Restoration Shaman Overview
Intro
The latest PTR build brought in a lot of very impactful changes for Restoration, some of them addressing very important issues the spec has had since the start of the expansion. The excitement for these is very high because it shows a real care for trying to fix deeper problems, rather than simply adding more power until the numbers match what other healers can do.
All these changes combined have a bigger impact on the spec than what you might guess at first, and to me it seems like a big step in the correct direction. There are still some issues that remain but that is inevitable, and as long as Restoration performs well enough and has engaging gameplay, some of the drawbacks can also be compelling weaknesses to have to compensate for strengths, rather than simply more bullet points in the list of annoyances.
So lets dive into all the new stuff Restoration Shaman just got, analyze what it means when it comes to gameplay, cover what issues weren't touched by this patch, and try to figure out if all of these combined means the spec goes into 12.1 being one of the top options for healers.
Latests Changes For Restoration Shaman
First, for the full patch notes:
Developers' notes: We're adjusting several talents and doing some tuning for Restoration Shaman this week to improve upon several underperforming talents or interactions that don't feel very rewarding. We're also improving the Chain Heal ability from the Farseer Ancestors to increase their healing capabilities.
New Talent: Swelling Tides - Healing Stream Totem and Stormstream Totem extend the duration of your active Riptides by 3 seconds when cast.
Unleash Life healing increased by 100%.
Midnight Season 1 2-set bonus has been updated - Unleash Life's direct healing is increased by 50% (was 100%).
Riptide direct healing increased by 25% and its periodic healing increased by 100%.
Healing Rain now heals up to 6 targets in its area (was 5).
Earthen Accord now grants an additive +20% to the healing buff from Unleash Life, rather than a multiplicative increase.
Current Control now also reduces the mana cost of Chain Heal by 15%.
The Venomous Abyss 2-set bonus - Bonus Healing Rains now last 8 seconds (was 10 seconds).
The Venomous Abyss 4-set bonus - Condensation absorb amount reduced by 30%.
Wavespeaker's Blessing has been moved up in the talent tree to where the Calm Waters talent was.
Calm Waters has been removed.
Farseer
Chain Heal from Farseer Ancestors now bounces to up to 5 targets (was 3), loses 10% healing per target jump (was 30%), and had its jump distance increased to 20 yards (was 15 yards).
Chain Heal from Farseer Ancestors healing increased by 50%.
The developer's note hits right in the correct place: Besides the obvious numbers tuning problem during season 1, Restoration Shaman's biggest issue is that a lot of its kit and talents just underperform or don't feel very rewarding to use. You end up locked into a bunch of "homework" casts that are supposed to be healing spells but don't do meaningful amounts of healing. You still use them because they improve other spells later on, but it still feels bad to have a big part of your kit be just filler casts. This didn't seem like the intended design of a direct and reactive healer like Restoration Shaman.
Similarly for the talent tree, a lot of talent choices end up not mattering at all because the amount of healing you get from them is so low that you can't really notice them affecting your gameplay. It can be good to have a talent that increases your single target healing competing with another that increases your aoe healing, but when both options are so weak that you see no real effect in the resulting gameplay then it just feels like your talent tree is useless.
These changes are a little bit too dense all together, so we're gonna divide them into groups to talk about them more in depth.
Fixing Unleash Life
Unleash Life healing increased by 100%.
Midnight Season 1 2-set bonus has been updated - Unleash Life's direct healing is increased by 50% (was 100%).
Earthen Accord now grants an additive +20% to the healing buff from Unleash Life, rather than a multiplicative increase.
Unleash Life was handled weirdly since the very early stages of Midnight. For a little while during the alpha and beta it was removed entirely and then brought back in a much simpler form. The main issue about it however was how the spell was left on the weaker side, and then literally doubled in power by our tierset. It didn't feel like we had a good spell in our kit and a tier set bonus on top, it seemed more like we had half a spell and the other half came from the tierset bonus.
