Note: I mostly do M+ but raid on the side a bit to get AOTC at the very least. I wouldn’t consider myself a heavy raider, though, so this post is more from a 5-man content perspective.
I understand that a lot of the talent choices we have are thanks to the (quite baffling) spec prune we had heading into Midnight. However, it’s a bit concerning and tiring, that so many talents in the Restoration tree are just percentage increases: more crit, less mana used, more direct healing, etc.
This, paired with our rather simplistic rotation (Chain Heal, Healing Wave, Riptide spam), as well as massively RNG-dependent throughput (Crits, DRE, Stormstream), and our utterly passive heavy hitter spells, makes healing feel like quite a chore. The cast time of Healing Wave feels awful, and our modifiers hit like wet tissue. The higher you go in Mythic+, the harder it becomes to keep up and respond to incoming damage.
We essentially had an entire cooldown removed by making Asc/HTT a choice node. I realize this happened to many healers, but it feels doubly terrible for Resto Shaman. APT is gone too, and while it wasn’t even that great back then, it was still something to use. And we still have no real external other than the meager 3% DR from Earth Shield and the pathetic heal it procs.
To top it off, the deeper the tree goes, instead of offering meaningful choices that help us adapt to situations or enable different healing styles for certain dungeons, we get what I consider some of the most boring talents I’ve ever had to play:
Tidewaters (1 talent point)
When you cast Healing Rain, each ally with your Riptide on them is healed for 7527.
A malnourished and undercooked take on the Aberrus tier set for Resto. Not only does it lack the old 4-piece effect, but with the increased cooldown on Healing Rain, this talent feels three times worse.
Undercurrent (2 talent points)
For each Riptide active on an ally, your heals are 1% more effective.
This probably shines more in raid than in Mythic+, but gameplay-wise it feels like a chore talent that keeps feeding into the Riptide spam playstyle, which simply isn’t engaging in my opinion. Not to mention that in 5-man content, this and Flow of the Tides being the go-to options makes it effectively a dead talent in one-third of the game’s content. (unsure if PvP takes this)
Wavespeaker’s Blessing (2 talent points)
Increases Riptide’s duration by 6.0 sec and its healing over time by 20%.
Surprise! Another Riptide talent. This time it increases the mostly meaningless HoT portion of Riptide (which again has almost no impact in M+) and extends its duration. Clearly raid-oriented as both aspects are irrelevant due to FotT in smaller group content.
Primal Tide Core
Every 4 casts of Riptide also applies Riptide to another friendly target near your Riptide target.
One of the most boring Shaman legendaries from Shadowlands somehow made it this far into the game’s lifespan. Pretty self-explanatory, and quite useful for spreading more Riptides in raid. But in M+, the most use I’ve seen for it is copying a UL-boosted/CW-empowered Riptide onto another target, which will probably just get eaten by FotT anyway, so forget about the HoT. Oh and this is a capstone talent, by the way. How is this a decent capstone talent? I’d understand if the rest of our capstones were impactful choices, but they aren’t.
The other sides of the tree being DRE (more Riptide slop!) and the Downpour talentline, which is laughable to say the least (at least for Farseer), makes the later parts of the Restoration tree feel like a poorly crafted afterthought.
There are so many exciting and useful abilities from throughout the spec’s history that could be implemented or reworked to preserve the simpler spec philosophy they seem to be aiming for, while also making us more than a three-trick pony when it comes to healing. I’m no class developer, of course, so I can’t really offer meaningful solutions regrettably. But I’d love to see Chain Harvest, Fae Transfusion, Vesper Totem, or anything else that could add variety and health to the spec adapted to modern content instead of just being “Riptide: The Specialization.”