Restoration ShamanMidnight Overview
Changes in Midnight for Restoration Shaman
If I had to give a "TLDR", I would say Restoration Shaman has been boiled down to it's 4 to 5 core abilities, 1 healing CD, and that's really it. There are no more buffs to track or anything that influences your gameplay, and there aren't really distinct talent builds like we had in Dragonflight and The War Within - you pretty much keep Riptide, Healing Rain, and Healing Stream Totem on cooldown and that's it. There isn't much of a gameplay loop, to keep you engaged, and while being "simple" isn't bad, Restoration Shaman just feels like it's missing something pretty basic to pull everything together compared to the rest of the healers.
There are a few non-talent changes that are happening for Restoration Shaman as well. They are:
The base cast time of Healing Wave and Chain Heal are now 2 seconds (was 2.5).
Downpour mana cost has been reduced and no longer applies a health increase to allies.
Healing Tide Totem and Ascendance are on a choice node as our only healing cooldown.
- Developer's Notes
Developers’ notes: Shamans have a bunch of strong utility and many rotational spells, so an important goal for us in Midnight was to balance the number of possible active abilities. We’re also looking to remove talents that add auras that are constantly active or ones that temporarily modify other spells which can often make normal spell casts feel weak.
A significant change here is the removal of Healing Surge and Tidal Waves. We are reducing the base cast time of Healing Wave and Chain Heal to simplify gameplay and adding options for mana management through talents for situations where mana management feels valuable. We recognize there is a loss of a decision point when doing single target healing and will be monitoring feedback closely when it comes to Healing Surge being removed, but our goal is to keep the spell decision-making simple because healing already has dynamic gameplay with target choice.
We’re also updating Healing Rain to last 18 seconds when not playing Totemic. While we want the instant, long duration Healing Rain to be a hallmark of Totemic, it makes the alternative feel less awesome when it has to be cast every 10 seconds.
Another goal for us was to reduce the number of available group cooldowns healers have access to, so Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem are now a choice against each other. We want healers to feel powerful, but having too many powerful cooldowns often leads to needing to deal spiky damage to challenge them.
What Was Pruned?
This is a long list, the intent here is not to try to say that the spec has been completely ruined, however it is important to note all of the things that are now gone. A lot of the removals here make sense, and shaman was a class that had quite a lot already. For example, getting rid of some of the modifiers to Chain Heal allow them to increase the base healing the spell does and balance the mana cost such that it's a much more consistent spell compared to before.
The following Talents have been removed:
Ancestral Protection Totem and Earthen Wall Totem
Cloudburst Totem
Healing Surge
High Tide
Mana Tide Totem
Master of the Elements (now a PvP Talent)
Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem
Tidal Waves
Tidebringer
Tide Turner
Undulation
Unleash Life
Wellspring
The following Talents have been removed:
Stone Bulwark Totem has been removed from the class tree. The replacement is currently not yet implemented.
Totemic Recall and the following upgrade talents.
Thunderstorm is now only for Elemental Shamans.
Earth Elemental is now a 3-minute cooldown but only lasts 30 seconds (was 60).
The first thing you notice is there aren't really any buffs or procs to track on Restoration Shaman anymore. Streamlining buffs (like getting rid of Tidal Waves and reducing the cast time of Healing Wave) is great, however there now isn't anything to sometimes spice up your gameplay and break up the monotony of keeping Riptide, Healing Rain, and Healing Stream Totem on cooldown.
Losing Healing Surge means we no longer have access to a quick single target heal, only a strong efficient single target heal with Healing Wave but it's hard to tell just how impactful this will be without actually playing. They did state they were willing to revert this change, however the draw to having 2 single target heals mainly came from the unique Tidal Waves effect, which is now gone.
Similarly, Restoration Shamans burst AoE healing has been really cut down with these changes, and I think that's where the bulk of the pruning is going to be felt. Losing Cloudburst Totem means we have lost one of our only AoE burst healing tools outside of cooldowns. Losing Tidebringer means Chain Heal will not only be slower but will have a much smaller jump radius, meaning you will sometimes not reach the maximum number of hits. This means you will likely want to use yourself as a Chain Heal jump target again, like we used to back in earlier expansions, especially if you have a mix of ranged and melee players in your group.
Restoration Shaman now will have to choose between Healing Tide Totem and Ascendance as its only true "healing" cooldown. There will be circumstances where your group may be too spread out to make use of Spirit Link Totem and, traditionally, Restoration Shaman performed very poorly on these kind of fights when it previously only had 1 healing cooldown.
Finally, losing Unleash Life and Undulation means Farseer takes a pretty big hit with Call of the Ancestors generation. We will now have less ancestors in all Farseer builds than we're used to.
New Talents
These talents are largely passive, and focus on making your filler spells (Healing Wave and Chain Heal) better, or just increasing our passive healing through Healing Rain and Healing Stream Totem by quite a lot.
Current Control - Reduces the mana cost of Healing Wave by 15%.
Soothing Rain - Increases the healing done by Healing Rain by 10% and reduces its cast time by 0.5s.
Quickstream - Healing Stream Totem heals 15% more often.
Calm Waters - Reduces the mana cost of Chain Heal by 15%.
Rip Current - Reduces the mana cost of Riptide by 1 second.
Crashing Waves - Increases the critical strike chance of Healing Wave by 12%.
Water Expulsion - Downpour healing is increased by 20%.
Double Dip - Healing Rain grants an additional use of Downpour
Earthweaver - Earth Shield healing increased by 40%.
Stormstream Totem - New Apex Talent
This is a completely passive talent that sometimes gives us a stronger version of Healing Stream Totem when we use Riptide. Currently, it is a very low chance for this to occur, so you would expect this to happen < 1 time per minute. A lot of the Apex Talents for healers appear to be passive, however being completely RNG seems like it's going to be a little frustrating if it's meant to be a powerful ability that we "always want to take".
Stormstream Totem (First point) - Riptide has a 10% chance to upgrade your next Healing Stream Totem to Stormstream Totem which heals for 30% more, heals 1 additional ally at 100% effectiveness, and heals 2 injured allies when used.
Stormstream Totem (Second and Third points) - Healing Stream Totem and Stormstream Totem increased by 30% per point.
Stormstream Totem (Fourth point) - Stormstream Totem is usable for free and ignores its cooldown when available. Effectively, this makes it so Stormstream Totem is usable whenever you get a proc, rather than having to wait for the cooldown of Healing Stream Totem to finish.
Restoration Shaman Hero Talents in Midnight
As it stands, Totemic is the clear winner with the talent changes that have occurred. The more healing that gets tied into Healing Rain and Healing Stream Totem, the better Totemic becomes, meanwhile Farseer really wants the player to be casting as many spells as possible and summoning as many Ancestors as possible, which would lean into casting Healing Wave and Chain Heal as much as we can.
Farseer
Call of the Ancestors are now summoned when you use Healing Stream Totem. This means you will have less Call of the Ancestors summoned on average, and are not able to have a permanent ancestor in M+ like you used to be able to.
We are currently missing the added column of the Farseer Hero Talent tree.
Totemic
Many of the new talents are increases to our passive healing through Healing Rain and Healing Stream Totem, which directly buff Totemic.
The new Apex Talent Stormstream Totem is also directly tied to Healing Stream Totem, which is buffed by Totemic.
Primal Catalyst returns from the Season 3 Manaforged Omega set bonus as one of the new Totemic Hero Talent nodes.
