Restoration Shaman Healing Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

Restoration Shaman is an extremely flexible specialization that shines when healing groups of clumped players. They have a variety of unique tools to deal with otherwise deadly influxes of damage, such as Spirit Link Totem.

Because Chain Heal has no cooldown, Restoration Shamans are one of the few healers that can area-of-effect heal continuously when dangerous, unexpected damage happens, a situation also perfectly suited to their Mastery effect, Mastery: Deep Healing, and to external Mana tools such as Innervate.

Shaman can be quite mobile with Spiritwalker's Grace, Ghost Wolf, and Gust of Wind or Spirit Walk, and deal decent damage when focusing on it, but for the most part cannot heal at the same time as they deal damage; this is considered one of the major weaknesses of the specialization.

In order to properly play a healing role, you will need more than just class-specific information. To better understand healing in general, we recommend that you read our healing guide.

Strengths

• Great healing, especially when your group can stack inside Healing Rain;
• Can often cast while moving with Spiritwalker's Grace and jump around with Gust of Wind;
• Unique support tools: Ancestral Vigor, Spirit Link Totem, and Ancestral Protection Totem;
• Excellent survivability with Astral Shift, Earth Elemental, Stone Bulwark Totem, and passives such as Brimming with Life;
• Great non-healing tools such as Skyfury, Reincarnation, Wind Rush Totem, Wind Shear, Purge, Tremor Totem, and Capacitor Totem.

Weaknesses

• Only passive source of damage is Acid Rain;
• Non-cooldown healing is Mana inefficient, or tied to high cast times;
• Loses healing potential in situations that force the group to spread heavily;
• No tank cooldowns outside of Spirit Link Totem which has a long cooldown;
• No teleports like Blink or damage immunity capabilities like Divine Shield.

Restoration Shaman has finally received a powerful raid buff in Skyfury, as well as major improvements changes to its talent tree, which is now mostly composed of 1-point impactful talents such as the new Spouting Spirits, Tidewaters, Downpour, and First Ascendant or Preeminence, to name a few of the best new tools available!

The Class tree also received some changes, removing much of the fluff that had to be taken for minor healing gains and adding new defensives, such as Stone Bulwark Totem and Primordial Bond, much-improved access to the mobility node that includes Gust of Wind, and a new choice node for Wind Rush Totem, which provides niche but potentially fantastic utility with Jet Stream and Ascending Air.

Once these factors are all considered, Shaman is a great healer for players new to healing or who want to have a relaxing time while healing. This is thanks to high reactive throughput, many healing cooldowns, and especially unique utility, which includes an area stun and knock-up, a short cooldown ranged interrupt, one-click poison removal tool Poison Cleansing Totem, and multiple ways to increase your group's effective life pool with Ancestral Vigor and Downpour.

On the other hand, Shaman's poor Mana efficiency and reliance on stacked healing for Surging Totem or Healing Rain makes it struggle in high keys and the hardest raid fights, and dependence on external Mana from Innervate and similar buffs makes it unsuitable for some compositions where those are not available. Farseer generally solves the Mana problems by causing massive cast time bloat problems instead, lowering overall healing throughput and potential relative to Totemic.

If you want to play a Restoration Shaman, but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Restoration Shaman, like any healer, is all about using your abilities strategically. Rather than a fixed rotation, you will be using your flexible spell kit to adapt and overcome whatever the game throws at you.

Cooldown abilities, such as Riptide, Unleash Life and Healing Rain are very efficient, and thus important to use as many times as possible throughout a fight, while the likes of Healing Wave and Chain Heal can be thrown in at any time they are needed, as long as you still have Mana left.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec but would like to learn the basic fundamentals of the class, we recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you are already somewhat familiar with Restoration Shamans, you can head straight to the Talents and Rotation pages to jump right into more detailed information.

Gearing can be hard to pin down due to the huge number of variables that can affect your character's performance. You can find information on how best to gear a Restoration Shaman on our dedicated gearing page, which includes the current Best in Slot from this tier.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.