Restoration Shaman Healing Mythic+ Tips — Dragonflight 10.2

Mythic+ Dungeons, especially high ones, are the highest level of competitive PvE content that WoW has to offer aside from Mythic raiding. As the group's healer, their survival is in your hands, and fortunately, Restoration Shamans are great at healing through unexpected damage and recovering from mistakes.

We would also recommend using the M+ Timer weak aura if you want to improve on the default UI, run tracker, and a Spiteful tracker to help you dodging the ghosts on Spiteful weeks.

If you are unfamiliar with Mythic+, you can read more on general concepts and systems on our Dragonflight Mythic+ Season 3 guide:

Note that the talents recommended below are specifically for Mythic+. If you wish to see a more general overview of Restoration talents, you can check our main page below.

The main talent build has some of the utility points in the class tree allocated by default and takes most damage talents in the specialization tree, with the notable exception of Lava Surge and Master of the Elements to simplify gameplay and free globals for healing or extra area damage with Chain Lightning.

As Restoration Shamans has many situational talents, make sure to adapt your general tree talents from dungeon to dungeon to include situational utility such as Tremor Totem for Fears, Improved Purify Spirit (curse dispel) and Poison Cleansing Totem (poison dispel) for Afflicted, Hex for the new Incorporeal, Thunderous Paws for Entangling, Capacitor Totem for added CC, or even Spirit Wolf for the extra damage reduction against one-shot mechanics!

We provide detailed dungeon-by-dungeon and affix-specific talent pick tips at the bottom of this page, so make sure to scroll down or click the linked text above if you are interested in those!

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

While Mythic+ demands more out of your single-target healing kit and DPS kit than raids, your spell priority does not change in Mythic+ content. For more information, check out the full guides for healing and DPS rotations in the links below:

Restoration Shamans gain a new set from the Amirdrassil raid with the following bonuses:

• Shaman Restoration 10.2 Class Set 2pc causes your Chain Heal, Healing Surge, and Healing Wave casts to mark their initial targets as a Tidal Reservoir, which causes them to receive 15% of your total Riptide healing for 15 seconds;
• Shaman Restoration 10.2 Class Set 4pc increases the healing of Riptide by 25% and causes its ticks to have a 6% chance to create a new Riptide on a nearby ally if its ticking on a person marked by Tidal Reservoir.

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 starts with one charge in Season 3 and will gain a new one every other week.

While it is not the most impactful set in Mythic+ (and provides no damage benefits), it still creates a decent amount of healing for free. This makes it worth using in all but the lowest of keys where you barely need to heal, in which case an argument could be done for respeccing into DPS instead!

As this is the Mythic+ section, we will be listing trinkets with strong single-target healing effects, strong stat increases, or strong damage effects below.

• Echoing Tyrstone (Dawn of the Infinite);
• Coagulated Genesaur Blood (The Everbloom);
• Sea Star (Throne of the Tides);
• Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge (Amirdrassil);
• Revitalizing Voodoo Totem (Atal'Dazar);
• Idol of the Lifebinder (Jewelcrafting);
• Smoldering Seedling (Amirdrassil);
• Idol of the Spell-Weaver (Jewelcrafting);
• Idol of the Dreamer (Jewelcrafting);
• Sustaining Alchemist Stone (Alchemy).

More useful gear for and from Mythic+ can be found on our specialized gear guide:

Restoration Shaman provides support for the party through healing, damage, and other additional effects such as dispels and crowd control.

