Restoration Shaman Season 3 Review: A Top-Heavy Talent Tree With an Unfriendly Playstyle
Restoration Shaman is a spec that hasn't really found its footing so far in Dragonflight. The talent tree has a lot of issues that have gone unaddressed, and with some of the playstyle changes with the stuff coming in Season 3, it's time to take a look at where Resto Shaman stands, what problems the spec currently has, and what we hope to see changed.
We'll start looking at where the spec was at throughout Season 2 in both Raid and Mythic +, then take a look at where the spec is heading going into Season 3 with the current changes and Tier Bonuses now that we've had a few weeks of testing. I promise I'm not trying to be overly cynical here, but with the tier bonus heavily altering our playstyle and the unaddressed talent issues, the spec is not in a great place right now.
We're still one of the few specs without a Raid/Party buff (hello Elemental Shamans and Hunter players!) and unfortunately, I don't think that's going to be changing before Season 3.
I want to add a small bit here quickly describing the talent tree, but currently Resto Shaman is looking to spend anywhere from 12-14 of our total Spec Talent Points in the topmost section of our Talent Tree. Most of the other options in our talent tree are either undertuned, buff spells we will not be pressing (either due to mana changes or the new tier bonus), or have been nerfed to the point where we don't really want to take them anymore.
I cannot emphasize enough how bad it feels to overspend talent points in the topmost section of the talent tree. Some of the options we're picking aren't really even healing improvements but more Quality of Life improvements like
or are things we must path through just to get to other talent we want to take like
or
. I'll cover this more below in its own section, but more than anything else this is one of the things I'd like to see tackled in a future update.
Season 2
Shaman had a strong start to Season 2. It wasn't "meta" in raid, but was certainly playable as even
Method used a Resto Shaman on their World 3rd kill of Mythic Sarkareth. In Mythic + Resto Shaman was the most dominant healer early on - which was likely a carryover from Season 1 after the giant buffs to
, but quickly fell behind Holy Paladin and Discipline Priest once the reworked Holy Paladin hit live servers.
The 10.1.5 change to
was aimed to combat off-healing CDs for dps specs, but this was a pretty big hit for Resto Shaman specifically as it was our best healing CD that we had. This was primarily the reason Resto Shamans healing in Raid started to fall off quite a bit, despite not really being 'ahead' beforehand. After seeing the performance of the spec in Raid after this change, I was really hopeful to see some buffs in other areas come Season 3, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening (yet, anyway).
Playstyle
The playstyle was predominantly focused on
this season despite the tier bonus pushing us towards casting single-target spells like
and
. The set bonus had a lot of issues in raid that I'm not going to cover here, but most players opted to almost completely ignore the tier bonus entirely in Raid, however a few players were able to showcase what it was capable of in both a Raid and Mythic + setting if you changed your playstyle around it. This is important, because this is actually quite similar to how we're going to play in Season 3.
Because most players opted to lean heavily into
, the spec was quite mana hungry - almost reliant on a mana trinket like
during progression. Again, this is important because Mana is one of the things Blizzard is looking at with the general healing changes heading into Season 3.
Season 3
Changes
There's a few changes currently slated for Season 3 so far. The important ones are the buffs to
and
, the buff to
, and perhaps most importantly, the nerf to
. The change to
in particular seems odd, as that is the reason our spells cost so much more than other healers - the mana cost of our spells are balanced with
in mind. The buffs to
and
now put them ahead of
both in terms of efficiency (HPM) and also just how much healing they do (HPS). The only way you would currently want to press
is if you have
,
, and also either
or
- and even then it's hardly better than simply pressing
. This week we also saw both a nerf and a change to how
works as well. It is no longer a true smart heal, which is the primary reason this was looking to be a good pick next season. I'm not certain yet if we'll play this talent after the change, but more on that a bit later.
It's important to note that every healer is being nerfed this season, so while we are losing healing with the changes to
and
, they don't really change much about the spec unlike the changes I listed above which both change your spell priority and also really restrict mana costs.
- Healing Stream healing increased by 20%.
- Healing Surge healing increased by 30%.
- Healing Wave healing increased by 30%.
- Primordial Wave replicates Healing Wave at 40% effectiveness (was 60%).
- Cloudburst Totem now accumulates 20% of your healing done (was 30%).
- Ascendance now duplicates 80% of all healing done (was 100%).
- Mana Tide Totem now increases mana regeneration by 80% (was 100%).
- Resurgence now restores 20% less mana.
- Riptide’s initial heal increased by 30%.
- Unleash Life healing increased by 40%.
Developers’ note: With Riptide, Healing Surge, and Healing Wave doing a lot more healing, Ancestral Awakening’s power was increased beyond intended levels.
- Ancestral Awakening heals for 10/20% of healing done (was 15/30%).
- Ancestral Awakening now prefers to heal injured players instead of always healing the lowest health player.
