I just started playing my shaman again recently, and how you play really depends on what you’re with. With that said, there are some general things you should be doing that you may or may not be, that could help:
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More of a general recommendation, but I feel shaman requires pre-emptive decision making and gameplay to truly be effective so you should be comfortable with your keybindings and your UI so that you’re looking at what is going on and not what abilities you have off CD or what you should be pressing.
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You should also definitely prioritize Mastery, I think I saw someone mention you had crit. You should aim to have about 135% Mastery, at least
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With Earthen Wall Totem, Healing Tide, Ancestral Guidance and your on use trinket you can really save yourself cooldowns and keep you and your team ahead if you’re able to access the situation and use these things before a stun or CC. I try to rotate these CD outs early so that I can save bigger CDs for the subsequent goes or situations. For example, if I see the other team getting aggressive early, I may try to get close enough to use on use trinket, Ancestral Guidance and Healing Tide and save everything else. You can then decide early what other CDs may or may not be needed. You then have Earthen and Ascendance still available, as well as link.
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There really isn’t a “rotation” with Resto either but it is important to know to use your Healing Stream Totem often, with 2 charges, I think you have one every 24 seconds so there really isn’t any reason you can’t have one up almost always, but also make sure to get familiar with the positioning of it because it needs to be in LOS of your partners to heal them so you can sort of get out around a corner, drop it and get back behind LOS. I wouldn’t say with Shaman you really have to cast or that you can rely just solely on Riptide, you have to sort of base it on the situation and also RNG helps, you may get an Ascendance proc on a Riptide and top your team, you might not. The way Shaman mastery works is the lower your targets HP, the more healing you do to them so at times you may be ahead and can keep your team up with just riptides, but when you fall behind, a Riptide → Unleash Life → Nature Swiftness + Healing Wave can move health bars. To build off that, thats your go to big and fast heal if you’re not dropping Spirit Link or something like that, IMO. Otherwise, you typically want to be trying to keep Healing Stream up, manage your CDs well and then as much as you can either:
- Riptide → Unleash Life → Healing Surge or Healing Wave
- Unleash Life → Riptide → Casted heal/riptide, depending on situation
Otherwise, the rest of being effective on Shaman just requires you to use the Kit and be as annoying to the other team as you can.
With Static Field and Root Totem, less than once a minute you can put the enemy team in a bad spot or if you and your team coordinate well you can either use them offensively or defensively. If you’re not using these, you’re losing them and the other team benefits 2 fold. The other note on that is your stuns, with cap totem (its very easy and effective to couple Cap totem with root or static field) and your Lightning Lasso, you can also be very disruptive.
Disruptive
Disruptive is another important word to consider as well because that’s where the other part to effective shaman gameplay comes in. Using your Wind Shear and Grounding Totem as much as you can, and at the right times, can be game changing as well. For example, using grounding against a DK to stop them from peeling your partner on their go on the other healer or to prevent the grip on yourself from becoming the go-target. You can also use most of your tool kit to just be disruptive to the other team, another example: a druid stuns you out of stealth and there’s no stop for the follow up clone and he’s close enough to you? Thunder Storm him away and disrupt the cast. Just try to get familiar with knowing what is available and when and how each tool can be useful for disrupting the other teams plans.