Hi, as a lifelong resto shaman I was pretty frustrated seeing the changes coming in Midnight. I honestly think that the new healing philosophy can improve the game, so some of the changes we’ve received are completely understandable, but I feel it’s overdone, some changes are nonsensical and in direct contradiction to the goals the devs posted. And since Blizzard asked the players to give their feedback I’ve decided to give it a go. I am not sure, if this is the correct place to post them, but I couldn’t find a better one. I highly doubt anyone from blizzard reads this, so consider this just a rambling of a player passionate about his favourite character in his favorite game.
First I’d like to discuss the removal of my two favorite spells in the whole game, the Cloudburst Totem (CBT) and Ancestral Protection Totem (APT). I’ve loved the CBT’s design since WoD and to this day it’s one of the most unique and versatile designs of any healing spell. The ability to convert aoe healing into a huge single target heal and vice versa is very cool, visually it’s very pretty and the endless possibility of playing with your CBT timings during raid encounters creates a lot of fun, that has kept me entertained even if the rest of the spec was weak, bland or broken. The path through the years was not easy, many times spells did not work with the CBT, sometimes they worked too well (Legion AG+CBT combo) but it was always fun. I fully understand, that there are people, who don’t like it and prefer using very bland but easy to use Healing Stream Totem. But for them in TWW Blizzard finally managed to solve this. In TWW they’ve been on a choice node and throughout the expansion, both choices have been very viable, both have been widely used so we see that this issue is resolvable and has been resolved. So removing it now, does not make much sense to me. It is not an additional button being a choice with HST, it’s just a option for players who want a more interesting gameplay, why is that an issue in any way?
Now, I understand that some of the talents, especially Farseer hero talents have been changed to work with HST, but that is not an unresorvable issue. With HST being 20s cd, we can have CBT on 40s spawning 2 ancestors, for example. And if the Healing Stream Totem is to be so important, that we need several talents for it, and further spec development can’t handle CBT as a separate spell, why not at least keep the fun part and bake it in via a talent, as many other effects have been baked in for every other healer this alpha. Just having a talent, that gives us “Cloudburst” buff for 10s when spawning a Healing Stream would be enough to keep the spirit and the gameplay that so many players enjoy, while keeping HST as the sole healing totem. It can be even a choice node with Living Stream, changing whether the HST healing is stronger at the start or towards the end.
Ancestral Protection Totem is also a great, unique, fun and flavourfull spell that I’ve enjoyed using immensily. I can’t count how many pulls I have saved predicting when someone was going to die, or just using is as a safety net in a difficult part of a fight. Because shamans don’t have any externals to save people, this spell has substituted that and removing it will again put shaman in a disadvantage compared to every other healer. It always felt great hearing from other players their compliments on me using this spell saving their lives(almost). If it is really that abhorrent to have this one more keybind on bar, I would at least suggest making it a choice node with Spirit Link Totem. They both serve similar purpose, but they have different uses and niches, so it would make perfect sense doing so.
Now I’d like to talk about the proposed talent tree. So what have we lost. CBT and APT I discussed earlier. High Tide and Tidebringer make sense if chain heal receives a baseline compensation. Undulation and Unleash Life removal simplifies the class, I think the specs will play fine without them, however changing Farseer ancestor spawn to HST does create some issues. Unleash Life’s 15s cd was perfect to line up with Ancestral Swiftness and you can hold Unleash Life buff or not use it at all and just use it to spawn an ancestor. With 20s HST and Living stream, you really don’t want to use your important healing cd just to spawn an ancestor. And you can only line them up every minute, provided you use HST on cd, which you might not want to. I think this change will impact farseer gameplay significantly for the worse. We lost wellspring, again I understand it’s one more button, but I also feel bad as I really like the spell. Considering Tidebringer is gone, we lost the ability to spread heal, outside of whispering waves and wellspring could have filed that niche a bit. Otherwise I am fine with other changes, Tidal Waves is a resto staple, but especially without Healing Surge it doesn’t do much for the gameplay anyway.
Probably the most noticible change is the removal of Healing Surge. From one point of view, it could work. Usually we’ve been using either surge or wave, not both. Surge for dungeons and raid spot heal, wave only lately with whispering waves or when low on mana. So I can see it working. However there are important differences, surge is quicker and heals more with the crit bonus. That crit bonus also works very well with other talents. If we lose that, we lose a lot if single target spot healing ability, which is really scary for m+ dungeons. The new wave is 2s cast, that is a lot, when you need to top multiple people up quickly. The other part is mana management. When we get low on mana we have an option to switch to waves. Now that won’t be possible. We get a talent for 15% cheaper wave. Wave is already quite cheap, but if this means that it gets more costly, then we can very quickly run into mana issues. Flat mana cost reduction talents for a single spell feels like a very clunky and uninspired solution. And we have THREE of them. It really feels bad, when you have to lose power so you can actually finish a raid encounter. Furthermore in m+ you don’t always know a priori how much mana you’re going to need. So not being able to adjust on the fly, having to predict “in this dungeon, with this group I’ll need cheaper chain heal…perhaps” that doesn’t sound like fun at all. Chain heal even has two talents that reduce its mana cost. Why?! We have water shield, why not use that to actively manage our mana, like mistweaver, paladins or druids can. Create a way to consume water shield charges so we can cast the spell more often that once per hour, maybe.
