This is first the part of my feedback on the current state of resto shaman, the spec I’ve loved and played since WoD. I wrote one post before right at the start of Alpha. Not much has happened since, but now at least I have beta and can test stuff myself.
Ok, so since resto shaman has not received literally any changes in last four weeks, I assume that it is done and ready for Midnight. If that’s the case it is the worst designed spec that I’ve seen in my 15+ years of playing wow, it’s riddled in completely pointless talents and spells, which is a suprise, since not a lot of them are left from the hit it took in the initial pruning where it was pretty unanimously pointed out as the spec which had received the worst changes of all by the community (maybe next to fire mage). So I’ve logged on the beta, to get some data to demostrate why I feel this way.
Let’s start with the talent trees. The reworked tree did have some nice changes, like Therazane’s Resilience, but there are so many 2 point nodes and “mustpick” nodes, that there is almost no freedom to choose any talents. For example if I look from the dungeon perspective, I have to take everything on the left (8 nodes), Lava Burst, Nature’s Fury, Elemental Warding, Totemic Focus, Totemic Surge, Instinctive Imbuements, Spiritual Awakening, Enhanced Imbues, Brimming with Life, Nature’s Guardian, Spirit Wolf, Wind Shear, Astral Shift, Planes Traveler, Gust of Wind, Therazane Resilience, Capacitor Totem are all necessary throughput/survivalbility/movement talents that you have to pick or path through (19 points). That leaves you with 7 points to actually pick. Winds of Alakir is 6% movement speed which is quite strong, but costs 2 points for some reason. You have to spend another 2 points for Static charge, to get 20s cd reduction on Cap totem, that we previously had for 1 point. Furthermore you have to path to Totemic Focus either through Wind Rush, Earth ele or Hex, that’s another 2 points. So that leaves you with 1 point to reasonably choose. At this point, we can’t dispell curses, we don’t have purge, we can’t even do aoe dmg since we haven’t picked chain lightning yet… It’s too much, too many mandatory 2 pointers, too many pointless “mustpick” talents like Spiritual Awakening or Nature’s Fury.
Okay, how does it look on the spec side? Pretty much the same, very little to actually choose, you have to pick everything riptide, healing wave and healing stream as those are basically the only 3 spells that we’ll use. Good thing is that you can avoid everything Healing Rain related, so you accidentally don’t push that button. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a Rain build, focused on stacked healing and fat downpours, but those talents are so weak compared to Riptide, Healing Wave+Whispering Waves stuff, that I can’t see them justified in any way. In similar fashion I don’t see why to pick any of the chain heal talents, chain heal is so anemic, it’s not even funny. More on that in Part 2. In rough count I see 15 nodes that I don’t see myself picking in any circumstance not in raid not in m+. Very pointless indeed. Now for totemic, we’ll have to pick at least some of them, but I would be quite suprised if totemic is ever competitive, but maybe I underestimate the power of its healing stream buffs. I definitely want to test that out. But the plain 25% boost to healing wave and riptide buffs from Farseer seems pretty hard to beat. The 5s Riptide with Farseer reduction talents is just too much. You have to spam riptide like crazy to keep from overcapping. The shaman is literally try to fit spells (95% of them healing waves) in between riptide spam. It’s quite mobile, I give it that, but it really feels horrible.
But why does that matter? If my whole party is covered in riptide, why should I care about overcapping? Well, because TWO of our strongest talents are about random procs from riptide casts. I am not aware of any other healer, that has this much potency tied to random procs. The art of healing is about learning the damage patterns and react or prepare accordingly. None of which can be done with random procs. At least you can hold one of them, the Stormstream totem, but with that, you can’t cast any healing streams and you risk losing another proc. Everybody agrees that having to hold procs feels terrible. As the result, if there are healing intensive parts of a fight, we literally might be forced just to pray for a proc or our group just dies. This design could work, if we have some cds to help us overcome the moments, where we are unlucky. Cloudburst totem was doing just that, managing High Tide also. But we don’t have those any more, we lost one more cd in Healing Tide, so basically we have 3 min ascendance (or 2 min, depends) and that’s it. I am very much looking forward to depleted keys because of bad rng, it’s the best. Maybe my sarcastic tone isn’t helping, but it is really frustrating to see these sloppy designs, often in contrast to the actual philosophies that Blizzard itself posted, that are not being interated upon at all (while other specs receive rework after rework every single patch note) and to see that on the class, that I want to play more than any other and it’s getting really hard to be excited for Midnight, which in every other aspect looks like a banger expansion.
