Class Changes for Restoration Shaman
Here are the changes for Restoration Shaman in Patch 12.1.
Farseer
(Ancestor's) Chain Lightning now hits up to 5 targets (was 3).
(Ancestor's) Lava Burst now also increases damage by a percent equal to your critical strike chance.
Restoration
Healing Rain now has a 12 second cooldown and an 18 second duration. Recasting Healing Rain while one is already active will despawn the previous one. This cooldown change does not affect the Surging Totem's Healing Rain from the Totemic Hero Talents.
Developers' notes: This change should allow more flexibility for the player to move Healing Rain around when that is desirable.
The first and most important thing to note for these changes are that they only impact Farseer. The hero tree has struggled to find a place to fit Healing Rain into its normal flow without it feeling awkward, and part of this was having to commit to placing it in one specific spot for 18 seconds at a time. The ability to reposition it earlier (even if it costs mana) will help alleviate this issue.
Farseer ancestor's damage was also heavily nerfed going into Midnight, to it is good to see them bringing back some power into them even if it is not intentional, as this change seems aimed towards Elemental and Restoration is just getting it due to sharing the hero tree.
Healing Rain is already strong enough to justify keeping it active all the time, these changes simply make your quality of life a little bit better during normal gameplay while also bringing up slightly the dps you can contribue during downtime when playing this hero tree.
Season 2 Tier Set for Restoration Shaman
Here is the Season 2 tier set for Restoration Shaman!
2-Set Bonus: Healing Wave and Chain Heal have a chance to create a Healing Rain at the target's location for 10 seconds.
4-Set Bonus: Every 1 second, 1 ally inside of Healing Rain gains a watery shield that absorbs X damage for 10 seconds.
This tier set is a very interesting one and it heavily interacts with al lot of our kit and talents. To list some initial findings about the 2-Set bonus:
The Healing Rain spawned from it will proc Tidewaters when it appears
Using Downpour while extra healing rains are active will cause a full-power Downpour on every rain
Allies standing in the rain gain the benefits of Deluge
Different rains can affect the same units. An ally standing inside two Healing Rains can get healed by both, and enemies inside two of them take Acid Rain damage from both
All of the effects are stronger while you are Totemic due to Totemic's passive effect Surging Totem increasing them.
The proc rate can vary a lot depending on your haste and how much of your time you spend casting Healing Wave or Chain Heal
All of this combined means that the Tier Set heavily affect what talents you want to play and how you want to play them. In the case of Downpour, you can double the value of the talent if you line it up properly with your procs. The main issue here is unreliability - the uptime isn't very high due to the somewhat-low proc rate, so you can't guarantee that you will have double Rains active right when you need the healing or when you want to press Downpour. There is also the chance that you get a proc on a ranged player standing very far away and get practically no value from it due to no one standing in it, because you are not able to reposition these extra Healing Rains.
As for the 4-Set bonus, the reality is that it is very flat and boring. The only interaction it gets is for it to trigger multiple times while the extra rain from the 2-set bonus is active. Realistically the 2-Set is fun and interactive enough that having a simple 4-Set that just increases your healing done can be perfectly fine as long as the whole thing is tuned correctly.
Conclusions
While the improvements to Farseer are very welcomed and are right in the place the hero tree needs them, it is very disappointing that these are the only changes the spec is getting on a major patch. The issues with Farseer Healing Rain where already brought up months ago, and that hero tree is getting the smallest of bones thrown at them at the same time as a new tierset is introduced that heavily favors Totemic, while at the same time we are losing one that heavily favored Farseer (but was still not enough to make it the prefered choice).
Restoration Shaman has some deep flaws in its kit that require a proper look into. A third of the talents in the tree randomly double in power if you are specced into Totemic, while the other hero tree struggles to have an identity after its main focus (the ancestors) were heavily nerfed and are practically irrelevant at the moment. The healing of the spec is entirely based around how many Chain Heals you can cast while also suffering from mana issues if you cast it too much. Riptide is still positioned as the main point of our talent tree while also being very weak by itself and only worth pressing because it buffs other unrelated spells.
The worse part: even if you had infinite amounts of mana (like a recent bug allowed us to have) and ignore all of the design flaws of the spec to focus entirely on the strongest thing it has (Chain Heal), you are still the weakest raid healer in the game.
Our new tier set bonus is honestly great. It is very thematic, interacts with a lot of our talents in cool ways, and it has room to be a cool new tool in both raids and keys. However it is overshadowed by the issues constantly plaguing the spec in recent years: bad tuning and lack of attention. As things stand right now, the extra Healing Rains proc too infrequently and too randomly for you to rely on them to get more Downpour healing, and the shields applied by the 4-Set bonus are so small they might as well not exist.
If the goal for season two is simply to have only one viable hero tree that is based entirely on getting as many casts of a single spell as possible, then Restoration still needs a decent buff to compete with the other specs. If the goal is to have actual choice between the talents and interesting gameplay that involves making decisions then heavy changes are needed.
