Feels like they do negative single target healing. Plus they have to hardcast literally everything. When I tank and have a rsham I always have to move at a glacial pace and play it safe because so many rshams just can’t keep me up on bigger pulls the way other healers can.
Resto shaman healing has no issues, it’s just more of a skill ceiling to it instead of spamming prayer of mending or rejuv.
Its just a l2p thing. I’ve noticed a lot of pug resto shammys aren’t very good. It’s a lot of cd management, using your procs of tidal wave, when to drop cloud burst/healing stream.
Also important to stand in healing rain when possible.
Also we don’t have to hard cast everything.
Unleash life
Riptide
All totems
When procced you can cast healing wave and surge quickly as well. Plus you have tons of mobility with spirits grace
They are alright in keys, you prob just had bad ones.
The biggest downside of resto sham is their tank healing at high keys. We just need to rotate cds and vitality major help a lot.
2 Likes
But man priests have it so much worse. I barely even do keys and I still see groups that say “no priests” lul.
Just don’t invite an Rsham when you have 2 ranged players. They’ll never stack and they’ll ruin Chain Heal/Healing Rain 99% of the time.
Even melee dont stack up when its needed for chain heals, the amount of time they all run out mindlessly on the tussle tonks boss in operation mechagon during the vent jets lol
Shaman healing in keys is more then fine. Vitality major, spirit minor plus whatever else makes them easy and shores up tank healing. 380k healing surge crits are not uncommon, and with proper use of cooldowns healing keys feels better then ever.
1 Like
yea actually what makes shamans less desirable than the top heals isn’t their healing (minus tank healing). It is the fact that they dont have a brez, cant put out as much dps, or dont have as much OH S**t buttons. The tank healing is eh. I’ll probably be going full crit/mastery for higher keys when the affixes require a lot of tank healing.
Might have to try this vitality major. I don’t often heal keys but tank heals always feel like pray for crits. Vitality might be my saving grace.
Recommend Vitality major 100%. Shorter CD. Strong single target heal.
If you get a squishy tank it’s horrible but outside if that it isn’t too bad. Definately seems more stressful than other healers as it does have a higher skill ceiling to manage everything.
I personally haven’t tried above +10 this season because I don’t trust myself haha.
I’ve had success with the spirit of preservation major and with the mana one, though I will admit mana one is just for when I’m being lazy
1 Like
all the new vulpera shamans chiming in lmao.
Non tyrannical keys below an 18 right now feel insanely easy to heal. Even busting up to 7/8 stacks, as long as it’s not rolled, last week was something that is easily handled by high tide & cloudburst.
The only time I could see someone having issues is
- Bad tank
- No plan for cooldown management
- Unnecessary damage
If your getting dropped to 25% health from full on a single spirit breaker nobody really has hpal levels of output. Rsham can’t easily top you repeatedly without tides (which come from riptide & chain heal) so anytime you run into a situation where your spamming healing surge it’s not going to be great. To the same extent if you are spamming healing surge, why… Cloudburst and everything else can be huge even for single target and the cooldown is so short.
If you have a shaman that’s randomly spirit linking because there’s a lot of damage (and he’s spreading riptides, using gcds on earth living, or doing something else that’s wasting link) it’s just going to do more harm than good.
Same with a group that’s taking a bunch of axe debuffs before charge / doesn’t know how to interrupt salt blasts or spectral bolts, those are not really shaman problems but they’re something that shamans can’t easily deal with. There is no glimmer or swiftmends or strong externals to cover for excessive mistakes. The more you make the worse they’ll look.
Rsham isn’t bad by any means.
2 Likes
Imagine having a key with two ranged. A lot of groups don’t even have one unless mechanics force it.
Simply take Spirit of Preservation for the major essence, with Vitality Conduit for a minor and tank healing is trivial. Take Undulation and 1 min Spiritwalker’s, with at least one Turn of the Tide trait, stack crit, and if you can’t keep the tank up then it’s a tank issue. There are already rshamans over 3k this tier, so this isn’t a spec problem.
I will grant you that a brand new shaman, without the right essences and with a generally lower skill level, may struggle more when they are starting out, vs say a MW or rdruid.
Spirit of Preservation minor, even, is fantastic for assisting in the single target healing. Generally, it will be a heal of lesser resort, so those stacks will be ready when the situation goes south.
I don’t think spirit major is a great option. Vitality conduit is insanely good and for the times you don’t use it the alternatives are still probably better.
Vitality Conduit Major - Conflict and Strife, Spirit of preservation, and Ever Rising Tide (or Lucid Dreams) is generally what I’d tell people to run.
If you need to add some extra damage you can run Ancient Flame major. Formless Void is also really good because it’ll proc off your Ancient Flame and if you have any Iris users it’s really nice to get that constant intellect.
The stacks build really fast and healing surge costs almost no Mana for the amount it’ll heal for with a stack of tide. You should definitely be using it a little aggressively to get the most value you can.
In the span of a few globals you could manually pop a 400k cloudburst if you wanted to.
A lot of groups don’t have a resto shaman either 
as someone who plays several different healers (pally/priest/shaman) shaman are at the bottom when it comes to mythic+, none come up until almost 700 on the top healing runs. no point in bringing a shaman when pally and druid are far superior and a well played monk or priest can even be better. Blizz has made us great AoE heals with powerful CDs which sacrifices us for sustained tank healing which is whats needed the most in mythic+ especially in high keys where the tank is getting slapped around. Add in crap mobility outside of a short window every 90 sec/2 min it requires you to be that much more on top of your game then other healing specs. I ran a 14 freehold last night to see how my shaman would compare to my pally and had no trouble (major essence vitality conduit is godly this week did almost 30% of my healing for the run) gonna try some 15/16 this weekend and see how they go cause this week could be a good week for shaman healers, with good dps windows as long as the group does boss mechanics correctly.
Any shaman who knows what they are doing runs with 1 min Spiritwalker’s, which is pretty mandatory in mplus. With that, and how fast we move with GW talents, we are actually quite mobile, especially compared to pallies or priests. Even MW’s have more problems healing on the run outside of essence font. Nobody beats druids for mobility ofc.
Edit: also, nice tip on the interactions between CoF and Formless Void. I totally missed how the short cd on CoF would make it very easy to maintain that buff. More of a raid thing where I’m doing the battle shaman thing, but that could be very fun!
@Talbyy- It’s really just a personal preference. I like using the SoP major to fill up a heavy hitting Cloudburst, especially on Bursting week where the damage is really predictable. It’s also nice for when the tank is taking a beatdown on tough Fort keys. I know a lot of shamans do like VC for the shorter CD and instant cast. More a potatoe, potato thing.
1 Like