Resto Shaman Class Fantasy - Farseer Hero Talent Failure

Classes Shaman
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I’ve been a shaman since TBC; and I’ve been an active Guildmaster & Raid Leader for two full expansions - all maining Resto Shaman. I’ve had the opportunity to coach fledgling aspiring R-Shamans in my tenure. When people ask me “What’s it like to play Resto” my answer often starts with a question:

Do you want to just heal, or heal and do damage?

I applaud the developers for baking this question into the fundamentals of our talent tree. The beautiful design of the Resto Shaman tree is that you can sacrifice a little healing for a lot of damage. You don’t HAVE to do this, but it’s an option.

For me the answer has always been “Heal and Do Damage.” So to my aspiring shaman, if they answer in kind, my follow up is: “Read [Master of the Elements] in your talent tree and let me know if it appeals to you”.

Casting Lava Burst increases the damage or healing of your next Nature or Frost spell by 20%.

The Master of the Elements is an extraordinary talent to play around as Restoration. And it’s a talent borrowed directly from the Elemental Spec. The class fantasy of weaving your damage into your healing for greater benefit is top-tier. Some of my favorite times in Resto Shaman history were not the ones where we had high healing. There were times in the game’s history where a “Battle Shaman” could be 75% of a healer + 50% of a DPS. This made raid balance really fun.

But sometimes, a new shaman says “Master of the Elements? No thank you. I’d rather just heal please.” Again this is where the power of the talent system comes into focus. The other big build-a-round talent is Cloudburst Totem. Which magnifies your Riptides and Chain Healing into a literal BURST heal. Very Fun. And the talent tree has you covered. You can drop all talents that focus on damage of crank up your Chain Healing & Rip tides and play the Cloudburst mini-game.

And yet still, there is a 3rd option: Run the amped Healing Stream totems along with other active spells like Wellspring and Downpour for a differently themed healing.

Why the Hero Talents have failed:

Ignoring what has been released, it seems obvious to me that one path should focus on Damage and the other path focus on Healing.

With the dramatic tension of Master of the Elements and Cloud Burst Totem in mind - Let us turn to Hero Talents. From the perspective of the Resto Shaman, we have two sister specs to pair to. It seems like the Master of the Elements track aligns closest to the Elemental Tree. But instead - we got Farseer.

Farseer suffers from an instant red flag: More than half of the talents do “X” for ele and “Y” for resto. So instead of finding commonality between the two sister specs - they just copy/pasted two different talent trees onto the same icons. And the result was a completely Riptide focused build that adds almost nothing. Reading some of these nodes, that Battlecaster in me wishes that as Resto I could just use the elemental version of the talent. Ancestors shot Elemental Blasts? I want that as Resto - that sounds awesome! But no - have a bubble instead… huge let down.

I posted this in the main thread:

For Resto Shamans who wish to forgo damage and be a pure healer - it seems obvious to me that Totemic would fulfill that fantasy. Totemic is the Hero Talent crossover for Enh-Resto. Considering that much of a Resto Shaman’s Cooldowns are already tied to Totems already, it seems like a natural fit.

Final Thoughts:
One thing that has kept me playing Wow over the decades is that Blizzard absolutely nails theming. In the past few expansions though, I feel like the Shaman Devs have somewhat lost the answer to “What does a Resto Shaman want to be?” I worry about healer homogenization. Where all healers are just all merge into same architype with different spell animations. Riptide focused builds are a step in that direction; and farseer is just the latest version of that. If my fantasy was to: spread buffs for a big benefit we already have Resto Druid AND disc priest as options.

Let Resto Shamans be the Spec that is allowed to sacrifice active healing for active damage. Lean into that architype. The times when this was true were some of the best times in Resto Shaman history.

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I was really looking forward to this hero tree. Over the years shaman have transitioned from ‘spiritual healer’ into ‘water healer’. Which is fine, but I much preferred the original theme.

