Introduction
Restoration Shaman has had an interesting run this season. Starting out as a good healer pick for Mythic+ while at the same time being incredibly bad at healing raids, it has received buff after buff without seemingly any meaningful effect on how it feels to play or how people see the spec. Being the poster child for the Midnight pruning, it is commonly said that the spec feels "boring", "flat", or "empty"; but even if we look past subjective feels and into real performance, Restoration has some important problems that can't be fixed by just aura buffing it.
Some of the complaints can be exaggerated as the spec plays just fine, but that doesn't mean there aren't issues that need to be addressed. After getting one more buff that won't fix the problems just this week, lets take a moment to discuss what is happening with Restoration, why is it a top pick for keys while being bad in raids, what are the problems preventing it from being a more interesting spec, and what needs to be fixed for season 2 before it causes even worse problems.
Good and Bad at the Same Time
Restoration Shaman has a kit very well suited for Mythic+. This is not related to utility but instead to how it delivers its healing - the power of the spec is heavily biased towards Chain Heal casts. When the main source of your healing is very accessible by having no cooldown and healing your whole group at the same time, it becomes very easy to constantly respond to damage. You don't depend on complex set ups or big cooldowns when you can simply cast more Chain Heals (or get your totems to cast them for you) and that can deal with almost anything.
In a raid, however, this doesn't scale up very well. You are still healing the same amount per cast even when the size of the group has increased, and you can't very effectively pool resources to do more healing during the most dangerous parts of the fights like other specs can. You can only cast one Chain Heal at a time.
Breakdowns can end up being a little bit lopsided
On top of this, on a long enough raid encounter, the mana cost of Chain Heal also becomes an important factor. You start to become limited on how many of them you can cast, but even if you try to limit yourself to only using the spell to only when it is really needed, it doesn't result on a big spike of healing during those moments. This is the main issue with the latest buff the spec got that reduced several mana costs. Being able to cast more Chain Heals is very good, but that only really helps you get a little bit closer to the good specs that already don't have to worry about mana almost at all, and in shorter fights where mana wasn't a problem anyway it does pretty much nothing.
As a good showcase of why these are problems, we can look at Ascendance. The spell heavily increases the power of Chain Heal by making it heal more people and reduce way less every jump. It lets you cast it much faster (thanks to Preeminence), and reduces its mana cost significantly. The result is that you become incredibly powerful during Ascendance as almost all the weaknesses of Chain Heal in raid are heavily reduced for the duration. The downside to this is that buffing Chain Heal by this much on a spec whose power budget is already heavily tilted towards it means that you want to press that spell as much as possible during your major cooldown and ignore every other part of your kit.
Very early in the season there was a lot of talk about Chain Heal feeling a bit too weak and not satisfying to use. The response to this was buffing the spell by 20%, and this did address the complain but the real issue was that the spec as a whole was too weak and Chain Heal, a spell that spreads its healing across several targets, didn't look very impactful when looking at health bars. This resulted in Chain Heal pulling ahead of the whole rest of the kit in power, up to the current situation where the only spells worth casting are either Chain Heal, things that buff Chain Heal, or spells that generate free Chain Heals.
You can of course simply increase the healing the spec can do over and over again until it becomes good in raid out of sheer power, but this is obviously not a good solution either. In my opinion the best path forward is to bake more power into other parts of the kit, trying to build towards a more healthy set of spells where different tools are valuable and you are more able to adapt to different damage patterns.
Deep Healing and Hero Talents
Restoration Shaman has a variety of issues (as does every spec), and some are long-standing and some are newly created for Midnight. One of the most common recurrent topics of discussion when it comes to things that need fixing is Mastery: Deep Healing. The reality is that Deep Healing as it currently exists just isn't very good in the modern game where most of your healing happens on targets at relatively high health percentages.
To be clear here this doesn't mean that Shaman's Mastery is flawed and can't work, it's just that the current way it is balanced just doesn't get the best results and it consistently gets worse over a season as people get more geared. Restoration Shaman has the oldest mastery of all the healers, maybe even of all the specs. While some other specs have kept a similar design they have still gotten rebalanced in the form of adjustments to the mastery coefficients.
While for other secondary stats rating from your gear gets directly converted into a percentage, for mastery it is converted into 'mastery points' which are then multiplied by a number unique to your spec. For Restoration Shaman this number is 3, so 1 mastery point multiplied by 3 gives you 3% mastery. While other specs have very similar (or even the same) mastery effects since Cataclysm, Restoration Shaman is the only one to my knowledge that has not only the exact same effect, but also the exact same multiplier for more than 15 years.
Another very important issue is related to the hero talents: Both feel really bad and seem badly tuned.