With Healing Wave discussion it’s important to mention Whispering Waves. I’ve hated the talent since it replaced Primordial Wave. I was hoping it would never be played, because to make a use of it, you have to just spam Healing Wave. It is in a complete oposite to the philosophy, that the new skill expression is for healers to use appropriate spells for appropriate situation (which I agree with btw.). But the currently used Whispering Waves build is a complete failure. It is just spamming wave after wave, often it doesn’t even matter on whom. The wowhead guide has 3 rows, use riptide, spam wave, use CBT and swiftness on cd. It is a giant failure in design and among the culling of our talents I was really suprised and disappointed to see that this abhorent talent was the one that stayed. Not to mention it’s just a copy of mistweaver core mechanic and now even druid is getting the same thing with regrowths. One thing worth mentioning, even though I hate the talent, it now becomes the only active way of active spread heal, which sounds really scary. The strength of this talent is closely related to Riptide, that also got some new talents. At this point I think it’s too much. For a time when discussing complexity in the game, often times the one example in the community was mistweaver’s renewing mist. There are 15 talents in mistweaver tree that involve renewing mist. The argument was, it is too complex, there are too many talents that work with it. Blizzard wants to cut down on complexity. Right know, in the alpha talents there are 17 talent nodes (21 talent points so 2/3 of the maximum) that involve riptide, 21 if we include Farseer and class tree.(Fyi it’s 7 for chain heal, 10 for healing wave and 7 for rain).
Next a few notes about the pathing. Moving Spirit Link Totem is in my opinion a bad change. Utility talents should not be in contention with throughput. We already have to spend TWO points in Ancestral Vigour, which is a pure utility/defensive node. Having Spirit Link in the way on the top side where we have to path through it is the only way for us not to feel bad about picking it (other than making it baseline). Moving it into the capstone area, where the most potent throughput talents are (or should be anyway) and compete with them, is a horrible design. Please move it back up, preferably as a choice node with AST. The capstone area as a whole has been pretty bad since Dragonflight, two-pointers Undercurrent, Wavespeaker’s Blessing even Ancestral Awakenig are lackluster, boring efects that I hoped would’ve been replaced with such a wide redesign of the spec. The positioning of Deeply Rooted Elements behind either Earth Shield talents or Spirit Link and 2 points in Wavespeaker’s Blessing makes also zero sense to me. I don’t like the spell, a strong random proc of healing doesn’t feel good when you want to be in control of your healing. Every time it procs when the group is full hp it just feels very bad and it also discourages picking First Ascendent to avoid losing the haste buff, which limits the otherwise cool choice of 2min vs 3min bur stronger cd. But nonetheless it is a strong talent that should not be buried as it is right now in Midnight. Overall I am not very happy with the changes in the talent tree, currently I see myself playing with literally only one resto-only totem, everything else is gone or in bad position or a choice against a much stronger cd and it really feels bad, when as a shaman I only get to use one totem.
The last change I’ve not mentioned yet are the new healing rain talents. I think it is good to help the spell, especially for Farseer the spell has been lackluster to the point of useless in most content, so brining it up is definitely a desirable goal. The new Downpour talents are for me the highlight in these talent changes and I really hope they will be playable. The longer healing rain makes sense from the standpoint of many players complaining on the spamming nature of the spell. However it can also be a detriment especially in m+ where we’re often moving quickly to the next pack and without the possibility of moving it (like with the Surging Totem) it’s debatable how usefull it will be in the end. Also Overflowing Shores has been an atrocious talent and with longer healing rain cd it will need a lot of work to make it worthwhile.
To sum everything up, I am very much looking forward to Midnight in terms of changing healing philosophy, addon changes, combat changes, it sounds very exciting. I am however very concerned about the resto shaman. I will be losing most of what I really love about the spec (especially CBT and AST), being replaced by very boring talents like -15% mana cost, +40% earth shield etc. I would have hoped that such a culling of talents would open up a design space for some new, interesting abilities, meanwhile we’ll be stuck with a shadow of the TWW resto shaman, which has been the most fun I had playing my shaman ever (I’ve been playing since WoD). I really wan’t to avoid another tier like this one though, where in raid we only spam Healing wave, but looking at the talent tree, it’ll be hard to avoid that. It really degrades the spec and it goes against the new direction Blizzard has posted, so I really hope, that it won’t end up like that. But it probably will, since we have been one of the least interated on specs since Dragonflight alpha, so I am not holding my breath. My ramble is over.