In the resto shaman spec tree, there are quite a few talents that have not seen any play or very minimum play throughout all of dragonflight. While I would typically say rework these talents, I know its too late in the expansion to expect talent reworks, even though im hoping thats on the horizon for us in TWW. My compromise is to go through the talents that never see any play and just buff them by a large amount. Like i wouldnt mind casting my occasional downpour. Flashflood could be a super nice QOL since we dont typically build alot of haste. Give wellspring a bit of its meat back. We have primarily been chainheal bots all expansion (in pve) so it would be nice to have other potentially strong options. I know the chainhealless build exists for keys but Laren said the chainheal build is still better but its just too mana costly in the highest end of keys. All of this is unlikely but its just a thought to maybe give us shaman some more spice since every other healer has at least gotten new shiny stuff in recent seasons.
I agree that talents need to be tuned correctly so that they are viable options.
But me personally, I feel Resto shaman is a bloated spec already and I wouldn’t want to feel forced into playing more active talents like wellspring or downpour; I don’t see the purpose they serve. Even when you exclude all the utility buttons the spec just has a lot of buttons to press.
For rotational healing abilities you have:
1 Healing surge
2 Healing Wave
3 Chain Heal
4 Riptide
5 Healing Rain
6 Healing stream / cloudburst totem
7 Earth Shield
And for cooldowns:
1 Ascendance
2 Healing Tide totem
3 Spirit Link totem
4 Ancestral Guidance
5 Ancestral Protection Totem
And then there are the medium cooldown abilities that are technically optional but not really:
1 Natures Swiftness
2 Primordial Wave
3 Unleash Life
I won’t go into the Utility buttons or stormkeeper etc.
I just feel like Resto has a really versatile and solid healing kit. I don’t want more buttons like downpour and wellspring that do the same exact thing as all my other healing spells but just in slightly different ways.
For players that do enjoy those spells, maybe next expansion they could be tuned to be useful, and then placed on choice nodes with other active abilities to combat bloat. Or maybe they could replace other spells. Like downpour could replace healing rain for example, since they are both targeted aoe heals with a cast time.
Yeah I agree with the button bloat. I was more of thinking in line of a world (which would never happen) where we could substitute like downpour for chain heal. I think its getting to the realm where shamans design is out dated and could benefit from some nice QOL. A big problem in keys is we need crit/vers to do good healing but in the high end key level, things are so bursty and our cast times are so slow that people are just dying before you can even get your cast off. We are also one of if not the only healer without an external.
One thing that could be nice was shamans tier set from the end of shadowlands where you auto cast chainheal when you dropped a totem. QOL like that is what the spec needs not power. We are “Strong” healers number wise but we getting those numbers out isnt as fluid as some of the other healers. Like im just shooting shots but like primwave could be tied into like undulation or just be like “every 30 seconds you gain primordial wave causing your next healing wave to heal all targets with riptide”. We basically already use it off cd and we hardly ever press healing wave outside of then anyways.
The one thing that I am realizing is we dont really have any strong passive nodes that are worth taking. We dont really gain buffs that increase healing or QOL like other healers and the ones we do have are just undertuned. For example, flash flood could easily fix the problem I stated above about slow casts by giving us increased cast times but as of now, the buff is hardly noticeable for a 2 point node and 2 points is hefty in our already constricted tree. Even though the riptide/cleave build is seeing some play now, I do think buffing the throughput of that build would be a nice change of pace for keys without feeling like we are playing a more “risky” build to be more efficient mana wise. They could start by reverting the nerf to ancestral awakening to cleave heal the original 40% instead of the current 20%.