The Current State of Resto Shamans

Hey,
Started playing from patch 8.0, i consider myself as good resto shaman player, i usually tryhard on raids, on previous seasons (1&2) weekly +10 was enough for me, but this season i decided i ll give m+ score more love, i play a bit 2v2 (but only for 1800rat, pvp is sooo unfun to play but transmogs are nice)

I ll start talking about pros and cons from things that are shorter (for me):

PVP,
Cons:
*If you dont have bis traits (pack + Tott) you’re pretty doomed
*One school for healing spells, every class has interupts, stuns, more stuns, even more stuns and movement abilites, so almost every fight is like “sorry mate, i cant heal you because im in CC”, some fights you literally stay in stun for whole fight (rogue+mage). (i learned that faking lava burst cast can easly mislead enemies into interupting fire school so can cast healing after, also new essence lifebinder is holy school)
*lot of our spells are useless, for example healing rain, HTT not that strong.
Pros:
*Utility: SLT, earthgrab totem, grounding totem,

M+
Cons:
*Even having a lot strong CD’s (SLT, HTT, Ascendance, new lifebinder) sometimes healing output is too low for damage group takes and its just from my +14/15 expirience, i dont want to know how its on higher keys.
Pros:
*Utility abilites like earth elemental, capacitor totem, earthgrab totem.

Raids
Cons:
*Most of essences are useless or below decent level for resto shaman, (only lifebinder actually does something)
*Talents, only one true build, (unleash>echo>Cloud>Hightide), most of our talents are so bad that trying something new is considered as trolling or just being dumb.
Torrent, undu, deluge, earth shield, wellspring, are almost no-go talents.
*Durning fight we have a lot to keep in mind, we are overwhelmed by amount of abilites we have that arent that good.
*Most of our trait are just boring

Pros: Spirit link totem, cloudburst totem… well thats the only pros i can tell, i might add strong healing but its just me, most of the time i see resto shamans on bottom in healing charts so idk.

Earth shield should be our baseline! blizzard wtf

Sorry for bad english, tried my best to translate : o
P.S i knew i seen somewhere your nickname nymvi, you were on rank1 shivara healing… were :stuck_out_tongue: sorry mate.

I was indeed #1 for a few days! ^^ Very nice to be recognized from somewhere!

Totally agree with Earth Shield becoming baseline once again… It was given an exceptional and frankly rather uncalled for nerf in the first place when it went from 10% damage reduction to 10% more healing from the Shaman on the target. I would love to see the 10% damage reduction return in conjunction with Earth Shield becoming baseline once again, it would atleast make single target / tank healing a slightly less big of a problem. Although I’m very dissapointed at the rest of the Shaman’s kit, still.

It feels so unfair to be the supposed “stack healer”, while other healers still outheal us even in that department. To top it off, Shamans are nigh useless when the raid is spread. Yet, for some reason, Blizzard thinks it’s a great idea to have ( for example the Mythic Blackwater Behemoth ) players spread, NEVER clump up and literally be all over the place in a 3D environment, all the while the Shamans kit literally revolves around AoE on the ground. It’s literally not possible for our Healing Rain, Earthen Wall Totem, Spirit Link Totem and to a large extent even our Chain Heal to do anything meaningful in that fight.

Wether or not the fight is easy is not the point here. I agree that if your raid kills the first Mythic Boss, the next 2 are only a matter of time. The problem here is simply the design of the class versus the design of the raids and the lack of empathy of the developers to understand that the kit they designed for Restoration Shamans is simply not working.
This is flatout unfair. Other healers have little to no drawbacks no matter where the raid is, they literally do not care.
I wanna emphasize aswell, that I very much do not agree with fact that even when people ARE stacked up, we -STILL- get outperformed by other healers.

On a sidenote. I feel the need to share another reason as to why I’m upset about this apparently chronic problem of class balance.
To me, it feels like the developers have agreed to favor certain classes over others. Druids are never in a bad spot, and even if they are, they’ll always be exceptional at something else.
Shamans, on the other hand, are literally never in the spotlights. And literally as SOON as they are, they get bashed with the nerfhammer. Often to unreasonable extents. Think about the Spirit Link PvP talent that went from, agreeably slightly overtuned, to “you take this PvP talent and you just deleted your spirit link totem while spending a whopping 12k mana for minor damage reduction”. It’s absolutely trash. Same goes for Pack Spirit, we literally HAVE NO defenses, and Ghost Wolf can be dispelled so there’s even a counterplay. Yes it was overtuned, no it didn’t need a 75% nerf.
What about the so called “bug” that we could use Unleash Life in Ghost Wolf. They said it was a bug in that patch a while ago, but “fixing” that bug was essentially a nerf. and quite frankly together with the Pack Spirit nerf, that’s actually a rather big one aswell!! No compensation, nothing.
As soon as something works well for a shaman, we’re getting the hotfix nerf. Why is this the recurring theme always, why is it that Shamans can’t be top of the pack for once. I would be ABSOLUTELY fine being in the middle. Hell, I can even be on the bottom, but NOT when it’s thís bad for the past 3 expansion and literally no one that cares one bit.

