Ya it’s totally stupid. It’s hard to believe how opposite shaman and paladin are. You can’t empty your mana bar to save someone on paladin and you have to really think about if you wanna cast that spell on resto shaman cuz it cost so much.
I don’t consider mana a fun thing. I guess it’s there for raiding and pvp maybe but it’s not fun at all to worry about mana in m+ or have to sit there drinking while your group waits.
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I wasnt sure about this post… until I just leveled a shaman 2 days ago. Shaman feels SO MUCH STRONGER than my resto druid… and ive been playing resto druid for years up to 3500 rating before… and never really played shaman much. CRAZY how strong shaman feels…
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I actually made this thread after playing disc and being miserable, and then leveling a resto shaman and seeing the insane difference.
It’s actually wild that the balance between healers right now is this bad, and how much better it feels to play a resto shaman. They’re not even overpowered and need a nerf, it’s not like you’re a god or anything as a resto shaman, other healers just need better kits to be able to deal with mechanics like resto shamans, too.
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I don’t think priests are trash, they just only heal. I capped out my crests on this shaman, so I ran a +2 on my ilevel 594 Holy Priest last night and my healing output was great and I never had any mana problems, I just really missed the ability to do anything else to affect fights. I went for a couple Fear bombs here and there, but it’s just not the same. Also, dealing with the affix was a little tougher since my group never clumped up enough for mass dispel to be useful, so I basically just pumped heals into it and healed through it.
It had me thinking though that the rise of Resto Shaman is also tied into the decline of Vengeance Demon Hunter. It used to be that the tank could completely lock down trash mobs solo, and because Blizzard nerfed that, someone has to pick up the slack. Enter the Resto Shaman, who got their healing buffed enough to be competent, but mostly brings an extra interrupt and lockdown. I spent most of Dragonflight Season 3 and 4 tanking on a VDH and I rarely saw a Resto sham because their utility wasn’t needed. Raw healing + healer dps was more important and that’s why Resto Druid was dominating.
So I don’t know what the answer is beyond giving tanks more ability to lockdown packs for longer. The only other options are to expand healer kits to all be the same, or reduce the necessity of interrupts and CC on trash mobs.
The 4p set bonus helps a ton. But yeah, the gameplay to preserve mana involves weaving in Riptides to get mana cost reduction and making Healing Surge more effective and Healing Wave useable. The downside of resto shaman utility is that if you think you can just go ham spamming Chain Heal you will find yourself OOM in a hurry.
It’s definitely a shift in mindset coming from a priest or resto druid where your mana bar basically never moves and is a non-factor. I leveled my druid to 80 this week by healing in dungeons and I could spam to my heart’s content, the same on my priest in a +2 last night, I never had to sit and drink. My shaman meanwhile has to pop into a follower dungeon to get some free mage water before I start doing M+ and then sneak drinks in-between pulls as often as I can.
I think a main reason for this difference is because HPal has a secondary resource to track, compared with resto druid that is only constrained by mana. It’s why Evoker frequently also isn’t spending much mana many seasons.
Most of their kit is CD based where Shaman and priest are not and tend to be more “mana” centric.
a first step would be to give disc and holy a kick since its their biggest weakness in a era where every pull have at least multi mobs that need to have their casts kicked
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What the healing changes did was expose bad healers who got carried through good groups.
Look, my main healer is Disc. And it’s arguably the worst throughput healer atm.
Ilvl 602, had 0 trouble keeping people up in 7s
They need to take everything they’ve done this expansion to mythic+ and throw it away. We don’t want healing to be miserable. We don’t want tanks to be squishy
It’s a combination of Essence and empowered CDs. The point is there is a second resource with Essence rather than just mana.
There are several reasons why the other healers’ profiles are terrible for this season.
But the most obvious one is the huge amount of utility that the shaman provides to the group and the high performance they have when it comes to keeping the party alive.
Added to that, it is a class that can increase HP from 10% (with heals) to 20% (if we add the use of downpour).
The other healers must be balanced to be on par with them, because they are taking more advantage than any healer in S1 (well, except in SL which was the pally), since at least in DF the Rdruids - Prevokers and Rshammys were meta.
Actually, the disc is the 2nd best healer right now.
The worst of all is the Holy Priest