Another puzzling factor was Earthen Accord. A lot of people doing a simple read of the talent figured that it would increase the bonus from Unleash Life from 25% to 45% due to the "increased by 20%" text. This wasn't the case however, as the talent applied a multiplicative 20% increase which moved the buff from 25% to 30% (which is actually 20% higher, to be fair). This was just weird because it made the talent very unintuitive unless you took a minute to look at it properly, and also made it kind of much weaker than what you would expect.
From the very start of season one the writing was on the table for Unleash Life: a spell that is just good when the tierset doubles its power is gonna be very bad after we lose the tierset. You can see this from the several rounds of ptr testing people have already done, while Farseer is forced to still use the spell due to it being the main way to summon ancestors, Totemic drops it entirely. This also further increases the divide between the hero trees that already exists, where one of them is forced to keep casting a mediocre spell on cooldown to even function while the other can get a more valuable talent and spend the GCDs on more valuable spells.
Thankfully, the Unleash Life issue has been addressed for season two now. Doubling the baseline healing of the spell basically bakes-in the 2-piece bonus of season one, making the spell feel more complete on its own rather than propped up by gear. Earthen Accord also got changed to remove the unintuitiveness problem and in the process buffed by a decent bit. While not exactly an analogous to the current 4-piece bonus that lets you buff two different spells, now Earthen Accord lets you buff one spell by almost double the amount. Close enough to be worth considering i would say.
The season one tierset also received a compensation nerf in turn, mostly to keep Unleash Life for going out of control during the early stages of season two when you are still wearing it and have access to the vastly improved spell. This is fairly normal and expected all things considered.
This is pretty much exactly what the spell and talent combo needed to not fade into irrelevance and take Farseer with them. A proper power compensation and a follow-up talent that works as you would expect it to and adds a good amount of healing. Just the ideal change on these, no notes from me.
Freshening Up The Talent Tree
New Talent: Swelling Tides - Healing Stream Totem and Stormstream Totem extend the duration of your active Riptides by 3 seconds when cast.
Current Control now also reduces the mana cost of Chain Heal by 15%.
Wavespeaker's Blessing has been moved up in the talent tree to where the Calm Waters talent was.
Calm Waters has been removed.
All talent trees have some issues, the ones specific to Restoration Shaman are mainly that you have some quality of life option competing with throughput talents, and that a lot of your capstones and tier 3 talents are just somewhat weak and boring (you might be noticing a trend by now).
Calm Waters and Current Control being two different talents on opposite sides of the upper tree makes sense at first: they are making you choose what spell you want to improve. This doesn't end up working very well in practice however because if you have to make choices that commit you to one spell over the other then you are incentivized to go fully into that one spell and then completely ignore the other. Healing Wave already didn't had a lot of good things going for it in raids, and having to invest one more talent point to improve its mana situation reinforced the scenario where you just never ever want to press the spell in a raid when you could just Chain Heal and then stand afk to recover mana instead. I probably don't have to say that this isn't very good gameplay.
Combining the talents fixes a good part of this annoyance. A single point to reduce the mana cost of both means you don't have to take extra talents into account when deciding what you will be casting during encounters. It also heavily increases the value of the talent which means its much simpler to path to Rip Current and Crashing Waves, you no longer have the extra tax of having to spend a point on the Healing Wave-only version of Current Control to get to them.
As for Wavespeaker's Blessing, this talent is not super strong at the moment (but gets much better next patch, we will get to that in a bit) but it interacts with Riptide and in turn with several other talents like Undercurrent and Tidewaters. It also lets you path to Deeply Rooted Elements. It is a talent that you might want to pick because it seems cool enough at first and lets you keep going down in the tree but never really adds as much healing as you would expect for a 2-point talent in the bottom part of the tree.
Moving it up to tier 2 is a huge improvement for it, as it is now competing with other options of more similar value. You don't feel bad for grabbing it as it makes more sense compared with the alternatives in that part of the tree. Replacing a 2-point talent with a single point one in the bottom of the tree is also a decent gain for the spec overall as that frees up another talent point in the part you were most restricted in before.