This hero tree was the perfect opportunity to get back to the roots of the shaman theme, but it appears not much work has gone into this.

The ancestor proc I can get behind, but I don’t want it tied to a talent ability, I would rather it be tied to a core or class spell that both Ele and Resto have.

Other spells that fit into the original spiritual shaman theme and should be amplified by this hero tree would be:

  1. Astral shift
  2. Spiritwalkers Grace
  3. Spirit Link totem (yes I know this is a totem, but the original spell wasn’t, and this has been present in the game as a non totem option that could make a return here in some form)
  4. Ghost wolf
  5. Spirit walk
  6. Reincarnation

Not a super long list as over time the theme of shaman has changed to more elemental, but there is plenty here to work with and create some nice utility effects, defensives, mobility etc.

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I agree with this, and I think I want to clarify some terminology, at least the way I use it:

  • Play Style - Play style is mechanically how the class plays (especially in contrast to other classes in the same role). Is it rotational or proc based? What is the composition of your healing profile? How much instant spot healing, heals over time, or mitigation? How much damage to do you, and is that damage passive or active?

  • Thematics - The look, feel, and flavor of your class. Animations, spell descriptions, armor sets, all this plays into theming, and is largely what you’re responding to.

  • Class Fantasy - This is really just the intersection of Theme + Play Style. Theme certainly needs to inform play style, and vice versa.

A good test for if your class has a strong theme: Write a sentence that describes your class fantasy (but doesn’t name your class/spec). Then see if people could guess “That’s a Resto Shaman!” If your fantasy sentence describes several different classes or healers -then the Devs have failed.

As a Resto, I want my two Hero Specs to offer me a choice: More Healing -verse- More Damage. For me, this is independent of the theming. I don’t really care which one is which, but I want that choice.

Now returning to theming, they’ve already accommodated that R-Shaman Fantasy into our spec talent tree with: Lava Surge, Master of the Elements, Acid Rain, Storm Keeper. I’m just really disappointed they didn’t use the Ele-Resto Hero Spec to expand on this.

We’ll have to see what Totemic offers (maybe Vesper can make return). But man, it seems like a missed opportunity to make Totemic be the “More Healing Please” path and theme the Resto-Ele Hero Spec around being a Master of the Elements.

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Yes, I feel to give both resto and ele the options to expand on their off roles, the main mechanic of this tree could have been something like:

“Your non cooldown abilities have a 30% chance to summon an ancestor spirit that casts a similar ability repeatedly for 4 seconds, dealing 10% of its damage or healing each second.”

So 30% proc rate feels often enough to avoid the downsides of RNG but not frequent enough that you would just have spirits littering your screen. 30% x 40% of the total spells damage would end up being +10% spell effectiveness over 4 seconds or something close on average which I think is fine considering most hero trees give a bland damage boost anyway.

Then the other talents in the hero tree could add additional effects to the spirit procs. This wouldn’t lump this hero tree in with the fire crowd or the lightning crowd, it could be useful for both. And would also be useful for adding damage to restó and some healing utility for ele possibly as well.

I would also like to see a return of the old astral shift but maybe lessened to be balanced for retail wow. Something like
“When you lose control of your character or lose more than a third of your health in a single attack, shift into the astral realm for 4 seconds reducing damage taken by 15%”

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Would like to add, Focused Insight (linked below) in Season 1 of Dragonflight was a nice addition to this theme, but was removed in favor of simplifying the amount of modifiers we were regularly using to amp up our spells.

Casting Flame Shock reduces the mana cost of your next heal by 20% and increases its healing effectiveness by 30%.

It was a little too powerful in my opinion, and I definitely agreed that we had too many modifiers that we were regularly stacking on top of one another (and we still do, to be fair), but I did enjoy using it. It made it feel a little less bad to take GCDs away from healing that would offer a small amount of damage when you were also going to get a small healing bonus later on.

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Yes, totally agreed.

