Restoration Shaman Healing Easy Mode — Midnight Season 1

These choices balance ease of use and raw power and work for every type of content. Although different talents might offer higher gains when played well, these same talents often result in healing losses when utilized by less experienced players.

The talents recommended below aim to present a setup that has very little punishment for unfamiliarity or mistakes, minimal buttons to press or buffs, and abilities to track, and also includes the most used utility. Shaman is especially reliant on using fight-specific talents for its utility picks, and you should swap talents around when needed, for example, to get Tremor Totem against Fear effects.

Be sure to use the 'Export Talents' button to import our build when playing!

If you are looking for the absolute best talents for Restoration, which do not compromise on performance for ease of use, you can find a more in-depth analysis on our full talents page below.

Currently, you will want to prioritize stats as follows.

1. Item Level
2. Critical Strike = Versatility
3. Haste
4. Mastery

While we provide stat preference lists, swapping gear to higher item level items — and their higher Intellect / total stats — should, usually, provide a larger upgrade than using lower item-level items with better stats. The exception to this rule are items with important tertiary stats such as Leech, which should still be used ahead of other items without them unless the difference in item level is around 7 or above.

If you want to see the full explanation of the stat priority, as well as the absolute top choices for the priority, head to our full stats page below.

1. Keep Water Shield active on yourself and Earth Shield on yourself and the tank
2. Use Healing Stream Totem as an emergency heal or whenever you hit maximum charges, particularly whenever it is upgraded to Stormstream Totem
3. Cast Unleash Life and Ancestral Swiftness to spawn Ancestors and get a healing buff for your next cast
4. Use Healing Rain if your group will be standing within it for most of its long duration
5. Cast Riptide on cooldown
6. Use Chain Heal on injured allies if group healing is needed
7. Use Healing Wave to heal the most injured single players
8. DPS if no one is in danger to kill the boss faster

For a more detailed and optimized version of the priority list, check the full Restoration rotation page linked below.

Below are the first Tier Set Bonuses for Restoration Shaman in Midnight. After the wording of the bonus, you will find a brief note/commentary that is italicised.

• 2-set bonus — Unleash Life's cooldown is reduced by 3 seconds and its direct healing is increased by 100%. This is a very simple bonus which increases the potential healing of Unleash Life.
• 4-set bonus — Unleash Life affects an additional spell cast at 100% effectiveness. Since much of the healing gain from Unleash is in the buffed spell you get afterwards, this is also a nice bonus that is easy to use.

Overall this is a simple yet strong tier bonus which does not change how you play but strongly emphasizes playing correctly, which means hitting injured players with Unleash Life for its initial heal, doing so on cooldown to avoid waste potential healing, and using the follow-up buff on the correct spells for the situation.

Healing Cooldowns are meant to allow you to provide a big burst of healing or survivability to your group. In exchange, each of them is typically only usable once every 3 minutes. Below is a short description of each cooldown taken in the above talent build and its basic applicability so that you can form an idea of when it is best to use them.

Healing Tide Totem should be used when incoming group damage is high but spread equally over the whole group. It provides high-spread healing over a period of time and can be used while moving, which allows you to use it while doing fight mechanics or casting other healing spells. It will always do its maximum healing once you are hitting 5 targets or higher.

Spirit Link Totem grants damage reduction and also redistributes the health of members inside the totem every second, keeping everyone inside at equal levels of health percentage. This cooldown is best used when there are allies taking deadly damage near other allies who are healthy and is often combined with damage reduction raid or personal cooldowns and immunities, as the immune player will not take any damage from mechanics but still contribute to stabilizing the group through the totem's effect.

The Apex talents of Restoration Shamans are Stormstream Totem, the two-pointer Stormstream Totem, and final talent Stormstream Totem. As a whole, these apex talents grants Riptide a small chance to proc a very powerful version of Healing Stream Totem which can be cast without using regular HST charges once you fully unlock the talent. Nature's Swiftness (or Ancestral Swiftness) also grant a proc when used.

The proc stays active for up to 60 seconds and stacks twice, allowing you ample time to wait for the best time to use it, although you will generally want to do so before both charges of regular Healing Stream Totem are ready to avoid wasting potential uses.