And then comes in the replacement at the bottom of the three. Swelling Tides is a great addition, it keeps the theme of a talent that gives you more access to Riptide heal over time effects but in a more interactive and fun way. The minigame of trying to extend your Riptides as much as possible and seeing how you can pool your Healing Stream Totems and line up your Stormstream Totems is very entertaining and way more fitting for a tier 3 talent.
Overall, while the tree still has some problems here and there, these few changes do a very good job at improving how it feels to path through the tree and open up new gameplay opportunities. Specially combined with some of the other changes included in the patch.
Riptide Is A Real Boy Now
New Talent: Swelling Tides - Healing Stream Totem and Stormstream Totem extend the duration of your active Riptides by 3 seconds when cast.
Riptide direct healing increased by 25% and its periodic healing increased by 100%.
Wavespeaker's Blessing has been moved up in the talent tree to where the Calm Waters talent was.
Surely i don't have to emphasize how massive a 100% increase to an effect is. We have had complains about the Riptide heal over time being pathetic for a good while and if the response to that is to literally double it then that seems like a good way to go about it. It has been a weird time where Riptide is the center piece of the spec and the very first talent point but the healing it did by itself was fairly low and the reason to press the spell was mostly because it triggered other effects.
Wavespeaker's Blessing's and Swelling Tides play into this as well. They both interact very well with the stronger Riptide heal over time and really help make you feel like the spell is supposed to be an important part of your kit. This is a great set of changes that improve how the gameplay feels a good amount. Once again i have to bring up how Swelling Tides just feels very fun to play around and while its not really enough to make you a hot healer it does spice up your gameplay just the right amount while still keeping the focus on spells that are core to Restoration Shaman.
You were already pressing Riptide on cooldown before, these changes simply make that feel much better, do more healing, and make it more interesting.
The Healing Rain Adjustment
Healing Rain now heals up to 6 targets in its area (was 5).
The Venomous Abyss 2-set bonus - Bonus Healing Rains now last 8 seconds (was 10 seconds).
The Venomous Abyss 4-set bonus - Condensation absorb amount reduced by 30%.
One of the main things that has probably been stopping Restoration from getting more straight buffs during season one has been its very good performance in mythic+. Sometimes it is hard to help a spec that is doing good in one type of content but bad in another because that requires more targeted changes to specific mechanics that work better in one environment over the other and you always risk messing it up and ending up with something overpowered. Shaman is a good key healer, even thought it struggled to do good raid healing for the whole season.
Increasing the amount of targets a spell heals above five is a good way to help with that, as the effects on a key are pretty much irrelevant but in a raid this is a 20% buff to the spell. Healing Rain has had a problematic history in Midnight as the spell was absurdly weak during alpha and beta and got buffed dramatically several times since. We have now reached a comfortable spot where no one should think of dropping the spell entirely in any build.
On the flip side, tier set bonuses have to remain at a reasonable level of power. If a tierset is too strong and the spec is balanced around it then you run the risk of being too weak before you get it and early into the next season once it goes away. Our 2-piece bonus summons healing rains so if rain gets a 20% buff then the tierset is also that much stronger. Bringing down the duration a little bit brings down its power without having to get into more messy stuff like having a different power level for tierset rains compared to your own.
As for the 4-piece bonus, my opinion is that the last buff it received was a bit of an overreaction coming from a bug. During the early stages of testing Condensation was doing very low healing but it was due to a bug that caused it to only ever apply on the shaman that owned the rain. Because it was only ever healing yourself its overall numbers looked very bad, and this lead to a 300% increase the following week. This buff combined with the bug being fixed pushed the effect into 'a bit too strong' territory, and after this last adjustment it looks to be in a healthier place.
Helping Out Farseer
Unleash Life healing increased by 100%.
Riptide direct healing increased by 25% and its periodic healing increased by 100%.
Farseer
Chain Heal from Farseer Ancestors now bounces to up to 5 targets (was 3), loses 10% healing per target jump (was 30%), and had its jump distance increased to 20 yards (was 15 yards).
Chain Heal from Farseer Ancestors healing increased by 50%.
