I wish Blizzard would take this into consideration when developing the healer role in Wow

Classes Shaman
1

I’m disappointed with Restoration Shaman in the current expansion (haven’t researched anything from DF yet). I want to explain why I am frustrated with Resto Shaman and get some opinions from other folks.

My experience so far has been that shaman healing has a phenomenal potential as a raid wide healer with abilities such as Wellspring and Healing rain but these abilities heal for so little that they cannot compete with traditional direct healing spells like Healing Surge and Chain Heal in a difficult fight.

What this effectively does is limits the player’s ability to choose what style of healing they’d like to do. Say, for example, the player would rather do raid wide healing instead of directly healing in raids. The raid wide heals are not enough to keep the party alive so the shaman is forced into using a style of healing that they’d prefer not to use.

I wish that blizzard would change the current system of healing so that healers can choose not only healing as a role but they may also choose what style of healing they’d prefer to do. Does the healer prefer healing the entire raid or do they enjoy having some strong capabilities to keep one individual or a small group of individuals at full health? It comes down to innovation in regards to what style of healing a player may prefer and I feel Blizzard has failed to provide innovation in this area of game development.

Essentially what I am saying is that Shaman’s raid wide heals are weak (in my opinion/in my experience) and it frustrates me as a healer because this class specialization has so much potential for innovation into a new style of healing. My experience may differ from others so I want to get your thoughts.

Do you think Blizzard should spend more effort into innovating the healer role? Are you disappointed in Shaman healing abilities and why or why not?

2

That is a very odd thing to say to one of the best raidwide healing specs.

Definitely not…

3

Hmm. Maybe you’re having a very different experience than I am. Are you you not running LFR?

4

My experience has been mostly on heroic and the start mythic season 1 raids, so let me quote Icy Veins:

Restoration Shaman is looking to be extremely strong going into Sepulcher of the First Ones, primarily thanks to an exceptionally strong new tier set. They bring one of the best raid cooldowns in the game, Spirit Link Totem, which combined with their other available cooldowns is invaluable on most raid encounters. Restoration specifically has also been putting out some lethal damage output in recent buffs as Kyrian with their Vesper Totem, giving them an exceptional offensive build available should a fight call for it.

April 25 update: Now that the raid has been fully progressed, we now know that almost every encounter has significant movement or spread throughout the fights. As most of the fights are designed to require high sustained HPS, Restoration Shamans are simply a worse choice when compared to healers like Holy Priests or Restoration Druids who excel at that type of sustained healing on spread or mobile raids.

In summary, they are very strong raid due to the tier sets (which boosts chain heal) and due to their valuable raid cds. However they kind of took a hit due to the large amount of movement and spread required in Sepulcher specifically.

So, unless you are advocating for better spread and mobile healing, I don’t think you have much of a case here.

5

You’re in an entirely different “league” than I am first off. I don’t even run mythics because I believe they are Blizzard’s biggest “mistake” that ruined the game. Period. I don’t like mythics, I think they’re stupid, I don’t even pay attention to them. Mythics don’t exist for me.

What I’m referring to right now is my experience as a relatively fresh, undergeared shaman trying to heal fated LFR. Since you’re running mythics you’re coming from a completely different perspective and might as well be playing a different game.

Finally, I think you’re missing the point entirely. If you had read my original post with an open mind you’d have realized that the focus was not on criticizing the restoration shaman but rather on the all of the healing classes as a role. I chose to use the shaman as an example and I’m sorry that you took offense to my original post and misunderstood the point of my post entirely. I hope you’ll keep a more open mind moving forward. Take care.

6

Sounds like you would’ve done better to post this in general than in the shaman forum, otherwise you’re going to get shaman’s takes on it.

7

Okay I knew people were going to pick on me for posting this here. I am sorry that you feel I posted this in the wrong section. I beg your pardon and ask that you please keep an open mind.

Please I’d like to hear from players who want to talk about the innovation and development that I mentioned in my original post. I’m talking about for future expansions, wouldn’t it be cool to see raid wide healing evolve to be more efficient and to be more enjoyable for the average player (not hard core mythics)?

8

You’d have to specify what changes you’d like to see more to get some discussion. From what you posted, it seems like you want raid heal throughput to be able to be specced into more. What would this look like? More aoe spells, more number modifiers?

