Good Feelings
- New raid buff.
- Gaining Lava Surge at level 12 (baseline).
- Downpour occupying the same keybind as Healing Rain / Surging Totem.
- New positions of Healing Rain and Acid Rain.
- Several 2-point talents reduced to 1-point talents.
- Several healing-oriented talents to augment Healing Surge’s utility/effects.
- Not having to pick up Spirit Link Totem (not great for solo/outdoor content) just to get to Lava Surge (now baseline, no longer a talent).
- Being able to acquire Ascendance and Deeply Rooted Elements simultaneously.
- Various brand new talents (such as Tidewaters).
Mixed Feelings
- The new Master of the Elements feels like it’ll actually be harder to play around than its previous iteration. Healing Surge feels like a really expensive way to spread Flame Shock. This could be “a DPS / HPS net positive” in practice, but I’m less excited to try and utilize it.
- I really liked having access to Stormkeeper, and I’ll be sad to see it go. I can understand the designer reasons for not having it in the tree, but taking away DPS options for healers will never feel great (in my opinion).
- Healing Rain still has a cast time. I get that Healing Rain is a much larger part of a Resto Shaman’s healing toolkit than Effloresence is for a Resto Druid, but the cast time on a stationary ability doesn’t feel good. This facet alone is enough to push most Resto Shamans into Totemic over Farseer.
- There are still quite a few 2-point talent nodes, most of which are associated with Riptide and their effects aren’t that spectacular (the tooltips don’t indicate any desirable numbers). Why not reduce these down to 1-point talents? The “talent tax” penalties associated with Riptide talents further incentivizes Resto Shamans to pick Totemic over Farseer.
- Why is Healing Wave still a thing? Do players really still want access to multiple nearly-identical abilities whose only difference on paper is “efficiency vs. speed”? With all of the new talents bolstering and incentivizing Healing Surge usage (these same new talent effects do not also benefit Healing Wave), I’d be hard-pressed to find any scenario where Healing Wave would be more desirable to utilize than Healing Surge outside of prolonged raid fights where mana efficiency becomes important.
- For the sake of minimizing button bloat, couldn’t we just turn “Healing Surge” into an “empowered” ability? Make more charges increase the healing and reduce the mana cost? That would allow you to still have “efficient vs. speed” dynamics for players to play with (if that’s really still important for you to maintain), but it would also introduce additional synergies and offer more flexibility as a whole. It’d definitely be a win-win.
- Why are there still so many spots with restrictive talent pathing? Spirit Link Totem is the most egregious, since you can only get it by first picking up Healing Wave (which many non-raiding players might not want to pick up in its current form).
- The High Tide talent seems extremely isolated, being behind 2 other 2-point talents which provide zero benefit to Chain Heal. Could another path be added from Tidebringer to High Tide?
- There aren’t many options on the spec tree to increase damage output. Personally, I’d love to see more options for healers to increase their damage output (see Mistweaver, Disc Priest, Holy Priest, Resto Druid, etc). Resto Shamans are able to deal a decent amount of damage thanks to Lava Surge, Chain Lightning, Acid Rain, and high base damage on their offensive spells, but it always feels good to be able to optionally talent into more damage for those of us that would like to play our healing specs for solo content. For example, having talents which make Chain Heal better (more targets hit, more healing amount) could simultaneously benefit Chain Lightning too.