Hey there,
I’m a Holy Paladin main by heart and have recently been playing Shaman. I like both of them, Paladin still a bit more if I’m being honest, but I just want to hear why I shouldn’t play Resto Shaman instead of the good stuff.
because resto is currently the worst healer.
crap output and crap mana
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What range of content are you talking about?
M+ < 20 or M+ > 20? Mythic raids or heroic raids?
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Play it, it’s fun, and the gap isn’t big as people think, my God wow community thinks that if it isn’t S+ it’s basically dogwater and unplayable, still the best pug healer due to wild amount of multi mob cc u have, which is very needed in all of the dungeons.
Holy paladin vs restoration shaman well there isnt much difference in it. Except they have had a huge nerf to mana regen. Mana is the biggest issue of restoration shaman. But performance wise i dont see a huge difference between them tbh. Paladins have way more usefill utility because tbh totems of shamans are non existand. I like shaman way more is more fun to play immo.
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Resto shamy is ok I’d say. We don’t have the best output but our utility is generally good. In my experience so far this’ll be a control heavy M+ season. A lot of trash groups are easy as long as you can stop multiple casts in bigger pulls which is something resto shaman is good at. (multi stun and knockup with thunderstorm) Short cd ranged interrupt, purge, totem support for tanks to help tanks with kiting is also good. It’s just not easy to get into all of this if you’re new to the class/spec.
An important answer to your question - if you mainly pug, much easier to get into keys as the meta after a certain level (have swapped from shammy to this priest this season mainly for that)
Sure, “bring the player, not the class” and all that but, at the end of the day, whether you are meta or not does matter for pugging
If you want to try a new healer, have you considered disc priest or resto druid? 
Can in fairness notice the crap mana. The crap output though seems fair to me due to how much output you can release to your group overall. Chain heal isn’t great don’t get me wrong, but in small group enviroments it seems decent enough.
Reply to Uda (Still figuring out the forums, will format it this way lmao)
Any range, just asking for overall thoughts on the class!
Reply to Casymi
I’m not looking for an S+ character, and will still be remaining on my Paladin regardless. I played the class before the post was just asking for opinions from actual Shaman players. Can definitely see how it succeeds in multi heals though!
Reply to Himmler
As much as I do enjoy Paladin, I can’t help but be jealous of Shamans vibe with water healing. Chain healing is very satisfying to use in dungeons, shame it eats my mana so much!
Reply to Aridius
Fair point in fairness. I’m not so trying to find a new main or anything, instead just trying to understand each healer better for general knowledge. I have tried Priest and do really like the class, just found it a little too squishy for my liking. Druid I haven’t tried yet, though I find it weird that it can be a healer since its main point is the morphing into animals? I will eventually try it for sure, but not sure my own opinion on it yet lmao!
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If the mana wouldn’t be so terrible and I could spam heals, the output wouldn’t be so bad.
Chain heals output is great if you waste 4 skillpoints on it and keep the procs for high dmg intakes. outside of that chain heals seems to heal for exactly nothing at all whatsoever and it is really only great with cloudburst up to pad the totem.
unfortunately it feels like I am oom after 5 chain heal casts and I seem to not recover mana at all.
I mean nowadays the people don’t let you drink EVER in a dungeon, so I feel my output is bad because I need to preserve my mana so badly.
Generally rsham output is so low because they have several CDs to make up for it, which is good when you have people avoiding dmg in other places, so it does feel not great in pugs.
well that is mostly due to the fact that holy pala got super hard clapped with nerfs as well, so they are almost equally as bad. Holy pala CDs are better and the mana is still miles ahead of rsham.
But now holy pala also feels like it struggles with output a lot.
I play every healer usually above 2.5k - 2.7k besides evoker and I cannot agree that rsham is best for pugs.
Currently my ranking for pugs:
monk>druid>disc>pala>rsham
of course Rsham is very much playable in higher keys, but it just feels like a struggle compared to other healers.