If that’s the case, I prefer the current system where healers have toolkits that allow them to handle all situations well. I wouldn’t like to have to spec heavily into a certain few spells in my kit to make them good.

9

Hey Snorcle.

Let me clarify. The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t like direct healing such as Healing Wave, Chain Heal and Healing Surge. That type of direct healing is boring to me. Resto Shaman is one of the few healing specializations that offers frequent and consistent cooldowns capable of healing an entire raid (primarily referring to Wellspring) which is why I chose to play the shaman and why I chose to use Shaman as an example for my post.

But, let me be clear here: in my experience, the raid wide heals were not enough to keep my raid alive and I had to switch back to using the direct heals like Healing surge in order to keep the raid alive because Wellspring doesn’t do enough healing.

What I am saying here is that Blizzard needs to buff spells like Wellspring and make them more viable so that players can choose that style of healing if they so desire. In other words, I wish I could play a resto Shaman and never have to press the button for Healing Surge. I would like to have the option to ignore that “style” of healing entirely if I choose. But with the current system that is not an option because it doesn’t do enough healing to keep the raid alive so I am forced to use those direct heals that I don’t want to use. Is that making any sense for you?

In other words, I want to be able to play the class in the style that I want to play rather than being forced into casting certain spells in order to keep the raid alive. In other words, Blizzard needs to innovate the healing role so that healers have more options and aren’t pigeonholed into certain spells or rotations that don’t suit their style.

I hope that makes a little more sense for you.

10

Ok so there are a few mistakes going on here. First of all, LFR is not a mode which receives any attention from the devs at all, it is extremely unbalanced (which is not a problem), and since you are undergeared, your class will not perform as it was designed.

So it is expected for the class to be very limited and awkward. However, since there is near to 0 difficulty (you can basically afk from start to finish and the boss will probably die, unless it is one of those very specific ones that only fall after a certain amount of stacks of determination) you can basically play anyway you want, with any rotation, and the raid will perform well.

Also, you are probably attempting to maximize healing per second, which is not a very good metric for healers at all, with the exception of very specific fights. Things like quick response, single target healing, damage prediction, mana management and things like that are very hard to measure.

And like always I heavily discourage anyone to engage in LFR, due to how badly designed the bosses are, the low rewards, the frustrating experience, and the overall cheap and sad feeling that is in it. I highly suggest normal mode and maybe early heroic instead, they are a lot more rewarding in all terms.

The new Dragonflight talent tree is a heavy push on the direction that you are suggesting. It allows you to build your character in more focused ways and change the playstyle a lot.

However there is an issue with your suggestion, which is this idea

While you have different possible play styles, each type of content will probably have an optimal play style and if you just focus on what you want to play you will almost always be behind, which is not an issue in LFR.

I think the ideal scenario would be that there multiple optimal playstyles for different content, and a secondary play style that is not far behind.

11

This is blatantly false. I would love to see a raid walk up to Halondrus on LFR and just afk, or any LFR boss for that matter, just afk and win the fight. That would be very amusing. And I think you and I both know what the end result of that would be. Don’t kid yourself. Comeon. Seriously?

I’ll be honest I wish I had received replies from people who are more casual like me. You are and I are not kindred spirits. Just being honest.

1 Like
12

Well, unless LFR received a massive increase in difficulty in the past expansion, which I doubt it, I think that my afk and win comment is still correct. In legion and bfa, most bosses were target dummies with almost no mechanics, and almost no raid damage. And I know that the afk strategy works because I did it several times.

There were very specific bosses where this was not possible and I had to participate since the raid starts wiping and people start getting kicked.

13

This I am not sure about as I did not play in Legion or BFA. Difficulty in LFR is very gear dependent and very DPS dependent. If you queue up with an entire raid of fresh, undergeared alts (which is quite often the case especially with DF on the horizon) with low DPS the difficulty increases significantly even with good healing. Earlier today we had a raid with two Resto Shaman each doing at least 10k HPS (which is high for LFR) and the raid still wiped in what was an absolute massacre. So the difficulty depends on raid composition. In those particular raids full of undergeared alts I can assure you the fight can not be won with players going afk regardless of skill.

14

Yes, depending on how bad the group is, content becomes more dificult, however this is not relevant to my afk comment. LFR is not tuned in a way were the content requires everyone to be trying. LFR assumes that a large number of players will extremely underperform, and therefore, your individual performace has little impact on the outcome of the fight to the point that afking and winning being viable.