It is no secret that Farseer has been underperforming lately. While on paper it is capable of keeping up with what Totemic can do and has its own strengths, the reality is that in actual practice there is too many conditionals for it to perform optimally and it ends up being just worse for most people. A big part of these is due to how weak the ancestors are. Most of the current power of Farseer comes from Maelstrom Supremacy which is simply a flat buff to your most relevant spell (Chain Heal), and the ancestors which are supposed to be the core mechanic of the hero tree just don't add any amount of meaningful healing.
This problem was gonna become way worse going into season two for several reasons: First Farseer is pretty much forced into Unleash Life to summon the ancestors even if the spell itself is weak, losing the season one tierset bonuses meant that Totemic could put the talent points and global cooldowns somewhere else while Farseer was stuck casting a bad spell. Second, Riptide doing low healing also negatively affects Farseer as some of its power budget is found in Elemental Reverb buffing the spell by 20% and Offering from Beyond giving more access to it. Finally the season two tierset being heavily based on Healing Rain works in favor of Totemic, as any rain-related effects are stronger while you are in this hero tree. Any Healing Rain you spawn from the 2-piece bonus will do 10% more healing as Totemic, and the Overflowing Shores, Tidewaters, and Downpours generated from them will do double the healing.
The buffs to Unleash Life and Riptide benefit Farseer more than Totemic, and the improvements to the ancestors Chain Heal almost triples the healing it does. I still expect Totemic to be the preferred hero tree for season two, but these improvements make Farseer really competitive and the difference in power between the two isn't totally clear right now. These are very good changes in the exact direction the hero tree needs to remain relevant. It is very hard or maybe even impossible to have two perfectly balanced hero trees, but I'm very happy that Farseer is getting the attention it deserves to have a chance at relevancy in season two.
What Problems Still Remain
This patch overall represents an incredibly good list of changes. I want to emphasize that i am happy with everything that was touched here, and if the spec goes live like this then i think we are in a very good spot and can have a very fun season. With that said i do want to take a moment to mention a couple of things that are still not great about Restoration. Even when things are good they can always be better and balance is a continuously moving target, so if the goal is to continuously improve Restoration Shaman then these are the areas that could use a look at next.
Mana Issues
The big question mark for a decent while now has been mana. Even when the spec lands on the strong side tuning wise it always has to take mana into consideration, because even in previous tiers where most other specs could completely ignore it or at least didn't have to pay much attention to it, shaman still ended up having to very carefully manage it or risk running out. With zero active mana regeneration and being entirely balanced around continuously casting spells, it is not uncommon to run out of mana way before a boss is close to dying and turning into a sitting duck.
Restoration is also in a somewhat unique situation of having two relatively powerful spells that don't have cooldowns and can be spammed as much as you want (as long as you can pay for them): Healing Wave and Chain Heal. This leads to the constant question of "what should i be casting when my cooldowns are on cooldown?". While the most interesting answer to that gameplay-wise is "it depends", the reality for season one was that it didn't depend and you would always prefer to cast Chain Heal.
While the most common way to evaluate how good a certain spell is is "hps" (healing per second, or how much healing it does every second), when it comes to evaluating efficiency (how well does this spell use my mana) we look at "hpm" (healing per mana, or how much healing this spell does compared to how much mana it costs to cast it). While Healing Wave costs way less mana than Chain Heal, it also does substantially less healing overall when you account for all the targets healed by Chain Heal.
The result of this comparison is that, during season one, Chain Heal not only did much more overall healing than Healing Wave but also did very close to the same healing per mana point spent. During gameplay this meant that if you had limited mana you would prefer to cast Chain Heal and then stand afk for a moment to recover some rather than casting Healing Wave, as this would be a more efficient use of your limited resource. The mana management minigame for Restoration Shaman was not only fairly bad, but the only interesting efficiency decision you could make (what no-cd spell do i cast?) had a single correct answer in all scenarios that included just doing nothing while you waited for mana to recover.
