Resto shaman alpha feedback

Classes Shaman
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Disclaimer: I would put this in alpha forums if I could, but I’m not cool enough to have alpha access, even though I desperately want to get in and feel it to see if my suspicions are true. However I hope the right people see this and take this feedback and use it for Alpha/Beta. It might come of a little ranty and angry, and I apologize for that; but I’m passionate about Resto and I want it to be fun while being simple as per WoW’s vision. This version on alpha however, seems too simple.

TL;DR: Resto shaman needs some love on alpha.

So anyway, resto shaman looks like a shell of itself. Since I don’t have alpha and can’t play it, I can only imagine it, and it does not look fun in my imagination. It’s too simple, there’s no choices to make. There’s no enhancing an ability, or deciding which heal to use ANY proc on.

To me, it essentially looks like this: you riptide, you spam healing wave in ST, you spam CH in aoe, earth shield and healing rain every now and that’s it. That’s the game. That’s the rotation, there’s no challenge, there’s no complexity.

Am I asking for it to be difficult? Absolutely not, I get there’s a lot of button bloat and A LOT of passive procs that can go away, but I want there to be some kind of decision for me to make WITHIN MY SPEC. SOME amount of complexity, cause as it stands, there seems to be none.
Something along the lines of “ok I got unleash life up, what’s the best thing to buff right now, instant riptide, a chain heal, a quick surge, or a downpour even?” or “got my tidal waves up, is it better to quick healing wave this player for mana save, or should I sent it on healing surge to hope for a huge crit cause they’re lower.” To me that was what made resto shaman fun. DECIDING what I need to press in the moment.

If you’re aim for challenging level of complexity is “here’s 4 buttons, use them in their rightful scenario, and heal; don’t worry about anything else but the encounter” then it seems you’ve nailed it. Looking at it; there seems to be no complexity within the spec at all, no deciding which totem is better for this fight, CBT or HST, no deciding what ability to use a buff on, no decision other than aoe or ST. To me that has no challenging level of complexity WITHIN the spec.

This is where I have a slight issue with the direction, because every healer has that “dynamic” gameplay of target choice. You’re just eliminating any choice I have within my class of Shaman. I’m just a blue healer at that point and not a Restoration Shaman. I want my shaman to feel like there’s dynamic gameplay IN the spec. Like I have agency over how good of a healer I can be because I know what situation to use a Tidal Wave proc on. I don’t have that agency anymore in Midnight at the moment. It seems like there isn’t a meaningful choice involved in what ability I use. It’s just “I heal this player, now I heal this player.”

Not to mention, the talent tree for resto looks like it’s mostly “hey what basic passives that have little to no effect on gameplay do you want.” I want my talent choices to be impactful on my gameplay. Yes some passives can be impactful, but “crit chance up” and “mana cost down” don’t feel that impactful since you never think about them other than when you pick which is better tuned at the moment, which you do once or twice a season. There’s also riptide build abilities on 1 side of the tree near the top, then in 2 different spots at the bottom. Chain heal build has the same issue. That just feels very off and clunky. I think they need to be more aligned with their respective builds.

The cooldown stuff with Ascendance/HTT, I get that and I’m in love with smoothing out the healing and not needing all those. I love the direction of less spikey damage and more sustaining/smooth.

There doesn’t look to be a way to distinguish yourself as a master of resto shaman over someone who just picked up resto shaman 5 minutes ago.

I may be in the minority with this, I have played resto at a decently high level for going on 15 years, but these changing so far don’t look fun at all. I’m not saying simple cannot be fun, because it absolutely can be. However if the spec plays like I think it’s going to play in it’s current state… I’m not playing resto shaman in Midnight, I can’t do it. I know our apex talents aren’t out yet, and they could do something, but 3 talent points won’t have what I think should come back like:

  • Ancestral Protection Totem: the ability to have a faux brez is awesome, couldn’t be used as an immunity anyway. Has some fun niche uses that just adds slightly more fun to the spec.
  • Cloudburst: It’s a fun ability with some complexity that added an extra little bit of flare that Healing stream just can’t provide. also another ability that offered a distinction between a new resto shaman and a seasoned one.
  • Earthen Wall: just an awesome totem that acted as a mini barrier CD. Could buff it and make it a choice node with SLT, or again with APT.
  • Healing Surge: having to make the decision between this and healing wave has been ICONIC for shaman since it’s inception. (would have to come back with Tidal Waves)
  • Tidal Waves: in my opinion, resto shaman’s ICONIC proc (not unlike sudden doom for unholy dk). The thing to play around that distinguishes good and great resto shamans.
    If healing surge and tidal waves were to come back, I’d expect the cast times of healing wave and chain heal to return to their natural state.
  • Unleash Life: gives the player agency over buffing a specific spell to make said ability feel more impactful.

