Resto Shaman design flaws

Classes Shaman
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Restoration Shaman is in a mostly good state currently, although there are a few glaring issues that have yet to be addressed. In this thread, I will provide an overview of these issues, and ways in which these issues can be remedied. I am going to focus on both the class and spec talent tree to begin with, and then discuss additional flaws with the current tier set bonus.

Disclaimer: I will not provide suggestions for the spec tree, as there are too many talents that need changing. I’m not here to write an entire thesis!

The Shaman Class Tree

  • Not enough talent points! Shaman is a class that brings a large range of utility spells to the table, allowing it to handle a wide variety of mechanics. This is all well and good, until you have to lose throughput to obtain said utility, which is usually what happens when something like Afflicted weeks come around, where we have to spec into both Poison Cleansing Totem and Improved Purify Spirit. Just one or two extra points within the class tree would go a long way, and would allow for more personal agency in what we choose. As such, I suggest that one or two of our two-point talents be reduced to a one-point talent (with the same value as the two-point version). Potential candidates could involve Surging Shields, Swirling Currents, Elemental Warding or Totemic Focus.

The Restoration Spec Tree

  • Dead talents. Unfortunately our spec tree has a few talents which are quite simply rubbish. As far as I’m aware, Flash Flood is not taken in any form of content and is simply a pointless talent. Torrent is another offender, being a 2-point talent for a completely negligible healing increase. Both Healing Tide Totem choice node talents are laughably bad, barring incredibly timing-specific encounters for Current Control. Speaking of choice nodes, Resonant Waters (yes, I had to search up this talent’s name) is just pitiful and is never even considered. Both Improved Primordial Wave and Improved Earthliving Weapon are sad to take. The former of these is only taken to get to Continuous Waves - the latter on the other hand is never taken. All of these talents need to be completely redesigned, as they are currently very unfun and unsatisfying to take, and we honestly do not have enough talent points to go around. Unfortunately Downpour and Wellspring are both never taken either, although that is due to tuning instead of any design flaws.

A special shoutout to Deluge as well. No other healer has a 2-point talent within their first 3 rows, yet Deluge is a 2-point talent that we are forced to take. This talent being a 2-pointer serves no purpose other than than eat up points.

Restoration Shaman Tier Set Bonus

  • Tidewaters sucks (for the most part). On most encounters, this extra bit of initial healing when we cast Healing Rain ends up being wasted as overhealing. This is because we are aiming to cast Healing Rain on cooldown for maximum healing, Deluge value, Acid Rain damage and 4pc stacks. The recent 40% buff to Tidewaters shows a disregard for this design flaw. Tidewaters should become a heal over time to help remedy this overhealing issue. Additionally, Tidewaters should fuel Cloudburst Totem, so that the overhealing is not entirely wasted.

  • Swelling Rain should only benefit Healing Wave. Swelling Rain’s value is found in combination with Primordial Wave, allowing for the chained Healing Waves to do some serious healing. However, mathematically speaking, using Swelling Rain stacks on Chain Heal provides far less healing, doing nothing but stacks. This is unfortunately unavoidable at moments of high healing. Additionally, having to use stacks on a Healing Surge to provide triage healing to someone who is at risk of dying feels bad, as it hinders the effectiveness of your next Primordial Wave.

  • Swelling Rain stacks do not last long enough. When Healing Rain expires, we have around 2 seconds to start casting another Healing Rain to keep our Swelling Rain stacks. This feels bad, and is an easy fix.

2 Likes
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if you wouldn’t have those then you would have even more

tree is quite ok, besides that primordial wave should just be deleted and living earthen weapon should be buffed by like 1000%

tier set is the real issue as it is just garbage for the most part

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Nice choice of transmog. Respectfully though, if you think that deleting Primordial Wave and buffing Earthliving Weapon is a good idea, then you do not have a strong understanding of Restoration Shaman. We need Primordial Wave, as without it our AoE healing will be reduced to simply Chain Heal spam. This type of gameplay is boring, unintuitive and incredibly mana-devouring. Earthliving Weapon on the other hand is completely passive healing. There is no gameplay there, we just sometimes do more healing. Seeing this buffed at the cost of Primordial Wave would make the spec feel horrendous to play.

4

Their 2 and 4 piece set bonuses are getting buffed next reset.

5

Well that is your choice
last season people didn’t even spec into improved pmw because it just sucked and wasn’t necessary.
I guess this season people spec it because of the tier set as you want to push out riptides anyways?

Chain heal spam is still more fun than pretending being a mistweaver throwing out a hot that doesn’t heal anything but need it to make another spell cleave you.
I think this is not fun design. I never needed it for healing output and rather play with earthen totem but that is my personal choice. I don’t play my resto this season really though.

Passive healing is what you want anyways so you can do more dmg. But generally I don’t like elw and neither primordial wave, just not a lot of other choices available.

personal opinion is though that pmw does not fit shaman and is not fun to play around. (on ele it is somwhat okayish though)

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Did you even read/understand my criticisms about the tier set?

