I mean it also isn’t inviting having to macro 4 abilities in 1 cooldown on dps where you have 10 seconds to blast, otherwise you do no damage since you can never press those buttons fast.
I also feel like we are moving marks now. People just do not want to hear how to setup different roles.
What we need as shamans is something like Monks and DPriest have: A way to heal and do dps.
Some sort of Ancestral Awakening but with a shorter CD.
But shaman rotation is EZ.
3 targets or more? Chain lightning and healing rain. Spam those.
single target? Lightning bolt and Lava burst. If you are really lazy, just spam Chain Lightning instead.
2 targets? Same as ST rotation, except that you tab targets to get more lava surges. If yo dont have that talent, then its the same as ST rotation.
So basically, you can reduce it to Chain Lighning and Lava burst for all situations. 
Spells that do damage when cast on enemies and healing when on allies would conflict with the action targeting system, as it always has a valid hostile target locked unless you hard target a friendly, which I for example never do.
When I target nothing my spells auto self cast, otherwise it’s mouseover>hard target. I can do all this just by dragging a spell to the action bar.
Don’t you have that with acid rain, flame shock dot and ancestral guidance? Monks want to be on ranged and be able to heal, something shamans have? I think it is good to have class variety.
I agree. I want class variety.
But damage while healing is something too OP to just give to MW and DPriest. Its like combat mana regen. Its too OP to have some healers with out it.
And class variety comes in the HOW you achieve it. I have Resurgence. You have Mana Tea. And that is neat.
Here is the issue with RShaman damage: Acid rain is caped to 6 targets. It also hits like a wet noodle. It suffers from the following problem: Its “padding damage”. Its not useful damage. What you want is some form of “blackout kick” to focus prio targets.
We have something like that in the form of CL, but its hard casted. Its not passive damage.
Flameshock does not heal. And Ancestral Guidance tansforms 30% of your single target damage to heals, but also, 30% of your heals to heals. On a 2 min cooldown.
EDIT: Forgot for a minute how AG worked. Its 30% ST damage to healing. Important to note ST (only lava bursts, 1st target of CL, and LB).
So its rarely used for damage purposes. Its more of a healing CD than anything else.
All in all, shamans can only heal OR damage. Not both.
But this is just the class variety. Resto shaman has the ability to do a lot of damage. Spinning crane kick also drops off after 5 targets, and mistweaver need 4+ targets to make it healing more than normal single target healing rotation with rising sun kick, black out kick and tiger palm (does not transfer to heal but is needed for BoK ancient teachings stacks, which is needed for resetting rising sun kick cooldown). And we need to be in melee.
And you need a lot of other preparation with renewing mists, since rising sun kick heals people with those hots. You have from the start only 2 renewing mist charges. You need quite some time to get the whole group running the hot. The only way to heal more than 1 player is by having the hot on people and rising sun kick or vivify. There is no chain heal. Resto shaman seems to excel in party healing.
Flame shock is a dot which runs while you are healing. It also procs instant lava bursts which give you healing bonus after the lava burst.
To me it is just class variety.
Having the ability to do so, but being unable to cast it because you need to heal instead == 0 damage. It does not matter if I have instant cast Lava Burst that hit for 200k if I need that 1 global cooldown to spam ST healing or the person dies.
We do. But have a ton of mana issues. I can give you a recent example if you want:
Last boss of EB. So its 1st stomp. 2nd stomp + add and then 3rd stomp. Rince and repeat.
2nd and 3rd stomps are the critical ones. Bust CDs, do what you have to do. But the 1st stomp needs to be healed as well.
You have 2 options: Waste a TON of mana in chain heals but have time to DPS. OR… use efficient ST healing waves to top people up before the 2nd stomp. 2s cast time each HW.
So in practice: You either go OOM before the boss dies and do some DPS, OR, you spend the whole boss fight spamming heals and doing 0 damage.
MW and DPriest require set-up for them to work. I get it.
But once its rolling, you just DD the boss and can heal people up before the 2nd stomp. And that is critical because not only do you do DPS, but you also dont spend mana healing.
Well, i have to press 2 filler tiger palms (2 gcds) full time to get ancient teaching stacks so i can use black out kick, which has a chance for resetting the cooldown of rising sun kick. It isnt that mistweaver can spam damage buttons and the healing goes. It is all the time RSK, TP, TP, BOK, hope RSK is back or TP 2x, wait for RSK to come back. If someone dies in 1 global i just have to single target spam ( soothing mist, enveloping mist, vivify) heal like you have to with riptide and healing surge.
We are getting very fast out of mana on EB last boss too.
You can not just DD. Rising sun kick has a cooldown, and the damage buttons of mistweaver cost mana. So we actually do spend mana healing. I can send you the megasett video about healing hard bosses where she also mentioned this boss causes mana issues.
So do mine unfortunately. I dont know why blizz does not just make them all cost 0 mana.
Its lame.
Want a really nice trick I found to help out? I dont know if you use it. But it does wonders for me so il say it anywais: So after the 1st add, when he repeats this “1 stomp” you take a Potion of Frozen Focus. You got ~10s to just sit there and recover 1/5 of your mana.
Because you will recover that mana, and you have BL (usually) you can save some CDs for later phases. Thats the idea more or less.
