The Current State of Resto Shamans

Classes Shaman
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Hey everyone, Nymvi here.

I’ve been playing Restoration Shaman for a few years now and while I really love the spec and class, I cannot help but feel like we’re getting the short end of the straw literally -all- the time.

I’d like to chat about my personal experience and actual facts about how Resto Shamans are currently competing in PvP, Raids, M+ (basically everything important) versus other healers. I have a lot more to say but it might not be wise to make the already large wall of text even larger.

First of all, let’s talk about Mythic+.
I know my way around the dungeons, I know precisely what to do on literally every occasion, I’ve been pushing keys from the start of BfA. I’m in no way considering myself top tier in M+, but I know my stuff. Mostly, I feel alright healing them, but that’s only because most of the times deaths aren’t really my fault, but someone screwing up a mechanic. I can easily maintain a high enough HPS output to survive fights on 8.2s 14-15 keys, averaging about 40khps during the entire dungeon ( with my current ~435 ilvl gear ).
My actual problem, though, is that for us to maintain this healing, we need to hardcast, ALL the time. There is no room to DPS, as we have no worthwhile HoTs to place like, for example, a Resto Druid can. Meanwhile, we also only have single target DPS abilities and 1 Chain Lightning which can only hit up to 3 targets.
On the contrary, a Resto Druid can spend 1 global cooldown to Sunfire 4+ mobs all at once while the party is HoTted up, and they will outdps us by miles.
I know Resto Shamans CAN spec into 3x igneous potential and have “the highest healer single target dps” in the game, but I hope you now understand this is not at all plausible, especially on higher keys.
Furthermore, the utility a Resto Shaman provides is also very minimal. A Resto Druid will always take priority over a Resto Shaman if only because of their Battle Res. Sum this up, and you’ll have a Resto Druid that:
1: Outheals the Shaman.
2: Outdamages the Shaman while still being able to heal.
3: Brings more utility than a Shaman with their CR.

Presuming I don’t miss something very important as to why a Resto Shaman doesn’t work too well, I’m sure you’ll also come to the conclusion we’re definitely lacking in the M+ department.

I’d like to add that it’s not just Resto Druid that outshines us. Other healers have higher DPS output while Healing. I just wanted to take Resto Druid as an example here.

Secondly, let’s talk PvP:
I used to be reasonable in PvP, although I am no longer nearly as “good” as I used to be back in WoD, but at this point in time, I feel like a major problem is that we need to hardcast literally everything for very minor heals. Healing Surges can be countered really easily by a kick or one of the many CC’s literally every Melee class has these days, and without hardcasting it’s literally not possible to keep up someone without blowing a CD ( Cooldowns like Spirit Link can be killed with 1 blow, and it happens nearly every game versus 1.8k+ rated players, healing tide doesn’t do a whole lot even when it gets off all the heals). I know, I am once again not at all to be considered a strong PvP player, but I still feel like Resto Shaman draw the short end of the stick again. The leaderboards are flooded by literally every other healer, but barely any Resto Shaman is in there, I wonder why.

Last but not least, let’s talk Raids:
I am currently doing -very- well in raids. That is, compared to other Resto Shamans. I hold 95%+ parses on every single normal and heroic fights, aswell as the first boss on mythic:
.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/36725569#difficulty=4
But that doesn’t mean it’s actually “good”.
Let’s go into some history. On Warcraftlogs, it is possible to check the previous raids, up untill WoD, and see how the HPS output of every single healer was.
I’ll give a link to the current state of Resto Shamans in pure HPS throughput in Mythic Eternal Palace:
.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/23#metric=hps

I know what you might think, that this is “not a raid designed around Resto Shamans”. While that in itself is, to me, a substantial / incredible design flaw, there’s actually even more to it.
If you go back in time, you will notice that on most of the Mythic raids starting in WoD, Resto Shamans are dangling at the bottom. With a few exceptions where we are second last place.
Even on fights where Shamans SHOULD shine, namely clumped up raid situations with a lot of damage intake, other healers -STILL- outperform Shamans. Combine this with fights where the raiders are loosely spread, and I hope you can understand in how much trouble we actually are.
5? 10? sometimes even 20k HPS below the other healer’s top parses. And the reason why is unknown to me, other than currently firmly believing Resto Shamans are indeed underpowered, and in dire need of a buff.