Restoration Shamans need help. We’re NOT in a good shape right now and we need something going for us.

Sorry for the long post! Thanks for reading nonetheless :slight_smile:

Nymvi

6 Likes

Hi Nymvi…I agree and I’m getting sick to death of my poorly designed class and now adding insult to injury they give us a druid skill to use with Life Binder obviously thinking that will solve the problem whilst also giving it to druids too, erm ok?

In my opinion it isn’t just our class that is bad it’s also the actual dungeon designs in both Legion and BFA, none of them were made with Resto Shaman in mind and they were overlooked, I suspect not even properly tested and due to this we are often overlooked by groups themselves, Blizzard continually scratch their heads wondering why so many people quit when they do this lazy hashing together plus lets face it it’s now 2019, back in the early days we could forgive them as things took time to programme but now they could knock up an expansion in a month if they wanted, which sometimes it does feel like they do just that to satisfy the greedy Activision shareholders so I’m afraid they don’t deserve our forgiveness. Things need to improve vastly, dont get me wrong 8.2 is fun just not as a resto shaman.

I will continue this hard slog till the start of the next expansion and if it hasn’t improved that’s a big quit game from me as I’m getting a bit old to play now anyway as Nymvi you hit the nail on the head regarding our heals and utilities as its constant hard push together with the constant feeling of rejection as groups only want druids.

Shaman needs better resurgance and a single target fast heal, yes Unleash Life got a few k buff and chain heal also which has been needed since WoD, woopie blizz you caught up after 2 expansions…*claps and misses…NOW DAMN WELL CATCH UP AND GIVE SHAMAN A NEW SKILL FOR INSTANT SINGLE TARGET HEAL LIKE EVERY OTHER BLOODY HEALER HAS OR MOVE UNLEASH LIFE OR UNDULATION TO ANOTHER LEVEL SO WE CAN HAVE BOTH AND PUT IT ON 45 TOO AS CHRIST THOSE SKILLS ARE AS MUCH USE AS FAR SIGHT!!! Grrr…Sorry Nymvi but i’m that angry about it as the fix is right there in front of them.

there are little things that would help already.

-healing tide and stream should heal significantly more
-bigger range for chain heal
-give spirit link totem a 40y range which quickly reduce to 10y (reverse halo if you will)
-unleash life baseline
-earth shield: well 2 options… either make it heal ALOT more or give it back the 10-20% dmg reduction
-delete healing rain and give us something better

Yeah it sucks but there is part of the game where shamans shine and its epic bgs. Chain heal build is insane here. You can have like 1000 dispels in game and 130k + chainheals going all over the map. Its insane how far can chainheal procs. I have only 415 ilv and with 25% crit baseline chain heal average crit chance is 50% and on crit it dispels. Yeah it sucks because ebgs isnt competitive area of the game but i have lot of fun here. But outside of this niche it sucks.

if pressing 1 button for 30mins is fun, well…

If you pressing only 1 button its probably not fun. Maybe bind more abilities?

apart from chain heals procs does anything heal for more than 20k?
guess not

Looks like our little Nymvi got what she wanted https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/class-tuning-incoming-wednesday-14-august/68112

Certainly seems so! :'D These changes will undoubtedly not get us in range of Disc or Pally, but! They are definitely most welcome and hopefully we won’t be dangling at the very bottom by a large margin anymore ! :>

Also, HI CAARDUN, it’s been so long! :open_mouth: Do you remember me from AFM? ( Nymsi )

I agree with you. The healing buff they are giving us is welcome, however we need to have riptide buffed by 250-300% the initial heal should be around 25-27k to start with and then another 27k over 10 seconds. The current version is really really bad in pvp. At 431 ilvl it heals for about 9,5k and then another 10k over 18 seconds. I don’t know about that but I know rogues who can kill you within 5 seconds.

Shaman are the only classes that can be locked out of any significant healing during an entire fight. They truly shine in pvp when they can free cast but then again who can’t??

The escape mechanic of a shaman is really bad. It’s actually non-existant. Rogues are faster with their sprints and shadowsteps, monks just torpedowarp to you or put a ring to stop you, Demon Hunters are ridiculously mobile, even warriors stick to your booty as if some filthy Dark Souls casul read the Dancer of the Boreal Valley strategy. If you try to LoS a caster you can’t they are mostly faster and more mobile than you. Mages just blink and KAMEHAMEHAAAAAAA pyroblast around a corner (please fire the guy who made blinking while casting a thing).

Spamming CC like mages/druid/warlocks/monks/rogues do to keep a player out of a game for 12-14 seconds is non-existant. I really opt that things like sap, sheep and cyclone are put on a 30-60 second cooldown.

The buff they gave to shamans it helps in pve mostly but in pvp what’s the deal with the +healing buff if you can’t cast or you’re being locked out the game for ages by classes with tons of cc?

