Restoration Shaman Guide: Extensive Detail

[DemonBolt]

Written by Mek


Introduction:


-Glossary:

I may use these abbreviations during the guide.

LHW = Lesser Healing Wave
ES = Earth Shield
SP = Spell Power
MP5 = Mana Regen per 5 seconds.
INT = Intellect
STAM = Stamina
DPS = Damage Per Second
HPS = Healing Per Second
AoE = Area of Effect
ilvl = Item Level
HoT = Heal over Time

I've been playing Restoration Shaman since the release of World of Warcraft with only a couple of short breaks. I think in the current version of the game it should be classed as a support healer, when played perfectly you will not get out the same kind of effective healing out as a similarly geared and skilled Druid or Priest. On the flipside, however, you offer some great buffs that will help secure that raid spot. As soon as Chain Heal began auto-targeting players with the lowest health it became the most dominating skill for Resto Shamans. This continued all the way through TBC and in Sunwell, with full Haste gear and a Shadow Priest in your group, you could push out some ridiculously high HPS with AoE healing. In Wrath of the Lich King, however, it seems that Blizzard's intentions for Shaman healing have changed dramatically. Talents, gear and the way the other healers have been designed push it much more into the Tank healing category with quick spot healing thrown in. I'll go into more detail on this later. The purpose of this guide is to give you an idea of the direction to take your Shaman if you want to improve your raid performance or if you are a beginner with the class. This is not going to be full of math - I am not a theory crafting nut. I think the best way to approach character optimisation is to just play and adapt to what is going on around you, particularly when playing a healer.


Restoration Talents:


So the first thing you need to approach is your Talent Spec. I'll start by linking the talent build that I use now, there really is no other standard spec for a Resto Shaman right now. View it here: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/ba...10501122331251

One of the most straight forward things about Resto Shaman advice is the spec. In 3.1, after they re-arranged the talents, there is only one choice for everyday play. The only change I would make is that you could remove some of your healing output and get Nature's Guardian. I will most likely be doing this for Freya hard-mode and perhaps Mimiron. I will remove my Elemental Weapons and most likely Improved Chain Heal (more on Chain Heal later) to get it. (view that build http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/ba...10551120331251

I'd write a lot more on spec but there really isn't much to say. Totemic Focus is more of a PvP talent, most of the time you will drop a few totems every couple of minutes and your very occasional use of Healing Wave will justify selecting that talent instead. If your tanks are not awful you will never have to worry about healing threat so Healing Grace is useless. Once again this is much more of a PvP talent and even then it's not in all builds. If there was a fight with a nasty unavoidable silence you might justify Focused Mind (say Gruul in TBC), currently there is no fight requiring it however and you will only take this talent in PvP. Healing Way is not used because of the Lesser Healing Wave Glyph and the fact that you will very rarely be able to land a long cast 20k effective heal. To wrap it up, take the first build I linked for general use and you can't go wrong.


Restoration and Stats:


My stats and how they integrate with playstyle are something I have been wrestling with endlessly since the release of WotLK. At the start I maxed out my Intellect because on paper it is definitely the best all-round stat for a Shaman. After getting decent gear and realising mana was never going to be an issue I switched to full Spell Power to test that out. I continued with that for quite some time until the change to Priest and Druid AoE healing which I believed would allow Shamans to begin using Chain Heal once again. In Naxx up until this point, it was impossible to land a Chain Heal before people were healed up by Priests and Druids spamming Circle of Healing and Wild Growth. So with the nerfing of these skills I gemmed a lot more Haste, switched some gear and gave it a go. It worked for a while but during Ulduar, particularly with the huge buff to Prayer of Healing for Priests, it became pretty poor again. I will most likely go back to trying Haste and MP5 gear once again later on in Ulduar when I have a lot more gear and 4 part of Tier 8. Until that point though and for the rest of this guide I will be focusing on skipping Chain Heal spam and focusing on single target healing and how best to setup for that.

