved Healing Waves generated from Primordial Wave should be: Primordial Wave > Apply Buff > cast Healing Wave. Unfortunately, here’s how each of the buffs work if you wanted to try to buff the cleaved Healing Waves.
  1. Unleash Life: Cast Primordial Wave > Unleash Life > cast Healing Wave = Healing Waves are correctly buffed.
  2. Undulation: Cast Primordial Wave > make sure you’re at 2/3 on your WeakAura > cast Healing Wave = Healing Waves are correctly buffed.
  3. Master of the Elements: Cast Primordial Wave > Lava Burst > cast Healing Wave = one of the X number of Healing Waves are correctly buffed.
  Other old buffs that are now removed, like the old version of Swirling Currents behaved differently yet again. It’d be nice if all of these functioned as expected.

Talent Tree

There’s a lot to talk about here since the Talent Tree reworks were one of the big pillars of Dragonflight. These sought to give players a lot more control of the talents they want to play in any environment, and along with Tier Bonuses, were really the only things that could help “make or break” your spec throughout the expansion. While Restoration Shaman got a few talent changes in 10.0.7, they simply got rid of 5 talent nodes that had a 0% pick rate, and added in a few others (more on this in a later section). Since then, we really haven’t had any talent changes.

My opinion is that we still gain far too much power from simply selecting talents (since you need to fill out your talent tree to play anyway) but that’s another topic entirely. There’s a lot here, so strap in.

Top Section
We have a top-heavy tree, meaning we regularly spend 11-15 points in the top-most section of our talent tree. These 3 talents are the biggest culprits.

Middle Section
The middle section of our talent tree is where things start to become lopsided. Outside of Cloudburst Totem and the Earthen Wall Totem / Ancestral Protection Totem choice node, we don’t have anything we want on the right side of the talent tree. This leaves most of our points to be spent in things that buff Chain Heal, and this problem only gets exacerbated by the capstone area of the tree. It doesn’t help that Chain Heal has 4 different talents that massively buff the power of the spell, while Healing Wave and Healing Surge get 2 much weaker talents.

Capstone Section
This is the section of the talent tree that you’d ideally like to change around between the types of content you’re doing, or even on a boss-by-boss basis to better fit encounters, however since the introduction of Tidebringer in 10.0.7 (along with nerfs to multiple other talents), we’ve been pretty locked in on a single talent setup. I would love to see Wellspring make a comeback, but the spell is both currently a little clunky and undertuned. More options that aren’t Chain Heal favored would open up a 2nd viable talent setup that isn’t solely reliant on tier set bonuses to make them decent, and that’s what I’d aim to go for here.

