I have played Resto Druid/ Resto Shaman(main) / Evoker/Priest/Paladin healers in dragonflight. Speaking from my experience, resto shaman has one of the worst healing playstyles of any healer, and its really boring. I have killed a few mythic bosses in Abberus, and I have played resto shaman since Legion where I got CE in Antorus. Not a flex, I am just framing my experience with the class so you can understand the feedback. I have some experience on resto shaman.
I am rerolling and won’t be playing resto shaman any more.
Resto Shaman feels really boring in terms of the gameplay. Numbers and utility is good not denying that. The actual gameplay feel reminds me of something out of Classic WoW.
It is so basic, you have someone injured and you cast a heal. Mostly you are going to be using Chain Heal. Outside that you are going to use riptide/rain/cloudburst on cooldown. The mastery is basically ignored, you don’t even think about it, it does not add any interesting depth to your gameplay.
Now there is a little room for skill with cloudburst usage, and riptide uptime. For the most part - majority of players will just put cloudburst down on cooldown, not pop it early and they will do absolutely fine.
Now Disc Priest, or Holy Paladin… they have very interesting and engaging little minigames for the player. You have to setup atones and follow a engaging dmg rotation for disc. For Holy paladin you have to build up combo points and buffs and spend it on finishers.
Even Resto Druid has an interesting mastery, more HoTs means better healing. You want to stack as many hots as you can then you want to accelerate the tick rate with Photosynth/Adaptive Swarm/Haste Procs. Its like a little mini-game and create this HoT storm feedback loop.
For me that was way more engaging, and I find myself playing those healers more and more and more and the shaman less.
Resto shaman needs some engaging hooks and a mastery rework.
I am currently 7/9 mythic and had CE last raid as resto shaman.
I also have an unsettling feeling that I am not enjoying my shaman at the moment. I don’t know if the reason is what you pointed out or not. I feel like I am struggling a bit.
Our tier set gives me a little anxiety to keep track of and execute. Not that it is difficult, I just feel like I can never unload my healing when it’s needed sometimes. I have to keep my riptides up and rain constantly. My raid cooldowns feel on the weaker side. I don’t ever feel like I can just go all out when needed. I am just a healer that slowly wittles things up.
What I am thinking is just the playstyle of the latest tier-set + the current talents just doesn’t fit my strengths as a player right now. I see some shaman in logs find success.
It’s not even that I am doing bad. I am parsing mid 50s and up most the time. I have a priest and Druid in my raid that are just completely Nuking heals… last patch I was able to keep up/beat them.
I mean. Chain Heal and Chain Lightning in the same spec and you don’t like it?
Kidding aside (kind of), sounds like you simply like proactive healers better (My guess is you don’t like HPriest). No problem with that. I personally still find RSham very fun. PWave and CBT are enough mini games for me. Love having all the CDs. Love our utility kit. And I enjoy our DPS kit versus say Cat Form or HPal melee restriction.
I actually find RSham more engaging than say RDruid (I like RDruid still). Some of this might be content related though. I will say I do think RSham is more fun in dungeon gameplay where we get to use more of the class utility kit versus raid gameplay.
I won’t argue against a Mastery rework. Maybe something like AA taking it’s place. And our tier does kind of stink compared to other healers, but that is a current tier thing, not a problem with the overall spec design imo.
I really did not have a problem until I saw what healer gameplay could be like after playing Disc and Holy Pally for the first time in DF
Holy priest is a bit better for me than shaman, I think the cooldown reduction mechanic with AoE heals reducing Sanctify - Single Target heals reduce Serenity that’s pretty neat. Gives the player some agency. Besides that, Echo of Light is a good mastery. On top of that the tier further enhances.
I agree the tier does not help, T30 you can just treat as a passive boost, but so was T29.
I mean heck T29 was even more passive than T30.
Perhaps resto shaman tier can help, but for me its a bandaid solution, whereas other tiers are enhancing their cores.
I’m a sucker for chain heal. Although I prefer the classic animation of it, it’s just my favorite healing spell in the game. I love that it’s so easy and acts as a smart heal, since the inception of the spell!
This might be a hot take, but I LOVE Reso shaman. I just don’t like healing rain and Earthen Wall. Whenever I place them everyone just walks out and that cd is wasted.
Eh, it’s been the same way it’s always been for a long time and I’m fine with that. We have extremely strong strengths and our level of powerful cd’s can’t be touched. SLT is for example still one of the strongest cd’s in the game hands down for multiple expansions.
We do have notable weaknesses though and I will add I do wish they leaned in more on the class fantasy. In that regard I think it is quite generic versus elemental or ehancement.
Definitely not doubting the strengths. Solid healer. Solid damage output. Great CD usage.
Shaman Class Fantasy is good but Restoration fantasy is non existent really.
I just find the minute to minute gameplay very vanilla compared to new designs for some healers.
Another big part of my decision to reroll is Elemental. I have always been a flex shaman, took great pride in my DPS spec being just a good as my healing which I considered my main. Elemental is hurting. With below average damage, heavy RNG components and absolutely no raid buffs, there is little reason to take one over a mage/priest/boomie
I would definitely doubt its strengths. It’s arguably the worst healer in raid and it just lost a powerful raiding cd. You cannot use AG anymore as a raid cd. Other specs cds just do more then both ascendance and SLT and it has middling throughput numbers outside of them. So effectively rsham brings close to nothing and what it even potentially brings you get from any other healing spec in a raid setting.
I’ve always felt resto sham had this weird anti-community perception problem. Where even when it was weak people still thought it was strong. It has been weak the entire expansion (outside of a 2 week farm period) and will continue to be weak unless something drastic is done to its spec tree and a tier bonus that actually does something in a raid setting.
The latest AG change means it is HARD capped at doing 2.5m healing. That assumes 0% overhealing and 7 optimal GCD’s inside the CD. That is a perfect scenario. Realistically its doing at most 1m healing per cast (and probably less then that even) due to overhealing and unoptimised play. That amount of healing cannot be used as a raid cd and is better being used as a button to randomly press when you feel like it to make the hps number go up. As far as I’m concerned, rsham is a dead spec until further notice.
bump because the current state of resto shaman is pitiful.
i see multiple threads in the PRT forums for resto shamans and not a single response from devs.
I’m not one too talk too much because I have not played resto shaman this expansion…
But in the past when I’ve switched between healers I thought resto shaman was engaging because of the abilities I had to place manually. That was cool to me. I felt as though I was using mouseover macros less and actually manually placing abilities more.
All of those take manual input where I need to place it properly or at the right time, and that was fun for me when other healers just felt like I was clicking healthbars.
I keep saying Resto need more earth based spell into his kit and to split it.
Water for healing.
Earth for Shields and prot.
Middle would be hybrid with buff.
Wht we need is Unleash life baseline bosting our spells and a version to boost out totems. Also we need more totem option. Shaman totems should feel more impactfull then just hit and forget.
You can debate Ascendance but SLT is a category of it own. In terms of versatility and usefulness it really is unmatched. Now granted this is more realistically tailored towards harder content where it truly shines.