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I don’t mind primordial wave, it helps to fill whole group with Riptides and gives some extra spread healing.

Though I wish it was a choice node between Primordial wave and Vesper totem (with SL lego effect going downwards). I really miss Vesper totem, I liked it a lot.

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Omg u hope they never bring vesper totem back i hated it even if they are bringing it back and buff it for 10000 % i even wouldnt take it

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It’s a matter of taste :slight_smile:

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It was fun yeah but I don’t think that they’ll give healers access to such a powerful dmg tool again. There was a lot of QQ in SL when resto shamys were rivaling DD’s in AoE situations.^^

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Hello Crackers! Nice post and nice suggestions.

However: I disagree with you in some details.

Too little utility talents. I agree that it would be nice to have everything, but I think there would be balancing issues. Compared to other healers we already bring to the table a lot of utility. It needs to be fair.

Dead Talents: I partially disagree with your statement. And it all boils down to Primordial Wave and the Tier Set bonus.

  1. Primordial Wave: I think that given the damage profile of M+ and Raid primordial wave is just a dumb, useless talent. I don’t take it, Tier set or not (which I will talk about later). Here is why:

Riptide itself is an instant cast heal that can have an initial heal of over 200k depending on mastery, but leaves a dot that heals maybe 10k/s at best. Having 2 instant charges that can get 1 individual from 1% health to 100% health in less than 1s is just insanely OP.

Instead, with Primordial Wave we are literally WASTING that OP skill in pre-ripting people so the have the dot for when the AoE comes. We use that for what? To spread 1 Healing Wave that is a 2s cast, and to have a Tier Set buff of 4-5% extra healing? Ridiculous.

Consuming riptide dot for 30% extra Chain Heal is just so much more HPS for AoE damage than spreading Healing Wave. And then, using Riptide for its intended purpose: Triage.

For those reasons, Primordial Wave should just be deleted. If I had to suggest an SL ability for raw HPS I would go Venthir for the chain harvest, that let me remind you folks what it did: It applied riptide to 4 people at once (the 200k instant heal I was talking about earlier).

That would be a VERY interesting talent, because if you take Primal Tide Core + Ancestral Awakening it gives for interesting synergy (the SL build basically) and would make the tier set more attractive.

  1. Tier Set: Its just garbage. Everyone knows that. So much so, that I perform better in some situations with OUT tier set than with it. Why? Because you cant choose what stats you get on the tier set. Simple as that.

This is what I would change realistically (they wont change the talent tree mid tier):

Remove the dependency on Riptide.

Just give us free Overflowing Shores talent. Easy. It heals 6 people for instant Y amount inside Healing Rain. Period. If you actually take Overflowing Shores talent as well, then you get double the effect.

Then buff our healing by X% for the people being healed inside Healing Rain. From 1% to 6%. The duration = the amount of time people are being healed inside the puddle. If people leave the puddle you loose the 1%. If someone walks in, you gain 1%. Up to 6% max.

Done.

Specific Skills: Flash Flood and Torrent

Given the discussions above, AoE is covered by Chain Heal and all its talents. Spot healing though is handled by Torrent and Flash Flood. Picture this: BIG AoE/spot damage and the SP is at 10% life. 1 riptide on him (with Torrent) gets him to 50% instant. Then: 1 Healing Surge/Healing Wave or 1 Chain Heal which will be almost instant thanks to Flash Flood.

If its a fight with a lot of rot damage (need to be mana efficient), having Healing Wave cast time < 1s most of the time (with Tidal Waves) or a practically guaranteed crit (with Tidal Waves) with an almost instant Healing Surge.

So NO. I dont agree that those are 2 useless talents. In fact, I would say otherwise. They are are actually good. With those 2 talents, you become a healing machine with OP AoE heals and super strong, instant cast spot healing.

You might disagree with me, and that is fair. But consider this: What talents are you replacing them with? Primordial Wave? What a joke…

Mastery: Miss-guided community

Let me be clear, I dislike Rshaman mastery and how it works. I would like to have it reworked into something better.

With that said, in DF blizz has clearly stated that they don’t want healers to do DPS. And while that drama unfolds, the whole community just copied the stat priority from Icy-Veins as if it was a religion.

The main drawback of mastery (compared to versatiliy) is that you loose DPS. And that is what the guides mean with “progression” and mastery. Progression means people tend to be at low health.

Which can be because you actually do +25 and above, OR, because you (and your party) are NOT perfect players and don’t interrupt absolutely EVERY single thing, or are running a dungeon with a perfect comp.

TLDR: Mastery is misunderstood. If you take into considering a non-perfect M+/Raid run with PuG/Friends, my 15k overall dps loss from not having that much Vers and DPS talents is 100% worth the extra HPS I get.

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