Your primary Stat is going to be Intellect. Intellect gives will increase your mana pool. It will boost the mana regeneration you get from Replenishment and will also boost your Spell Power (Talent: Nature's Blessing) and Critical Rating. Your second best stat is going to be Spell Power. This comes a very close second to Intellect and should be considered pretty much equal. Spell Power is a great way to increase your HPS (Healing Per Second) since your HoT ticks will also benefit from it (Earthliving and Riptide]) and they will not benefit from Crit. The fact is you will naturally get these 2 stats on any gear you pick since almost everything has a good amount of them by default. Except for when Gemming, the main decision for you will come when choosing between 3 stats: Haste, crit and MP5. The Shaman gear and such will offer different options based around these 3 stats and I will now go into each of them in more detail.

-Crit: Crit is important for 3 reasons.

* It will apply the 25% armor buff on tanks that you critically heal which is very important. So unless you are running a Disc Priest (Holy Priests usually do not spec it) or a second Shaman you will most likely be the only person in the raid able to apply the buff.
* It will give you mana regeneration through Improved Water Shield and since your main spells are going to be Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide, critting these spells is going to provide a large amount of your mana regeneration
* To increase your HPS. Since Ancestral Awakening was changed in 3.1 those Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide Crits are going to provide a lot of effective healing without requiring you to re-target people. I actually found that the amount of effective healing I gained from this talent in 3.1 was massive. Also don't forget it makes your heals bigger which you cannot discount!


-Haste: The Chain Heal Stat.

Haste is almost entirely designed for Chain Heal. Lesser Healing Wave doesn't gain much from Haste at all because firstly it's a shorter base cast and secondly due to Tidal Waves. By this I mean that the speed you can pump out LHW will most likely be limited by the global cooldown because Tidal Waves reduces your cast time by such a massive amount. Haste will not affect the output of Earth Shield, Riptide or Earthliving. So if you are not using Chain Heal, the effect is purely to make sure your LHW is below 1 second cast and to reduce your global cooldown a little. That being said, for Chain Heal it is the best stat by far. I tested it out with the Leviathon Relic and 900 Haste on PTR (shirt of uber, Haste Gems, Haste food/elixir) and this was a significant improvement. I believe that with these kind of stats and the 4 part Tier 8 bonus (-0.2 sec on Chain Heal cast) Chain Heal will come back into fashion in a big way, but until then I will not be basing my stats around it.

-MP5: Mana please!

Since Spirit is completely useless for Shamans, this will be your other source of mana along with Water Shield charges (from Crits and environmental damage). How much you use is entirely up to you. I currently sit at around 275MP5 (with Water Shield) in my standard pre-Ulduar gear and I find that keeps my mana up pretty well. The amount of MP5 you need is going to be dependent on the length of the fight and the amount of Haste you have since Haste is the only thing that will cause you to burn mana faster.

-Balancing and Prioritising your stats:

There is no magic number of Intellect to get, it's just an all around good stat. Along with Spell Power it's just a stat you will naturally increase as your gear improves. The next stat you should be looking for on your gear is Crit rating for the reasons above. You should prioritise Crit over Haste and MP5. If you are not trying to use Chain Heal too much then Haste is not too important, I have around 375 unbuffed at the moment and that feels sufficient. It does not hurt to have more at all just as long as you keep your mana up but do not gem it. I would therefore look for MP5 more than Haste on gear however the important thing to understand is to balance them. Haste is better than MP5 if your mana bar is not empty. Continuing to stack MP5 when you don't go oom on a 10 minute fight will serve you no good at all. So when using the playstyle recommended in this guide Int > Spell Power > Crit > Haste/MP5. The most important thing to remember is balancing them though, more Haste needs more MP5 and the more Crit you get the less MP5 you will need. You should be looking for 30 Crit (Spellbook), 350 Haste and 250MP5 as solid minimum stat levels to aim for! (self buffed)

-Stamina:

Last but not least never forget Stamina. You cannot heal people if you are face down dead on the floor.

Restoration Gems and Enchants:

Very simple here. As long as you gem Intellect or Spell Power or a combination of both you can't really do it "wrong". Personally I like to balance my stats at the moment so I put:

16 Intellect in Yellow Sockets
9 Spell Power and 8 Intellect in Red Sockets (19 Spell Power is also absolutely fine here)
8 Intellect and 3 MP5 in Blue Sockets (9 Spell Power and 3 MP5 is also fine here)

* Your meta gem should be Insightful Earthsiege Diamond (Int + mana restore proc). It is by far the best meta gem.
* Consider Stamina or hybrid Stamina Gems in Blue sockets if there is a high risk of death from raid damage on a fight.
* Haste should be your primary stat for gemming if you are going to go for as much Chain Heal as possible so use the above Gems but whenever it says Intellect, replace with Haste.
* If you are lucky enough to be a Jewelcrafter I would suggest using your Blue sockets for either 27 Intellect or 32 Spell Power Gems (27 Haste if you're going Chain Heal). Otherwise follow the guidelines stated above.
* There will always be people using different Gems, the important thing to do is always to gem how you feel best suits the gear you have and the way you play. If you have an excess amount of mana don't use extra Intellect Gems, use Haste or Spell Power instead and so on ... There is no 100% correct way above all others.


