Hello everyone. As a classic veteran, I want to try this expansion. I bought epic edition recently.
I always felt shamans were only useful in
raid situations where you just cast your healing rain and just “blend in” with the raid with your healing.
5 men tough content only when you have it on farm status and want to buff your allies with totem so you can clear it faster.
I played Resto Shaman in Cataclysm, which was just brilliant - Healing Rain has always been beautiful. After watery chain heal edition, Shaman became my #1 class.
The problem however is, that we just lack good healing spells and mobility. Chain Heal and Healing Rain work well if the party is stacked. Do you guys remember TBC expansion? Priest had 9 heals, shaman had 3. And priest spells required no stacking from party too. I feel we are still handicapped like that.
If I use spirit link totem, then I have to healing surge even faster, as party most often don’t or can’t stack.
So then we have to mechanically reach out for some odd cooldowns, to save the party, because main spells are just not useful enough.
Certainly as a priest veteran, it feels weird to rely on cooldowns during every pull.
Are Shamans just undertuned?
I am not gonna bother asking about pvp, tried it a few times, awful…
P.S. The reason I am asking this is being a healer is always stressful - unlike dps who can afk for 5 seconds and nothing happens, 1 our mistake costs the party and shamans feel undertuned too.
As a resto shaman main since vanilla, throughout the years i have engaged in both PVE and PVP. TBC was a complete different play style as we used to stack haste and just spam chain heal. But now given the extra spells and tidal waves, it has given a new element of shaman healing which was very welcoming.
In raids and M+, its important to always have your riptides active, especially as you have the talent to have 2 charges of riptide. Additionally making use of Tidal Waves with Healing Wave is very efficiency, while at the same time your cloudbourst totem is generating healing.
While shamans have never been good at moving and healing as we are more of caster healers, it has surely improved over the years.
Yes, rsham gameplay is archaic, just from another era of mmorpgs. 2.5 sec casting Chain Heal doesn’t fit modern WoW. By the time you end the cast the raid is topped and your mastery brought nothing.
It’s great in PvP with 50% speed talent and 100% aura though. This is how it should be in PvE too. I enjoy rsham in BGs since Legion, but without these PvP talents I wouldn’t bother playing it. Just too slow and clunky.
Uuuugh what? You’re being nice so I can’t tell if you’re trolling, but one of the reason shaman healers are so meta in m+ right now is their base spells are straight up overtuned.
Healing surge heals for 248% of spell power, while Flash of Light heals for 168% and Flash Heal for 203%. Healing Surge is further amplified by 20% due to Earth Shield if you’re tank healing, 25% on any target due to Swirling Currents, im not going to even get into Undulation and Mastery, or the 30% extra you feed into Cloudburst. Just the baseline spell is one of the strongest quick heals in the game. It literally takes me 1.3 sec to bring a similarily geared dps from 3% hp to 100%. Highest Healing Surge crit ive had is 55k when people run around with 35k-ish hp.
Yes, resto shamans and holy priests are the only healers left that have the same playstyle they had in vanilla, that is simple healing, without a twist. We dont heal by dpsing like disc, we dont have to melee things like paly, we don’t have 90% of our heals being HoTs like druids, none of that. We just have a few basic healer tools (riptide to spot-heal, es to tank-heal, quick heal, slow heal, aoe heal) and we can play to very competitive levels with just those, because their numbers are very big.
Yeah, they upgraded single target healing from trash to decent. Still rhams lack mobility and aoe. Healing Surge being OP doesn’t make the spec comfortable to play.
I’m a raid healer primarily and I cast Healing Surge once a week, so I didn’t notice much difference. Still a slow, hardcasting and immobile healer. Glad for people who do keys.
Thank you for responses guys. Healing Surge is fine of course, but it is the only reliable heal when party is not stacked for whatever reasons.
I am thinking of just getting lot of single target heals, like Unleash Life, so that when 3 party members get low, I cast riptide on one, Unleash life on other and Healing Surge on third. Seems decent.
Obviously raid healing is much “better”(easier) - just cast healing rain, spam chain heal and relax.
eeeh your spell healing 60% more than other classes’ IDENTICAL spell is “from trash to decent”. okay.
rshams lack aoe between 0 cd chainheal, healing rain, cloudburst, healing tide totem, and ascendance. Eeeeh true, them paladins and their <5 target heal every 10 sec, only to targets right next to you> are destroying the aoe healing balance.
rshams with their 0 cd infinite duration 30% speed increase lack mobility. also true, how will we ever catch up with paladins and their 45 sec cd 3 sec duration horsies? or priests and their literally 0 baseline mobility?? They can even talent into feather and have 5 seconds of what we have indefinitely! how are poor shamans supposed to compete?!?!! How many of those super mobile healers pull competitive healing WHILE moving? Because resto shamans are the only healer in the game that can keep healing while moving like nothing happened for 15 sec every 60 sec. Thats a 25% uptime on being able to cast while moving.
IDK how the top 3 healers in m+ are shamans, theyre probably hacking.
IDK why every single guild in CN world first race was using several shamans on almost every boss kill, theyre probably memeing and trying to flex on other guilds by killing bosses while using the weakest healer in the game.
Idk what game youre playing, but in wow rshams are in an excellent spot in every single department you can possibly think of. You can tell yourself youre playing a weak spec all you like. You can ask for buffs on the forums all you like. This is why no developer ever takes forum suggestions seriously. This. Exact. Post.
It’s actually funny about mobility. I’m always the last running in a dungeon unless there is a priest. Cuz now everybody has 2 spints.
Spamming Surge, Surge, Surge, Riptide, Surge, Surge, Surge is a viable option, I just don’t find it that fascinating. I’d rather have twice faster Chain and Rain.
If tomorrow they nerf Healing Surge rshams will go mid tier healer with 5% M+ participation like it was in BFA.
Even though 99% of our healing casts are Healing Wave?
This forums is really starting to give me second hand brain damage
I’m glad, because Healing Wave is far superior to Healing Surge. Healing Surge heals less, costs far more mana, and doesn’t even heal as much as Healing Wave even with the Tidal Wave buff. Only time you should be casting it is when you somehow run out of Tidal Wave buffs, and someone is literally about to fall on the floor dead.
As far as Chain Heal goes, unless you’re Venythr it’s not your go-to, even in raids. You should be using Chain Heal to boost up your Cloud Burst totem for incoming AoE damage.
To me rsahaman feels extremely powerful right now. Healing wave healing everyone with riptide was a very welcomed buff to us. Mobility is good. Spirit link totem, cloudburst totem etc are very fun to use and play with. And the HPS is just phenomenal.
Otherwise you keep using Riptide, Healing Wave, Healing Surge in conjunction with Cloudburst Totem. Healing Rain is only relevant when the people are and keep stacked. Spreading Riptides and Primordial Wave followed by a Healing Wave is superior to Chain heal. Overall the Restoration Shaman is fine at its current state for raiding and dungeons.
You know the problem is not that we dont have spread AoE healing spells, the problem is that people if they see a resto shaman they think we are gods however they dont stack or just dont bother to stand in the healing rain or the spirit link totem, shamans are masters of AoE healing spells if the party stacks, best example is last boss of pf.
Tidal Waves gives 20% less cast time to Healing Wave but 40% more critical strike chance to Healing Surge. At reasonably high critical strike values it’s often more valuable to cast Healing Surge instead. Healing Wave is often too slow when group damage comes in.