Healers are put to the test if there are mobs that channel heavy aoe several times in short windows. The healer with the most output and/or most cds to cover will come out on top. E.g. the stupid dragons in Doti
Then rshaman wins by a mile, they are littarly a powerhouse to heal heavy AoE dmg better then almost anyother healer.
you can burst aoe heal with cloud burst and you have 3 cds basically.
1 dragon does 4 or more aoe phases.
if you spam chain heal you are oom so fast its not even funny.
meanwhile I press 1 button on my monk an whole group gets healed by 500k pp
so yeah no rshaman doesn’t win that by a mile.
rsham is a great CD aoe healer but not good for consistent aoe at all. ripperoni tide, chain heal and healing rain heals for poop. Besides those you don’t have anything to heal except single target heals and cds
actually the only healer that is weaker in aoe healing currently is holy pala in my opinion at least
but guess everyone has their favorites.
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OK.
So TLDR: Everyone above are total doomers. RShaman could be better, is not the best, but its definitely viable across all levels right now.
Because after a certain key level (~24/25 in S2), you don’t get into keys PuG keys because people want to offset the fact that you REQUIRE coordination to progress in difficulty with FOTM classes.
But that just delays the inevitable, because 1 or 2 levels later not even FOTM classes can offset the need for discord.
Therefore, if you wanna push very high keys you have to start networking and building a team. There is a limit to how much you can PuG, and because RShaman is not Meta you will reach that limit 1/2 keys before Disc that is.
Anything less than that, RShaman is 100% fine.
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So il go through the good stuff and bad stuff:
A) Many people have a nasty tendency to copy-paste the builds and rotations they see in WoWHead/Icy-Veins. And Resto Shaman is one of the specs affected the worst from this tendency. Il go through a couple of points.
- DAMAGE: RShaman cant heal AND do damage simultaneously. Both in talent choices and in the rotation itself. Unlike Disc for example. Therefore, if you copy the builds from the pros, who have perfect coordination, perfect execution, where DDs do everything perfect… you will not be able to heal what you need to heal in dungeons.
So people think RShaman is bad. Fact is: Damage is irrelevant and it depends on how good the DDs execute the encoutners (CCs, deff CDs, ect…). And until you run keys with a premade, that execution is guaranteed to not be perfect. So: except for the highest key levels, the difference between doing 100% of your potential damage and 80% is irrelevant.
Just take FULL 100% healer talents. DONE.
B) Mana regen issues. In S2, the healer buttons were: Chain Heal… and basically it. If you go with the same mentality as S2 to S3 you will have garbage mana.
- S3 playstyle: You have to embrace that Healing Wave exists. With talents such as Flash Flood and a bit of Haste you can significantly reduce its CD to something reasonable. Also, it not only costs a significantly low amount of mana but it also returns the most via Resugence.
RESUME: In rot bosses, in S2 you used to just spam Chain Heal and your fine. While in S3, you spam Healing Wave. Works just as fine.
Ive been doing 19s/20s with certain bosses making me spam Healing Wave + Riptide. And I started at 80% mana and ended the fight at 90% mana. Which is impressive efficiency if you ask me.
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With setup, yes. Like totemtoez already wrote, spamming chain heal is just a huge mana waste. People need to be inside healing rain and/or have riptide on them to profit from deluge. Then you also want to utilise the master of the elements buff for chain heal and ideally you also have high tide rolling. Strong chain heals require you to track several things and, of course, to spend some points in its supporting talents.
This. The amount of CC resto shaman has is insane, and it easily carries groups in a lot of cases. Short interrupt, couple short CD AoE disruptions (stun and knock-up), mass slow/root, hex, …
I tried to play disc priest, and I felt like I am useless, because I didn’t have as much CC as I have on my shaman.
These aoe disruptions makes keys so much easier, pseudo-interrupting few mobs at a time saves lives.