To start with Farseer, the key talent of the tree lets you spawn ancestors that cast spells in response to your casts to do extra healing. The fantasy here is around summoning your ancestors to help you in combat and enhance your casts, but the reality is that the ancestors are incredibly weak to the point of being pathetic. The ancestors don't cast the same spells as you. They have their own version of the spells that they use in response to what you cast, but when you compare your own Chain Heal to the ancestor's Chain Heal side to side, you can see how terrible these are.
The ancestor spells seem to have been forgotten when it comes to balancing, and so the power of the hero tree is heavily tied to Maelstrom Supremacy which is (to the surprise of no one) a talent that heavily buffs your own Chain Heals. Farseer also has Unleash Life as a key component because it summons the ancestors, but the spell itself is very weak and currently being propped up by the tier set (which literally doubles its power). The identity of the hero tree is in shambles as the main part of it is fairly irrelevant and instead it draws power mostly from passive increases to your base kit.
For Totemic, while Surging Totem sees much more usefulness than the Farseer ancestors, and the hero tree ends up being propped up by Chain Heal anyway as the most impactful nodes are Lively Totems, and Earthsurge (which is used to, you guessed it, increase the healing of your Chain Heals).
While Totemic gets less complaints simply because instant cast Chain Heals from your totems are better to deal with than the bad ancestors, both hero trees end up being practically the same ("Who can buff Chain Heal better?") rather than having unique and well defined identities, strengths and weaknesses.
What Needs to Be Fixed?
With season two looming over us, there are several things that I would hope can be addressed before we move on to the next season in order to have a more enjoyable experience playing Shaman. I know it is unlikely and maybe even impossible that all of these get looked into before next patch, but here they are anyway:
Make the spec less Chain Heal centric. The spell is very cool and iconic but it is overpowering everything else right now which results in a less interesting design. It is still our go-to tool for AoE healing so i would love to see it being made better for AoE by bringing down its overall power but reducing less on jumps to spread the healing it does more. This would allow the spell to be less powerful in comparison to other options but still be good at the job it is supposed to do.
Buff Riptide. This spell is supposed to be the central part of the Shaman kit considering it's the very first talent, but it is weak by itself and the main reason to cast it is because it has a bunch of other effects and procs attached to it. The main attractiveness it has, besides the chance to proc Stormstream Totem, is giving you Undercurrent, Deluge, and Flow of the Tides. All of these are, once again, meant to buff Chain Heal.
Change Ascendance. The major and most impactful cooldown of the spec only improves Chain Heal and Healing Wave, which means during it you are heavily incentivized to ignore every other part of your kit and only spam one of these spells. Restoration Shaman is supposed to be a simple healer but only using one button during your major cd is a bit too much.
Improve Farseer. The spell casts from the ancestors are fairly weak and are completely disconnected from your base kit. Unlike Totemic's Lively Totems where any buff to the base spell or talent that improves on it is copied over, Farseer is stuck with whatever the ancestor spells already are with no way to improve them. Farseer is also heavily tied to Unleash Life as the way to summon the ancestors, but the spell currently weak and only works because of the tierset. If nothing is done to improve this situation, the hero tree will fall behind even more next season. A very good solution for this that already existed during beta was making Healing Stream Totem summon the ancestors instead. This adds power to a spell that is a core part of the kit but currently bad for Farseer and gives it the ability to pool charges to spawn more ancestors when needed to better respond to damage, which is part of the identity of the tree.
Take a look at our secondary stats. Complaints about shaman mastery have been happening for longer than some other classes have even existed, it really could use some kind of refresh to bring it up to a more modern standard. A better multiplier would be a simple way to make the stat stronger (and buff the spec in the process) even if it would keep some of the same design issues. Changing to work on a different scale than 100-0 (maybe have full effect at 30% hp and scale from there) would heavily increase it's value and make it better to play into as well. Another stat that we don't interact very well with is Haste, as practically none of our cooldowns are hasted. Making Riptide work this way could be another way to add power and complexity to the spec in a healthier way than more aura buffs.
Some Final Words
Restoration Shaman is currently in a pretty ok spot. Having one good hero tree and being very good in one type of content is already way more than some other specs get. I don't think this should stop us from voicing concerns about how going from one season to the other will affect us or from pointing out some design problems the spec has that make it feel worse to play even if they aren't directly related to power. Things could always be better even though we know Restoration isn't a spec known to get a lot of attention and changes during mid-expansion patches.
The base kit is very solid and fun to play with, and the spec is very popular overall. It just always seems to be missing just a little bit more to land on a satisfying spot. My hope is that all the rough edges can get improved over time to showcase how a spec that got heavily pruned by Midnight can still result in a very well balanced and fun gameplay experience, but to get there we are gonna need some level of constant attention, willingness to accept some ideas aren't working, and the desire to fix how the spec works rather than just aura buffing it.
