Resto Shaman Totemic Hero Talents Review

Overall, a bit disappointed, but not surprised. Wordy overview from dipstick incoming.

Totemic Tree is up now: Totemic Hero Talents - Restoration Shaman.

I want to know other Resto Shams breakdown of it as well. Here’s mine:

  1. Surging Totem: 6.5/10 - Not my preferred reform for Healing Rains, but it is something. It’s instant cast, benefits from increased radius, and can be moved around with totemic Projection. An improvement over its current iteration, I hope it’s modified to work in pvp. As someone who has whined on these forums for awhile about healing rain, I do see it as a slight win.

2a. Totemic Rebound: 5/10: Eh…it’s alright. Little extra boost to health. Not great but not bad. Adds more passive healing which helps because the core Rsham healing is still hardcasts.

2b. Dual Node - 1) Amplification Core: 5/10 - Uhh…fine whatever. Relatively unremarkable like the most other parts of the hero tree.

  1. Oversurge: 5.5/10 - Not bad, not really good either. With ascendance and deeply rooted elements procs, it may be noticeable. I wish they had an additional talent to reduce Ascendance by 30-45 seconds instead of having us put 3 points into earthliving(bad talent tree layout) or to increase the chance of riptide proccing ascendance through deeply rooted elements(to reiterate, why is Earthliving 3 points in the bottom of tree, what even is this??!?)

2c. Lively Totems: 6.5/10 - Pretty decent. Getting an instant chain heal when dropping certain totems improves passive healing. Especially with healing Stream, as you drop these frequently. I think the passive heals offered in this tree will add up.

3a. Dual Node- 1) Oversized Totems: 6.5/10 - Also pretty decent. The 15% increased radius is solid. The 30% increased hp of totems is lacking. For a Spec so heavily based around and reliant on totems, it should be more like 50% + improved hp. There so fragile right now, I don’t know how much 30% more hp will actually help.

  1. Swift Recall: 4/10 - Could just be mediocre, but based on the way I’m understanding it, it’s pretty empty/mehhhh. It reduces cooldown by 5 seconds of control totems(Tremor, Earthgrab, capacitor), but only once every 20 seconds for each totem…so basically it’s just a 5 second reduction in CD for a few totems. How many would take this over Oversized totems?

3b. Wind Barrier: 7/10 - Could be being overly optimistic, but this seems pretty good. Resto Shams struggle with mobility so adding passive abilities to make us a bit tankier will help.

3c. Reactivity: 6.5/10 - Pretty decent. Again, it’s not world breaking, but all these little passive heals in the Totemic tree will add up.

4a. Imbuement Mastery: 1/10 - I don’t know if this is supposed to be a joke or not. Absolute waste of a node. Earthingliving, an ability that is constantly proccing and refreshes its duration when procced, lasting another 6 seconds…? Why even put this in here? Please, Please, Please…come up with something better then this.

4b. Dual Node- 1) Pulse Capacitor: 7/10 - 25% increased healing for surge totem is pretty substantial when surge totem already improves healing rain by 30%.

  1. Tidecaller’s Guard: 5/10 - Not terrible, but also lackluster.

Note: I think this idea is better for a shield imbue → Tidecallers Guard(Applied to shield): “When you take damage, you have a chance to gain a stack of Tidecaller Guard, stacks up to 5 times. Each stack of tidecaller’s guard reduces the cast time of your next heal by 10%.” It’s basically just Resto sham’s own version of maelstrom weapon(it’s in regular Shaman tree already), but it works better as a shield imbue because when is a shaman gonna start whacking people for maelstrom stacks?

4c. Dual node - 1) Totemic Coordination: 6/10 - Solid. Again, improves passive healing. Adds up.

  1. Earth Surge: 7/10- Solid. Earth Shield increases healing on target by 20%, Riptide and Healing Rain w/Deluge increases healing, Unleash Life, and now this. Adds up and makes a difference.
  1. Capstone - Swirling Elements: 7.5/10 - Seems Good. Definitely seems like it would have a nice synergy with other abilities. Between reduced cast time for air, to duplicating a heal with water, to increasing Earthliving HoT with chain heal for earth, it has a good “flow” to it. A combination of increased efficiency and healing.

Overall Rating: 6.5. Could go to to 7+ when I try it out or down to a 2 and lead me to quit wow and start drinking again.

Notes - This is just based off of first glance. We won’t know until deeper into beta. There’s some lackluster stuff and also a couple of real stinkers( I’M LOOKING AT YOU IMBUEMASTERY! FRIG OFF!). Overall, I think it adds a lot of passive healing that Resto Shaman needs. It gets rough trying to rely on hardcasting healing wave and surge. A lot of this stuff is instant cast and has passive effects that contribute to our sustain healing.

From what I see so far you get: Improved Healing Rain that procs every 5 secs and improves other abilities through cast time reduction, duplicate healing and improved HoT efficacy. Also, chain heals off Healing Stream/Tide Totem, 1/2 heals from Healing Stream after using healing ability, and additional chain heal bounce to most wounded teammate. So chain heal “double dips”. There’s more but that’s the jist of it. It honestly doesn’t seem bad overall, but time will tell.

Do we need a bit more in the mobility department? For sure. Resto Sham is dead in the water mobility wise in the current meta. I wish there was something for improved mobility( I dunno, maybe replace…IMBUE MASTERY WITH A MOBLITY TALENT). Maybe they’ll do something with regular Shaman tree because all 3 specs like mobility

Going to preface this by saying I’m pretty much exclusively a Raider. I don’t do M+ or PVP, so my opinion is based on how I feel this would play in a raid environment.