I like to press once again, that the current trouble is NOT JUST boss design that makes people loosely spread, and thus very difficult if not actually impossible for a shaman to get higher than “bad” numbers compared to other healers, it is also the lack of DPS while being able to heal. Other healers do NOT have this problem, look at Disc Priests and Holy Paladins, who with no problem at all easily add 6-12k dps in a raidfight while outhealing Shamans. Another “niche” of the Resto Shaman, was that they are supposedly amazing “progression healers”. but if that’s true, then why are we STILL dangling at the bottom? A new raid comes out… if this isn’t the time we shine, then when is it?

Dear Blizzard and readers, I hope I’ve made it clear that out of the 3 things a player can do in this game, not a single one is in favor of a Resto Shaman. Worse yet, we’re losing versus every other healer in every front. I would love to see something change for the better for once.

I hope to have a proper discussion about this, and if people do not agree, I would love to know why they don’t.
Furthermore, if there is a reason to why a Shaman has the lowest throughput and single target healing, I would really like to understand this as right now, it simply feels unfair ( and quite frankly… nearly masochistic ) to play a Resto Shaman.

Thank you for reading,

Your lovely Nymvi

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Welcome to the bottom of the pile. Make yourself comfortable. Nice post and I empathise. Alas design of Shaman in WoW these days suffers because of badly designed stuff in other classes. If anything other classes like Druid need to be taken down to our level and nerfed.

They keep Shaman bogged down and limited by its mechanics but loads of other classes just have stupid easy time with no limitations.

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only thing they need to hotfix is the tooltip of character creation.
choose garbage, stay garbage

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I play all healers and i feel like shaman is the healer the heals the least, but has the most utillities, i mean what class can provide Hero, interrupt ( shammy is the only healer with interrupt, short cooldown too! ) Battleres totem without spending a res, reincarnation ect

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In raid content i feel fine, its mainly m+ where i struggle, mostly by not getting invited into groups that see that shamans are not being able to play high keys aka the current meta.
Its worse than in legion, and the new season now also got rid of the need of an earth elemental every 20%

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It’s not about “feeling” fine in raids. There’s actual proof we lack hps throughput compared to other healers. I also “feel” like I’m doing alright in raiding, but that still means other healers are either severely overtuned or it’s still Shamans that are undertuned.

I agree completely with the M+, however. There’s no reason to bring a Shaman over another healer at this point in time, there’s nearly nothing a shaman does better than other healers. And as you can very easily see on the Raider IO site, Resto Druids are far and away the most popular.

To me it feels like there’s no single excuse as to why Shamans are at the bottom ( again and again ). We needed a buff 2 weeks after the release of BfA, we got a VERY minor and clearly not high enough buff half a year later, and literally nothing at all in 8.2.
I cannot help but feel Blizzard does not understand Shamans correctly, but if that’s the case they -should- listen to their community or look at literal proof from Warcraftlogs.

Thank you for your replies thus far, everyone :slight_smile:

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I read a similar thread on mmoc where somebody compiled some data regarding m+
https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-bfa-2/all/world/leaderboards-strict shows the #1 ranked resto shaman on position 2084

you have to scroll 104 pages to find the first resto shaman

Top healers:
Druid at #1
Paladin at #19
Priest at #39
Monk at #293.
Shaman at #2088.

There are also a lot of reports of shamans being abandoned by their m+ pushing groups and told to reroll druid.

While i don’t think the game should be balanced around m+20 keys the raiding numbers concern me more. It’s not a whole lot, but even in 8.1 a good parse was still 10k hps behind other healers.

It seems that currently only Spirit Link is keeping the raid space open, and it probably figures why everybody is running with spouting spirit traits to utilize that niche to the max.

I don’t see a lot of easy solutions though, for m+ and especially pvp we would need a lot less reliance on hard casts while raids probably need a flat adjustment instead of cloudburst-nerfs.

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That link is horribly depressing… I have no words for this. I do not know where I can go to, other than this official forum, to post how broken something is. But I just noticed there hasn’t been a blue post in the class section since 2016… How is it possible to be this far behind without them knowing or acknowledging and quickly promising a -VERY- necessary buff in all kinds of places for us to even remotely be competitive again?

Short end of the stick is one thing. This is just humiliating. Thanks for the statistics, Ograshuk, they simply cannnot keep ignoring this.

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Resto shaman is the one spec I want to like, but I personally can’t get to work properly.
It has a great toolkit, a unique playstyle, but it’s lacking something to make it compete with the other healer classes.
You have made all this properly clear in the first post, so I won’t repeat it, just want to add my support to your statement.

I’ll cross my fingers that blizz does something, but I will not get my hopes up. it seems that unless you rolled the FOTM class in the beginning of the expansion, you are out of luck, unless they accidentally change something to drastically improve it. (Thinking of how warriors suddenly became top tank, and how paladins went from competent to amazing thanks to the discovery of glimmer).