But RShaman is especially bad with mana this season. So if you have issues, I have more.
Ok, well. I think i did explained a bit that we can not just do damage and heal. But it sounds like it is all the time the issue of the grass is greener on the other side, while both healers were actually doing exactly the same key level.
So when shaman is worse, that means the best shamans are playing with a better group.
You explained it in great detail. Thanks.
Its not as easy as people think. But at least you have the option to do it. I only wish to have that option too. Even if it requires prior set-up.
I wish i had some options of the resto shaman 
But to me that is just class variety.
I mained resto shaman in s3 and s4 in shadowlands, whole legion. It was actually my first char I got KSM s1 and s2 in DF too on it. But this season i left it where it was.
I used to play warrior, from Classic to BFA… 
Discovered my hidden healer vocation with Shaman in BFA. Stuck with it ever since.
I tried MW to see what the hype is all about… and it was a disaster. I forgot to be in melee range.
Got killed by every swirly/cleave in the game.
Every healer wants my interrupts and CC for fortified weeks. I can tell you that.
Pitty that PuGs dont realize the value of it. Especially this week with Fort + Bolstering.
Every interrupt I do to a bolstered mob is 1 guy that is not 1-shot. That is very valuable.
i think it would be nice if they put a choice node between chain lightning and chain heal and on a later node add aoe damage around targets healed/damaged or simply added damage portion to default chain heal
Ever since early on in this topic I’ve been pondering what I’d like stripped from MW monk. I can’t really come up with anything, I enjoy it all and most seems decidedly useful. Even something like crackling lightning which is sort of laughable damage wise is great for long range pulls and yu’lon procs. And some of the bloaty stuff seems optional, it depends on how you talent and what is useful in a given situation.
I get running out of keybinds if you have many different set ups tho, monk trees are quite versatile and can change quite a bit. I’m curious what others would like removed, or perhaps consolidated?
I more think it got out of hand with utility and defensive buttons. In the previous talent-system (before DF) we for example had to choose between defensives dampen harm or diffuse magic.
Obviously they both are very usefull in their own way, or very needed when you have to press a defensive on literally every cinderstorm on 3rd boss everbloom, but we now have 3 defensives. I am more interested in maybe talents that lower the cooldown of your defensive than having an extra.
We now also have an interrupt, aoe stun, and hard cc. Again it is all usefull, but to me it was totally fine when only resto shaman had an interrupt. It was their thing.
Healing and dps wise it are basically only 4 or 5 buttons. I do not think that is bloated at all.
I think holy paladin is more bloated than mistweaver.
I understand yeah, that’s one of the things when I went over the trees where I went hmm, why not just focus on one? But that’d no doubt be Life Cocoon and that is so strong… so I sort of get the dilemma there.
And an addition. Coming from priest I love having a short cd interrupt, I’ve always been rather envious there 
I wasn’t even meanin life cocoon We’ve got diffuse magic, dampen harm and fortified brew.
When it is about holy paladin; holy paladin has subjectively the best single target stun in the game. I know not everything can be stunned, but hammer is really strong with 8 seconds stun. Why did we receive rebuke (interrupt) this expansion? My holy paladin now has rebuke, blinding light, hammer, turn evil (and warstomp since it is a tauren). This is 5 keybindes which has nothing to do with the role of healing. I definitely was fine in previous expansions without the interrupt.
And then holy paladin has quite some basic healing spells and damage spells (more than mistweaver) and a lot of cooldowns. I for sure think holy pala is pretty bloated.
I meant more in case devs would go: let’s do some pruning! and would nix it all But I agree, I think in between Life Cocoon and Dampen Harm it should be enough…? I don’t know, I don’t play at a level where having every defensive you can get your hands on matters.
For me abilities like Thunder Focus Tea where you cast this, amplify that and then gain that stat are too finnicky. But I blame myself for that, I just don’t have the headspace to play optimally with mechanics like that.
I have only dabbled in hpally a bit (hadn’t played it for a long time and was curious). I enjoyed ret very much but hpally felt rather clunky to me. I concluded that whatever they are apparently going for with hpally just doesn’t gel with me.
I disagree. Chain heal is the only AoE heal we have. With out it, we only have ST heals.
So no choice node IMO.
The changes I would do would be the following:
Make storm keeper instant cast
Take Lava Surge procs off the GCD and merge that talent with Master of the Elements.
Rework Flash Flood. Reduce cost from 2 to 1 talent. Buff it from 20 to 30%. Make it affect “cast time of next heal” AND cast time of next damage spell. And most importantly, stacking.
The goal would be to lower the cast time of certain heal which would help out with some of our issues.
But most importantly, while we heal we would make our offensive spells instant cast every 2/3 hard cast heals we do.
That would make the unique fluff of shaman “weaving” DPS in between heals on par with other healers.
Thats how I would keep the shaman play-stile. With minimal changes to our talent tree.
On the long run though, I would like to see Flash Flood and Tidebringer removed. And incorporated to Tidal Waves as a “key shaman fluff talent”.
Some “lower cast time of heals AND damage”. So if you do damage, you get instant cast heals, and if you do heals, you get instant cast damage.
In my ideal world though, I would make my proposition of reworked Tidal Waves our new mastery. Instead of the BS we have now.