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Restoration Shaman State in Shadowlands Alpha - Battle Shaman, Earth Shield, Covenant Abilities
Shadowlands
Posted
2020/06/18 at 2:07 AM
by
Jaydaa
Thanks to Sylvanas Windrunner, the veil between Azeroth and the realm of death has been shattered threatening the cosmic balance between life and death. On April 9th, the Shadowlands were flooded with the Champions of Azeroth as select players were invited to the Alpha test for World of Warcraft's next expansion. As adventurers explore the Shadowlands and the covenants that are core to this new realm, players learn that the machine of death has broken. This realm we become a part of is in desperate need of mending and the mechanism of death must be restored if we are to bring balance back to the Shadowlands. Who better to do that than healers? We've been bringing back players from the brink of death and resurrecting our allies for years. It's time we take our gifts to the Shadowlands.
In this episode of the state of healers series, we'll explore Shadowlands Restoration Shamans and see how these elemental magic wielders with a affinity for the restorative properties of water heal afflictions and purify their allies like fierce tidal waves washing upon the shore.
Previous Articles in the Series:
Restoration DruidMistweaver MonkHoly Priest
Introduction
Currently all classes with their updated toolkits are able to be tested, but so much has changed with each healer on a base level and the introduction of covenants adds a completely new twist and set of tools for each class. Moreover, we have still yet to see the full toolkits for healers as soulbinds, conduits, and legendaries have yet to be tested. Additionally, only a limited amount of content is available for testing including the
Bastion
and
Revendreth
leveling zones,
Torghast, Tower of the Damned
, and 4 leveling dungeons (
The Necrotic Wake
,
Halls of Atonement
,
Mists of Tirna Scithe
, and
Plaguefall
). The types of encounters have just as much of an impact on healer balance as the toolkits of the healers themselves.
Although we don't have the entirety of healing toolkits and Shadowlands content to test, we can and
should
still offer feedback on the current state of healers on the Alpha. This series will attempt to give a first look at each healer specialization in Shadowlands and hopefully provide early feedback on the current changes including baseline toolkits, covenants, and even the hot topic of abilities that feel lackluster still on the GCD.
Previous articles (ie.
Ny'alotha
and
Eternal Palace
) ranked healers according to desirability in previous raid tiers. While those articles were helpful especially for new and returning healers to determine what healers would be in high demand, it's nearly impossible to determine any sort of ranking or demand this early in development of Shadowlands due to how much is still unknown or in flux regarding healing.
Remember, this is only my opinion on healers so far in Shadowlands and primarily comes from a PvE point of view. Everyone should provide as much constructive feedback as possible. As always, the information presented here is based on the 9.0 Alpha cycle as of this article's release date and thus will almost certainly be inaccurate when the Shadowlands officially launches. Expect lots of changes to classes, covenants, soulbinds, conduits, legendaries, items, and encounters between now and launch. It should be noted that we're trying to hit the
major
changes to each class, yet for the sake of brevity we won't cover every single spell differential or mana cost reduction. If you're interested in the entirety of the spell differentials for each class please see the Class Change link listed at the top of the section for each class.
About the Author
This article is written by
Jaydaa
a veteran healer and contributing writer to both World of Warcraft content and other Blizzard games content here on Wowhead. I've been raiding in WoW for almost 15 years at various levels of progression. I've contributed to the theorycrafting of multiple healing classes, notably Mistweaver Monks and Restoration Druids. Find me on
Twitter
or on the
Wowhead Discord
.
Contributors
Niseko, the Restoration Shaman for Entropy on Draenor-EU, co-creator, author and theorycrafter for
Ancestral Guidance
, admin in its Restoration Shaman specific
Discord Server
and MVP in the
Shaman Class Discord
. Collaborator for
WoWAnalyzer
where I'm actively contributing and keeping the spec up to date. Also contributing on
Simulationcraft
to make simming Restoration Shaman DPS possible.