Adding to that pile was the removal of “offensive” P-Wave for Resto. I was a little bummed that I had to take P-Wave for this last season, and I considered main-swapping when they announced that P-Wave could only be used on allies.

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How would we feel about adding some sort of ascendance interaction with this tree?

Both Resto and Ele have access to ascendance and/or deeply rooted elements. And I’m assuming stormbringer and totemic won’t do anything for ascendance

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Reactionary healer largely based on the element of water.

RNG period makes it sub par. And it doing healing or damage would hurt ele. A lot. Ele “expanding” on its off role just makes it worse in actual gameplay.

This wouldnt be that useful in PVE though.

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This isn’t even accurate (and honestly, could be describe mistweaver if you take “mist” a little loosely).

I would say that modern Resto shaman is less and less reactive. You have things like Cloudburst totem which requires set up. As well as a larger focus on stacking up riptides to some payoff.

I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally contradictory - but my point wasn’t about making a “game” it was a thought experiment. If you want to be pedantic, you could have just said “It’s a class that rhymes with Best-o Raw Man”

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Is MW a reactionary healer water based healer? No.

Cloudburst is non reactionary. You are right. Otherwise like 95% of your healing is reactionary. Cloudburst is also optional.

I am being contradictory by playing through your game / thought experience?

How do I participate without being contradictory? Just blindly agree that it cant physically be done and everything is just bad and all the classes are the same?

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I’m just trolling you back relax :slight_smile:

My point wasn’t that: It’s completely impossible to define a spec in one sentence - prove me wrong.

My point was that as development as of late has been pushing healing specs closer together - rather than creating unique playstyles to separate them. Thematically, sure, there’s only one “Water” healer… I guess you got me good on that one. But the Riptide playstyle has been done before in other classes.

Like If I said: I want to play a healer that stacks up small buffs on may different players, then gets a big payoff for proper stacking. What class best fulfills this fantasy?

… This describes Resto Druids, Disc Priests, and to some extent MW as well; and now Shaman as well. That was at the heart of my question. I want the Devs to move away from making all healers have the same: spread small buffs → big payoff! Mechanical style.

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Yet they still play quite different.

No one is going to mix up the playstyles of resto druid, resto shaman, mw monk.

Is there over lap? Sure. You can only move health bars up so many different ways. But there are still a ton of differences.

If anything I would say resto shaman is more closely aligned with holy priest.

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So, we’re kinda saying the same thing, but I still feel like you’re trying to be contradictory…

So Let me try and summarize my point: There are many axes on which rate healing mechanically.

  • Proactive - Reactive
  • Single Target - Distributive
  • Sustained - Bursty Cooldowns
  • Set-up & Payoff - Improvisational
  • Passive Damage - Active Damage
  • High Utility - Throughput focused

So all healers have some of everything to be sure, but how much you pull on each of these levers is how you define the differences between the classes mechanically.

I would agree with you that, historically shamans were probably closest aligned to Holy Priest. But given the changes made this season, and the looking at Farseer Hero Spec as evidence, I think they are moving Away from this architype. I also fear that the devs are trying to move the different healing specs closer to the middle across the board. In my opinion this is a mistake.

To me, what I want Resto Shaman to be is a class that has high utility, high improvisation; Not another ‘set-up’ healer. I want a healer that always has the option to forgo a heal now, and add in some active damage when the team is healthy; not a class that spends most GCDs on maintenance. The risk, is that health on the team dips too low, that you fly too close to that damage sun and get burned. But that’s the way of the shaman. I joke with people in my M+ group that ‘you died because I proc’ed a lava burst’.

You appear to want something different. You apparently like and defend what resto shaman is going to become when they make “Riptide whack-a-mole” the new shaman fantasy.

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Considering that the main aspect of the farseer hero talent is copying a holy priest ability…why do you feel they are moving away from being similar to holy priests?

But hero talents we have been shown dont actually effect anything rotational with resto shaman. There is no additional set up.

…what?

Thats exactly how I play resto shaman today in keys.