From what I’ve heard Resto shaman is not good in mythic plus? But I don’t understand why? I feel like it’s so good because of its aoe healing, decent damage output and offer lust buff oh yeah and a kick. Why are they considered bad for m+.
Trying to decide on a main for SL and I’m leaning towards a class with utility. Might go Resto Druid because of brez. I’m looking to raid and do m+ so what do you guys think of the 2 Resto specs and what you think is better. I would like to do off spec dps if I can too but I know it will be hard too.
To be fair… I havent done resto healing for an age. But the odd part is that it kinda comes down to a few factors regardless.
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No single target mitigation.
Now I know what your thinking, we shaman have the best in aoe mitigation with spirit link, and you are right. The cd is insane, but its a 3min cd. It also doesnt reduce the damage incoming merely splits it. This normally forces a shaman to use more than 1 cd when poop hits the fan. Also requires the party to stack, again hard to co ordinate with random people. -
The mastery.
Dear god … I remember when I loved our mastery. But we are the only healer who will NEVER use our full mastery potential, and I dont mean that as an exaggeration… it is 100% fact that we will never use our mastery to its full potential.
If you dont know how our mastery works … and incase others dont. Your healing increases by X% for every 1% of missing hp. So, if your mastery is 100% additional healing… a target missing 25% hp will gain 25% more healing from you.
Shaman healing is nerfed to accomodate the potential of great healing, so our spells through put is garbage untill the target starts to drop low. Im sure you understand it… but for anyone else… Low hp in m+ bad.
- Grievous. Im just putting this affix here because I hate blizzard. I hate paladins, and I hate holy priests. Do you remember back in legion what the original affix was? It was over healing on a target became a heal absorb which you had to heal off before you can heal the target. During this week… damn shaman was grand due to your mastery causing heals to be weaker at high hp. But the other classes had “issues” So blizzard rear ended the shamans with grievous. We suck at handling a slow bleed trickle at high hp. Mastery is the cause.
You have it right, they do have the best interrupt in the game. Damage… well… that is actually on the weak side i’m afraid, and our utility is second to none. Except we dont have brez…(Im not counting anscestral totem. just standard brez) which… has become near mandatory for all content now. Why not just give all healers brez and strip it from all others? … I unno seems logical to me.
But there are tools every healer needs to succeed in m+ Holy priest also lacks the single target protection. Guess which other healer has issues?
Compared to other healers… you are just handy capped in m+. You just dont have the healing through put as others do from the start. (lets ignore injured targets) Imagine your monk needed someone to be at 60-70% hp for your heals to start to matter?
As for raids… well. Ill keep it short. Reverse scaling.
How many classes get worse as you get better gear? None? … Well resto does. It boggles my mind on why the raid getting better gear means I do less healing.
Now, there will be less healing in total to get done, but spells become weaker since hp totals / armor increase, so the % of hp lost goes down… and we are back to why mastery sucks.
Ill always be a shaman. Ive raided… Ive healed, I have done elemental… I havent done enh for some reason I suck at it, but I cant say with 100% certainty that the shaman will ever compete with a resto druid. Maybe for a few weeks in a raid, but thats it.
But make no mistake. You will always be able to do all the content. You asked me for my opinion on why it is bad. Please understand you can still do all the content, its just going to test your resolve as a healer, it isn’t easy being green. Uh blue. Im not an orc anymore.
I may seem negative… but thats because im Old. I have existed in this game for over 11 years as a shaman, Ive seen our ups… and ive seen our downs. But there is one thing that all resto shaman have, its the love of our class. We dont play to be number 1. We play for the sake of being shaman, and maybe… you will too?
Others can feel free to correct my statements, or id prefer them to add to your knowledge with their own stories and claims. So you can make a wise choice, rather than a mis informed one. Goodluck potential shaman. Enjoy what ever you choose.