+1. This is 100% true. If anything, compared to other healers shaman can heal by avoiding damage in the first place via interrupting.
And given the massively dangerous casts in this season, that is a fair ammount of damage prevented.
Yeah especially when your bear tank is getting bombed from Africa by casters in Everbloom being able to kick someone from range to bring them into the pack is godsend sometimes.
Here’s my opinion as a Heroic raider, getting 2k or 2.5k each season in M+. So fairly casual, but I’ve been playing for decades now.
Pros
- Ranged interrupt: Not having this on other healers makes me feel naked. Dangerous cast going off, going off, nobody doing anything, going off… bang. You can save yourself a lot of grief when the Special Squad decides to just faceroll their rotation instead of participating in the mechanics.
- Potential utility: a hallmark of Shaman since time immemorial, if you want, you can have a button for pretty much every occasion. Need a purge? Gotchu fam. Powerful defensive? Yuh. Incoming AoE fear? Say no more. Magic, curse and poison dispel - got them all.
- Self-res: it’s kind of bad, but better than not having it.
- Good mobility: between Ghost Wolf, Spiritwalker’s Grace and Gust of Wind or Spirit Walk, you can quickly reposition to get out of trouble, negate many mechanics or use these abilities to get that last cast off to save a teammate.
- Crowd control: with a knock, an AoE slow/root, AoE stun, single target slow and a poly, you can keep enemies in check.
- Versatile healing toolkit: on paper, the Shaman is well-equipped to tackle basically any situation. Multiple forms of AoE healing, a HoT with an instant heal, decent cooldowns to keep the whole group alive.
Cons
- Contradictory design: Blizzard wants us to watch our mana, but also delivers damage in spikes that require immediate attention or people will die. Also, why are we the only healer that has to worry about mana? When I’m at 20% mana and the Paladin is at 75% with overall healing being very close, you know there’s a problem.
- Lackluster class tree: whereas a resto Druid or holy Paladin can go down their class tree and get all their classic utility PLUS a whole bunch of new goodies, a resto Shaman has to make some hard choices. You will also be constantly switching your talents on a per boss, per dungeon basis. The class tree is bad and needs an overhaul.
- Dead talents in spec tree: many talents deep in the tree like Downpour and Wellspring are unusable because they are just badly tuned. Talents that buff another talent should have been baked in a long time ago, but still persist, such as Improved Earthliving Weapon.
- Monotonous healing: while the Shaman toolkit is varied on paper, in reality you mostly spam Chain Heal and throw out the odd Riptide. This is the same playstyle since Wrath of the Lich King. Some of this healing could be delegated to spells like Downpour and Wellspring, but instead they have been consistently nerfed. Cloudburst used to be a sizable chunk of our healing, but has now been nerfed directly and indirectly so much that Living Stream is competitive with it. Which isn’t necessarily bad: having to watch timers so that you can pre pump your CB or your healing is dog water was not fun.
- Patchnotes pessimism: please for the love of god, just give us one patch that gets me excited for the changes. Just one. I’m so tired of patch after patch with either no changes or debilitating nerfs for no reason.
- Constant catchup: Shaman heals are so undertuned that you are constantly feeling like you don’t have enough GCD’s to keep up. A holy Paladin can heal nuke their whole group with a single Light of Dawn, or burst heal with a multicast Holy Shock that also gives a shield. You’ll cast your water puddle, then spam Chain Heal and pray for crits.
Well, that’s my 2 cents on it. I like the spec and have been playing it for years now so it’s difficult to switch, but I wouldn’t main it right now if I had no prior experience and had to pick. Hoping for better times.
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My comments on this:
This is a an apparent utility. Not a real one.
You know why nobody uses Tremor Totem anymore? Because there used to be a time where there actually WERE AoE fear mechanics. And RShaman had that totem and could cheese it (same for priest fear ward by the way).