Edit: Also, buff Earth shield by 350%-400% and increase mana cost as well so it’s actually useful. 4k healing on a 600k tank healthpool is nothing.

Also as Draenei shaman I’m fascinated that, I cannot use my racial in ghost wolf. Probably in wolf I’m not draenei enough for Gift of Naaru.

I only healed NM EP myself, but did do a +13 last week in time, didn’t rly feel I underperformed there, but as I understood, our healer counterparts from other classes do much better. That is fairly sad, but I am still enjoying my spec, I don’t really check the healing meters, esp in M+, as long as the group stays alive, and usually it does, that is what matters, not the amount of healing output I do.

That being said, and I can’t speak for PvP, since I never do that, but the new raid I felt boring/useless to heal as resto shaman. Much walking, very few stacks moments, sure I do need to work myself on the CBT moments, but all in all, I don’t rly feel like healing a raid, eventhough I will still try to do a HC raid, to see if that is better, since I can’t rly judge my spec on a NM raid experience.

You describe how I feel about the spec. I don’t have any problems healing m+ right now (doing 10-12s). I would assume that the weaknesses start to show at higher keys. But that doesn’t matter to me - doubt I’ll get that far with my guild anyway :smiley:

I don’t heal raids but looking at the logs resto shaman does less healing but is still quite popular, even at mythic level (if I am not mistaken resto shaman has the third most amount of logs in mythic after resto druid and holy paladin). So it appears guilds still want shamans even though we do less heals.

Number of resto shamans are probably too high becouse enhancement players are playing resto (like me for example). People do play with resto shamans becouse it’s what they have. Their friends dont wanna stop playing shaman and they dont wanna stop playing with their friend. It’s not becouse of some kind of hidden awesome mechanic that resto brings to table.

Right now our guild runs raids with 2 enhancement shamans. Probably the only guild in the world that does that :smiley:
it’s not becouse they want to. We are the ones that are online during mythic raids. Guild would be much better with me playing a rogue or warlock instead of a shaman.

We all spends so much money dual pottin on pulls with flasks runes and vantus runes. We all also spend so much time and the feeling of playing the wrong class on pulls that are close to a kill… Just hurts.

I’m not expecting miracles but at least making stoneskin totem have 2 uses and buffing it a little would make a good tool for healing. I think it’s a unique and good ability. But we can’t utilize it as good as we should.

I don’t rly see it as negative as you, but I admit, I wouldn’t want to play any other healing spec, as a main that is. Now due to the essence system, I am not even thinking about playing an alt healing spec either, since I assume most healing specs rely on the Mechagon/Naz&Naz follower rep essences. I now am doing all that rep stuff for the 2nd time, after that, it’s done ;).

Spirit Link totem, is rly something that does make a difference I think, that’s unique for us. I wish we had 2 charges of that.

Before 8.2 I also played a holy priest, she’s now in the vault sadly, that’s for me next to resto shamans the healing spec I like to play most. And I do not dislike any of the other specs, just can’t play them all.

I do recall I used to play with more mastery in Legion, I guess they changed something, so that it isn’t that great any more? I always like to be more effective when people loose more hps. Hope they give us a good buff, or do this…give us ancenstral guidance back, I miss that spell so much :smiley:

Maybe it has something to do with enhancement, but none the less shaman has some strong cds that make em beneficial. Doubt we’d see any shamans right now if that wasn’t the case :slight_smile:

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i still miss earth shield as baseline. can never get over how stupid it is as a talent.

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You see guys, it’s not about “looking negatively” and “doubt we’d see any shamans right now”

We DON’T see any shamans right now in the competative part of the game.

just right now go to warcraftlogs .com and check out the state of shaman at the top percentage. There will be pages after pages before you see any resto shaman. Dont even wanna mention enhance right now.

It’s all about numbers. Ofc game is beautiful if you are doing world quests and 1600rating pvp with mythic 10-15 dungeons. Nazjatar is a piece of art just nice to look at. Shaman is a very good trip to have fun out in the world when there is no competative deals going on.

But when the min maxing begins. When you spend your days gearing up. Spend hours finding best pieces you can. Using simulators and whatever available to you, spend tens of thousands of gold to consumables just to see a resto druid out hps you not by 3-5k but by 10-15k… It simply gets depressing.

In mythic dungeons. People just dont want to be healed by a resto shaman on higher keys. They specificly type “lf rdruid”. How about that for negative thinking?

For pvp… No need to beat a dead horse. There is no comparison.

You’re probably right, I admit I can’t say anything about 15-20 keys, but that doesn’t mean people who do 10-15 keys can’t have an opinion. And sure not the highest content, but doing HC raiding and 10-15 keys, isn’t exactly the same as WQs :slight_smile: .

My opinion is indeed based on that type of content, and I’m sure that for the really competative content it’s different, which is quite sad to hear, since imo they’re such a fun class to play.

I agree, never understood something like Earth Shield as a talent, or why we don’t have that water shield back as well…