So we all know Blizzard is on record as being reluctant to give shaman additional defensive cooldowns because they want healing to be our defensive option.
We ALSO all know that this design has a very real ceiling where our healing spells could all be instant-cast off-GCD Lay on Hands, and it wouldn’t save us, because the meta at this point is about surviving incoming damage in the first place, and you can’t heal yourself back up from a one-shot.
At least not more than once every 30 minutes, Roflcarnation.
If Blizzard wants to keep healing as shaman’s primary defensive means, then, we need some way to make that actually work.
Bwonsamdi’s Bargain
While you are above 40% health, any damage that would kill you is prevented by the loa of death. Upon being saved by this effect, you gain the Bwonsamdi’s Bargain debuff, absorbing healing from your shaman spells up to the amount of the damage prevented. If any of this amount is unhealed by the time the debuff expires, you die. Once this effect occurs, Bwonsamdi will not intervene again for 2 minutes.
This passive option takes inspiration from Blood DK’s Purgatory talent to give us an actual opportunity to heal back from lethal damage, attaching stricter activation parameters in exchange for a shorter cooldown. Importantly, this effect takes the form of a debuff which only reacts to the shaman’s healing instead of healing in general, so it can’t be passed off to the healer(s) to deal with instead of the shaman.
Shamanistic Rage
Removes all loss of control effects when activated. For the next 8 seconds, all damage you take is converted into a healing absorption shield, and your shaman healing spells are X% more effective and refund 100% of their mana when cast on yourself. When this effect ends, you unleash all healing you did to yourself during its duration as Elemental damage divided among all enemies within 30 yards. 2 minute cooldown.
Shamanistic Rage has been a frequently requested ability to be returned to the shaman kit for ages, but would be largely redundant with Astral Shift, besides its effect being completely at odds with its name – the spell originated as an offensive cooldown that removed the resource costs from our spells for its duration, and gradually morphed into a DR over many years. This version tries to be a little more thematic to the name by leaning into the “too angry to die” interpretation that a simple DR doesn’t quite convey, and more mechanically distinct from Astral Shift.
This option is more flexible than Bwonsamdi’s Bargain, allowing for your party/raid healers to deal with the absorb the same way they would still be healing up any other player who used a defensive cooldown to survive a major damage event, but encourages the shaman to do so themself with increased self-healing effectiveness and an offensive payoff for doing so.
Earthen Ward
Gain a damage absorption shield worth 10% of your maximum health for up to 20 seconds, or until the shield is depleted. While the shield persists, your shaman healing spells add to the shield’s strength, up to X% of your maximum health. When this shield is depleted or expires, you erupt with earthen spikes, dealing Earthstrike damage split between enemies within 30 yards based on the healing you put into the shield. 2 minute cooldown.
In contrast to the above options expanding our ability to use healing reactively, this option makes self-healing a proactive option for preventing damage instead of recovering from it.
Like Shamanistic Rage above, this option also includes a damage payoff for self-healing, as it needs to be recognized that even after solving the issue of living long enough to self-heal, self-healing as a DPS shaman carries a much heavier cost than using a simple DR or shield defensive as another class. Elemental has to devote substantial time to hardcasting healing spells on itself, and Enhancement has to spend its primary offensive resource to get any value out of its healing at all.
Tuning-wise, the damage payoff from these effects should be less than if the time and resources had been spent on pure damage in order to dissuade degenerate gameplay to turn these defensive abilities into offensive CDs, but enough to lessen the blow of having to dedicate so much more to your survival than other players with robust traditional defensive CDs do.