The group usually have a few extremely geared people that do most of the work, there is always several extremely underperforming players, and even a couple of afks, which people usually don’t even notice since they don’t show up in the damage meters. One common strategy is to just die intentionally at the start of the fight to have an excuse to afk, and even with several players doing stuff like this, most bosses still die.

15

I think we found your problem. You are stuck back in classic era WoW where you want to do things the old way, in current times there is no real need for raid wide healing unless you are a an rdruid who spams hots on everyone.

16

I always work hard in every raid I do and to my knowledge everyone else in the raid is as well. If people are going afk I was not aware of it. Based on my effort that I am putting into each and every raid, I consider LFR to be difficult unless the raid has some good DPS.

Like I said, it is very gear dependent and dps dependent. When Sepulcher of the First Ones was initially released, before players started getting better armor, the dungeon seemed extremely difficult even on LFR. Once folks started getting higher armor it became easier but now that folks are queuing up with their alts again, the difficulty increases because you are queuing with folks that in some cases have maybe 5k dps max as your highest dps in the raid and that makes a huge difference.

17

If you are going to open up maelstrom weapons instant spellcasting in the Dragonflight class tree, then let me dual-wield earthliving melee chain heal like I could in WotLK before blizzard realized their oopsie and made all spellpower weapons main-hand only.

Aside from that, Resto Sham is in a great spot, and you can choose to either focus on single target healing or raid healing, and do both decently well. Resto sham is also largely regarded one of the best raid healer specs.

18

My main was a resto druid until SL. My shammy became my main because this expansion it just made it easy. It is nuts. What also made a difference is UNDERSTANDING the spells, what buffs the other. If you just spam whatever spell is up, you won’t optimize your output.

I think you can change from being an ‘under geared shaman’ running LFR, to running m0’s with friends or form a group, get 262’s then run 2’s and 3’s. That’s how I geared all my healers.

I have 2 resto shamans and I do keys. By the time I fated came around the corner, I already out geared the LFR raids.

Try mythics. With friends, it’s not as ‘stupid’ as you think it is. By the time you’re geared enough and know the class (use the proper weak auras etc) then you’ll really enjoy that content.

If I can’t run with friends, I do pug and probably in the 100’s of runs I may have 1 or 2 bad one. Not a really awful ratio. Once you’re in a group, you bound to make friends with a good tank and add them to your friends list. Expand your experience.

That’s just my 2 cents, and yes I love my shamans. With the right covenant, you can also contribute to the damage better (I’m bad at cat weaving, for example, so my druid hitting with boomy spells at downtime can contribute 3k-4k to a run while my shaman can do 7-9k)

on my main shammy, because I both run keys and raid with her, I leveled 3 covenants so I can switch depending on the raid.

Good luck, hope you enjoy your experience better.

19

Hi. I miss the good old days in Vanilla when a group was able to slow down and actually enjoy the scenery in a dungeon and grouping for dungeons was about the adventure and the exploration. When heroics came along everyone suddenly started rushing through dungeons and it ruined the game. Thus I have a negative opinion of heroics and mythics—they ruined the game in my opinion are are Blizzard’s biggest mistake in World of Warcraft.

Haphazardly running through a dungeon as fast as possible making huge pulls and not stopping to see scenery and enjoy the lore is not my idea of fun and yes I do think it’s stupid. However I recognize that everyone is free to enjoy the game in the way they see fit so I don’t judge anyone else. You’re more the welcome to run mythics if you find them enjoyable. I just don’t!

As far as my original post, I feel I have failed to adequately communicate the point of my post and I feel not one person who has replied so far has been on the same page but that is my fault for my inability to effectively communicate. Thanks for replying.

20

In my experience, most wipes are due to tanks who don’t know the raid or are under-geared. There have been a few times where dps have failed, though the change-over for dps generally tends to be more fluid.

As for AFK, I think it’s rather contemptible for a player to expect a carry from a LFR raid. Generally they get kicked rather quickly, still some get through which, along with comments about how easy it is, encourages others to try which makes LFR unnecessarily more difficult than it already is. To anyone who doubts that, try LFR during its first week, its quite an eye opener!

Can’t really comment on healers as I only play dps.