• Primordial Wave is a “love it or hate it” talent for us. Many players feel the set-up time to spread Riptide around and then press Primordial Wave and then buff it with Unleash Life until you can finally cast your Healing Wave takes far too long for it to feel good. Instead of having Improved Primordial Wave buff the power of the spell, it’d be really nice to simply offer a bit of a Quality of Life improvement to the spell instead. Primordial Wave is a fantastic addition to the spec, and helps us with healing spread out targets, it’s just a shame a lot of players just dont enjoy it as much as others.
• While Tidebringer makes Chain Heal feel good to press, I think it’s done more harm to the spec than good. Tidebringer cuts down the cast time of the spell, and also doubles its jump range. Chain Heal is a true smart heal, so it will always try to do the most effective healing possible, and having a nearly infinite-range spammable smart heal be as powerful as it is makes a lot of your decision making redundant. Your problem solving button for most scenarios is simply to press Chain Heal, and while some may enjoy that, I’d love to see some power stripped away from Tidebringer so it doesn’t feel so locked-in.
• The High Tide / Primal Tide Core choice node is unbelievably one-sided. Primal Tide Core only has an ~8yd jump range, cannot apply if nearby players already have Riptide or are out of range, and unlike Shadowlands, applies on every 4th Riptide as stated, instead of every 3rd. Essentially, this means you should typically get ~2 extra Riptides per minute. High Tide on the other hand, massively buffs Chain Heal on a semi-controllable cooldown (mana expenditure) that gives you 2 buffed Chain Heals per proc. You typically expect 2-3 buffs of High Tide per minute, depending on the encounter. In Mythic+ you typically get at least 1 per trash pack that you do.
  There isn’t a choice here, it’s hard to push a “no Chain Heal playstyle” when Primal Tide Core is this weak compared to the other option.
• Wellspring was much better when you didn’t need to hit as many players as possible for it to do semi-decent healing. It’s not only numerically weak, but often times feels really hard to use (even in Raid), because you simply want to hit as many players as you possibly can, every single time it’s up. I realize the old “bug” was overpowerd, but if there was a way to make it do falloff healing instead of what we have now, it’d make this button feel much easier to get value out of.
• Downpour is weird, because it feels pretty redundant in our kit. We have a lot of grouped up AoE healing already, so this feels like it’s intended to make you press Downpour instead of Chain Heal. The issue, is it’s not better than Chain Heal when you factor in all of the other talents that buff Chain Heal while Downpour gets none of those.
• I don’t know of a single Restoration Shaman that actually likes Deeply Rooted Elements, it’s just something we sort of deal with because the other options aren’t very good. Giving it some bad luck protection was great, but it can still proc at inopportune times, and every Restoration Shaman knows it’s bound to proc right before the pull. This isn’t a proc like Awakening used to be for Holy Paladins where you could really use the proc – most of the value of Deeply Rooted Elements is simply in the initial burst that Ascendance does.
• Improved Earthliving Weapon is simply not a good talent. We already typically don’t take Earthliving Weapon, and giving yourself an additional 40% value for 2 additional talent points is horrible. The only benefit here is that it auto-procs on low HP, but that’s not something we care about in PvE at all, and would simply be useful for PvP for Purge protection. They could bake that in as a part of the base Earthliving Weapon and we still probably wouldn’t play it over a Buzzing Rune.

Tier Bonuses

Every single one of our tier bonuses had issues – whether that be tuning or gameplay related (or both). I’ll quickly talk about each of the 3 set bonuses and the problems I had with each of them. As the expansion went on, the tier sets became increasingly less-shaman. It doesn’t take a whole lot to make the spec feel fun (just look at the Season 4 set bonus of Shadowlands, for example), but when the tier bonuses are convoluted, it just pushes people away from trying to get much use out of them – and that’s exactly what we saw in Season 2 and Season 3.
Season 1

(2) While is active, your chance to critically strike is increased by 10%.
(4) Your critical heals have 215% effectiveness instead of the usual 200%.

The set bonuses in Season 1 are a little bit hard to criticize, as they were meant to be fairly bland and low-impact increases, and ours certainly fit that description quite well. The 2pc was actually quite strong compared to quite a few bonuses at the time, but our 4pc was very lackluster. This set bonus technically added a small amount of damage because it increased your Critical Strike at times, but it certainly wasn’t enough to lean into. If this set ends up being the pick for Season 4 I expect them to buff the value of the 4pc by quite a lot, but I can’t really offer much else because almost every specs bonus was just boring in Season 1.

Season 2

(2) When you cast Healing Rain, each ally with your Riptide on them is area healed by Tidewaters for (322% of Spell power).
(4) Each ally healed by Tidewaters increases your healing done by 1.0% for 8 sec and increases the healing of your next Healing Wave or Healing Surge by 10%, or your next Chain Heal by 2%.

This tier bonus took a lot of work to get right. The 2pc alone Tidewaters was buffed 3 different times on live despite numerically being quite good, as it was only contributing ~2% of our overall healing. In Raid, the issue with Tidewaters is that it often times did too much healing to the same targets every single time you dropped Healing Rain. This led to most of the healing being wasted, and unfortunately, none of that healing was stored in Cloudburst Totem either.
Mythic+ was an entirely different story. The top players often leaned into the heavy healing that Tidewaters did which let them dps between casts of Healing Rain and also allowed them to stack up the 4pc (which I’ll talk about in a moment). While the vast majority of players didn’t actively play around the set bonus like this, it was a common strategy by Resto Shamans at the higher end.