All these abilities feel like they contributed to the identity of what shamans were. With losing what feels like half our identity, it seems like we’re just a shell, a husk of a spec if you will.

If you made it this far, congratulations, and I thank you for attending my yap session. I may have bounced around a little bit, and I’m sorry for that. I’m not jumping ship just yet, I want resto shaman to be FUN, but also simple, yet with a few complexities that make it really fun.

P.S. Please let the 2 abilities that are capstone in the class tree be Vesper Totem and Chain Harvest.

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Wait tidal waves is going away? What the heck?

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Unfortunately yes.

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Im guessing alot of this will change by release. The community pushback for nuking WAs and addons is already huge and the announcment of these possible alpha changes a day ago didn’t go over well either.

I mained my shaman healer since Vanilla playing off and on, only missing Legion, and the gameplay has changed alot over that time. Though I dont necessarily love the changes, I can get onboard with them feeling people out for feedback. My biggest fear is that this game goes to console or that they implement a battlepass like Blizz did in Diablo and Hearthstone.

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These changes might actually make Resto Sham manageable to play for more people

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I’m fine with them simplifying the spec down and making it more approachable. However, I think it was too much. Again, it’s just my opinion, but I know many other share it.

I think at the bare minimum, they should bring back Healing Surge and Tidal Waves. Those two are iconic resto shaman abilities in my mind that shouldn’t be taken away.

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I always see people making the claims that “pruning” or “simplifying” a class will make it more approachable. That more people will play it, but people wont stick with healing. The core of healing is rotten and must be addressed. Should we not start with the foundation of a building before we buy furniture for the tenth floor apartments?

Thing is, WoW has an extremely bad teaching curve. Lets look at something like rotations for example. Yes, healers dont exactly have that but lets keep it basic. Sorry. Simplified.

What in this game tells you A. What is a rotation, and B. What is YOUR rotation? The one button “rotation” kinda barely manages that, but you as a player are expected to do research in 3rd party stuff. Like Wowhead etc. What does this do? As a new player to MMO’s they dont know terminology. They dont know of 3rd party stuff, unless they are told. Lets take FF14 for a contrast. Melee characters have “combo strings” of abilities. By reading the tooltip you can see that Ability A does X dmg. Ability B will do Y dmg BUT if you press it after Ability A it will do MORE dmg. The game itself helps to guide with your rotation. WoW teaches you nothing and because of the poor education people cant LEARN to be a healer.

Couple this with healer metrics. The hardest thing in the game for a person to gauge how they improve. Healing cant be measured as much as the parse people want you to believe… How does a healer even know if they are doing better? A dps does more dps / dmg total. A healer? You can heal less and have done better. Deaths? Again, some dps die because they sat in fire, you as the healer arnt to blame for it. You will be of course but, this is still a daunting prospect for new healers.

Finally you have WoW culture. Do you honestly think new players can handle how ungodly toxic players are towards healers? Lets not mince words. WoW groups are pretty disgusting when it comes to how they treat each other. The pressure and anxiety any new healer has on them is more than enough without people ripping them apart.

Make no mistake. This isnt pruning. This isnt “removing button bloat”. This is over simplification to its core. This is patricide against the King of utility, for what? Empty promises of new blood. You must fix the core of why healers are bad to play, and killing healers toolkits for the sake of a false arguement aint it.

I would love to see the best of both worlds. A Resto shaman filled with accessability options, varied spells that are impactful and a learning curve that doesnt hurt new players. We must first learn to walk before we run. The prune may come but, not now. Not like this.

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Oh my god, both of the people using this will be furious.

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signed up for forums to talk about resto changes. I love shaman utility, and I haven’t loved another healer like rsham because it feels so easy, useful, and impactful all at once.

of all healers, resto didn’t need this many things removed. cloudburst was already a choice node and not required, why not let those of us who enjoy it use it???

