Restoration Shaman Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (11.2)

Welcome to our Rotation page for Restoration Shamans. On this page, you will find everything you need to know about actually playing the spec in Raiding and Mythic+ scenarios.

If you have not already, please read the Spell Summary page. Knowing how each spell/ability works in detail will greatly increase your understanding of the topics discussed on this page.

• Water Shield on yourself;
• Earth Shield on tank and yourself.

Situationally: If the fight starts with high damage, cast Healing Rain, Riptide, and maybe even Cloudburst Totem just before pulling.

In Season 3 the tier bonuses are different for each Hero Talent specialization. You can use the switch below to see the rotation impacts of both bonuses:

• Spirit Link Totem (instant group health stabilizer, combos well with Darkness, personals, and immunities);
• Healing Tide Totem (high healing-over-time to 5 or more nearby allies, activates Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem if talented);
• Ascendance (almost duplicates your healing for the duration, split among nearby allies);
• Earthen Wall Totem (low value but short cooldown damage reduction for allies within its range which counts as healing done);
• Ancestral Protection Totem (alternative talent to Earthen Wall, provides a health boost and free combat resurrection for a long duration but also has a large cooldown).

While you will be primarily focused on healing, being able to consistently deal damage when healing is not required is what separates good players from great players. Learn more about this subject on our specialized page below!

For Restoration Shaman this will alternate between Flame Shock, Lava Burst, and Lightning Bolt on two or less targets, or just spam Chain Lightning if three or more targets will be hit by it.

This is a stress-free way to get damage done when healing is not needed, saving some button space in the process, but will never be as optimal as using your full rotation manually, as there is a small global cooldown penalty added in between casts of the one-button combat assistant.

While most abilities are easy enough to track with generic weak aura packages, we list four weak auras in our add-ons guide below, which are especially helpful for Restoration Shamans, to track the multiple Chain Heal buffs and Cloudburst Totem stored healing:

The following image, made by Sky Rokit from the Restoration Shaman Discord, visually showcases some of the combos and interactions in our kit that can help you perform better. Make sure to click it to see the full list.

Correctly utilizing cooldowns is one of the most important things when playing a healing specialization, and often, the organization of the healing cooldowns is the determining factor in the success (or devastation) of a raid group. Acclimatizing yourself to your cooldown kit and understanding when each applies to your current situation is key to your success.

Spirit Link Totem represents one of the most unique and flexible cooldowns within the World of Warcraft. Every second, the health of the group inside the totem's area of effect is redistributed, so all targets have an equal percentage of maximum health. It also grants a 15% damage reduction to players inside its area of effect and a massive heal shortly after its effect starts with Spouting Spirits. You can use Spirit Link Totem to split overwhelming damage on a single target to everyone in the group, making it non-threatening. Or to instantly ensure everyone has high health just before a highly damaging ability hits the group. If you add in Darkness, you can also further reduce the damage your group takes by 20% with no randomness involved. Finally, because Spirit Link Totem ensures that everyone inside its effect is damaged as long as at least one person is damaged, it allows healers to rapidly heal the whole group efficiently with just area-of-effect healing spells.

Healing Tide Totem is the specialization's baseline throughput cooldown. As it is a totem, you can use it and immediately be free to move or cast other spells without needing to channel or stand still like other healer's raid cooldowns. Healing Tide Totem heals all allies within 40 yards for a flat amount, which is larger the fewer allies it heals, with maximum healing always being done as soon as you have at least 5 allies within range. Its supporting talents, Current Control and Tide Turner are not particularly powerful, but Current Control can unlock better timings by reducing the cooldown significantly.

Ascendance is a powerful throughput cooldown that works very differently from Healing Tide Totem. While it is active, it almost duplicates all of your non-totem healing and redistributes it among all group members. Thus, in order to make the most out of it, you should aim to have many heals over time active when activating it, followed by using as many high-healing abilities within the duration as possible such as Downpour, Wellspring, and High Tide Chain Heals.

Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem makes your next 3 Healing Surges cast instantly and cost half Mana. While this buff is not terrible, it is also not particularly competitive with other talents for PvE purposes, especially considering it is tied to Healing Tide Totem which will massively heal your group by itself.