The 4pc was, in my opinion, nearly good – but they never adjusted it. Basically, the idea was to slowly stack up multiple stacks of Swelling Rain from dropping Healing Rain, and then once you had a good amount of stacks you’d fire off a Primordial Wave and do a ton of healing every ~30 seconds. Alternatively, you could use a high amount of Swelling Rain stacks to spot heal someone with Healing Wave or Healing Surge. The issue here, is the 4pc also buffed Chain Heal which meant you didn’t have any “filler” buttons to press if you were trying to build up the tier bonus. There were a lot of instances where you’d actively be building up to set up for a buffed Primordial Wave only for the stacks to get consumed on a Chain Heal because someone would have died otherwise. Even for good players who were actively trying to play around it, this interaction was frustrating, but despite lots of feedback, was never adjusted.

While I don’t PvP much anymore, I did want to give a quick shout to the PvP players here, as they actively went against using this set bonus for the entirety of Season 2, and instead opted to use crafted gear in many cases instead. Ground-based healing spells simply don’t often work well in PvP, and they often don’t even talent into Healing Rain, which meant this set bonus was completely useless for them. They do have access to Rain Dance as a PvP talent, however the set bonus was reduced by 50% in PvP, essentially keeping it from being used.

Season 3

(2) Chain Heal, Healing Surge, and Healing Wave mark their initial target with a Tidal Reservoir, causing them to receive 15% of all Riptide healing you deal for 15 sec.
(4) Riptide’s healing is increased by 25%. If Riptide is active on the same target as Tidal Reservoir, its heal over time effect has a 6% chance to create a new Riptide on a nearby ally.

Of the 3 tier bonuses, this one certainly has the most issues. The potency of the tier bonus changes drastically depending on your playstyle and talent choices, the style of healing it promotes is frustrating (more on that in a second), and more than anything, you don’t feel like a Restoration Shaman if you’re trying to play with it. The 2pc itself is pretty mediocre, and while the % increase to Riptide sounds really good, the best part of the bonus is actually in the small % chance to spread additional Riptides. There’s a few issues with this:

1. You can only apply Tidal Reservoir to 1 player at a time and can only realistically apply a small number of Tidal Reservoir in total since they only last 15 seconds.
2. In order to actually keep Riptide and Tidal Reservoir rolling, you need to constantly be healing players regardless of their current health. This means you are often intentionally overhealing players so that you can keep the cycle of spreading Riptides going. If you don’t do this, you will fall behind.
3. Chain Heal is a much more expensive applicator of Tidal Reservoir than Healing Wave or Healing Surge. If your goal is to apply as many Tidal Reservoirs as possible, then you can really only do that with Healing Wave or Healing Surge.
4. Spreading additional Riptides is much more beneficial in a Raid environment where there are lots of players compared to Mythic+ or PvP where you can already maintain 4-5 Riptides with ease.

All of this essentially led to most players ignoring the set bonus entirely, despite it being a numerically strong bonus (if you actively tried to play into it). Trying to spread HoTs on players and chasing those HoTs with single-target heals just simply doesn’t make you feel like you’re playing a Restoration Shaman, and actively deters players who have played the spec for years.

The 10.0.5 and 10.0.7 “Rework”

Restoration Shaman started off Dragonflight really weak. We didn’t have a lot of great talent choices and our damage/healing was lagging behind the rest of the healers. Acid Rain was buffed by a massive 120% in 10.0.5, giving us some much needed passive damage to keep up with the rest of the healers. Along with some changes to other spells such as Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt, our damage was actually very strong, and one of the reasons Restoration Shaman started to see a lot of success in Mythic+ after this update.