Restoration Shaman
Shaman Class Changes
Because we don't have a lot of Shadowlands content to test, we'll be primarily be looking at how Restoration Shamans have changed since Battle for Azeroth, especially in the stripped down world of healing sans Azerite, Essences, and Corruption. The additional systems of Battle for Azeroth didn't largely change Restoration Shaman's healing playstyle; however, the
Igneous Potential
Azerite Trait significantly boosted the single target damage output of Restoration Shamans. Combine this with damage-only essences and corruptions like
The Crucible of Flame
,
Twisted Appendage
, and
Gushing Wound
; and Restoration Shamans competed with more traditional damage dealers. While this 'Battle Shaman' playstyle required the player to heavily invest in dealing damage at the cost of their healing throughput, Battle Shamans were occasionally used in scenarios when a full dedicated healer wasn't entirely necessary opting to provide damage in low impact phases and providing cooldowns and healing support during more intense phases. While a lot of the support systems for Battle Shamans are going away, hopefully the playstyle can be supported either in the base class or expansion systems.
Baseline Toolkit Changes
Primal Strike
,
Flametongue Weapon
,
Frost Shock
, and
Lightning Shield
- While it's nice to receive some additional tools for dealing damage, none of these are particularly that impactful.
Primal Strike
and
Flametongue Weapon
require you to be in melee and do very minimal damage.
Lightning Shield
requires you to be melee'd to provide damage which is very unlikely outside of solo content and as a Restoration Shaman you'll most likely run
Water Shield
for the mana regen.
Frost Shock
is probably the most useful of the returning damaging abilities due to the added utility of a 50% slow. While the damage of
Frost Shock
recently received a buff on Alpha, it's likely only going to be used when you either need the slow or when you're moving and
Flame Shock
is on cooldown.
Earth Shield
- This talent will be nice to have baseline for the passive healing and 10% healing increase on a single target; however, all the issues that made this a rarely picked talent still remain even as a baseline ability. With BFA,
Earth Shield
was put on the GCD making this already low impact ability and maintenance buff feel even worse to maintain on your tank. Where before you could quickly put it up between spell casts, you're now having to expend the GCD to do so. With a 3s internal cooldown and 9 stacks, you're looking at recasting
Earth Shield
every 24s or so for normal play or even more often if using the new
Surge of Earth
. If this ability is returning baseline, please make it more impactful for the GCDs spent to maintain. Increase the stacks, give an upfront benefit, increase the healing.
NEW
- The mana totem returns for Shadowlands albeit with a 15 yd range. While I don't mind the range restriction to differentiate it from
Symbol of Hope
,
Mana Tide Totem
needs a visual indicator otherwise it'll likely be completely lost during an encounter for other healers. As an interesting and possibly unintended interaction, multiple
Mana Tide Totem
s currently stack multiplicatively with each other on Alpha. This means having multiple shamans pop
Mana Tide Totem
at the same time will yield higher mana returns. For one shaman that's 2x normal mana regen; two shaman 4x normal mana regen; and three shaman 8x normal mana regen and so on and so forth. For a single shaman,
Mana Tide Totem
is pretty weak only generating 6.4% max mana with each use compared to the 144% of max mana that you regen every 3 mins between
Mana Tide Totem
casts. Fairly weak overall so could use a small buff.
NEW
- The mana regen elemental shield returns. As added flair of encircling watery orbs, the ability definitely encapsulates the class fantasy of a Restoration Shaman, but it does little to provide any sort of meaningful gameplay. Yes, the passive mana regen is nice but the mana gained from taking melee hits is likely to be very rare outside of solo content. It's sorta this set and forget buff that doesn't have any real player interaction.
Shadowlands Leveling Perks
:
NEW
(Level 28)
Reincarnation now revives you with an additional 20% health.
A nice addition to
Reincarnation
to help ensure that you're not instantly killed after reincarnating. Not huge but I'll take it.
Reworked Restoration Shaman Abilities
:
Tidal Waves
&
Tidal Waves
Rank 2 (Level 27)
Casting Chain Heal or Riptide reduces the cast time of your next Healing Wave by 30%20% or increases the critical effect chance of your next Healing Surge by 40%. Stacks up to 2 times.