Nature's Swiftness gives you an instant, Mana-free cast every minute. If used with Tidebringer, it will consume one Tidebringer stack to make your Chain Heal jump farther away, but you will not benefit from the cast time reduction, making it less efficient than using it for non-Tidebringer buffed Chain Heals. Besides the obvious Mana sustain benefits, this talent is great at allowing you to burst even harder during cooldowns, especially if you time along cast to land as damage is happening, and immediately follow up with Nature's Swiftness.

Totemic Recall instantly resets the cooldown of your most recently used totem with less than a 3-minute base cooldown. This excludes Ancestral Protection Totem, Spirit Link Totem, Healing Tide Totem, and Stone Bulwark Totem, but works with Earthen Wall Totem, Cloudburst Totem, and Healing Stream Totem, which are also very powerful!

When playing with Cloudburst Totem, you should nearly always cast it on cooldown unless you are delaying it for a specific timing or instance of damage. There are a few interesting interactions between Cloudburst Totem and your other abilities and talents which allow for significant extra healing:

• Save small cooldown healing effects for Cloudburst windows: Wellspring, Downpour, and High Tide Chain Heals should almost always be saved for when a Cloudburst Totem is active;
• You can pick the general Shaman tree Healing Stream Totem talent and the Restoration tree same-name talent to gain two charges of Cloudburst. You still cannot have two active simultaneously, however, as the second charge is only usable after the first totem expires or is recalled.

Unleash Life allows you to amplify many of your heals when used, with different effects depending on the heal used. While it looks good at first glance, its interaction with Wellspring is not very good, as you are required to overheal in order to gain any benefit, which wastes Mastery value, and even then, only 40% of the healing is converted into an absorb shield.

Instead, try to use this on cooldown for High Tide Chain Heals, Downpour, or Healing Rain if group healing is needed, or on Riptide, otherwise.

Restoration Shamans are well known for the high amount of utility — non-healing benefits to yourself or your group — they bring. It is not always obvious how to best use these tools to the benefit of your group, and often, they are used as part of your guild's overall encounter strategy.

Thunderstorm is a very powerful tool that can interrupt and reposition enemies to help stack them up for AoE abilities. It can be combined with Thundershock if the knockback is not desired for added crowd control, which shares no diminishing returns with other common forms of crowd control. In the War Within you will also be able to use it on other players to knock from their direction with Traveling Storms.

Bloodlust and Heroism allow your group to dish out increased damage/healing for a long duration, which is of critical importance to beating soft and hard enrages on raid bosses and successfully dealing with Mythic Keystone dungeons / PvP situations. Usually, this spell is cast at the start of an encounter/dungeon boss when allies have their DPS cooldowns but this can change depending on the encounter's specifics.

Ancestral Protection Totem grants 10% extra Health Points to everyone inside its area of effect for a long period, which helps the group survive through the hardest mechanics this game has to offer. Even if someone dies while this effect is active, the Ancestral Protection Totem will consume itself to allow them to self-resurrect. As it does not count towards the battle resurrection limit, this is one of the most powerful abilities in the game whenever your group's strategy implies the sacrifice of an ally at some point in the encounter.

If your group needs a movement speed increase to facilitate doing encounter mechanics, Wind Rush Totem is a great help, granting a significant group-wide speed boost every 2 minutes. As the totem's speed buff only lasts 5 seconds, but the totem itself lasts for 15 seconds; it is possible to get multiple speed boosts from a single totem as long as you return to it once your speed boost is gone.

Earth Elemental calls an elemental with very high health to taunt and tank non-boss enemies for you for a long duration. This is best used to increase your DPS during an encounter or as an emergency tool to relieve some pressure off your group's tank. You will also gain 15% extra health (and 5% damage reduction with Primordial Bond) while the Elemental is active, making it a personal defensive.

Astral Shift allows you to survive/ignore mechanics you usually would not be able to and should be used whenever you feel like you might die in the next few seconds of an encounter, preferably while you still have plenty of health remaining.

Tremor Totem enables you to quickly remove Fear / Sleep / Charm effects from yourself or your group members, as long as you cast it before you are crowd-controlled. Its PvE usefulness depends on the encounter mechanics, and it does not work on all types of Fear / Sleep / Charm you will find, but it is nearly always useful in PvP.

