Posting this on behalf of Tsunki, an EU player whom I very much agree with, as the EU forums often don’t get very much attention. I’ll add a few extra thoughts of my own below their post.
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Hi, I’m Tsunki. If you’re ever stopped by the community discord, Ancestral Guidance, you might have seen me around. Resto Shaman is my passion in this game, and I have a particular interest in theorycrafting and trying to push the limits of the spec in raids. This is going to be a long one, so apologies in advance.
I’ll start by saying I’m not here to necessarily advocate for any of the proposed changes to be reverted, as I understand the need for the game to evolve. Instead, I want to provide feedback and highlight some of the issues in achieving the aims the developers have outlined in their rationale. Whilst my main focus is raiding and I don’t actively push M+, I do keep in mind the wider impact that any suggestions may have on the class.
‘Adding support to Riptide focused builds’
Whilst increasing the viability of other builds again would be very welcomed, the proposed changes actually make Riptide focused builds weaker, and less desirable than the alternatives. Some of the main reasons for this are as follows:
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Removal of Primordial Wave (PWave):
I understand that PWave was a polarizing talent, however it’s importance to the strength of Riptide focused builds shouldn’t be underestimated. One of the major weaknesses of Riptide focused builds is the lack of burst AoE healing in comparison to builds that lean into Chain Heal. Riptide focused builds have been at their strongest when PWave was good and we could play around the burst healing it provided (e.g. Season 2 Dragonflight), and one of the main reasons these builds have massively fallen behind is due to the lack of power that PWave had this expansion. Also, it’s worth noting that PWave functioned as an additional Riptide charge every 30 seconds, so losing this further devalues Riptide focused builds. -
Whispering Waves:
The introduction of this talent as an alternative to PWave is an interesting thought, however it requires pressing Healing Wave as your main rotational ability over Chain Heal to be viable. Currently, we do not press Healing Wave at all, favouring Healing Surge for triage healing, or Chain Heal for AoE healing. Whilst Healing Wave is an efficient single target heal, it is not strong enough to replace Chain Heal with this talent alone. One particular issue is that Chain Heal is a smart heal, whereas healing done by Whispering Waves not only requires setup in the form of spreading Riptide, it also has the potential to do considerable overhealing due to lack of control over targeting. Another thing to consider is that with Downpour, High Tide and DRE/Wellspring nodes all being very strong options, Whispering Waves really needs to shine to be chosen over the alternatives. -
Wavespeaker’s Blessing:
This talent needed a change to become a viable option in the highly contested bottom part of the tree, however at 22% spell power, the HoT portion of Riptide accounts for such a small fraction of our overall healing that at 10% per point, this talent will still never be favoured over the other options. Increasing the HoT portion of Riptide is not necessarily a bad idea, however a more fundamental change to the balance of Riptide’s healing is most likely needed to achieve this. If the desire is for Whispering Waves to become the lynchpin of these builds, then perhaps increasing the duration of Riptides further rather than focusing on the HoT power itself is something that would be a more suitable change. Furthermore, this talent, much like Undercurrent, suffers from requiring a 2-point investment, whereas many viable alternatives for pathing only require 1 point to take. -
Ancestral Awakening (AA):
Arguably the biggest blow to Riptide focused builds was the nerf to AA in Dragonflight, and then the further change to AA this expansion which introduced an RNG element to the talent. I will say that I believe the nerf to AA was largely unwarranted, and what I can only presume was a reaction to a very unique interaction with the Dragonflight Season 2 tier set, which naturally is now long gone. Whilst currently AA still performs reasonably well in terms of numbers if your primary source of healing is Healing Surge, this is mostly due to the fact that we have nearly 100% crit chance on Healing Surge currently due to the Season 1 tier set. Forcing us to use Healing Wave more would significantly weaken AA’s performance again, which is one of the things that Riptide focused builds really need to even out their healing profile. -
Coalescing Waters:
Coalescing Waters really brought Riptide to life again in the 11.0.5 patch, which is something I wrote about at length when putting together the Farseer raiding build. However, obviously this talent only triggers from pressing Chain Heal. Shifting more of our casts away from Chain Heal and more towards our single target heals actually reduces the value of Riptide again, as being able to regularly buff our Riptides to diversify our healing profile was a very positive change. Whilst I would argue that reducing the amount of Chain Heal we press is a good thing, this does need to be
factored in.
Removal of Ancestral Guidance (AG)
The overlap between AG and Ascendance for raiding was caused by a particular sequence of events, in conjunction with the fact that AG redistributed Ascendance’s healing:
- The significant nerf to AG’s power at the end of Dragonflight, which made it undesirable to press AG alone, like we had done previously.
- The introduction of First Ascendant as a talent in The War Within, enabling us to pair the cooldowns every 2 minutes.
