Restoration Shaman Healing Spec, Builds, and Talents — The War Within (11.1.5)

While these are the baseline recommended talents, feel free to swap to different utility talents to suit your raid setup and boss-by-boss needs.

Chain Heal can be supported by very good talents such as High Tide, Tidebringer, Ancestral Reach / Flow of the Tides, Unleash Life, and Coalescing Water making it one of the hardest hitting heals and well worth building around. The Totemic Hero Talents further improve upon the Chain Heal playstyle by granting you free instant casts through Lively Totems, which also helps with Mana.

Consistent Riptide usage is also key to this build to make the most out of Primal Tide Core and Tidewaters, and you will also want to have as much burst healing as possible when raiding, usually with the triple raid cooldowns Ascendance, Healing Tide Totem, and Spirit Link Totem.

While the listed build currently goes for First Ascendant and Current Control to lower their cooldown, encounters where incoming damage is spaced by 3 minutes benefit from having a more powerful Ascendance with Preeminence instead. Ancestral Protection Totem is another great alternative for harder bosses with mechanic overlaps where raiders are likely to die. Finally, while Acid Rain does not provide healing, it provides massive damage benefits for a single point and should almost always be taken.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the build directly into your game!

While these are the baseline recommended talents, feel free to swap to different utility talents to suit your group composition, target dungeon, and active weekly affixes.

The idea behind these talents is to give you high baseline healing and utility, including many DPS talents, such as Acid Rain and Master of the Elements, which allows you to seamlessly alternate between healing and DPS with Healing Surge and Lava Burst, while skipping on casting Flame Shock altogether.

Undulation and Ancestral Awakening work well in small group settings, where single target heals are much more used than in raids, but Chain Heal and its support talents can also be useful in a Totemic shell as you will be able to have a very strong Healing Stream Totem with Lively Totems, Reactivity, Supportive Imbuements, Living Stream, and Elemental Resistance to carry your healing on most pulls.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the build directly into your game!

While these are the baseline recommended talents, feel free to swap to different utility talents to suit your raid setup and boss-by-boss needs.

Chain Heal is supported by very good talents such as High Tide, Tidebringer, Ancestral Reach / Flow of the Tides, Unleash Life, and the new Coalescing Water making it one of the hardest hitting heals and well worth building around.

Because of Maelstrom Supremacy giving a massive buff to some spells, using Wellspring is recommended, and you will also have more than enough Riptides rolling around due to Offering from Beyond to use Flow of the Tides effectively.

Ancestral Protection Totem is a great talent alternative for harder bosses with mechanic overlaps where raiders are likely to die.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the build directly into your game!

While these are the baseline recommended talents, feel free to swap to different utility talents to suit your group composition, target dungeon, and active weekly affixes.

The idea behind these talents is to give you high baseline healing and utility, including many DPS talents, such as Acid Rain and Master of the Elements, which allows you to seamlessly alternate between healing and DPS with Healing Surge and Lava Burst, while skipping on casting Flame Shock altogether.

Unleash Life allows for permanent uptime of one Ancestor, which is more reliable than having to cycle through Undulation, and having the full Chain Heal package allows for easy area healing, even in spread out situation where Totemic struggles. With the high amount of Riptides available as Farseer in a 5-man setting, Flow of the Tides is also a great pick.

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the build directly into your game!

While these are the baseline recommended talents, feel free to swap to different utility talents to suit the kind of Delve you are entering and its specific challenges.

While Restoration is not particularly fast at clearing Delves in general, it has the advantage of being able to do it while keeping itself healthy without much effort through beefy self-healing with Healing Surge and multiple cooldowns that work surprisingly well when healing only yourself, and perhaps also a handful of allies.

The new tank specialization for Brann in Season 2 is meant to allow healers like us to have a way to clear delves in a way that is compatible with our group healing role, and we recommend you to run with him as tank along with strong damage Curios as a default.

Acid Rain increases your DPS potential and Master of the Elements allows you to seamlessly alternate between self-healing and DPS with Healing Surge and Lava Burst, while skipping on casting Flame Shock altogether. Unleash Life is picked to guarantee near-permanent Ancestor help for the Delve with the Farseer talents picked.

