Im new to resto sham and trying to get better.
I’m wondering what key gameplay mechanics you think people miss or need to work on most. I still feel like I dont understand the class completely and I’m missing out on good plays.
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i’ve been working on my typing speed so that i can more accurately get an “EARTHEN PLS” out inbetween globals
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You need to macro the world markers in it. They will still miss it half the time but at least you get half
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people walking out of my earthen is tilting but have you ever had someone walk out of your giant purple bubble
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- Stormkeeper is your winning condition in many cases
- Never forget to reapply your earth shield
- Totemic Projection is your best friend
- Totems ignore LoS for their effect (Healing Stream/Tide, Tremor, Poison Cleansing, etc.), use that to your advantage.
- Unleash shield is beautiful, learn to love it.
- If a priest is running towards you, drop tremor, try to Totemic projection it behind a wall in case the priest isn’t a dum dum, if he destroy your tremor before you can move it or there is no good wall to move it behind, you can always thunderstorm the priest away before he gets his next global.
- Learn what can and should be grounded, like execution sentence from a ret paladin. Bonus points if you manage to get them to rage whisper you after the arena.
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
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those general tips are good but shamans strength is in their utility… make a macro to purge your targets target so you can weave in a purge or 2 while healing without having to target something, focus purge, purge enemy purge friendly macro is really nice. shamans can be highly disruptive so work on keeping your eyes up looking for shears and look for the positioning of high cc threats, if they are pushing into you look to preground. same goes for priests and pally healers if they are pushing at you slow/root/stun them pre ghost wolf hpals as they try and push in so they cant rep you out of stuns and pre tremor as priests try and push in. totemic projection them if needed so they cant be stomped but still do their job. once you get healing down its all about disruption. kick kick kick disrupt disrupt disrupt purge purge purge… rsham is best played in aggro comps so use your kicks and purges to keep them on the back foot and let your teams momentum run them over
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I’ll add to that, you can thunderstorm someone to a bad position (Like off bridge on Blade’s edge arena, or off platform on dalaran sewer, or behind a pillar) and earthgrab them into a capacitor totem if they can break or cleanse the root. This is especially effective against other healers.
Rsham CC isn’t easy to use but it’s extremely effective when used well.
If earthern totem isn’t at least top 2-4 in your healing done in 90% of games then you probably messed up somewhere
You mitigate uptime from melee cleaves that want to train you by ghost wolfing around corners with earthbind down (when you can’t sit in earthern because it’s on cooldown) if you try and stand in the open while getting trained you will eventually run out of healing and have to blow all your cooldowns a lot faster and die
If ur getting trained look at when u are coming off stun dr and try to pre unleash shield the person who’s stun is off cooldown first and then stack in the whirlpool with them
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Dyllbars got a sick macro for eathern totem.
It puts those raid markers for your team mates to see.
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Hey, thanks so much for this list.
Didn’t get a chance to check back on this thread until tonight, but these were great, thank you very much.
This is my biggest issue. I’ve had people tell me Shaman is easy to play, but learning when to ground gives me big anxiety, and I think is a fairly high skill cap.
On my Disc priest I give people bubbles and try not to die. There’s just a lot less to keep track of.
Oh and PS:
Is Chain Heal a thing in arena? Like EVER? Seems like I should take it off my castbar tbh.
I think there is a build that make use of Tidebringer and Flow of the Tides for 3s but overall nah, it’s not very great.
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I have just one more question.
Spirit Link Totem. I understand it’s usefulness in a Raid setting, but in 3v3 pvp, doesn’t seem like it would be used often. Am I missing something here?
That’s my last question. You’ve been an amazing resource, thank you so much for your time.
Spirit Link is amazing, quite possibly my favorite resto shaman spell.
Try and save trinket for it. That way when one of your teammates, or both depending, are in trouble you can immediately trinket+link to save them. Then top them up.
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Best tip is to use things preemptively. Earthen down before the damage starts coming out, get your earth shield/stream totems out before the damage starts.