- The fact that the damage patterns in Nerub’ar Palace heavily favored 2-minute cooldowns vs. 3 minutes, which made Preeminence more difficult to use. Whilst a 3-minute Ascendance with Preeminence is still very strong, the removal of AG significantly reduces the potency of our healing capability when incoming damage is more regular. No other classes currently rely on a 3-minute cooldown to achieve their optimal throughput, which will potentially harm the viability of the spec.
The removal of AG also negatively impacts Cloudburst, which is a core part of the spec currently, as healing done by AG fed the totem whereas healing done by Ascendance does not. Whilst Healing Stream has become a more viable alternative for Totemic, primarily due to Reactivity making the totem heal for more than intended/stated, this change pushes Farseer even further behind. For M+, this change hurts particularly as AG was strong enough to be used alone to handle healing intensive scenarios, allowing better spacing of healing throughput on a spec which is already very reliant on 3-minute cooldowns. It also removes some capability to do damage whilst healing, which is something that this spec still struggles with compared to other healers. An alternative to removing AG could have seen it being moved to the spec tree instead of the class
tree; that would have allowed an iconic spell (our spec Discord is even named after it!) to remain with the spec, whilst removing the issue caused by having it available to Elemental and Enhancement. If the aim is to prevent us from pairing AG and Ascendance, the interaction between the two abilities could be removed, and the ability tuned accordingly.
New Set Bonus
Whilst a lot of this will come down to tuning, there are a few issues at a glance with the new tier set for 11.1, particularly the design being based around Insurance! being consumed. With the way damage patterns have been in recent years, typically we don’t want to let people drop below 40% health, as that leaves them in significant danger of dying. Naturally when there are massive bursts of incoming damage, people will drop low enough for this to trigger, however this is where people will have damage reduction/healing cooldowns assigned, which will devalue the tier bonus significantly. Given Insurance! works the same for other healers too, this even further reduces the value of our Mastery, which benefits from targets remaining at low health. Further to this, our 4 set gains value the more we let Insurance! be consumed. As stated above, the opportunities for people to drop below 40% will be minimal, and optimal gameplay will actively prevent people dropping low more often than not. Due to having very little control over if/when Insurance! is consumed this will also result in the buff sometimes being unused, or unavailable when we want it. Having the bonus rely on casting Healing Rain is a serious problem for Farseer, which does not actively press Healing Rain at the moment. In raid, this is a GCD which does not do enough healing to warrant being pressed, even with Downpour talented. Even in M+, where damage matters, the frequent buffs to Ancestor damage has made pressing Chain Lightning a better alternative than pressing Healing Rain in most circumstances.
Mana Tide / Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem (STT)
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Mana Tide:
Mana Tide is slightly stronger than it was before, presuming that we play Current Control to reduce the cooldown of Healing Tide, which we almost always do. It’s still a fairly lackluster talent, and with how much the spec suffers from mana issues in comparison to other healers at the moment, we would benefit from this talent giving more mana return to the Shaman themselves. The only downside to this being passive is the loss of an additional Chain Heal through Lively Totems when playing Totemic. -
Spiritwalker’s Tidal Totem (STT):
The current iteration of STT is still underwhelming compared to the one we had in Dragonflight, and it is now very rarely taken in any content. The cast time and mana cost of Healing Surge is already very low due to Tidal Waves and Resurgence, and it was rare that the need for this buff coincided with when you wanted to press Mana Tide. Having this talent now be reliant on pressing Healing Tide now further reduces its value, as you have even less control over when you can utilize
the buff.
Therazane’s Resilience
This change is very positive, reducing the GCD burden of refreshing Earth Shield, and potentially being quite strong in all content when combined with Earthen Harmony. Its position in the tree also vastly improves the pathing to the DRE/Wellspring node, as Reactive Warding and Improved Earthliving are still extremely undertuned and/or difficult to get value from.
Downpour
This is a really good quality-of-life change, especially for Farseer, where the window felt very short before and was often difficult to use effectively. Pressing Downpour on Totemic felt much better, and whilst it will still continue to do so due to the length of time Surging Totem is active, this is as good as it can get with the current design.
Ancestral Vigor (AV)
Whilst this talent being 2 points again isn’t realistically going to change much for us, as we will just spend the additional point we gained from Healing Wave being baseline, it is a shame, as having more freedom to spend points in the top of the tree was something that this spec would really benefit from.
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A few words of my own (very short):
The tier set definitely needs work. It is currently about half as strong as our Season 1 set bonus, with almost 80% of that healing coming from the Insurance! HoT left by the 2pc. It’s very likely we’d forego the 4pc entirely and just wear gear with better stats or wear our Season 1 2pc bonus if it was left untouched.
The removal of Ancestral Guidance hurts Cloudburst Totem A LOT. Ancestral Guidance was our only cooldown that fed into Cloudburst. Cloudburst Totem has a longer cooldown, less healing feeding it, and requires precise planning/execution compared to the very easy-to-use and almost-always-available Healing Stream Totem.