Restoration Shaman Healing Gear and Best in Slot — Season 4

Welcome to our Gearing Page for Restoration Shaman, where we will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.

For detailed information on gear stats and what you want to chase, check out our Stats page below.

Also, if you have a new piece of gear that you need gems and enchants advice for, you can find everything you need on our dedicated page below.

There are three main paths to gear your characters in Dragonflight:

• World Content (crafting, reputations, quests, world bosses, world PvP);
• Instanced PvE Content (dungeons and raids);
• Instanced PvP Content (battlegrounds and arenas).

You are free to pursue any or all of these paths. The more content you do in the game, the faster your gearing up will be, but we recommend that you focus on the types of content you enjoy the most, letting gear come as a by-product of having fun!

Season 4 offers a way to target specific, powerful items with the new Antique Bronze Bullion. Here are the best items to spend your Bullions on in Dragonflight Season 4.

• Ominous Chromatic Essence;
• Broodkeeper's Promise;
• Seal of Diurna's Chosen;
• Seal of Filial Duty;
• Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno, if still missing a weapon at this point.

In Dragonflight, Valor was replaced by the Crest system, which works for all PvE gear, including crafted gear (through new Enchanting crafts, such as Enchanted Aspect's Awakened Crest) and loot from Awakened raids, which rotate between Vault of the Incarnates, Aberrus, and Amirdrassil.

You will be able to loot Flightstones and Crests from practically all forms of content in the game. These can be used to upgrade dropped PvE gear and Crafted Gear up to a maximum Item Level equivalent to Mythic Raid Item Level, although the exact amount of upgrades available depends on the source of the item.

For more information on the Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page for it below:

 

The cost to upgrade depends on the slot and increases as the Item Level goes up. In order to create crafted gear in Season 4, you will need Spark of Awakening, which can be obtained from weekly quests or dropped randomly from any type of content while you are under the current maximum cap, which rises every other week.

Gear obtained from PvP is upgradeable like before, with Conquest points earned from doing Rated PvP and other PvP activities.

You should generally be using your highest item-level gear. If you have an Intellect two-hander that is of higher item level than your one-hand + shield combination, use the two-hander; otherwise, use the shield for an increase in survivability against physical damage.

You will usually want to start with upgrading your weapon, followed by trinkets, and then any leech / avoidance pieces or items you won't be replacing for a long time. These would be great choices, for example:

1. Highest item level weapon you have;
2. Highest item level trinket(s) of S-rank you have;
3. Any Leech / Avoidance pieces of high item level.

Restoration Shamans will return to the Dragonflight Season 1 tier set bonuses, as voted by the community:

• Restoration Shaman 2pc increases your Critical Strike chance by 15% while Healing Stream Totem or Cloudburst Totem are active;
• Restoration Shaman 4pc increases the effectiveness of your Critical Strike healing from 200% to 220%.

Besides getting Tier pieces from doing the raid, you can also turn any non-profession piece of gear into a Tier piece with the Revival Catalyst, which will gain stacking charges every week.

In Dragonflight, only Helms, Necks, Bracers, Belts, and Rings can have sockets. These are guaranteed for necks and rings crafted from Jewelcrafting, and you can add up to three sockets to any neck with the Jewelcrafting item Tiered Medallion Setting, while other sockets are randomly rolled on items when they drop.

Engineering items also come with a special Tinker Socket where instead of gems, you socket special Engineering perks such as Tinker: Breath of Neltharion, Tinker: Arclight Vital Correctors, or Tinker: Plane Displacer.

Take note that a trinket's worth might vary wildly between types of content. For example, there are trinkets not listed below that are specifically created and tailored for PvP, while PvE players mostly chase stat sticks, as those improve healing (and damage) reliably, without the burst and bust characteristic of proc or on-use trinkets.

The ranking system is as follows:

1. S Tier: the strongest and most generally useful trinkets; these are always good choices;
2. A Tier: these trinkets are slightly weaker than the S Tier traits, but are still solid choices;
3. B Tier: a below-average trinket that should be picked only in the absence of an S or A Tier trinket.