While the nerf to the cast time reduction of a
Tidal Waves
buffed
Healing Wave
doesn't seem that huge, it seems unnecessary to do this especially for a class that already struggles to find footing in the heavy single-target healing situations of Mythic+. Perhaps this nerf is to better differentiate
Healing Wave
and
Healing Surge
, but just seems odd but not too impactful.
Flat Healing Increases and Mana Cost Changes
*
Chain Heal
~25% Healing Increase & Cost changed from 25% to 30% of base mana
*
Healing Wave
~33% Healing Increase & Cost changed from 9% to 14% of base mana
*
Healing Surge
~8% Healing Increase & Cost changed from 18% to 23% of base mana
*
Healing Rain
~20% Healing Increase
*Factors in the
Restoration Shaman
Core passive healing modifier reduced from 46% to 0%.
Flat Damage Changes
Flame Shock
~37% Damage Decrease
Chain Lightning
~21% Damage Decrease
Lava Burst
~36% Damage Increase
The base toolkit for Restoration Shamans hasn't changed significantly in Shadowlands and the playstyle will largely remain the same as BFA. The strengths and weaknesses of Restoration Shamans still remain in Shadowlands. Utility has always been Restoration Shaman's strong suit with abilities like
Spirit Link Totem
,
Ancestral Protection Totem
,
Ancestral Vigor
, and much much more. They always seem to have an ability or cooldown to answer any situation. Where they've tended to struggle is single target sustained healing and spread AoE group healing.
The biggest letdown of the entire baseline toolkit changes is the general lack of support for Mythic+ which is an area that Restoration Shaman has struggled to find footing since the inception of the dungeon mode. While they have a lot of utility that works quite well in dungeons including
Wind Shear
(the only healer interrupt),
Purge
,
Wind Rush Totem
,
Tremor Totem
, and
Capacitor Totem
, their single target healing throughput and lack of damage reduction has always seemed to hold them back. Restoration Shamans did get additional single target healing with
Earth Shield
baseline as well as some small buffs to
Healing Wave
and
Healing Surge
, but I'm not sure that's enough to compete in dungeons.
To contribute to the plight of Restoration Shamans in dungeons, damage-wise they've fallen below the mark compared to other healers, especially in the absence of
Igneous Potential
. Most damaging abilities have long cast times or long cooldowns leading them to feel unimpactful. Moreover, AoE damage for Restoration Shamans has largely been restricted to 3 targets. With more and more content meant to be soloable by any class/spec, including Torghast in Shadowlands, Restoration Shaman damage is falling at the wayside.
Finally, Restoration Shaman
Mastery: Deep Healing
remains unchanged despite a lot of scaling issues especially over the course of a tier. While highly valued at the start of progression when players are learning encounters and making lots of mistakes,
Mastery: Deep Healing
loses significant value as fights are learned, the raid gears up, and progression turns to farm. Additionally, modern WoW encounters rarely have damage patterns with frequent hard-hitting bursts of damage that aren't covered by raid cooldowns. Ideally,
Mastery: Deep Healing
would have benefits even at high health instead of the current reverse scaling with itself.
Talent Changes
High Tide
Every 0 mana you spend brings a High Tide, making your next 2 Chain Heals heal for an additional 20%10% and not reduce with each jump.
As the always taken talent for raiding Restoration Shamans, it's no surprise to see this talent nerfed and some of the power directly baked into
Chain Heal
. This will likely mean
Wellspring
and
Ascendance
will see more play but will largely depend on final tuning.
NEW
Consume up to 3 charges of Earth Shield to heal up to 6 allies near your Earth Shield target for per charge consumed.
Tier 2 Talent, in place of
Earth Shield
This talent isn't bad, but it's not great either. The problem is
Surge of Earth
as an AoE heal doesn't really do much to solve shaman issues. For reference,
Surge of Earth
does a little less than the upfront healing of
Riptide
on 6 nearby targets for the cost of 3
Earth Shield
charges and a little more mana than the cost of a
Riptide
. This in total is a bit less than a
Chain Heal
worth of throughput albeit at a slightly cheaper price and limited to allies near your
Earth Shield
on a 20s cooldown. The only real benefit is the instant cast and lower mana cost compared to
Chain Heal
. Easy way to fix this talent is to just allocate all or some of the healing as a single target heal on the
Earth Shield
target turning the ability into a
Swiftmend
-like ability allowing Restoration Shamans a way to quickly recover and respond to incoming single target burst damage.