So… because there were massive balancing problems, blizzard had 2 options: Remove the AoE fear mechanic from the game. OR, give every healer that totem. But having shaman be the ONLY one capable of cheesing the mechanic was too OP. And I agree.
So now, we have a totem that is useless for ALL cases.
Rshaman utility in paticular is: Speed Totem, Cap Totem, and thats where the list ends.
Because poison totem… well it has a 40s CD. When you need it, you cant use it cause its on CD. And taking this 1 talent for 2 mobs in a dungeon feels lame to be honest. But the dispel situation is something else I can talk about later.
This is the worst. Because if you do reincarnate, you loose 8% health, which is quite a chunk and is literally the only other defensive you have other than Astral (having a ton of HP). Its as if reincarnate did not exist. Most of the time its more efficient o just CR or wipe than use that.
Everything else in the PRO is 100% true. And just from the interrupts you can carry a key on your own. Something a DPriest cant do.
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On for the cons:
True. But that is not a RShaman issue. Thats a blizz issue. If blizz wants healers to go OOM, and some dont. The ones who dont need nerfing basically.
We are spot on with Blizzards intentions. Like them or not.
Its not so bad. It could be better, but not unplayable. Also, we dont sacrifice any “utility”. What utility? Tremor? 
True. And blizz has always had trouble balancing RShaman because we are the only healer in the game capable of spamming AoE heals like that. Everyone else has a CD of some sort. And you can see where the issue lies right?
Not really. We also can heal nuke a whole group with chain heal. WAY more often than a pala can. And thats the issue. We dont have any other tool to heal AoE situations other than that. And to be honest, we don’t have anything to do cleave healing.
If damage is in more than 1 person, its chain heal. If its 1 person only, nothing short of spamming Healing Surge (mega expensive) is gonna keep that person alive. Sometimes, you just don’t have 2s to cast a slow efficient healing wave.
Other classes have other tools, but we have either ST NUKE, or MT NUKE. Nothing in between. Well yes: Riptide. But that’s basically it.
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On to the suggestions:
So I believe that a whole revamp is not going to happen. But there are a couple of quick fixes that can be done.
- Either nerf other healer mana, or buff Resurgence to what it was.
- Fix the issue of the trinket from BRH (from another post).
- Allow riptide CD and Healing Rain CD to be affected by haste.
- Reduce cast time of healing wave by 0.5s.
Those things would kinda make it OKish for the season.
If the revamp does happen, then I would comment on their suggestions first instead of making one from scratch.
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Shaman lost a lot of its uniqueness coming into DF
That being BL and kick.
Now all healers except priest have a kick, 1 of them is also a range kick and the other 3 healers play in melee anyways.
Of course it is still the best range kick in the game, but 2s less cd is usually not the game breaker here.
If you don’t have the procs and setup, heal bombing the group with basic chain healer takes like 10 casts and you are also oom afterwards.
Pressing ascendance is probably more worthwhile in that situation.
downpour is just bad to use, because you can never hit all targets unless you have a full melee group. sadly then also it is undertuned. Biggest gripe for me is still that everything in shamans kit has such a small radius… rain, downpour, spirit link, earthen wall etc.
Earthliving isn’t even that bad but it just cannot compete with the other talents AND 99% of its healing is actually useless. 8k healing hots on 800k hp targets… nice will surely do much.
Earthliving is bad because of the damage pattern we are facing.
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During persistent high hitting rot you cycle CDs. But to top up a group from a 1 off BANG it takes less than 10 chain heals.
Also it depends when the group will take the next hit. Sometimes you don’t even need Chain Heal. Some riptides here and there and the DD leach will do the rest.
From the lessons learned of exodia and the meta healers, what I beleive Shaman needs (and ALL healers need) is a shield to pad damage.
Thats the difference between a meta healer at the top and a non-meta healer. And not nececerely the healer. The shield pad can come from the comp (mage and aug in case of S2 exodia comp).