Phase 2 Restoration Shaman is Lacking

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Hello all,

Longtime classic shaman player here and I wanted to share thoughts on the class and restoration specialization at the start of this phase.

In my opinion, Restoration is very weak in both PVP and PVE due to the runes available to us. Shaman brought a lot of utility in classic, but less so in SOD due to our toolkit being spread to other classes. I understand the hybrid class fantasy, but the runes made for healing are just not very good, don’t synergize with the spec very well at all, and can’t measure up to other healers.

Restoration Runes
Gloves - Water Shield - Gloves
Chest - Healing Rain
Pants - Earth Shield*(Currently Bugged. Base healing not scaling with level.)*
Waist - Power Surge (Currently Bugged? 1.5% not 15% mana regen)
Boots - Ancestral Awakening

What I’m actually choosing
Gloves - Water Shield
Chest - Overload(PVE), Shield Mastery(PVP)
Pants - Shamanistic Rage(PVE), Way of Earth(PVP)
Waist - Power Surge
Boots - Decoy Totem / Spirit of the Alpha(PVE)

Our most used healing rune is Water Shield, a passive MP5 buff, and Power Surge which is only reluctantly taken. Simply put, none of our new designated resto runes synergize with our spec. Earth Shield is never chosen over Shamanistic Rage, a stronger, much shorter MP5 cooldown version of Mana Tide Totem, the top tier talent. Healing Rain is clunky and won’t be chosen over Overload which gives a 50% chance of duplicating a weaker Healing Wave or Chain Heal, our main spells. I can’t actually wrap my head around the addition of Healing Rain as Chain Heal is such an iconic(and better) shaman spell. Ancestral Awakening is as forgettable as Ancestral Guidance.

SUGGESTIONS
I totally get and endorse the classic fantasy of not being the best healer when I bring a lot of utility to the table. I also understand that this is just phase 2 and there’s more runes to be added all the way to 60. But our toolkit is just lacking at worst and boring at best. A combination of suggestions for each include…

Water Shield:

  • Add the WotLK era improved water shield mechanic to water shield baseline (makes crit heals restore mana) -Zenetta

Earth Shield: Currently bugged

  • Increase the stacks.
  • Increase the healing.
  • Give it an absorption effect.
  • Increase the recipients armor.
  • Allow multiple elemental shields to be active at the same time.

Before Earth Shield will ever be taken, we will have to have MAJOR changes to mana. Shaman in SoD spam vanilla era spells that are much less efficient than things like Prayer of Mending which heals for a ton and costs very little. Without Shamanistic Rage, we would be OOM a couple minutes at best into a fight like the last boss of gnomer where you currently can pop SR like 6+ times a fight and you need to. -Zenetta

Healing Rain:

  • Give it a riptide effect where it’s a strong heal and then a passive hot.
  • Allow its area of effect to travel with the recipient.
  • Combine it with healing stream or make the spell a totem so we can project it to a given area.
  • Make the effect raid wide. “Have it effect the 5 players with the lowest hp.” -Cashollary

“It’s a big flashy (sort of) visual that everyone can see, so someone who’s injured might go out of their way to stand in it. But, uh oh, you’re in the wrong party, so it won’t heal you. You have no way of knowing that, though.” - Cashollary

Power Surge: Currently Bugged

  • Add Healing Rain to its roster.
  • Make it reduce the mana cost of Chain Heal.
  • Reduce the cost of Lesser Healing Wave.
  • Reset the cooldown of Nature’s Swiftness.
  • Give it an on use effect to reduce cast time of healing spells as well as keeping the passive effect.

“The mana regen on power surge is 1.5% instead of 15%. The tooltip should be the correct amount, but its 1/10th what it should be. Someone placing the decimal in the wrong place.” -Oldtomatoes

Ancestral Awakening:

  • Give it a similar effect as tbc tidal waves where Chain Heal reduces the casting time of Healing Wave/Lesser Healing Wave.
  • Make it into a totem that acts similar as the monks jade serpent statue in MOP that casts a similar spell as the shaman at 30% effectiveness.
  • Have it morph Frostbrand Weapon into a pseudo-earthliving that increases healing and provides an ice shield that gives an absorption effect. This could add an interesting incentive to not always choose shamanistic rage and open things up a bit.
  • Reduce cast time of chain heal.
  • Make Ancestral Awakening proc on chain heal crits and healing rain crits as well, or increase the % to 60% for the few spells it works on -Zenetta
  • At the very least give it some sort of cool ghost animation so I don’t forget it’s there completely.

“Ancestral awakening is terrible with our crit only being about 10%. One in 10 healing wave, lhw, procs for a 30% healed on the lowest health group target. It’s just not good for a rune.” -Aaoogaa

Conclusion
I think what I’m most bummed about is how unexciting healing is for shaman. My main heals are a couple of different ranks of Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave and Chain Heal. I’m completely useless on the move. Pvp is almost entirely just Lesser Healing Wave. My runes are mostly passive buffs in pvp and pve. The entire schtick of resto shaman is regen.

TL/DR I’m jealous of other healers with their flashy abilities while I’m still a mana battery.

Thanks for reading.