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Blizzard is going about this the wrong way and Resto shaman is being made the “experiment”. Just stop. Are classes button bloated? Sure. But you are taking away all skill expression with these changes. Why take an away cloud burst? Just because you can’t track i
The metric? Pretty sure we can time a good cloudburst off boss timers. It’s not rocket science. That makes no sense. Why take away an OPTIONAL talent like Unleashed life? You don’t even have to USE it! That’s a prime example of EASY expression, (hit a button to buff another). It’s not like it has 5 different tree modifiers. I played the 2 button Farseer rotation in raid this tier and it was absolutely mind-numbing. I swapped to Pres for raid healing after a month because it was so boring. Totemic is already so easy to play that I know people who have never gotten 3k io on a healer before, did last tier. Take away some modifier, sure. Take away healing surge, fine. But let us have more than 4 buttons for the love of Azeroth.

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This is actually frequently used on raid prog, both for the saved brez if it goes off, and for the 10% health buff for 30 secs if it doesn’t. It loses a lot of value on raid farm, and on keys, where deaths tend to be less predictable.

Resto shaman healing was already simple, the skill in using the class was to make the most of its utility. What’s happening now leaves no room for skill expression, the floor and the ceiling of the class will be the same. Farseer especially looks dead, you will be able to heal it using a one button rotation feature as its healing will consist of keeping hst/riptide/healing rain on cd and using hw or ch for filler.

I intend to enjoy the rest of this tier, as the future direction of resto shamans, and healing more broadly, looks pretty shaky.

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Cloud burst’s removal is the odd one to me. I could see an argument for everything else but not cloud burst. It let you convert a fairly static set it and forget it healing stream totem into a large burst heal if you time it right or a popcorn fart of wasted healing. It was fun to get the timing down by knowing fights and whatnot.

I’ve not always liked CB but I’ll miss it for sure.

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Good write up. I disagree on tidal waves though from a pvp perspective.

I feel rsham is losing more than all the other healers. Losing 2 3-min cooldowns is huge. I play rsham because I want to press a bunch of different buttons.

I would have been fine just removing the modifiers.

Overall everything feels like a HUGE nerf and the changes just seem unfun.

Each specialization now automatically learns 1 spell instead of 2 through the Shaman talent tree.
Totemic Surge reduces the cooldown of totems by 5 seconds (was 6 seconds).

Ive said it before and Ill say it again, this blue text rubs me the wrong way:
Another goal for us was to reduce the number of available group cooldowns healers have access to, so Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem are now a choice against each other. We want healers to feel powerful, but having too many powerful cooldowns often leads to needing to deal spiky damage to challenge them.

This only effects rsham, so why are they pretending that other healers are losing their big cooldowns?

Itll also be 2026 when the xpac comes out. Make our totems invulnerable. Especially Healing Tide Totem. Totems are no different than another classes buffs. This ruins pvp specifically when your 3-minute cooldown will be a choice node with ascendance and can essentially be 1-shot

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Figured I would chime in here and say that loosing Tidebringer will basically make it so that we can’t heal Ranged players in Mplus. Tidebringer is the primary tool that made Rsham powerful in Mplus back in 10.0.7 and loosing it will make us bad Mplus healers.

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10% chance on Riptide to get an extra HST that heals another ally sounds incredibly OP. It doesn’t even buff your next one; it effectively gives an extra one because it doesn’t incur a CD.

60% increased HST healing is also giga powerful with more totems out. Totemic Rshams could have 2 totems out and be healing 5 players quite often. A proc with the 60% increased HST apex talents would be ~400% more healing than an ordinary totemic HST.

Rsham looking powerful on paper but I don’t see Riptide and HST spam being compelling gameplay at all.

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Hope you like hitting nothing but HST, Healing Rain, and riptide.

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I could see it being fun in pvp with Storm Conduit talent if they don’t remove that.

I love dropping HSTs

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It works out to about 1 proc per minute, but there’s a lot of rng to it, which makes it fairly useless for healers. If it gave a charge you could then expend when it was useful then I could accept it, but as it is, it’s just more zero skill gameplay, buffing our numbers without any action from the player.

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I’m more upset that the talents make us choose between Healing tide and ascendance. like, wtf is that?

also, earthen wall was nice for raid bosses…going to miss that.

having our utility gutted sucks so much.

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Problem is, like someone else said, it’s RNG so therefore just bad for healers. Especially how little of a chance it is. Someone tested this on alpha and they did 17-20 Riptides, and no proc. Getting no proc when you need a decent heal is terrible, and getting a proc when you don’t need it is also terrible. Which will happen like 98% of the time.

Also the problem with these apex talents is Farseer is just bricked, it’s dead on arrival.

Why? Totemic allows HST to heal an additional target. With HST being our “fun” button now, it’s going to be a big amount of healing. So healing 3 targets with totemic vs 2 with Farseer is an insane difference, just because they made HST the focus right now.

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