For my enchants it's fairly straight forward. If you go to my armory or here you can see what I use (check chardev link if armory is PvP gear).

Notable choices are that I choose 10 stats over 8MP5 on chest because I think that Stamina is a worthy stat to have and you should always give it appropriate weight. On boots I recommend always using Tuskar's Vitality since you will no longer get runspeed from DK aura in raids. Survival is just soo important. With your head and shoulder enchants you have the option of Crit or MP5 as the secondary stat. I'd go with Crit however if you really want to push Chain Heal then go with MP5. Do not get 16 Int on bracers over 30 Spell Power, the enchant is significantly lower ilvl and it is a complete waste of stats. Stacking a particular stat for the sake of it at the expense of ilvl is not advisable for Resto Shamans since most stats are at least decent.

Restoration and Items:

-General

* I think many people in guides are going to write a list of the absolute perfect set of gear to get but again with playing a Resto Shaman you just need to adapt according to what gear you have available and using the stat advice above.
* Always take advantage of set bonuses, the Tier 7 and Tier 8 set bonuses are definitely worth getting (particularily Tier . There are no items that are going to boost you sufficiently in order to negate the bonus of these sets. They should therefore be your primary goal with your gear.
* Be very careful about getting too much Haste and not enough MP5 and Crit to keep your mana up. In Naxxramas you can do lots of 2 minute fights so you don't feel the effect of regen but in Ulduar it's an entirely different story.
* If your gear is really lacking in some stats, use your Gems to compensate, they provide a huge stat bonus and allow you to specialise a lot more than it might seem.
* Picking gear with no Stamina at all is unwise. You need to stay alive and a "glass cannon" healer is not the way to go at all.
* Use the PvP Relic if you can get it since it's by far the best relic for playing LHW heavy. With Chain Heal the new one from 25 man Flame Leviathon is by far the best however if you don't have that yet, you can use the one from badges instead.


-Trinkets

I'd like to give special mention to trinkets because while weapon is your most important item, there isn't much of a choice there. With trinkets, and especially with 10 man + 25 man, there are many, many choices. Before you have access to Ulduar I recommend Soul of the Dead from Sapphiron and Je'Tze's Bell (usually you can buy one on AH or in Trade Chat). Those are the best 2 trinkets because both of the procs are for mana regeneration. The problem with many trinkets is that a "chance on cast" to gain either Haste or Spell Power is often completely useless because you cannot control how it's used. You could cast one Riptide on your tank and proc +1000 Spell Power but you have absolutely no need for it at this time so it's a waste. You will however never be on full mana so I much prefer these kind of regen proc trinkets. I will definitely be going for the new version of Je'Tze's Bell from hardmode Freya 10 man called Sif's Remembrance. In my second slot I am really unsure what I will end up going for, hopefully a new healer trinket will come out. Pandora's Plea from Ulduar 25 has an nice amount of Intellect but an uncontrolled proc putting its quality a bit lower than I would have hoped. Scale of Fates is going to be an absolutely fantastic trinket for burst Chain Heal however you will most likely have to get in line behind your DPS casters for this one.

If you are struggling to get any of the trinkets above then the basic badge trinket or the Darkmoon Faire 90 Intellect trinket are both excellent places to start.

At the end here I am going to provide a list of "perfect" pre-Ulduar gear in my eyes. I will update this with Ulduar Gear but I prefer to wait until all items are available. You can see the items -> HERE.

Consumables:

Options! While progress raiding I carry a huge number of options. Your main Flasks will be either 125 Spell Power (Frost Wyrm) or 38 MP5 (Pure Mojo). You should however carry 1300hp flasks (Stoneblood) and a variety of elixirs such as Lightning Speed, Guru, Mighty Thoughts.