This specific situation is being improved a bit for season two. Healing Wave got a 10% buff which means it is a more efficient cast as it does more healing for the same cost, and Calm Waters is getting merged into Current Control so you don't need to spend an extra talent point making the cost of Healing Wave go down. You can now realistically say that Healing Wave is a slightly better healing tool when mana is a concern compared to Chain Heal. This isn't really a solution to the overall problem thought, as it only means that you have access to a weaker spell instead of not doing anything. A vast majority of your healing still comes from your Chain Heal casts and cutting down on them to save mana will hurt your overall performance.
Honestly, I don't know what the ideal solution to this would be. I personally think that healers having to care about mana and interact with it can be good gameplay, and this issue only really arises when most other specs don't have to deal with this problem at all which might or might not be the case this season.
Some specs have active ways to regenerate their mana during combat, others are better at not spending it in the first place.
Five minutes is a good ballpark for what we expect Restoration Shaman mana to last if you have to actively heal with no breaks.
We have also seen what happens when a spec has the option to do high throughput but its limited by mana with Holy Paladins in season one. It ended up being a very frustrating situation all around as people became dependant on external mana sources like Innervate in order to properly perform their role. If Restoration Shaman ends up in a situation where their numbers are very good but their mana is bad so they get assigned multiple innervates in order to function in longer fights it would probably be the worst possible outcome, as any player that doesn't have access to the external mana tools is simply playing a worse spec from factors out of their control.
Some people want an active mana regeneration tool like added to the spec. This would still incur the cost of having to cast dps spells to recover mana which does cut down on the amount of healing casts you can do, but the option to actively do something to resolve your mana problems instead of being forced to do nothing would go to great lengths to improve the gameplay feel.
Another more simple option would be to simply tune Water Shield more aggressively during the season. If Restoration is underperforming due to mana problems then the regeneration from it could be increased in a hotfix until it matches what you would expect from other healers. This would be a less disruptive approach but it also means constant attention and adjustments which is somewhat unlikely to happen.
Healer mana is a very complex topic and you could argue for hours on what are good and bad ways to handle it. I don't have a perfect solution that everyone would love to make Restoration Shaman mana great, but i do know that running oom is a constant worry on every raiding shamans head and one of the most asked about topics when people are playing the spec. This leads me to believe that something should probably be done about it, whatever way it is decided that it should go.
Secondary Stat Imbalance
Restoration Shaman is a Critical Strike spec. This is perfectly fine and i don't think anyone is against it, but complains regarding the other secondary stats and how they interact with the kit are very very common.
The thing most talked about is Mastery. First of all it is important to remember that Restoration is the only healer spec that has the exact same Mastery, untouched in any way, since Cataclysm. Most other healer masteries are much newer and in the case of Holy Priest, which has the same effect as they had back then, it has still been adjusted numbers-wise to provide more healing per point of Mastery than what it did before.
The problem with Mastery is how bad the effect interacts with the modern healing game. A majority of your heals are used on people above half health so you are never getting most of the value of the stat, not to mention that any player that gets a healing absorb effect will require you to heal them while getting zero value from Mastery, as their health isn't actually low. The result is that a majority of the time you are getting very low Mastery effectiveness, your Mastery just doesn't do a lot to increase your healing.
We use tools like WowAnalyzer to figure out our Mastery effectiveness in any given encounter.
It is common for this to range between 20 and 30%. This means you only get a fifth to a third of the total bonus of your Mastery.
There are two separate issues here. On one hand the effect itself could be considered outdated, it is very old after all and currently healing doesn't really lend itself to scenarios where Mastery works very well (the 'shaman mastery is good for progress' meme is really just that, a meme, not reality). On the other hand even if the effect isn't amazing, Mastery could still be a good stat numbers-wise if you simply got more Mastery from your gear than what you currently do. As an example, if the same 200 points of Mastery rating from your ring that currently give you 13% more Mastery suddenly increased it by 26% instead, the stat would become very good out of sheer numbers.
Some people hate the effect of Mastery, and some people hate that it is not a very good stat to get on your gear. Fixing the first one is hard because it requires coming up with a new mastery, fixing the second one is easier as it only really requires numbers tuning but it would result in an overall buff to the spec as well.