Capacitor Totem allows you to stun a group of enemies at will, allowing your group to dispatch them before they can deal further damage / heal.

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 (and in PvP), but ultimately, its specific use depends on the encounter mechanics you are dealing with.

Hex allows you to crowd-control a humanoid or beast target for a long while. Handy in PvP and in dungeons but of limited use in raids.

Purify Spirit allows you to dispel Magic (and Curse when talented) effects, something that is often essential to completing dungeons and raids successfully. It also has great PvP uses, depending on the enemy compositions. Keep in mind that if you dispel a target that has just been completely dispelled by another healer, you waste Mana.

Restoration Shamans make ideal candidates for doing interrupt and dispel assignments, as they have a ranged short cooldown kick. Take advantage of Wind Shear whenever possible, though you should avoid compromising raid healing if this is during a period of heavy incoming damage. Purge is also great on fights where a dispel is necessary, but bear in mind that this costs Mana, so if resources are tight, consider asking a DPS to fulfill this job.

As with all healing classes, Mana management is at the core of this specialization. It is important to choose your spells and timings wisely so that Mana can last until the end of the encounter, especially in a progression raid setting. Ideally, you should aim to keep your Mana pool roughly at the same percentage as the enemy's Health Points throughout an encounter. This ensures that you both keep enough Mana around for the later parts of the fight and also that you end the fight around 0% Mana, thus not wasting any of its potential healing.

Using a logging tool to analyze how your Mana was spent (or wasted) during an encounter can be a great way to improve your Mana management. No one is perfect in this regard, and practice is the key to success. Even seasoned veterans of the specialization will take some time to learn each individual encounter and how aggressively they can afford to play with their Mana pool while still having enough reserves to last the entire fight.

Very often, it can be beneficial to deal damage rather than heal, especially during periods where the incoming damage is low, and you want to recoup your Mana. Lightning Bolt is cost-free, allowing you to help push some important timings or assist with high-priority targets while your Mana bar fills up. Shaman is also a well-equipped class to assist in dealing damage at minimal cost to healing time with instant cast Flame Shock and Lava Surge procs.

Mastery: Deep Healing is your Mastery as a Restoration Shaman. It causes your heals to be more powerful on low-health targets. When you heal a target with full health, you get no additional healing. When you heal a target with 0% health (1 health point), you get the full benefit of your Mastery.

Your Mastery heavily influences the way you play a Restoration Shaman.

• When raid healing, you should focus on low-health targets more so than any other type of healer, as you have the most efficient tools to heal them;
• When single-target healing, your Mastery has less influence because you should give priority to your assignment and cannot freely choose low health targets. By being aware of how much damage your assignment will take, you can optimize your heals to benefit from your Mastery.

Proper movement/usage of movement abilities is paramount to maximizing the time you have available to heal / DPS while dodging encounter mechanics. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to explain how to move and reposition within a fight, but as a healer, there are some basic principles you should follow as much as possible.

• Position yourself central to your raid for best access to all targets;
• Ghost Wolf can allow you to avoid mechanics easily, even while slowed, as it stops you from being slowed below 100% movement speed;
• Take advantage of your instant-cast spells and totems when you have to move. If none are available, use Ghost Wolf to get to your destination faster;
• Gust of Wind can help you against knockback mechanics to cross wide gaps, and when emergency movement is needed;
• Track mechanic timers and position yourself in advance to avoid moving later;
• If you have time, take stutter steps over an extended period to reach your intended destination. Every time you use an instant cast, take a few steps while you are locked by the Global Cooldown.

Many players will unconsciously move during fights, despite it being unnecessary. For example, sometimes the boss or adds will be moved by the tank a couple of yards, and though you are still in range to cast, you subconsciously mirror that movement, costing you global cooldowns. Consciously work to "quiet" your movement, and reduce unnecessary movement to a minimum. The best way to see this in action is to take a video of your raid then watch yourself play. Most players will be surprised by the amount of wasted movement they commit. When you are forced to move, make use of the tips above and make your path as direct and decisive as possible.

Spiritwalker's Grace should be used during periods of heavy movement where healing throughput is a concern. It can also be used to allow you to reposition while continuing to heal your group.

If you are finding your performance lackluster, but are not sure where you are going wrong, you can check out the pages below for potential tips or answers to questions you may have.