The same goes for your food. Depending on the fight you should be selecting MP5, Haste or Spell Power food.

Restoration Glyphs:

-Minor.

I use Water Walking (for convenience), Renewed Life (to avoid carrying ankhs), and Water Shield (because it's amazing!).

-Core

Earth Shield -> The absolute core glyph of playing Resto Shaman. You should always have your Earth Shield up on a tank and it will give very good effective healing. Use this 100% of the time.
Lesser Healing Wave -> If you are planning to ever heal a tank you should have this glyph, I don't think I have ever been without it while playing Resto in PvE or PvP.
Riptide -> This one is going to be a bit more debatable and is a recent change for me. When you play LHW you will spam Riptide and having an 20 second HoT up on random people is really nice on a lot of fights.

-Optional

Chain Heal -> You want to switch this one in if you are using Chain Heal a lot
Earth Living Weapon -> You can use this one in conjunction with Chain Heal but Riptide + Chain Heal may well be better now (have not tested) and both of these options are only if you are never going to heal a tank.

Your Play-Style:

Well this is the most difficult thing to "Teach". I don't think I do this stuff perfectly myself at all but if you take some of the advice onboard your play will probably improve.

-Spell Selection

Your 3 main heals will be Earth Shield, Riptide and Lesser Healing Wave.

Earth Shield should always be up on one of the tanks, if in the rare situation there is one tank and two Resto Shamans, put it on a healer or another caster with low hp for healing help and interrupt protection. A good example of this would be Razuvious, if the priest doing Mind Control is Holy they will have no interrupt protection so an Earth Shield will help them out.

Riptide has multiple uses. It's an instant heal in tight situations, for example a tank goes a bit low so you do a LHW then Riptide straight after to get as big a heal as you can in a short time. Where lots of people are taking consistent damage from AoE you want to try and use it as a HoT and therefore keep it up on as many people as possible. Tanks should have Riptide on them 100% of the time. Finally it's used to make your LHW casts a lot faster. For all of these reasons I would recommend using it on cooldown or as often as you can remember.

Lesser Healing Wave is your main direct heal. It's going to make up the largest part of your healing output so this is what you use when you don't need to refresh Totems / Shields / Riptides.

Always have Nature's Swiftness ready for tight situations in conjunction with Healing Wave. Your Tidal Force cooldown is tricky to time. The best time to activate it is when you know that some heavy damage is going to be incoming shortly (to be honest, I often forget to use this ability in the perfect situation).

For your totems you are going to have Wrath of Air Totem down all the time. Most of the time you can use Healing Stream Totem because your raid will have Blessing of Wisdom and they do not stack. For Earth Totem I use Stoneskin the most for reducing tank damage. On fire you can use Flametongue but your Enhancement Shaman will have a better one and more often than not there will be a much better buff being used in the raid (Demonic Pact, Totem of Wrath). Always watch out for Elemental damage and see if you can provide a resistance totem to counter it without sacrificing too much. All other totems are highly situational: Tremor for Fear/Sleep, Earthbind to slow, Cleansing to remove diseases and poisons.

Think about the length of the fight in regards to using your Mana Tide. If you are going to be able to use it multiple times within the length of the fight time it so that you do. Save your Mana Potion for if you go really low on Mana only.

-Character Control and General Tips

* Keybind your skills. Using the mouse to click skills will slow you down and misdirect your attention from what is actually going on with the fight. This is a very important aspect of the game.
* Do not backpeddle (this means using your back key to move). We all occasionally take a couple of steps to adjust but doing it consistently (unless tanking to keep front to mob for avoidance) is going to mean you move a lot slower than you should be.
* Do not keyboard turn, always use the mouse to turn your character and camera, it is significantly faster and more accurate.
* How you position yourself in the room is very important. You want to be in range of as many people as possible and in a safe spot. If your tank is about to move be ready to adapt to that movement. I like to just settle into a particular position on most fights and get comfortable with playing like that, but you should always be ready to adapt.
* Be raid aware. 99% of bad players are bad because they do not think about what is going on around them, they die to damage they should not be taking and/or don't take notice of what their fellow players are doing. Tunnel visioning and playing only through your raid frames is a very easy thing to fall into as a healer and is a very bad habit.
* Never die with healthstone and potion unused. These are two lifesaving heals and you shouldn't die without them being on cooldown/consumed.
* Always keep the boss in your Focus target with a big cast bar in the middle of your screen so you can see when they are casting their abilities.
* Always keep Water Shield up. Whenever you get a free global cooldown try to refresh it, even if it's still on 3 stacks. Get into the habit of this because sometimes you will just not have time to refresh it and u need to take the opportunity when it's there.