As for Haste, the main drawback of Haste leads us back into the mana situation: Haste is the only stat that makes you spend more mana. As casting Chain Heal is a big part of your healing, having more Haste to cast more of it is actually a very good throughput increase, however you are limited by how much mana you can spend on Chain Heal anyway on any given fight so casting more of it sometimes means you just go out of mana faster instead of doing more healing overall.
This is also a somewhat new situation due to the power of Chain Heal compared to the rest of the kit at the moment. Restoration Shamans normally don't have a lot of Haste scaling in their kit as not a single spell with a cooldown actually gets its reduced from Haste. You do gain some increase from Riptide heal over time and Healing Rain ticks but when the bulk of your healing comes from things that aren't increased by Haste you simply don't want to get more Haste. Chain Heal being very strong presents a new angle to Haste but the high mana cost limits it again.
Versatility as a numbers stat is perfectly fine, its just not very interesting is it?. For a good portion of its life Restoration Shaman has went into a lot of Versatility after Crit when possible not necessarily because it had good interactions with the stat but instead because it had bad interactions with the alternatives.
At the end of the day it is possible that having one very good stat and then a lot of problematic or boring alternatives is considered perfectly fine for a spec and shaman should get no changes under that light. This is still an area ripe for improvements thought, and Mastery will continue to be a hotly contested topic until it gets some form of change. The community seems to have already firmly decided that they don't like the current Mastery effect and i doubt that will change in the near future.
The Totemic Problem
I have already mentioned that i expect Totemic to be the preferred hero tree for season two, but at the moment this prediction isn't necessarily based on performance differences shown during testing and instead more on how strongly Totemic interacts with the new tierset. While things have improved a good deal for Farseer with this last patch, one of the main draws of Totemic is still present since the reveal of the tierset bonus. A bonus based on Healing Rain is heavily weighted towards preferring Totemic.
One part of it is fairly obvious: Totemic has stronger Healing Rains so spawning extras is better if you are Totemic because they heal more. However another very important part of it isn't really known by a lot of people because it is not mentioned practically anywhere: Totemic has a hidden passive called Surging Totem (not to be confused with Surging Totem which is the actual spell that you cast, this is a passive that shares the same name) that greatly increases the effect of Healing Rain-related talents.
Tidewaters, Overflowing Shores, and Downpour all do double the amount of healing while you are specced into Totemic. The original intent behind this passive was to balance out Totemic having around twice the cooldown on Surging Totem compared to Farseer Healing Rain (you cast rain twice as often, so effects that happen on cast are half as strong), but we have since moved heavily away from this while the passive hasn't been adjusted accordingly.
The current duration of Healing Rain is 18 seconds compared to Surging Totem's 25, which is only around 40% longer rather than double. While you can technically recast Healing Rain every 12 seconds as Farseer doing so would be very detrimental as all the extra global cooldowns you would spend doing this would do more healing spent somewhere else. To make matters worse any Healing Rain summoned from the tierset 2-piece bonus also procs all these "on cast" effects: Every proc heals people inside of it with Overflowing Shores, heals everyone that has a Riptide with Tidewaters, and using Downpour while extra rains are active casts a downpour on every active rain at the same time.
The end result here is that Farseer has access to just slightly more Healing Rain casts over a fight compared to Totemic, and to compensate Totemic gets literally double the healing on all these effects. While this problem is heavily exacerbated due to the tierset bonus, it is still present even without it. Why would Farseer ever consider taking Downpour talents when the spell is balanced for Totemic doing twice as much healing on every cast of it?. Some part of the talent tree simply feels intentionally suboptimal when you are playing the 'wrong' hero tree.
At some point i wonder why Surging Totem and Healing Rain can't just have the same cooldown and same power on related effects (and balance the talents accordingly). It is no secret that Farseer Healing Rain is heavily lacking in quality of life compared to Surging Totem, and while this has been greatly improved recently there is still a very clear difference in gameplay feel. My main worry is that this passive effect isn't being taken into account properly when balancing the hero trees or the rain-related talents, which (maybe unintentionally) always tilts the odds in favor of Totemic.
