About the Author
This page is maintained by Niseko, Restoration Shaman for CyaThursday on Stormscale-EU, co-creator, author and theorycrafter for Ancestral Guidance, admin in its Restoration Shaman specific Discord Server and Moderator in the Shaman Class Discord. Also responsible for the Restoration Shaman sections of WoWAnalyzer and contributed towards Simulationcraft to make simming Restoration Shaman DPS possible. For questions you can find me on the aforementioned discord servers or during my mute streams on Twitch.
Restoration Shaman and the Dragonflight Launch
Once again, Shaman launched in a rough state at the start of an expansion. The early preview of out new talent tree showed a lot of promise and much potential to become great – but afterwards was left untouched for almost the entire Beta cycle, leaving it feeling a bit unfinished and lacking any real number tuning. With only one iteration on the Spec Tree and largely ignored community feedback, Restoration Shaman ultimately launched in what I’d still consider an unfinished state, lacking both healing and damage in all types of content. Unless otherwise noted, when it comes to talents I will be talking about the Restoration talent tree for the rest of this article.
Patch 10.0.5 – Tuning Up Damage
With 10.0.5 the damage was tuned up quite a bit, especially of Acid Rain (which was already buffed multiple times before this point). Now you can be contributing decent and consistent passive damage in raid fights by using Healing Rain on the melee camp, keeping up with the damage other healers contribute – but you have to give up healing potential in the form of Overflowing Shores. For Mythic+ this change combined with other damage buffs put Restoration Shaman in a very strong position. Not much was done outside of damage contribution, however.
Patch 10.0.7 – Talent Tree Changes
The next patch addresses a few core issues of the current Restoration Shaman spec. Healing Tide Totem and Mana Tide Totem received secondary nodes, allowing stronger cooldowns, although not being too impactful at the current tuning. Only Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem seems fine and gives a good reason to not forget about Mana Tide Totem. Healing Tide Totem is still quite weak compared to other 3 minute cooldowns (even considering that you can use other spells during it).
Right Side Talent Roadblock
Nerfing Wellspring will make it a hard pick, and it already was not really taken in M+ or PvP. It’s stuck behind a couple okay but not great talents, which both require multiple points of investment – actually most of the right part of the tree is lackluster and most of the reason we even get deep into that part is the highway towards Cloudburst Totem and Earthliving Weapon. There is quite a few talents that either are very situational, boring, weak or otherwise great to pick up that block pathing to more interesting talents, highlighted in red:
Avoiding these, apart from picking Mana Tide Totem for the 2 choice nodes after and Water Totem Mastery as part of the highway, leaves us with a very left heavy tree with a lot less flexibility than it looks like, and with the changes in 10.0.7 that seems to leave us with less talent variation than we already have.
Some Good News
Some of the good parts to highlight is the removal of Nature’s Focus (useless) and Ever-Rising Tide (hard to apply) and the buffs to the “improved” talents (Improved Primordial Wave and Improved Earthliving Weapon, which helps but still doesn’t give much of a reason to be picked unless you want whatever is after them. Water Shield moving to be a baseline spell instead of a talent is great, and removes one of the weird fluff points that you only pick because you must for the talent after.
Tidebringer is a fantastic addition as there is an endless amount of fights where the added range alone will be massive, and allows us to lean heavily on Chain Heal for fights where we never would have been able to before, due to range restrictions making it hard to use (think Fetid Devourer, Halondrus). It even helps on fights that don’t have a huge spread, as the longer range allows the spell to reach all the low health targets, increasing mastery efficiency, aka throughput. The worry here is that it is so useful that it might just become default loadout, incentivizing using the other Chain Heal modifying talents as well and potentially never change out of them again. A core build to stick to is great, but competitive alternative playstyles or builds is what you want for the class to really be enjoyable. Picking up Tidebringer you might as well go for High Tide, and at that point you’re only a few points away from just picking all the Chain Heal stuff 😉. It seems like they will be good regardless if it is a fight that is Chain Heal-spam friendly or if its only occasionally as using the spell less often will mean you combine all the modifiers together, picking up low health people all over the raid regardless how spread they are (considering each jump with Tidebringer is 1 Evoker worth of healing range, and with no drop-off due to High Tide).
A Overstuffed Top Tree
Back to the less good, one core issue seems to be getting out of the top part of the Restoration tree in the first place. For raiding you currently want to be using 11 points there already (out of the required 8), 13 if you want Ancestral Vigor during progress, and for M+ you’re basically looking at 13, which limits what you can do for the rest of the tree.
Removing or shuffling some of that bloat could help a lot, or at least it would be a great first step. Something like Deluge does not need to be 2 points and Water Totem Mastery is more of a fluff talent in the way rather than anything tangible that you pick up for what it does.
Ancestral Guidance is being changed to properly interact with Cloudburst Totem again – well, not quite as it used to in Legion, but good enough. The healing Ancestral Guidance will now get stored in Cloudburst Totem, which especially in combination with Ascendance (and other potential synergies) creates a potent and impactful healing burst which is fun to set up and use. This is probably the most exciting change with real positive impact.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, 10.0.5 addressed Restoration Shamans damage issues with the Acid Rain changes. Even with the nerf to it in 10.0.7, it will still be a strong talent choice if you’re looking to add in more damage. 10.0.7 seems to remove a few of the talents that we never took, though it needs to remove a few more if they want to give Restoration Shaman some talent build diversity. The change to Ancestral Guidance gives us 1 big cooldown, however it’s unlikely we’ll be grabbing the new nodes under Healing Tide Totem unless they seem some buffs, as they’re currently pretty weak.
These changes should be enough for good spots in raiding rosters with no real major issues seeing play and being brought to bosses. A Restoration Shaman is not getting anything to make it mandatory, but that would not be healthy anyway. Without raid testing evaluating these changes in terms of “real wold” power is difficult of course, but it does look promising so far.