Tide Turner finally finds its purpose for boosting Healing Tide Totem's output on yourself, and Reactive Warding is actually quite nice when you know you will be the main target of enemy attacks constantly, and thus be able to get a lot of value from low count shield refreshes.

The build also includes many ways to kite, such as Frost Shock with Arctic Snowstorm, which has the benefit of being an efficient way to get Ancestors to cast their Lava Burst, especially when you are kiting!

Be sure to make use of the 'Export Talents' button to import the build directly into your game!

We will not discuss every talent on this page, as this is done in the dedicated spell summary guide, instead:

Ability	Abbreviation	Description/Effect
Call of the Ancestors	CA	Allows you to summon Ancestor-friendly NPCs with Undulation or Unleash Life which help you heal by casting damage spells, single target heals, or area heals depending on the spells you cast while they are active.
Latent Wisdom	LW	Causes your Ancestor spells to be 20% more powerful.
Ancient Fellowship	AF	Ancestors will call a new Ancestor to aid you 20% of the time when despawning.
Offering from Beyond	OfB	Whenever you summon an Ancestor, you will also reduce Riptide's cooldown by 2 seconds. This has good synergy with Riptide talents.
Natural Harmony	NH	Reduces the cooldown of Nature's Guardian by 15 seconds and causes it to heal you for an additional 10% of your maximum Health.
Earthen Communion	EC	Increases the maximum charges of Earth Shield to 12 and makes it heal you for 25% more. This has good synergy with Reactive Warding.
Heed My Call	HMC	Makes Ancestors last 4 seconds more.
Routine Communication	RC	Causes Riptide to have a 15% chance to summon an Ancestor. This has good synergy with Riptide talents.
Primordial Capacity	PC	Increases your maximum Mana by 5% and allows for 4 Tidal Waves to be stored instead of 2.
Maelstrom Supremacy	MSup	Increases the healing done by Healing Wave, Healing Surge, Wellspring, Downpour, and Chain Heal by 15%.
Elemental Reverb	ER	Lava Burst and Riptide are 5% more effective and gain an extra charge. This makes Echo of the Elements mostly redundant, saving one specialization talent point.
Spiritwalker's Momentum	SwM	Using spells with a cast time increases the duration of Spiritwalker's Grace and Spiritwalker's Aegis by 1 second, up to a maximum of 4 seconds.
Final Calling	FC	When an Ancestor expires, it will cast a small absorb shield on a nearby injured ally that lasts for 10 seconds and steadily decays over its duration.
Ancestral Swiftness	AS	Replaces Nature's Swiftness and causes your next healing or damage spell to have a 10% increased effect, on top of being free and instant cast. If you also know Nature's Swiftness it will also summon an Ancestor for 6 seconds when used.

Ability	Abbreviation	Description/Effect
Surging Totem	ST	A longer duration, higher impact Healing Rain replacement.
Totemic Rebound	ST	A passive Chain Heal boost that makes your Totems do an additional, less powerful Chain Heal of their own.
Oversized Totems	OToT	Makes your totems larger in both size and radius and increases their Health.
Swift Recall	SR	Causes some of your support totems, such as Poison Cleansing Totem, to have a reduced cooldown after performing their duties.
Imbuement Mastery	IM	Increases the duration of Earthliving Weapon's heal over time proc by 3-seconds.
Amplification Core	AC	Increases your damage and healing by 3% while Surging Totem is active.
Oversurge	OS	Makes Surging Totem 150% more effective while Ascendance is active. Good synergy with Deeply Rooted Elements.
Wind Barrier	WB	Grants a large absorb shield every 30 seconds if you have any totem active.
Pulse Capacitor	PC	Increases the healing of Surging Totem by 25%.
Supportive Imbuements	SI	Allows you to imbue your shield to increase your healing by 2% and increase the duration of Healing Stream Totem and Cloudburst Totem by 3 seconds. Good synergy with Living Stream.
Lively Totems	LT	Causes your Healing Tide Totem, Spirit Link Totem, Healing Stream Totem, and Cloudburst Totem to cast an instant free Chain Heal that benefits from all of your Chain Heal talents and procs such as High Tide. Massive synergy with Chain Heal talents.
Reactivity	Reac	Makes your Healing Stream Totem heal a second target at 50% effectiveness and increases the healing stored by Cloudburst Totem by 25%. Good synergy with Living Stream, as the Cloudburst bonus is much weaker.
Earthsurge	ESurge	Increases your healing by 10% on allies affected by Earthen Wall Totem, Ancestral Protection Totem, or your Earthliving Weapon heal over time proc.
Totemic Coordination	TC	Causes the Chain Heal effects cast by totems to be 25% more effective. Good synergy with Chain Heal talents.
Whirling Elements	WE	Using Surging Totem grants you 3 motes with special effects: the Water mote causes your next Healing Wave or Healing Surge to also heal a different ally within the Rain; the Air mote reduces the cast time of your next heal by 40%, and the Earth mote causes your next Chain Heal to apply a 150% effect Earthliving Weapon proc effect on all targets hit.

