Mists of Pandaria Classic Restoration Shaman Talent Builds

With Mists of Pandaria the talent system was heavily reworked to focus on a small amount of highly impactful choices and Restoration Shaman has multiple talent options for different encounters and gameplay profiles, ranging from high survivability to high Healing.

In Mists of Pandaria you will be able to unlock a new row of talent selections every 15 levels, starting at level 15. Each row has a specific theme in order to keep the choices balanced with each other, and thus the choice will mostly rest on what type of defensives you want, or mobility, or utility, for the situation.

This tier of talents is dedicated to additional defensive options and cooldowns.

• Nature's Guardian provides a passive defensive layer by increasing your health by 25% and reducing your threat whenever you drop under 30% health. While this is not a particularly powerful talent, it is also fully passive making it easy to make full use out of.
• Stone Bulwark Totem summons a totem which shields you for 30 seconds. With its short cooldown of 60 seconds it is easy to get good value out of this talent but its shields are not particularly powerful.
• Astral Shift has the longest cooldown of all options at 90 seconds but is also by far the most powerful as it reduces all damage taken by 40% for 6 seconds when used. That means you can activate it before hard hitting abilities or if you cannot dodge a dangerous ability to guarantee your survival.

This tier of talents has crowd control and anti-crowd control options. Their usefulness depends on the encounter you are facing, so be prepared to adjust these talents on a fight by fight basis.

• Frozen Power causes Frost Shock to root its target for 5 seconds. While this can occasionally be useful, its diminishing returns and high time cost when needing to root multiple times make it not that useful in practice.
• Earthgrab Totem replaces Earthbind Totem and roots its targets before slowing them. This totem can be very useful whenever dangerous enemies need to be crowd controlled for an extended period.
• Windwalk Totem grants allies within 40 yards immunity to movement impairing effects 6 seconds on a 1-minute cooldown. While this totem does nothing if the encounter you are doing lacks movement impairing effects, it is invaluable against slows and roots!

This tier of talents increases the quality of life for using most of your utility totems.

• Call of the Elements allows you to reset the cooldown of all totems with a base cooldown under 3 minutes which mostly excludes Healing Tide Totem, Stormlash Totem, and the Fire / Earth Restoration totems. This can be very useful to get multiple utility totem usages in emergencies or more Healing Stream Totem healing.
• Totemic Persistence allows you to have multiple totems of a type active at the same time, but does not affect Fire totems. This is mostly used to allow you to use your utility totems freely, as Tremor Totem and Earthgrab Totem would not be able to be active at the same time otherwise, for example.
• Totemic Projection allows you to change the location of your totems to a nearby point every 10 seconds. This can be extremely useful to use Earthgrab Totem and Capacitor Totem on enemies far away, for example, or to relocate Spirit Link Totem to hit players not standing next to yourself.

This tier of talents grants you extra throughput ranging from long cooldowns to passive bonuses.

• Elemental Mastery grants a 30% Haste boost for 20 seconds on a 90 second cooldown, which makes it very useful for fights requiring extra burst healing, especially when combined with Healing Tide Totem or Ascendance.
• Ancestral Swiftness increases your melee Haste by 10% and spell Haste by 5% passively and also allows you to make your next spell instant cast every 90 seconds. This is a decent semi-passive option, with the active effect being small but still useful for occasional emergency healing.
• Echo of the Elements gives you a 30% chance to duplicate spell effects other than Elemental Blast which has only 6% chance. This is a fine passive effect, but as much of your power comes from cooldowns, you are leaving significant potential on the table by not picking the Elemental Mastery multiplier.

This row is healing focused with multiple options to increase the power of your healing kit.

• Rushing Streams allows your Healing Stream Totem to heal two targets at once for 15% additional healing. This is a good passive option, but its total healing bonus is rather underwhelming when compared to the potential of the other two options.
• Ancestral Guidance copies 20% of your non-totem direct healing to three injured allies nearby for 10 seconds, resulting in a 60% direct healing increase on a 2-minute cooldown. While it is often overkill, if you need very high burst healing this is a great multiplier skill to apply on top of Ascendance.
• Conductivity extends the duration of your Healing Rain by 3 seconds every time you use most spells and abilities, up to a maximum of 30 seconds. This makes it potentially the best talent of the row, but also the most situational, as having to recast Rain often will ruin its benefit.

The final tier of talents provides throughput increases mostly focused on dealing additional damage or buffing yourself, which limits their usefulness for healing.

• Unleashed Fury causes Unleash Elements to add additional effects. For Restoration the important one is Earthliving Weapon making your next single target spell heal for 50% more. As Restoration will almost always want to use Unleash Elements on Healing Rain, making this effect useless.
• Primal Elementalist transforms your Fire Elemental Totem and Earth Elemental Totem into more powerful versions with access to Empower and Reinforce. This is generally the best option because both effects are strong for healing, with Reinforce also having defensive benefits, and if healing is not needed they will provide free damage.
• Elemental Blast is a damaging spell cast which increases your stats significantly but only for a short time after being used. The opportunity cost of frequently casting Elemental Blast is generally not worth it while focusing on healing, leaving this as a pure damage option where Primal Elementalist is also very competitive.

There are only two categories of Glyphs in Mists of Pandaria: Major and Minor Glyphs. Major Glyphs tend to improve or change how major abilities work and thus have direct impact on your performance, while Minor Glyphs are mostly cosmetic or small quality of life improvements for niche spells.

While not all recommended glyphs affect your throughput, we still recommend using the glyphs listed below for their high quality of life improvements.

• Glyph of Healing Stream Totem — causes Healing Stream Totem to reduce the elemental damage taken by its targets by 10% for 6 seconds. This is a very strong glyph with high damage reduction potential as long as you are using Healing Stream frequently.
• Glyph of Telluric Currents — causes Lightning Bolt to restore 2% of your Mana every time it strikes an enemy. This is another strong glyph which allows you to actively regenerate your Mana when healing is not required.
• Glyph of Spiritwalker's Grace — increases the duration of Spiritwalker's Grace by 5 seconds, allowing you to cast while moving for a bit longer.
• Glyph of Riptide — is very situational because it removes the direct heal component of Riptide, in exchange for removing its cooldown. This can be useful if you need to move very often, since Riptide is one of the best spells we can use while moving.
• Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem — can be useful for short fights, where the full duration of Fire Elemental Totem would be wasted.
• Glyph of Chain Lightning — is situational since it lowers your area damage in situations with less than 4 targets, but is can be recommended whenever you will be facing 4+ targets, although it has no healing value.

Restoration Shamans only have quality of life Minor Glyphs, but there are a few useful ones listed below.

• Glyph of Astral Fixation — causes Astral Recall to take you to your capital's Earthshrine rather than your Hearthstone location, allowing you to have a different Hearthstone location for extra mobility around the world.
• Glyph of Spirit Wolf — allows you to use Ghost Wolf while in ghost form, which is likely to make any corpse runs much faster.
• Glyph of Astral Recall — reduces the cooldown of Astral Recall by 5 minutes, allowing you to teleport with it more often.