Healing theory is close to impossible to explain. We do not use many healing assignments, it's all about feel and knowing when you can land a heal or not. Try to think about how your other healers are going to heal and adapt to make sure that your heals are as effective as possible. I hardly ever cancel heals on tanks because the damage they take will usually come in huge spikes and cancelling could mean that they die. Your character should be setup so that you can spam heal for long periods of time so do not be shy with your mana. Spam, spam, spam and make sure you get as much healing out as you can.

Restoration Addons:

How you setup your UI is always going to be personal preference. I'll be making my UI available for download in the near future. For now though here are a few addons you might want to consider.

TotemTimers: I use this to monitor Totems and Shields. There may be better addons out there for this but I use this one.

Quartz: The standard castbar is pretty limited, this is the best one I have come across.

ScrollingCombatText: I believe there are many other options to this now but I use this, the default one has far too few options.

PowerAuras: I'm actually about to set this one up as a Riptide reminder, very customisable addon you can use to warn you about many different buffs, debuffs and cooldowns in-game.

oRA2: Raid Addon for Main Tank targets and monitoring a few other useful bits of info, far from essential though

HotCandy: I used to use this to see timers on Riptide, sadly it wasn't working with Riptide Glyph as of the time I wrote this but I will be looking to update or find another option as soon as possible.

Raid Frames: Well most people use Grid, I personally use sRaidFrames. Either is good just make sure you have something you are happy with and feel comfortable using.

Conclusion:

There is no one right way to do a lot of things in this game. This guide should explain you the mechanics of the basics and what you should be aiming for.

[remnever]

mmomaven.com/forum/showthread.php?p=24266


Written by mek on this forum.

[tsi]

What a ******, even claiming that you wrote it.

Shaman Restoration - Part 1 - General - Ensidia

[Aegan]

What a ******, even claiming that you wrote it.

Shaman Restoration - Part 1 - General - Ensidia

I believe this qualifies as ownage.


@ OP: Next time you go fishing for rep, you might not want to steal from Ensidia. See, they're kind of famous, so a lot of people will know where you got "your" guide from.

Oh, and go kill yourself <3

[phorentez]

****ing noob, l2 make your own guides!

[Pietje]

He edited: "Written by Mek" in at the top now. Also, none of the links are working, probably due to copy/paste. The huge titles are a pain as well. On top of that, regardless of him begin Ensidia, I don't entirely agree on some points, healing is a feeling!

[DemonBolt]

He edited: "Written by Mek" in at the top now. Also, none of the links are working, probably due to copy/paste. The huge titles are a pain as well. On top of that, regardless of him begin Ensidia, I don't entirely agree on some points, healing is a feeling!

It wasn't a copy + paste. I had to reformat it to fit with the difference between the two sites message boxes.

[whykay]

nah i dont really agree with him on all things and wth would you want to use Elixir of Mighty Thoughts instead of Flask of Distilled Wisdom which vanilla old school player wouldnt know about that flask ;< shame on mek

on a general note, i dont get why ppl are so into ensidia :confused:

you can read some about the ensida merger and what kind of guild they are here:

Last Resort - Forum / The Hog Blog

Last Resort - Forum / **** 9am!

[rawflstomp]

Whats up with the leechers and people with like 2 posts and 5 rep lol....anyways!!! :repost: soz mate but it is ._. I'll give ya my guide though

1: Use earth shield

2: Put your lesser healing wave as numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - =

3: Face roll those numbers

4: Target someone while you do that

5: Put Earth Shield on Them and Use Water Shield (What ever the **** its called lol >_>)

6: CONTINUE UNTIL THE PERSON THEY ARE FIGHTING IS DEAD!!

[remnever]

or just chain heal spam like every other resto shaman

[remnever]

It wasn't a copy + paste. I had to reformat it to fit with the difference between the two sites message boxes.

Just because you added spaces doesnt mean you wrote it.