Ability	Description/Effect
Chain Heal	One of the few no-cooldown multi-target heals in the game, and its healing jumps prioritize the most injured players in range, making it a very powerful spell. As one of the core spells of a Restoration Shaman, there are many talents that can interact with it, such as Unleash Life, Nature's Swiftness, Flow of the Tides, and High Tide.
Astral Shift	Your main defensive cooldown and an important talent that provides a a lot of defensive power, especially in the hands of an experienced player.
Wind Shear	Your interrupt, and a good one as it has the lowest cooldown among ranged interrupts, although it compensates by having a lower range and lower lockout time. In Mythic+ or whenever you are planning to fight enemies with interruptible casts, you should take this.
Planes Traveler	An excellent way to increase your Astral Shift uptime, and generally the most valuable talent in this choice node.
Astral Bulwark	A good alternative to Planes Traveler if you cannot get good value from a lower cooldown, as it will make you much harder to kill while active.
Static Charge	Allows you to use Capacitor Totem more often, which can be valuable if you are able to use it on cooldown effectively. This is mostly the case in Mythic+.
Earth Shield	Provides a lot of healing for the single global it takes to cast, and also increases your healing on the target by 20% and reduces damage taken by 5% when used alongside Earthen Harmony, making it a great pick whenever you will be casting heals on the target regularly.
Elemental Orbit	Allows you to have Earth Shield on yourself at the same time it is on another target of your choice. This can be great when used alongside Earthen Harmony.
Healing Stream Totem	Must-have, as it contributes significant healing, especially when transformed into Cloudburst Totem.
Brimming with Life	Excellent talent which increases your health significantly in most situations, and allows you to use Reincarnation more often if you are dying often, which is exactly when you would want to reduce its cooldown.
Spirit Walk	Excellent mobility tool that allows you to cover large distances quickly with its effect and avoids the landing position issues Gust of Wind can have. While it does not help you against knockback mechanics or against long falls, it will remove roots and movement-impairing effects, which can occasionally be required for encounter mechanics.
Gust of Wind	Low cooldown mobility tool that allows you to quickly reposition at a fixed distance in front of your character. While the added mobility is nice, what really makes it stand out is that it allows you to break knockback effects, cross gaps, and avoid fall damage, making it a powerful situational spell.

Ability	Description/Effect
Elemental Resistance	Reduces Fire, Frost, and Nature damage taken by players healed by Cloudburst Totem or Healing Stream Totem by a slight amount and a short duration. While it is not very impactful, it will usually be taken for pathing reasons.
Wind Rush Totem	Great for raiding, and you should take it whenever your group's strategy involves getting a speed boost to go from point A to point B unless someone else is already providing this effect.
Ascending Air	Making Wind Rush Totem lower cooldown can be excellent for specific encounters, as can the added duration.
Jet Stream	Becoming even faster and having Wind Rush Totem remove snares can also be great, making this the most generally useful of the two Wind Rush Totem nodes.
Thunderstorm	Fantastic for solo play and PvP when you are being trained by melee enemies. You might want to use Thundershock along with it if you only want the CC aspect, but not the knockback.
Totemic Focus	Increases your totem duration and radius. As you rely on multiple totems for both healing and utility; this is a great talent for Restoration Shamans.

