Let me start by saying I love my class, the spells, lore, everything. In previous expansions it felt on par with other healers but in Dragonflight something has gone wrong and it hasn’t been addressed in any of the updates or even acknowledged as of yet by blizzard.
I have consumed much of the content so far and the issues I personally have experienced are as follows:
Mythic+
I have managed PUG groups and get all dungeons to +10 but the damage is bursty and there is a lot of movement, shamans have a lot of tools to combat this provided people group up but it isn’t always possible, the healing of shamans needs slightly tweaking to make them more effective.
All other healers bring stronger utility and damage. Due to the weak healing, I find myself having to focus solely on this whereas in other expansions I could help dps a lot more.
The above makes it punishing to find groups.
Raiding
I have managed to get curve (finally!) but as with mythic+ grouping shamans do not provide the utility/healing that other classes can thus making it difficult to find/get into groups.
How to improve
Improve healing effectiveness, the toolkit is there it just isn’t strong enough.
Improve damage as healer, change some of the spells to be more useful.
For example, we have the elemental orbit talent that allow you to use two shields. On fights when you want to do more damage you could make it so that all of your healing spells do a small portion of nature damage by using water and lightning shield together (synergy with water conducting electricity) and it would make it so healing rain would damage as well as heal but you wouldn’t have to talent into it (keep the range and instant first heal though!)
Another option is if people stand in healing rain their weapons armour is coated in water and they themselves act as a conduit for the lightning shield and do a small portion of additional damage, much like windfury and bringing more utility/reason to want to take a restoration shaman to your raid/group.
I’m sure there are plenty of other things that could be changed or improved upon but that’s my two cents.
As someone who switched to Druid, yes, yes i am serious about the following:
Echo of the Elements:
give back that missing charge for riptide!
include “Tidal waves can now stack up to 4 times”
Healing Rain
remove cast time
remove cooldown
only one rain can be active at any time
Make choice nodes actual choices
They should enhance a given skill in different ways to either improve the base version or alter them in the way they work
They should let you pick between two skills which compete for something of equal value
This is NOT how it should be:
Stormkeeper against Ancestral Wolf Affinity is a poor joke at best
Master of the Elements against Refreshing Waters is an odd option
Give nodes more value/ overall more synergies/ meaningful pathing:
looking again at Echo of the Elements…
healing rain looks like not part of the kit, as nothing interacts and synergies with it
Examples:
dull copied from Undulation, not additionally put into Undulation but an individual new talent something like: “Every third Healing Wave or Healing Surge heals all targets within Healing Rain.”
inspired by Power of the Archdruid, something like: “Riptide cast on an ally within your healing rain has a 40% (or whatever seems balanced) chance to splash, applying itself to 2 (all / or whatever seems balanced) additional allies within your healing rain.”
So… playing druid, i got the impression blizzard struggled when they gave both restoration specs almost the same ability: efflorescence and healing rain.
Now either additionally to what i already mentioned above or without them, one way to make them different could be: efflorescence is “rooted” and stationary while rain is “mobile”.
The idea is:
While the druid is the one who can move and still cast the majority of their skills, their healing circle stays in place.
While the shaman is the one who needs to stay in place to cast the majority of their skills, their healing circle can move. Just like a cloud, a cloud a shaman can command because of elements and stuff…
Smart targeting: If there was at least one tank within the circle when initially cast the rain will follow the most injured tank, if there was no tank within the circle when initially cast the rain will follow the ally who was the most injured at that moment and if cast at their own position it will follow the shaman.
Regarding “meaningful pathing”:
Ancestral Awakening does not even include chain heal, yet it leads to High Tides which only buffs chain heal
(Okay, on PTR you can also path through Tidebringer, but don’t they kinda contradict each other if you line them up together?)
I’m having the same feeling and impression.
The idea around double shields giving additional benefit depending on their combination might sound cool on paper but how will it be in action?
You have to constantly track the current combo or at least be aware of it.
How do you change the combo, each shield separately?
The first shield gets removed when a new one is applied.
So if you made a small mistake in a fight because several things happen and placed water first, than earth because you needed what ever water+earth gives you
and now you want to contribute more damage,
you would have to cast lightning which removes water
and cast water again
to get from earth+lightning finally to lightning+water.
So you want to switch to deal more damage but already had to use two global cooldowns to get there, depending on how long you can maintain the combo before you might just need the earth shield back onto you you might have been better off to not juggle at all.
I mean, when talented into elemental orbit you could receive something like 3 stances, one for each possible shield combinations but iirc not having to switch between stances anymore was originally something warriors were glad about, so i am not sure if something like tracking and switching between stances is something others than druids with their shapeshifts may enjoy tbh.
Wow, how old is this. Right now after all the tuning only evoker and rdruid actually outperform shaman. It’s crazy how much they buffed rsham. I think acid rain might get tuned back a bit because it currently does insane amounts of damage.
resto shaman is more of a dps than a healer currently.
it works fine if your group is good, but if people constantly stand in trash you have trouble picking up the large hp pools. unfortunately some dungeons will do heavy aoe dmg 3ven without bad p3ople and you can only rotate your big cds and hope people use def cd and they are up for the next aoe again
I did love how it played in SL with the 4 set (free chain heal for dropping some totems) and vesper totem with 2 charges of cloudburst on a 30 second CD.