11 Likes
2

I wish this dev team was better at making fun and interesting to play healer specs but they really are blowing it big time with healers in general imo

3

Fixing the bugged af Earth Shield rune would be a step in the right direction.

3 Likes
4

All the devs care about is make priest healer stronger and more fun. Every other healer is an afterthought

3 Likes
5

I haven’t played resto much so far in SoD, but it does feel weird that most other healers get cool new healing abilities, where besides earth shield (bad) and healing ran (clunky), there are no actual new healing spells for resto.

I think that Riptide would’ve made more sense than Healing Rain and made the spec feel better to play in both pvp and pve. We already have Chain Heal for aoe healing. It would check both the Instant Cast and HoT boxes, which resto has neither of.

Plus the Healing Rain implementation is just weird. It’s a big flashy (sort of) visual that everyone can see, so someone who’s injured might go out of their way to stand in it. But, uh oh, you’re in the wrong party, so it won’t heal you. You have no way of knowing that, though.

6

I think that Riptide would’ve made more sense than Healing Rain and made the spec feel better to play in both pvp and pve. We already have Chain Heal for aoe healing. It would check both the Instant Cast and HoT boxes, which resto has neither of.

That was my first thought when seeing healing rain in phase 1. I was honestly so surprised to NOT see riptide on the rune roster for phase 2. Surely it’ll be introduced next phase?

7

Pretty sure priest got everything they wanted hand delivered on a silver platter in P1.
Then they got upgraded to gold in P2.

P3 must be platinum I guess.

1 Like
8

Meanwhile every other healer will get like a nuke and a buff that gives someone 1 hit.

10

I wonder what % of resto shamans are using Earth Shield and Healing Rain. Blizzard must be able to see those numbers. If it’s like 90% of resto players are using Shamanistic Rage and Overload instead of Earth Shield and Healing Rain, you’d think they’d look into doing something to spice up those runes.

1 Like
11

Tbh the more I play shaman the more it just feels like clearly no one on the dev team plays Shaman

Your best to always keep expectations low when playing the class

12

Pretty sure priest got everything they wanted hand delivered on a silver platter in P1.
Then they got upgraded to gold in P2.

P3 must be platinum I guess.

Just reading through wowhead I looked up the others healers before making this post. You can’t tell me Ancestral Awakening and Pain Suppression/Spirit of the Redeemer are on the same playing field for boots slot runes.

2 Likes
13

Yeah they actually showered priests with love then every other healer they’re like “lol here’s some abilities teehee”

14

Please fix earth shield and resto shaman as a whole. Class is purely a snoozefest mana battery in PvE and straight cannon fodder in PvP. Runes lack any kind of synergy and are half baked designs

1 Like
15

Chain heal+overload is the way to go in most ae damage situations. Make sure in raid you’re casting it on members that you’re not grouped with so the intelligence bounce is raid wide vs group only.

Ancestral awakening is terrible with our crit only being about 10%. One in 10 healing wave, lhw, procs for a 30% healed on the lowest health group target. It’s just not good for a rune.

Power surge provides 0 mp5 passively currently.

Earth shield does not scale.

List goes on but SoD playstyle is the same as classic with better mana management.

Does it work? Yes. Is it SOD level fun? No.

2 Likes
16

Power surge provides 0 mp5 passively currently.

Is this true? Description says you generate mana equal to 15% of your intellect every 5 seconds.

Also, I hope everyone doesn’t mind me quoting posters on this thread and putting them on the original post. Just let me know and I’ll remove it. I figured I’d compile everyones thoughts because I couldn’t find any recent similar topics created around resto shaman.

17

Earth Shield is majorly bugged and not functioning properly. Its been like this since P2 launch. Part of the reason no one uses this rune is because its broken. Step 1 is fixing the bugs imo.

18

I think Healing rain and Earth Shield COULD be awesome, but the way they’re implemented/tuned are keeping them down.

For Earth Shield, it needs to do more healing and have more charges. Its only current use is to avoid spell pushback in certain situations. The tiny number of charges and weirdly low healing makes it perform very poorly as a healing spell. I think it should either have the charges massively increased, to like 9, or just remove charges altogether and have it last for 1-2 minutes instead. It also needs to do more healing. Of course this would require balancing to not become overpowered, but something like doubling the current healing still might not even make it very good.

For Healing Rain, if it’s going to be a flashy visual that everyone can see, it should have the potential to affect everyone instead of only 1 party. The original implementation of healing rain could affect the whole raid, right? There’s a good reason for that. It doesn’t make sense to have a big rain storm graphic lasting for 10 seconds that can’t actually heal you due to being in the wrong party. If it did something like affect the 5 lowest health targets in the raid, that would be way better. Or instead of being a persistent targeted heal, if it instead just put a HoT on the people in targeted party who were in range of the target, that’d be less clunky.

19

Thats not a design choice. Its bugged. The base healing is supposed to scale with level.

20

What about my post suggests that they were?

21

Wait, is this a thing? I assumed if you cast it on someone outside your party, then it would only bounce to people in their party. It sounds like a bug if casting it on someone outside your party makes it no longer respect party boundaries and it will bounce around to anyone in the raid.