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So when people say Shamans aren’t good in M+ content, they primarily mean very high m+ keys (+20 to +25). The reason is because once you get to keys that high, you aren’t even really playing the same game anymore, and the shaman kit is not as well suited to healing in that situation as many other healers. I don’t do keys that high myself, but my understanding is because of the following:
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Shaman’s healing style is not effective at progressing quickly through high m+ keys. We are entirely reactive healers with a lot of long cast times. Healing in these situations is more about mitigating damage, dealing dps during the pull, and topping people off in between pulls. Shamans can’t do these things as effectively as many other healers.
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Shamans don’t bring the right utility for high m+ keys. They do bring a lot of nice things to the table (a kick, a purge, an aoe stun, etc.) but these can be covered by other classes, and they don’t bring the most important things - a brez, good aoe dps, and some way to reduce damage taken by tanks. It doesn’t help that they can’t HoT people up and start dpsing like druids can, which further exacerbates the dps issue.
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The unique utility that shaman do bring is not suitable for high m+ keys. The perfect example of this is spirit link totem. In “conventional” content, this is one of the best cooldowns in the game. It basically makes everyone in it immortal for the duration. However, mob damage is so high in a +25 that the health sharing becomes a liability, and can actually cause wipes. Furthermore, shamans niche in healing is stacked multi target healing, which just isn’t as helpful of a niche in difficult 5 man content.
So yeah, all these situations only apply to the very top end of m+ content. Unfortunately, lots of people extrapolate this mean shamans aren’t up to the task in all 5 man content, even though that isn’t the case. Shamans can heal a +15 just fine, and are very sought after raid healers. Playing a shaman is dealing with the stigma that’s attached to the class. A lot of people just assume shamans are mediocre unless they’re proven otherwise, and the problems above reinforce this opinion, often unfairly.
TLDR Can you do well in a +15 as a shaman? Absolutely. Will you be better suited to playing another healer in a +25? Probably. Does that mean the spec isn’t worth your time? Hell no. Play what you like.
Just my 2 copper.
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Resto shaman is the other side of the coin in the the design of strong healing capabilities, growing in the opposite direction from traditional healers. However, most of the content, particularly small group content like M+, is designed to scale along almost purely traditional lines.
When a positive and a negative slope intersect, and one says to the other, isn’t it neat how we can arrive at the same solution?
Then the other line leaves the station to proceed at exponential growth.
For me there are 2 things that really bug me about R shaman for m+ and I probably won’t come back to the spec unless they’re addressed.
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Miserable aoe damage - baseline we just have just 1 aoe spell, chain lightning which is a long cast time, target capped at a miserable 3 and hits like a wet noodle.
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Chain Lightning, Healing Rain and many totems require people to be stacked together and is usually pretty miserable when pugging. If you have a good group where you can coordinate it’s probably not as bad but if you’re pugging like I do, you will feel so much better playing a spec that isn’t so reliant on group organization.
Those are the 2 biggest things but there are a lot of other little things too. No Tank CD, Healing Stream Totem isn’t smart and rarely heals the target that needs healing most (usually the tank),
Capacitor Totem is really hard to time, Tidal waves isn’t a good m+ mechanic and is made even worse due to the stacking issues, The Mastery rewards a risky playstyle and bad players, and Mobility isn’t great.Most of this could be overlooked in m+ if its healing was less reliant on the group and/or it could dps like a beast. With all these disadvantages compiled together, it’s correctly one of the worst m+ healers. The only worse healer is Holy Priest.
Its kind of understandable though. Holy and RShamans kits are more designed around a Raid environment. I think its ok for different specs kits to shine in different areas and M+ just isn’t where R shaman is designed to be.
On the other hand. Resto Druid feel like it was designed for M+ and is basically the king of m+ healing. Its the clear winner that checks every box you could want to check. I think every healing class forum complains that they don’t have something that Druids have.
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We are exactly half as bad at m+ as players often suggest. People put entirely too much stock into the top 1% of players on RIO.