Rsham doesn’t have great reactionary tools outside of link. To get a big heal it takes several globals if earth shield and stream totem buff aren’t already up.
Using NS to heal without shield/stream buffs means about a 40k heal, not saving anyone.
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#showtooltip Earthen Wall Totem
/wm [@cursor]1
/wm [@cursor]5
/cast Earthen Wall Totem
That will add a beam of light (2 stacked together) making your team slightly more aware earthen is down. It doesn’t go away on its own though, so it stays down until you drop another earthen or make a macro to remove it if that’s possible.
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There are quite a few answers to your question. It seems you’re fairly new to the Rsham life so let me give you a breakdown from how I’ve played it historically.
- Unleash Shield, there is a good macro to use for this. It reduces damage done by the enemy by 50%, and healing done by 50%. 30 Second CD (Nearly every DR)
The macro would be: /cast [@mouseover, exists] Unleash Shield; Unleash Shield
This macro will cast Unleash Shield at your enemy target, if there isn’t one then it will cast at whatever name you mouseover. This way you can quickly fling at say DH/Warrior as they’re bursting w/grippy hands + Spear.
Ensure you have BOTH Water shield and Earth shield up, as they both do separate things. The talent Elemental Orbit will allow you the ability to have two shields. The reason it’s important is ES triggers the root effect, and the DR + MS is done by water shield.
You have a few major defensives in Ancestral Guidance, Earthen Wall Totem, Spirit Link Totem, Healing Tide Totem, Ascendance, and Astral Shift.
When you’re using these buttons, you want to not overreact and that requires an understanding of when you’re okay. Shaman Mastery increases healing done to lower HP Targets.
Ideally a few things to always check for (before ever worrying about mlg groundings or moving things around w/totemic projection, or trying to backpack your dps w/stormkeeper), do you have HST off CD? Can you cast when you place it maybe? If so, it’s going to get more healing, about 25% more from various talents.
I can go more in depth, but basically just get used to your CDs. You can use Earthen Wall Totem and totemic reset to use it twice even, if needed.
Totemic projection macro:
/cast [@cursor] Totemic Projection
Will place whatever totem you put in there to go where your cursor is, good for link/ewt. Or if some really smart dps want to kill HTT, put it far away.
Hope that helps.
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I have played until I got my first win of the day, and then done that every day to vault cap, for the past… three weeks? On my resto shaman.
The main thing that has allowed me to achieve the immensity of my 1600 rating in that time has been learning to press all my buttons every round. It sounds silly but I’m actually not being sarcastic here. Resto has a pretty wild number of buttons and just making sure you’re using them all, every round, is a pretty big boost if you aren’t already doing so. Once you’re at that point you can start focusing more on when to use what, which itself starts with making sure you’re not being overly wasteful of your buffs like the ones you get after each Riptide and Healing Stream cast.
The other thing I’ve been doing is tweaking my build. I started off with a heavy offensive build but realized that that was just asking too much of myself at one time, so I fully indexed into a build that focuses on sustain and damage mitigation. I use my CC first to mitigate damage and second to make plays by targeting the healer. Funnily enough by focusing on this, as I’m getting better at it I’m creating opportunities where damage is the best thing I can do. I feel like as I continue down this improvement path I will be able to slowly shift my build back to an offensive one as I am actually capable of weaving each piece into my playstyle.
I definitely have no high level tips to offer, but these are the things I’ve found useful going from completely new to the spec to feeling some kind of baseline comfort.
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Spirit link is your best CD, while it’s down, you basically pool the remaining HP of everyone in your team standing in it. So the enemy team either has to kill the totem or do your entire team’s HP pool worth of damage to kill someone.
It gives you the time you need to heal and one of resto shaman strength is that you have a lot of cleave on your heals so equalizing your team’s health allow you to more easily catch back up on the damage.
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Thanks everyone for all the information. I think this is a really valuable thread for beginners to resto sham. Thanks a lot!
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yeah a targettarget for purge is squared away