Unfortunately, the Restoration Shaman talent tree saw very few changes in Shadowlands. Ideally, I would have liked an additional pass on more mandatory talents and then perhaps making others in the utility section baseline with a replacement talent to support the Battle Shaman playstyle of BFA that is likely to become extinct without some intervention. Without trying to harp on this too much, talents would be a perfect place to explore more dungeon oriented abilities to help Restoration Shaman Mythic+ viability.
Covenant Abilities
Kyrian:
Vesper Totem
- Versatile and powerful ability with a lot of control. This cheap 1 min cooldown ability comes with a ton of AoE healing and damage. The damage and healing components are separate meaning you'll get 3x healing activations and 3x damage activations. The only real downside is the small 8 yd range for the pulses, but because relocating the totem is off the GCD it makes it easy to reposition to maximize output. The damage is a little lackluster single target, but on multiple targets in Mythic+ this ability will be strong. Ideally, I'd like the activator for the damage to be healing as well since passive damage tends to be more highly valued, but others might also like the control so perhaps a way to choose whether active or passive damage would be nice. Overall a strong covenant ability that will be hard to beat.
Summon Steward
- The steward offers some quality of life options like free talent changes or a vendor to sell things, but it essentially boils down to
Phial of Serenity
, a glorified healthstone for all intents and purposes. The healing will be nice and contribute albeit minimally to throughput, and the personal bleed, disease, and poison dispel for Restoration Shamans could come in handy as you can't normally dispel those; however, the circumstances where the phial will be invaluable will be few and far between compared to other covenant abilities which are more universally valuable.
Venthyr:
Chain Harvest
- Think of this as a free dual
Chain Heal
plus
Chain Lightning
combo with a variable cooldown based on crit. With a 20yd jump range, players can be a bit more spread out with
Chain Harvest
compared to
Chain Heal
's 15yd jump range. The problem with this ability is it doesn't really have many pros in the way of throughput except for the fact that it's free. The actual healing is very similar to
Chain Heal
without a lot of the extra tie-ins like
High Tide
or building stacks of
Tidal Waves
. Even if all hits crits reducing the cooldown to 40s, the throughput just doesn't compare to that of
Vesper Totem
. The only significant benefit
Chain Harvest
has over
Vesper Totem
is allies can be significantly more spread out.
Door of Shadows
- Quite possibly the star of the covenant signature abilities, it's hard to say no to a 35yd teleport with a minute cooldown even if it has a 1.5s cast time. This type of movement is almost universally valuable and it's hard to think of an occasion where it'd be useless. Full Venthyr dungeon groups can plan skips around this ability. As a Restoration Shaman, I can't turn down additional mobility.
Necrolord:
Primordial Wave
- This covenant ability comes with a lot of setup. Because this healing is tied directly
Riptide
, you'll need to make good use of your
Riptide
to ensure that you're maximizing the throughput on targets that will actually need the healing. The upfront healing is significantly less than a
Healing Wave
to start even when factoring in the applied
Riptide
but also can't be buffed via
Unleash Life
. Only your cast of
Healing Wave
benefits from
Unleash Life
and
Undulation
not the copied casts. At a 45s cooldown, the healing throughput on this one is comparable with
Vesper Totem
especially when you take
Echo of the Elements
and can achieve 5
Riptide
out at a time. It's also fairly cheap for the extra throughput. The problem comes when you're also not getting any damage out of the ability and only healing. It would be nice if the ability also triggered
Lava Burst
on our
Flame Shock
targets when we used
Healing Wave
and rewarded multitasking
Riptide
and
Flame Shock
. I think allowing the additional
Healing Wave
s to interact with the rest of our toolkit via
Undulation
and
Unleash Life
would go a long way in rewarding an even higher skill ceiling.