In 10.0.7 they took some talents that were redundant and made them baseline, like Water Shield, and outright removed multiple other talents like Nature’s Focus and The Ever-Rising Tide, which was an Essence from Battle for Azeroth that we never used. Healing Tide Totem and Mana Tide Totem also got some upgrades to them, despite being quite lackluster. Finally, they ended up adding Tidebringer as a spot to get to High Tide. I talked about this earlier in the talent section, but suffice to say that Tidebringer has been a staple of the spec since, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, a lot of the other talent tree problems like fact that our talent tree is very top-heavy, and we don’t have much choice in our capstone section with the significant nerfs to Wellspring (as well as other useless talents like Improved Earthliving Weapon being there) still leaves a lot of room for improvement.

The War Within Hero Talents

While we don’t know many of the details around what The War Within is going to bring to Restoration Shaman, we at least already know the names of the 3 different Hero Specs that Shaman is able to go. They are: Stormbringer, Farseer, and Totemic. We don’t know just yet which of these 2 Hero Specs that Restoration will have access to, but we can make some assumptions, and take a few guesses as to what these Hero Talents may be focusing on.

Farseer
If I had to take a guess, Farseer will likely be the one Hero Spec that Restoration will not have access to. Taking a look at some old Warcraft III stuff we can see that a Farseer Shaman had access to a few iconic Shaman spells like Far Sight and Chain Lightning but also a couple of spec-specific iconic spells for both Elemental and Enhancement with Earthquake and Feral Spirit. It wouldn’t shock me to see this focus on summons with Feral Spirit and Fire Elemental, or just sticking to those iconic Warcraft III spells I previously mentioned instead. Either way, if this does end up being one of Restoration’s choices, there’s a ton of different directions they could probably go if they wanted.

Stormbringer
My initial reaction figured that Stormbringer would likely be the Ele/Enh option, however after learning more about Farseer Shamans and taking a look at more of our kit, we have access to quite a few spells that would fit a “storm” theme. Healing Rain, Downpour, Wellspring, and really just about anything with the name “Tide” in it, all allude to different types of storms, and all would fit thematically with a Stormbringer Shaman. If I had to guess, having the Restoration part of the Hero Spec focus on Healing Rain while Elemental focused on Feral Spirit would both fit the theme, and also fill a similar enough part in the rotation to make sense.

Totemic
Of the 3 shaman specs, Restoration certainly focuses the most on totems, so I’m fairly confident that this will likely be 1 of the 2 Hero Specs that we will have access to. Cloudburst Totem or Healing Stream Totem are both used often on a short-medium cooldown, while Healing Tide Totem, Spirit Link Totem, as well as things like Mana Tide Totem and Earthen Wall Totem round up the rest of our regularly used totems. There’s a lot of different ways they could go with each of these, but none of them really seem to fit well with either Elemental or Enhancement.

I do need to add a quick section here to talk about a couple of other recent totems / totem buffs we had in Shadowlands, because while I myself hated them, people do continue to bring them up. Those 2 things were Deeptremor Stone which added an Earthquake effect to your Earth Elemental, and of course Vesper Totem which was one of our 4 Covenant abilities in Shadowlands. Players really enjoyed both of these for 1 simple reason: they did a lot of damage. You never ran Vesper Totem for healing, as both Venthyr and Necrolord were better in that department, but Vesper Totem did by far the most damage of the 4 options when you also equipped the legendary effect that buffed it. While this certainly is an option they could bring back, I don’t think this would be very healthy for the spec and I think a lot of players are reminiscing over the overtuned damage that the effect did, rather than the gameplay of dropping a totem every time it was available just so you could do a lot of AoE damage. Vesper Totem was also infuriating to play with as either Elemental or Enhancement as they don’t really want to be using healing effects very often, so that would be another big strike against adding it into the Hero Talent Trees for me.

About the Author
This page is maintained by Theun, Restoration Shaman for Fun Detected on Area52 (US). I’ve been playing the spec since Nighthold and managed to achieve up to world 4th playing for BDG in Shadowlands! I am also an MVP/theorycrafter in the Restoration Shaman specific Discord Server and Moderator in the Shaman Class Discord and am very active in both communities. For questions you can find me in the aforementioned discord servers or during my very rare streams on Twitch or babbling mindlessly on Twitter.