You are right, we have a lot going for us, our kick, lust, great ST dps, SLT which can be used to ignore mechanics and save lives, a pocket tank to save from a wipe in the event the tank gets squished, a ranged, aoe stun, a sheep, etc.
We also have mostly hard casts, with long casts for some. Also the reason shaman healing is so engaging is because of the combo benefit of arranging spells in the certain way for the best benefit, but this also results in multiple GCD casts to accomplish what other healers can do in less, and often, instant casts.
We are perfectly capable of 15’s. Community perception based on RIO has been a cancer on this game.
Play what you like, unless you’re planning on pushing 25’s.
Also we currently are great in raids, and are looking S tier for raids in SL.
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I agree with most of what’s been said here, and I’ll add that even in a +15 key you can easily feel the difference between a resto Shaman and a resto Druid. I mained resto Shaman in Legion and for the beginning of BFA, and switching to Druid made every dungeon just feel so much better for me. Sure, resto Shaman is capable of doing keys up to a certain point, but Druid’s kit is just so well-suited to M+ that it’s hard to overstate it. Playing a Shaman in a +15 feels so much more stressful and like you’re fighting against a current or something, compared to Druid which feels much smoother and like you have better tools to handle virtually any situation. This only becomes more apparent in higher key levels.
So, I’d say play Shaman if you really want to, but it’s definitely going to be harder and probably feel less rewarding. I personally don’t enjoy the resto Shaman play style enough to push through it. To me, it’s not challenging in a “fun” way, you just feel overall worse than a resto Druid IMO, which feels bad.
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Pugging with a Resto Shaman in Mythic+ is one of the more frustrating ways to play this game. Can it be done, of course it can. Is it fun, relatively speaking it isn’t IMO. If you play in an organised group on Discord is really not too bad at all. If you are going beyond 15 you are probably in an organised group so its only when you get to the cutting edge does it all really fall apart for Resto Shaman.
To heal effectively you need players to stack up otherwise your AOE healing becomes weak single target heals and the group falls apart. Problem is people are so used to healers being able to target them from anywhere they don’t want, or can’t be bothered to play around a Resto Shaman.
Cast Healing Rain and then everyone moves, wasted GCD and time to cast. Use Chain Heal and it does not bounce again wasted GCD and cast time…same with totems, in Dungeons pugs are all over the place avoiding mechanics and doing their own thing.
The mastery sounds amazing but it’s a stat you use less and less and your healing throughput gets worse and worse as time goes on. Its not broken, its just not optimal.
Probably the biggest issue outside the limitations of Shaman AOE healing is a lack of a supportive DR defensive. You just don’t have that ‘Oh Crap‘ button that can buy you some breathing room in bad situations. You tend to get stuck hard casting where other healings don’t have to. The Earth Shield changes and legendary are nice but its just more healing throughout not a DR which is what is really needed. Spirit Link Totem really isn’t that amazing in Mythic+.
If you are not tied to Shaman emotionally and want to do well in PvP and Mythics as a Healer there are superior options to consider. If raiding is what you mainly do then all good Spirit Link Totem is a must have for most raids.
Resto Shaman is no bad, its just an extra layer of challenge above what a Disc Priest of Resto Druid brings to a Mythic Group. To me they are a Holy Priest with better utility both heavily rely on throughput and if tuning is off they really struggle.
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I do think it’s important to mention that the few changes we have received for shadowlands seem specifically targeted at improving our 5 man healing. Our single target spellpower coefficients got buffed quite a bit, and we got earth shield as a baseline spell.
Getting a baseline earth shield is actually quite a large buff in my mind. It can be precast before every pull, it’s another HoT (which shaman sorely needs) and it buffs all our heals on the tank by 10%. It’s basically free healing that we didn’t have before. And that’s not even counting the legendary that buffs it by 300% and lets healing wave add stacks.
Yet this gets applied by the sheer masses of fanbois to mean anything above M+0
I’m not disputing that. Is it fair? Of course not. But making broad generalizations is one of the hallmarks of the wow community.
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