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In raids I don’t focus on hps. I do see other healers building their HPS, whilsts the raid dmg is VERY low. I usually DPS, instead of focussing on my HPS just so I look good on meters, since that is the ONLY reason for doing that.

I literally hate these HPS meters.

I’ve started doing dungeons again, and I’m doing great. Grevious, no issues with it, Cloudburst totem is the best thing. And in dungeons I love to be on my toes healing the sh** out of people. And I do manage to put on a FS on a few adds quite often, even assist in interrupt, since resto druids may be the FotM, but we got a 12 CD interrupt, don’t forget that, Spirit Link totem.

Just saying for content I do, NM/HC raiding, 10+ keys, I feel like I heal like a God. I don’t recognise my spec when I read these posts. PvP, can’t say, so if we really suck there, can’t say.

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Game shouldnt be balanced around raids m+ And pvp. So you guys are fiiiiiine

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[quote=“Dikru-lightbringer, post:10, topic:64941, full:true”]
In raids I don’t focus on hps. I do see other healers building their HPS, whilsts the raid dmg is VERY low. I usually DPS, instead of focussing on my HPS just so I look good on meters, since that is the ONLY reason for doing that.[/quote]
Well, the thing is your dps as a healer is not very good. Sure, with the right traits resto shamans have a nice single target dps potential, but you are sacrificing a lot of healing power with that - and are still a far way off from real dps classes.

Heck, Method 2-healed the final mythic boss, with disc priests no less, and let moonkins offheal. Which is basically the same concept, just that they do a lot more dps.

I play a healer because i want to heal. And the resto “dps rotation” is not very engaging.

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It’s down to numbers dude. If you didn’t play another healer with similar gear to your resto shaman you might not be understanding what people say. You say you do mythic keys and you feel like a god.

Maybe with your “skill level” and ilvl range you could accually be doing 20+ keys if you were a druid.

As a matter of fact. I do have an alt druid. I can swear it’s much much easier to keep party alive with a druid. It’s not my main but it can heal same level mythics with 20-25ilvl difference. Sure parties wary but i dont think that matters that much. Doing dps and cc with druid in mythic and raids if much more effective.

Cloudburst isnt a game changer. Healing rain is a joke. Chain heal is very limited. Interrupt gets handled by dps and tank in good parties and people dont select healers for that. Only awesome thing resto shaman has is spirit link totem.

Hps AND dps in raids just doesnt compare to other healer specs. Like others say, optimal stuations for shaman doesnt me it shine but only become competative which is also rare.

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Guess you have a different experience than me. I don’t play my resto druid, I honestly think they’re boring to play, may be good, but I fall asleep playing them.

And tbh, if something is easier, I tend to play whatever is less easy instead. I know, in wow people prefer to play the least challenging OP specs, but not me. A true gamer likes a challenge.

I am sure I can even heal up to I dunno, +12/13 with this one, not that I’m given the chance ofc. I do play with mates mostly anyways, pugs is not a fun environment to play in, it annoys me, so I try to stay away from it as much as possible.

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Dude that’s what we are talking about. Everyone likes challenge. But not unfair handicap. If you play druid in a mythic 15 dungeon you wont be falling asleep. You can heal better, cc better, and damage much better.

You say “im sure i can even heal up to +12/13 with this one”

Well, what i’m saying is you can heal up to +15/16 with similirly gear druid.

There are places your HPS simply wont be enough to keep your party alive. If it doesnt happen in mythic 12 it will happen in mythic 15 or 16. That’s why we are crying here. Ofc if you just wanna have fun with your friends your class doesnt matter. They will wanna play with you be it mythic 12 or 15 doesnt matter.

But if you wanna invest more time into the game and play more passionately and wanna make it into “lists” resto shaman simply falls short. And its not by a small margin where you can make it up with your imba skills.

Let me just compare something as simple as this.

Screw healing where they are obviously better. When it comes to places where you dont need to heal. You flameshock, throw LavaBurst twice. After that, its done. Lightning bolt damage is next to nothing. What they could at least do is increase lightning bolt damage in this horrible rotation we have as resto. But they dont even do that. And it’s infuriating for us.

Your friends may put up with your bad selection. but after a mythic 14 kings rest run where you failed to do it in time by 2 minutes, same thought will be there in the back of all 5 of your minds “if he was a druid instead of a shaman we could have done it.”

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“A true gamer likes a challenge.” I don’t mean to call you out or be a hater, but you’ve done nothing but casual content (People can click your profile to check on your progress btw).