• Ominous Chromatic Essence (Aberrus);
• Whispering Incarnate Icon (Vault of the Incarnates);
• Rashok's Molten Heart (Aberrus);
• Water's Beating Heart (Halls of Infusion).

• Screaming Black Dragonscale (Aberrus);
• Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge (Amirdrassil);
• Neltharion's Call to Dominance (Aberrus);
• Spoils of Neltharus (Neltharus);
• Ruby Whelp Shell (Ruby Life Pools);
• Smoldering Seedling (Amirdrassil).

• Idol of the Lifebinder (Jewelcrafting);
• Idol of the Spell-Weaver (Jewelcrafting);
• Alacritous Alchemist Stone (Alchemy);
• Sustaining Alchemist Stone (Alchemy).

The Spark of Awakening is a time-gated resource used in all high-end gear crafting, which you can find more about in our specialized guide below:

Be careful when deciding what you want to craft with these sparks, as there is no way to get them back once an item is crafted.

Embellishments are special effects that are either found on crafted pieces by default or can be added to crafted pieces during the crafting process. A character can have two embellishments equipped at any time. The following are our recommended embellishments:

• Allied Legguards of Sansok Khan are the best embellishment option, giving a large amount of Versatility to nearby allies with constant uptime. Their downside is taking up a tier slot and not buffing your own character as much as the other options;
• Adaptive Dracothyst Armguards provide a great amount of stats with their effect and are the second-best embellishment;
• Venom-Steeped Stompers has a great upside, as you will be gaining a huge amount of the stat you care about the most while losing what you care about the least, but gives an overall amount of stats lower than the other top alternatives;
• Elemental Lariat is a Jewelcrafting necklace with a powerful stat proc. This is a great embellishment, but only when you have at least 5 sockets on your gear due to the way the buff scales with socket amount. The stat you get from it on dual-stat gems is the lowest stat available on the gem;
• The Horizon Strider's Garments set is potentially interesting for pure DPS purposes, but ultimately Haste is not one of our good stats;
• Verdant Tether is a new embellishment which can be added to most unembellished pieces of gear and gives a decent amount of Versatility to you and a tethered ally, depending on your distance to your ally;
• Undulating Sporecloak is only useful if you value the personal shield highly, as its throughput benefit is weak, even for an embellishment;
• Blue Silken Lining grants a lot of Mastery but does require you to be healthy, which is usually not the case when you need to heal the most because everyone in the raid just took a very large hit;
• Potion Absorption Inhibitor adds 50% extra duration to Potion uses. This amounts to a large stat increase with Elemental Potion of Ultimate Power or extra Mana with Potion of Frozen Focus or Potion of Chilled Clarity;
• Magazine of Healing Darts is quite weak and not worth using.

Remember to also get the Alchemical Flavor Pocket, as it does not count towards your embellishment limit and will allow you to skip eating food after dying in Mythic+ and other dangerous content!

Our current recommendation is to use your first Spark to craft a one-hand weapon with Verdant Tether, such as the Primal Molten Spellblade from Blacksmithing.

After that, you should get Allied Legguards of Sansok Khan and Adaptive Dracothyst Armguards, at which point you remove the Verdant Tether embellishment from your one-hand weapon with Griftah's All-Purpose Embellishing Powder.

Remember that if you start with multiple sparks, the Verdant Tether can be skipped altogether!

Simulating your damage is mostly a thing that DPS players do, as Healers need to interweave their healing with damage, which means their damage potential is always contingent on how much healing is needed.

For the most part, all you need to think about for damage is avoiding the Mastery stat, which has no DPS value. Learn more about how to optimize your damage rotation below.

For healing, we recommend analyzing your performance in past encounters instead. Tools such as Warcraft Logs, WoW Analyzer, and QE Live are capable of giving you an accurate stat weight and tips on how to improve based on your logs.

You can find more details on how to make the most out of these tools in the specialized page below.