WotLK Classic Restoration Shaman Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

Restoration Shaman talent builds focus on throughput, sustainability, and usually involve a trade-off between raw healing talents and improving your survivability.

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Shamans.

This build provides the highest healing potential out of all Shaman talent builds, with a focus on Chain Heal and Healing Wave. Enhancing Totems is also taken for the group benefit, but you can use Ancestral Knowledge instead if your group already has a Shaman with this talent.

While Healing Wave talents can theoretically be skipped in order to free up points for Elemental Weapons, this talent provides extremely low healing value, and it is almost always better to figure out how to best use Healing Wave, instead.

In Wrath you will be able to unlock Glyphs that improve your abilities and can be swapped around freely as long as you have the consumable glyph item on your bags.

As a Restoration Shaman in 25-man raid PvE you will want to be using Glyph of Earth Shield, Glyph of Chain Heal, and Glyph of Earthliving Weapon, as they increase your area healing throughput the most. If you are focusing on 10-man raiding and dungeons, replace Glyph of Earthliving Weapon with Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave for more single target power. Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem is an interesting DPS tech option if extra healing is not needed.

For minor glyphs, use Glyph of Ghost Wolf in PvP, Glyph of Renewed Life in PvE and Glyph of Water Shield plus Glyph of Water Walking for their quality of life benefits.

While we did not create any build that uses Elemental talents, there are a few notable options for Dungeon grinding and leveling.

Call of Flame increases your Fire Totem and, more importantly, Fire Nova damage by up to 15%, as well as giving Lava Burst a small boost. This is a large boost to your area damage, but has relatively low value for pure single-target.

Elemental Focus increases your Mana sustain in area-of-effect situations drastically by giving you a 40% discount on your next two spells after getting a Spell Critical Strike. This is typically used with Fire Nova, which hits all targets near your Fire Totem, making it have great odds of landing at least one Critical Strike.

Improved Fire Nova makes your Fire Nova hit up to 20% harder and have a cooldown up to 4 seconds faster. As Fire Nova's baseline cooldown is only 10 seconds, this allows you to use it almost twice as often, and can be stacked with Glyph of Fire Nova for a 3-second cooldown Fire Nova, which can do the highest sustained area DPS in the game as long as you have Mana.

The Enhancement Tree is a decent tree for extra throughput and utility, but you will mostly be throwing any leftover points in here, rather than chasing critical talents.

Enhancing Totems increases the power of your Strength of Earth Totem by up to 15%, which makes it the best buff of its kind. While any Shaman can bring this buff, at least one should do so as it is a powerful raid DPS increase.

Guardian Totems increases the Armor provided by Stoneskin Totem by up to 20% and, most importantly, the cooldown on Grounding Totem by 2 seconds, allowing you to use it more often in PvP.

Improved Ghost Wolf makes Ghost Wolf instant-cast, which is great for quickly moving around when outdoors and in PvP.

The Restoration Tree is your bread and butter as a Shaman healer, allowing you to heal for large amounts efficiently.

Improved Healing Wave decreases your Healing Wave's cast time by up to 0,5 seconds. This is a direct healing gain when using this spell, and much more impactful than Totemic Focus.

Healing Grace reduces the threat caused by your heals and makes your buffs more difficult to dispel. The dispel protection is quite useful in PvP, as it will allow you to use trash buffs such as Water Breathing and Water Walking to stop your valuable Bloodlust from being dispelled.

Improved Water Shield makes your healing critical strikes regenerate a percentage of your Mana. This improves the value of Critical Strike and your Mana sustain.

Tidal Force increases the Critical Strike chance of your next healing event by 60%, with each critical strike reducing this chance by 20%. While it can look good for Chain Heal at a glance, each jump is counted as a separate healing event, and thus a single Chain Heal can consume all three Critical Strike chances if enough jumps crit.

Healing Focus lowers the chance of suffering spell pushback on heals from taking damage. This is extremely useful when being attacked directly, especially if the attacks are fast such as the ones from Rogues or Hunter pets.

Ancestral Healing reduces the Physical damage taken by your target by up to 10% for 15 seconds after you land a critical heal. Chain Heal can apply this to multiple targets at once, but its real value is in boosting the tank or PvP target's Armor, which will increase their survivability significantly.

Tidal Mastery increases your Critical Strike chance with heals and lightning spells. This has synergy with Ancestral Healing and also contributes to your damage potential when soloing.

Nature's Swiftness causes your next Nature spell to become instant. This is great when trying to land an emergency Healing Wave on a struggling tank, or a direct healing increase with Chain Heal.

Mana Tide Totem returns a significant amount of Mana to your party over 12 seconds, but due to its high 5-minute cooldown it has a low impact in the course of a fight overall. For maximum benefit, try to rotate Mana Tide Totems into the healer or Arcane Mage's party during a raid.

Focused Mind reduces the duration of silences and interrupts on you by up to 30%, making it a great talent in PvP, as almost all of your heals need to be hard-casted, and thus are prone to being interrupted.

Nature's Guardian increases your maximum health by 15% whenever you are brought below 30% health, with a 30-second cooldown. This is usually negligible in PvE situations, but it can be strong in PvP, especially if you are the main focus target, as it will heal you even while you are crowd controlled and can proc multiple times in a short period if you keep going low on health.

Nature's Blessing increases your Spell Power and healing by up to 15% of your Intellect. This makes Intellect more valuable and gives you a lot of extra Spell Power for just a few talent points.

Improved Chain Heal increases the healing done by your Chain Heal by up to 20%. This effect increases the baseline healing of Chain Heal, but also the benefit it gains from your Spell Power, making it a must-have when raid healing!

Earth Shield puts a shield on its target which heals when the target is hit and provides a small spell pushback reduction. This is a minor healing increase in PvE and a must-have talent in PvP, where it will often be the only heal you can land while being pressured.

Riptide is a new heal-over-time for Restoration Shamans with a strong initial heal component, making it an ideal spell to use while moving, or for emergency single-target healing. Chain Heals cast on targets with Riptide active will consume it to make the whole Chain Heal 25% stronger.