My thoughts? It’s garbage. I don’t ever see myself taking Totemic over Farseer. I don’t like losing control over where my Healing Rain gets dropped. It would feel terrible to drop the totem and it puts the rain over on the Hunter who’s standing way out in the boonies instead of on the melee pack. I also don’t like fishing for the buff I want with the capstone.

The only two talents I like are Totemic Rebound and Supportive Imbuements. The rest is just uninteresting or terrible.

I posted my thoughts on each talent in another thread:

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Imbues just make up for such a tiny amount of our throughput. Any increases to imbues need to be huge in order to make any difference at all. And so far they aren’t close to being impactful I don’t think.

Yeah, this is what I’m disappointed in. Losing the ability to place the healing Rain where you want it.

If they made it controllable like how Spirit Link or Ancestral Protection are, then the Hero Tree would go from garbage to mid for me.

I do like the idea of bouncing Chain Heal off totems, though. That could be some interesting tactics. Like, dropping Earthbind out in nowhere just so I could bounce a Chain Heal off it to reach a Mage or Hunter who’s way out in the boonies.

The rest of the tree is just… meh.

The Tree for Resto is pretty powerful. It’s probably the second most powerful healer to Disc Voidreaver.

In fact a lot of Resto Shaman who do high end content would say it’s a little too powerful.

11/10

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I can understand the healing rain issue for raiding especially. In raiding, there’s going to be a large group that could be way spread out. You don’t want it just going to random areas of wounded players. You want autonomy over where you place it based on the situation. I wish they would keep surging totem, but allow you to move it. Not with totemic projection, but just repositioning the rain, and taking healing rain off the global cooldown. So you could continually reposition it as you require it.

In pvp, your constantly moving. In arena it’s hard to stay in a single spot for long, so having the healing rain move every 5 seconds to where they go is useful. With a team of 3, there’s also only a few places rain can go. Even in battlegrounds, with a lot more people, the rain is generally going to be in condensed areas. I would still rather control it though.

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Yeah, I can see that. Like I said before, I’m exclusively a Raider, so my take on things comes from that perspective. I’m just really not a fan of taking control away from the player and relying on RNG to roll in my favor.

If they made it function like Spirit Link and Ancestral Protection, like I mentioned before, then I’d at least entertain the idea of trying the Hero spec a little. But so long as it remains as just randomly targeting where there’s an ally player… I’ll stick to Farseer.

If other people like the randomness of the Surging Totem… then more power to them and I hope it all works out for them. It’s just not for me.

Are you talking more PvE, or for both PvE and PvP? Just curious because I don’t PvE much.

Im going to keep it 100. I dont PvP and dont care TO PvP.

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I would be happy with it for resto if the surging totem didn’t replace healing rain and if earth living weapon was changed too 100% even if it had to have its healing lowered some

Farseer for m+ for dps bonus.

Totemic for raid.

Farseer has quite a bit of out of your control RNG as well.

Did some totemic testing over the weekend. Just regular dungeons, not mythic or m+. Some of the things I noticed is as follows:

Riptide - this has been largely nullified. As hp increases, the use of riptide is lessened. With certain talents, it can be buffed, or can buff other abilities, such as the first drop of surging totem, or chain heal. However, using riptide as a buff ability is basically just increasing ramp up/prep time for shaman healing. The spell altogether feels awful and useless. Considering it’s our first talent, and with totemic leaning so heavily into chain heal (which doesn’t feel bad), the further down the hero talents you go, the less and less riptide is appealing.

Similarly, Primordial Wave is another one of those ramp up abilities. Spread your riptides around, cast a HW for a fairly big heal… However, this also feels lackluster and rather a useless talent with totemic.

Downpour felt decent. I rather enjoyed downpour and would grab this with High Tide in order to maximize your chain heals. This felt strongest, but there are a number of talents that I feel are needed overall that one might need to ignore in order to get these two talents. However, an Ara-Kara run showed how powerful this can be.

I did enjoy being able to place the surging totem and using that to build my heals around, but the HoTs of the healing rain and the riptides really did nothing when compared against the scaling of the hp of our characters. In like manner, the damage from acid rain felt terrible.

If I’m being completely honest, the only heals that really felt useful were chain heal and healing surge. Surging totem was okay, but even with the increased radius (twice), ranged often stood outside of it, nullifying its use, or at the very least, limiting its usefulness significantly. Having chain heal proc when dropping healing stream totem, or cloudburst (depending on talents chosen) was good, and I like having the choice between consistent heals with healing stream, or more bursty heals with cloudburst, which would work well when timed right.

Bulwark totem… we need to have a chat about bulwark. It’s a crappy version of Astral Shift. For the caster only, not the party. On a 2 min CD, this is a total waste of a talent point. It needs to be a party-wide CD, even if you extend it to a 3 min CD. This would make the talent worth getting and would work very well with other totem abilities like Earthen Wall where damage is redirected to the totem. With the lack of throughput on our heals collectively, having damage reduction totems like this to help us keep up/catch up would make healing feel less cumbersome.

Healing Tide - for a 3 min CD, this is sorely lacking. It’s only real purpose is a free cast of chain heal. As with many of the above abilities, it’s the scaling.

Now, obviously, we don’t want to just be OP and take the fun out of healing, but having something that is literally just chaining totems for chain heals and casting chain heals to keep everyone up take a lot away from out toolkit.

Anyway, my 2 cents worth.