Season of Discovery Restoration Shaman Healer Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

While they are extraordinarily powerful, explosives such as Heavy Dynamite will not be detailed in the rotation. Usually, you will want to use them as soon as the tank has solid threat on the target. The main exception is when you are facing multiple or particularly dangerous (such as enraged) enemies at some point in the fight. Saving explosives to carry you and your group through these moments (and possibly do a ton of AoE damage in the process) is probably worth it.

Healers do not have a formal rotation. As such we will display a priority list instead:

1. Use Riptide (followed by Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave if needed) as an emergency heal for players about to die;
2. Keep your group-buffing Totems active and in range of group members at all times;
3. Remove dangerous debuffs from group members as soon as possible. This includes preparing for Fear effects with Tremor Totem;
4. Keep Water Shield active on yourself and Earth Shield (if runed) on the tank;
5. If runed, cast Healing Rain if two or more people in your group are hurt and standing close together;
6. Use Chain Heal if two or more people in your group are still hurt and standing close together;
7. Cast Riptide (to activate Tidal Waves) and various ranks of Healing Wave to spot heal injured players or use your DPS spells according to the Elemental rotation, as the situation calls for.

In this section, we will dive a bit deeper into the core mechanics and various abilities of Restoration Shaman. Understanding these topics is an important step to truly mastering the specialization.

Tremor Totem and Poison Cleansing Totem should be dropped when slightly less than 5 seconds remains until the Fear or Poison application. As they remove effects every 5 seconds, this will ensure that these harmful effects are removed as soon they are applied, which is of particular importance for Fears, so that allies do not have time to run out of the Totem's radius.

In order to keep healing throughout a long fight, and to avoid overhealing in general, it is a good idea to downrank your spells when heavy healing is not necessary.

Spells that can be learned before Level 20 gain a smaller benefit from Spell Damage and Healing, making them less efficient to downrank. Since the level cap is currently 40, Chain Heal only has rank 1 available, meaning there is no way to downrank it, and Shamanistic Rage makes Shaman stand much stronger on Mana than it would be usual at this point in WoW Classic.