Fleshcraft
- This extra self survivability will be nice and as an absorb will contribute minimally to overall throughput, but where this one loses me is the 4s channel. . I would really like to see the channel time reduced or allowing this ability to channel while moving would go a long way to making this ability more palatable. Even with those changes it's a bit of a hard sell against the other movement oriented covenant signature abilities.
Night Fae:
Fae Transfusion
- While this covenant ability has an interesting damage to healing mechanic, the fact that the healing throughput scales based on the number of targets means that when you're only facing significantly fewer targets the healing will be much less. Unfortunately, at fewer enemy targets, which is the norm in a lot of PvE content, the healing just can't compete with other covenants. Now throw in a 8yd radius for both the damage and the healing, a 3s channel, and a 2min cooldown and you'll begin to understand why this ability feels like a less versatile
Vesper Totem
.
Soulshape
As someone who adored
Displacer Beast
, it's nice to see this come back as an option although more watered down. Blinks and teleports are universally valuable and while it might not be the Venthyr ability this is a strong second place option. You likely won't be coming up with skips for such a limited 10 yard blink, but you get 3 in the 12s duration so you may have some opportunities to blink over some particularly nasty mechanics. It should be noted that you can cast while shapeshifted and you gain the
Spirit Wolf
if you started out in
Ghost Wolf
. Comes with a cosmetic collecting minigame which is fantastic.
We don't have the full class toolkit yet with soulbinds, conduits, and legendaries still to be released, so it's hard to make a clear choice right now as to what covenant is the best and for what type of content. However, if I had to pick one now based solely on the information we have on Alpha I think I'd be hardpressed not to pick
Kyrian
for Restoration Shamans.
Vesper Totem
is a versatile healing tool that works great in both dungeon and raid content. There's very little setup, a lot of control, and solid throughput. Unfortunately,
Kyrian
have somewhat lower tier signature abilities, but for how powerful the covenant abilitiy is you can't go wrong with
Vesper Totem
.
Lackluster GCDs
Earth Shield
- As I mentioned earlier this low impact ability feels more like a maintenance buff especially while on the GCD. Adding something upfront like a small heal would go a long way to making this ability feel better. Alternatively, increasing the number of stacks so fewer refreshes are necessary would limit the impact these GCDs have on your rotation.
Mana Tide Totem
- The extra mana is nice, but it's sorta this set and forget type ability. The trickling of mana regen you have normally you get more of but I'm not sure you'll notice the difference. Maybe making the first cast after gaining
Mana Tide Totem
free at least gives players some interaction with the totem.
Personal Wishlist
Mythic+ Viability - While there are a lot of factors that determine how well a spec performs in Mythic+ (utility, damage, single target throughput, etc.), I'd really appreciate if future development could be focused on helping Restoration Shamans become stronger and more relevant in dungeon content. I know it's a big ask and there isn't an exact solution, but perhaps the additional systems of Shadowlands could really offer some more tools for Restoration Shamans. For a lot of players the spec tends to let them down in dungeon content causing players to feel forced to class swap to feel more viable. Outside of spamming
Healing Surge
, Restoration Shamans feel like they don't have the tools to handle the incoming damage of higher Mythic+.
Spouting Spirits
- This Azerite Trait for
Spirit Link Totem
took an already outstanding ability raised it to another level by adding a throughput component. This made timing the
Spirit Link Totem
an added skill component to dealing with incoming damage. I'm not sure how this functionality could fit in, but I welcome this addition to the toolkit going forward.
That's a wrap for now for Restoration Shamans. I hope you enjoyed the breakdown. More Shadowlands healer breakdowns will be coming very soon so stay tuned to Wowhead.
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Comment by
Negatorn
on 2020-07-15T06:19:17-05:00
the part where shaman excels is stacked AoE healing.
Excels? Not quite, this is the only scenario Shaman can barely compete, it's not a niche, it's a restriction.
Shadowlands looks like another uninspired bandaid patch for resto shamans, ignoring all the classes outdated and flawed design. DIssapointing.
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