Nymvi is talking about high-end shaman content, not content i could teach my nan to do on a weekend.

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No worries, I don’t mind doing casual content :slight_smile: Got a wife and kid, and I play this just for blowing off some steam outside work and RL, so I’m cool with it. My first kid was born 2 months ago, and I know people go Asmongold on others, and if they didn’t kill any mythic bosses or do 20+ keys, they didn’t do anything :smiley: .

In Season 2 I got the dungeon achievement for 10+, which I worked hard for (since I started this one in 8.1.5 and worked my way up_, and yeah I play with people who do casual content, we try to do keys as high as we can, but on a chill level, nothing wrong with that. But so you’re like using the Asmongold argument? If you’re casual, you can’t have an opinion?

That being said, not that I play perfect, but a lot of keys I play are messed up by the group. Game is for having fun, that is what I have.

I do get it, in higher keys or mythic raiding, that’s where the differences are mainly noticed. Guess that’s one of the reasons, besides lacking time, why I don’t aim for that content :slight_smile: in the end, my family goes before this game. My aim is though, and usually I succeed, to do content that for me is challenging.

But I agree that I can’t say how this spec functions on 20+ keys or mythic raids, but if I see the number I push sometimes, I do wonder are they indeed that bad on high level content? Our guild does tend to try the first 1-3 mythic bosses.

I did do Eternal Palace last week, I noticed that most fights had very few stacked moments. For my ilvl compared to our guild’s higher geared monk I wasn’t doing bad there, but monks I noticed also put crazy numbers. My aim is always to try the best I can, and I manage to do that. In 8.2. I also think I will focus on 2 characters, that way I put less pressure on myself to get stuff done, plus I can do more content with the 2 characters I play. I was tempted to try a resto druid, but after doing a few dungeons with mine, the gameplay just doesn’t attract me, I love shamans, eventhough they may not be OP.

Thank God there’s a few discord groups to do content with, since if that wasn’t the case and I had no choice but to pug, I’d probably have quit already. Social interaction for me is also important, I am a casual gamer, but I am a pretty good casual gamer. Love hard games like Dark Souls etc…finished them all :smiley:

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Thank you for your elaborate reply! :slight_smile:

I agree, I absolutely love hard content, and I agree that equals more fun! What I have trouble to understand, however, is how being the worst healer is making the game harder. In this game, there’s always something new to learn, like finding more spare time to damage and make the dungeon faster. there’s a fine line between an increase in difficulty and having a handicap because you managed to pick a class that is literally the worst at anything they do, compared to others :>.

I really like how Oturanboa wrote it:
“You say “im sure i can even heal up to +12/13 with this one”
Well, what i’m saying is you can heal up to +15/16 with similirly gear druid.”

And I agree with this completely. There’s also not -anywhere- a single sign that actually says Shamans are “hard mode” healers, yet they definitely are lacking at this point in time ( and actually has been for multiple expansions ).

To me, the single most important thing is the balance of the classes, so that everyone has a fair chance to do anything they want with the specs available to them. I know there’s different teams working on different aspects of the game, but I still cannot help but get annoyed, sometimes even angry, when I read entire walls of texts about how they fixed some bug that happened literally 2 expansions ago ( something about hellfire citadel, it was in the patch. ), more things about, to me, extremely unimportant and completely outshadowed by the severe imbalance of class balances itself.

As was stated before, in top M+'s, Shamans cannot even be found in the TOP TWO-THOUSAND. That’s not just a slight issue, that’s something that DEMANDS fixing or it’ll have major consequences.
I’m not one to say easily I wanna stop playing the game because it feels unfair, but I have to say this has gone to the point where I literally cannot understand the changes made nor do I understand why they aren’t in heavy spotlights and up for a hotfix, ( preferably 3 months ago!!! ). Rerolling another class is ofcourse completely out of the question.

Thanks for the posts, everyone :slight_smile: I’m very glad to see I’m not the only one who’s seeing this!

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Ha! Blizz doesn’t read about Shamans they don’t care about shamans. Shamans are WoW’s Africans. They don’t care man…

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I might be slightly biased :slight_smile: But I would sincerely love to keep this post alive. The balance designers have shown me too many times that they’re unable to balance the game correctly, and for them to understand what’s wrong, we need to elaborate :>

Please keep the posts coming; Questions, experiences, vulnerabilities. Anything that can help shine light on the problem at hand. Namely finally getting us back at competitive play!

I’m incredibly happy with the replies thus far and I for one value everyone’s opinion :slightly_smiling_face:

<3