Is Restoration Shaman Weak?
I have seen a wide arrange of reactions towards the tuning of the spec during this PTR and comments like "Restoration is bad anyway" or "It doesn't matter that they buff X because the spec will still do bad healing" are surprisingly common. I feel like a lot of people don't see how easily a spec can go from undertuned to overpowered with just the correct number on a single line of patch notes.
I understand the worry about committing to playing a spec that ends up being weak (nobody wants to invest time on something that ends up not working), but also think people are bad at estimating how much spec balance really affects them. Outside of very big outliers (admittedly, like Midnight season one) it is not common for most people to be effected by the balance of the spec they are playing more than they are by their own ability to play that character.
But even then, community perception is important in that it dictates how likely are you to be invited to groups when pugging. So let me try to answer the question, is restoration shaman bad?
Where Restoration Currently Stands
The short answer is no, Restoration Shaman is not weak. The long answer is that for the vast majority of players, the spec has enough power in it at the moment to effectively fulfill its role without being a detriment to the group. It is very hard to make definitive statements about the power of healers relative to each other when all you have to go off are PTR numbers, but from what we have seen so far Restoration Shaman is in a very competitive spot and is capable of doing very good healing.
The best way i can put it is that if you started season one as a Restoration Shaman, the sad reality was that you were doing a disservice to your raid team because you were simply inferior to other healers (except maybe Holy Paladin), and this is not remotely the case for season two. The spec is now perfectly capable of doing very high healing and can easily overshadow other classes when played well.
This does make sense, because since the expansion started we have received constant buffs over and over and over again, and while most of them where small (and maybe even laughed at at the moment) they all added up. At this point you are doing around 15% more healing on every spell on top of all the targeted buffed to things like Healing Wave and Healing Rain.
At the risk of having to eat my words later, i expect Restoration Shamans to perform incredibly well going into season two.
You Can't Know Everything
With that said, the reality is that trying to predict the future, and specially the meta, is a fools errand. Even if I'm personally confident on the power level of Shaman, predicting if it will be part of the Race to World First healer compositions would also require me to know just as much about every other healer spec in the game, and even about several dps specs to figure out what raid buffs are gonna be required for the healers to fill.
There is also a factor of having to know what damage patterns are gonna be present on the last boss of the raid, which no one knows. And having foresight on what last minute buffs or nerfs might fall on any other spec as well. Anyone trying to tell you for sure what class is or isn't gonna be played on any given boss or for high keys at this point is really just guessing.
I can say that the spec is very strong relative to the content we have tested and to what it was during season one. I can't really make definitive statements about its power relative to all the other present and future healer specs.
Conclusions
In short, Restoration Shaman got a big set of very needed and very well-aimed changes. It is looking much stronger and solid than what it was going into season one, and i expect it to look very good as we go into season two. It still has some issues that could be worked on mostly to improve some rough edges, but the truth is that weaknesses are much easier to deal with when you are capable of doing good numbers anyway and the rest of the gameplay feels good.
The main positive point i want to make about these changes is really how hopeful it makes me that we got them. Since Midnight started i have felt that the spec has gotten just the bare minimum of attention, despite being in a very dire spot raid-wise, and none of the attempted fixes were properly targeted. Getting this list of very direct improvements aimed exactly at known pain points makes me feel like there is still the want to make a fun and enjoyable spec, rather than just something "good enough".
It is no secret that the community feels a bit abandoned, and it seems to not be a problem exclusive to Restoration Shaman. Finally getting a proper list of changes and a developer's note that acknowledges our issues has brought a wave of excitement over the part of the playerbase i have contact with that hasn't really been there since at least the Midnight beta (the last time the spec was heavily iterated on).
I think we are gonna have a pretty good time during 12.1. And hopefully, if i can ask for one thing, the changes don't stop at this and we can get adjustments as the season progresses and more data comes up.
Telluric Currents
Instant
Requires Shaman
Causes your Lightning Bolt to restore 10% of your mana when it strikes an enemy.