• Thunderstorm is great to push enemies away from ground effects, such as Sanguine pools or Spiteful shades. It can also be used with Thundershock for added crowd control that does not send enemies flying all over the place;
• Purify Spirit removes all Magic (and Curse, when talented) effects from a friendly target on an 8-second cooldown. This can often allow the purified ally to survive otherwise deadly situations and usually lowers the damage intake of that ally;
• Purge removes one beneficial Magic effect from an enemy target. This is very useful in Mythic+, as there are a lot of enemies with very powerful Magic buffs that we can remove immediately;
• Wind Shear interrupts an enemy target and prevents spells of the interrupted school from being cast for 3 seconds on a 12-second cooldown. Restoration Shaman is the only healer that can interrupt, and Wind Shear has the shortest cooldown out of all ranged interrupts. As interruptible enemy casts are, often, some of the most dangerous abilities you will face in Mythic+, you should try to interrupt enemies as much as possible, prioritizing the most dangerous casts / ranged enemies that are hard for melee allies to interrupt;
• Capacitor Totem allows you to place a totem up to 30 yards away that, 2 seconds after being placed, explodes to stun a group of enemies in a 16-yard diameter for 3 seconds on a 1-minute cooldown. When facing dangerous trash packs, 3 seconds can easily be the difference between victory and defeat, especially against Raging. Be careful not to stun enemies on top of Sanguine pools;
• Earthgrab Totem and Earthbind Totem allow you to root / slow enemies in an area. This is very useful whenever your group has to crowd control powerful enemies, for example, when facing Spiteful or Raging;
• Tremor Totem places a totem beneath you that periodically removes Fear, Charm, and Sleep effects from allies within 30 yards. It lasts for 10 seconds on a 1-minute cooldown. This should be used whenever enemies are casting Fear, Charm, or Sleep effects on your group;
• Hex disables a non-boss humanoid or beast enemy for 1 minute. This allows you to disable especially powerful enemies ahead of a pull, or the mobs spawned by Incorporeal;
• Earth Elemental summons an elemental with a large health pool and good non-boss tanking capabilities — its taunt does not work on bosses — for 1 minute on a 5-minute cooldown. It can be used for a minor DPS increase or as an emergency cooldown capable of distracting dangerous non-boss enemies;

While most affixes and dungeons do not need any specific advice, Shaman has unique tools to easily deal with tricky situations, as long as you know how to adapt your talent tree to each particular week or dungeon.

As Wind Shear and Capacitor Totem are assumed baseline, the main utility talents you should be swapping in and out of depending on the dungeon are Tremor Totem, Improved Purify Spirit, Purge, Stoneskin Totem, and Poison Cleansing Totem. Check the image below, by Shamrocked to learn more about which utility is useful in each dungeon:

During Sanguine weeks, make sure to use Thunderstorm without Thundershock, as that will enable you to push enemies away from the sanguine pools and stop some of the healing from happening!

This affix can cause a massive amount of damage if many enemies die at the same time or high amounts of sustained damage if the debuffs keep being refreshed by enemies dying slowly over time. You should dispel on cooldown when Bursting stacks are high, and the tank is a particularly great target for it, as the damage dealt is a percentage of the player's Health. Dispelling the tank also allows for its massive health pool to serve as a pool for Spirit Link Totem to draw from.

Spiteful makes dead enemies spawn Spiteful Shades, which fixate players in your group. They have a large amount of Health but lose 8% of it every second. They also hit hard, often for over half the Health of anyone nearby.

While running away from them is a perfectly acceptable option, using Earthgrab Totem is a useful tech to have in Spiteful weeks, as it will automatically root any shades that spawn in place for long enough for them to die without requiring repositioning.

This affix spawns mobs that count as any type, making them easy to disable with Hex, which should be specced into in weeks where it is active. Alternatively, their cast can be interrupted by regular means or short-duration CC, but you will have to do that multiple times, as the mobs last for 20 seconds and their cast time is 8 seconds long

In order to stop the casts from the mobs spawned by this affix, you need to remove one of their (curse, poison, disease) debuffs or heal them fully. They have a large amount of Health, making the dispel option much easier. You can single dispel them with Improved Purify Spirit or dispel every mob at once by yourself with Poison Cleansing Totem, which is highly recommended for Afflicted weeks!

While this is one of the easiest affixes to deal with by default, taking Thunderous Paws for Entangling weeks makes it even easier, as will cause Ghost Wolf to instantly remove the affix in most situations.