Ability	Description/Effect
Totemic Projection	Great when used alongside Spirit Link Totem and the upcoming Surging Totem, in order to make sure the right targets are hit by these support totems.
Totemic Surge	Great for Restoration, as you rely heavily on multiple totems, from the short cooldown Cloudburst Totem to the long cooldown Spirit Link Totem.
Thundershock	Allows you to use Thunderstorm to CC enemies in place in PvE and reduces its cooldown, making it useful when you do not want to knock enemies away.
Traveling Storms	This talent allows you to cast Thunderstorm on an ally within healing range, which is often extremely valuable in encounters requiring enemy repositioning.
Mana Spring	Decent Mana generator for a large raid group with multiple healers.
Totemic Recall	has the niche effect of resetting the cooldown of your most recently used totem with a baseline cooldown under 3 minutes, making it mostly useful with Earthen Wall Totem and Cloudburst Totem.
Creation Core	Allows you to reset the cooldown on Earthen Wall Totem and Cloudburst Totem at the same time, and is a decent option when you are using both in close proximity.
Stone Bulwark Totem	Long cooldown totem, which grants you a personal absorb shield that is reinforced every 5 seconds it stays up. While the shield is not huge, this is a decent extra defensive at your disposal.

Ability	Description/Effect
Riptide	Core ability that is Mana efficient and provides high healing on a short cooldown.
Healing Stream Totem	Must-have talent that contributes significant healing, especially when transformed into Cloudburst Totem or with Totemic hero talents and Living Stream. If you took the talent with the same name in the general tree, you would have two charges of this spell.
Healing Rain	Low cooldown, high-efficiency spell, with multiple modifiers that allow it to also contribute significant damage ( Acid Rain) and do instant healing ( Overflowing Shores).
Tidal Waves	Causes Riptide casts to give you two charges that reduce Healing Wave and Chain Heal cast time and increase Healing Surge critical strike chance. This is a fantastic talent that ties your kit together and boosts many of your core spells significantly.
Acid Rain	Turns your Healing Rain into a heal that also deals significant damage. This is a must-use talent for DPS purposes and works especially well against multiple targets that stand inside the Rain for its whole duration.
Ancestral Vigor	Good talent that works well in any situation. Your highest priority with this talent is to ensure it is running on the tanks and other priority targets at all times to grant them additional survivability.
Resurgence	Significant Mana sustain talent, which will return a huge amount of Mana to you throughout a fight. Logically, if Mana is not an issue, then this talent loses some value, but it is a very important talent whenever extra Mana is valuable.

Ability	Description/Effect
Spirit Link Totem	Iconic Restoration Shaman ability, which has excellent life-saving potential due to instantly restoring the life of whoever is most injured inside a player grouping.
Spouting Spirits	Excellent talent which increases the damage reduction of Spirit Link Totem and causes it to massively heal everyone inside its effect after a small delay, making it a much stronger ability than it has been in the past few years.
Master of the Elements	Increases the healing of your next Healing Surge by 30% after a Lava Burst cast, stacking twice. This empowered Healing Surge will also cast Flame Shock at a nearby target, improving your rotational flow, especially in small-group content such as Mythic+.
Cloudburst Totem	Stores some of the healing you do while it is active and releases it all at once evenly among nearby friendly targets. This is a very powerful talent, which acts as a multiplier on your healing, especially during cooldown-boosted periods.
Living Stream	Causes Healing Stream Totem to heal for 100% more, decaying over its duration. This allows Healing Stream to pack a much bigger punch when it is dropped, making it a strong reactive healing tool. It also has strong synergy with the Totemic hero talent Reactivity.
Healing Tide Totem	Provides high 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 do its maximum healing at 5 targets or above, making it good for Mythic+ and small group content as well!
Ancestral Reach	Increases the healing of Chain Heal slightly and causes it to bounce one extra time. Its unconditional nature makes it attractive to newer players, or when maintaining Riptide uptime is of critical importance.
Flow of the Tides	Also causes Chain Heal to bounce one extra time but has a higher 30% healing increase, which is conditional on casting on a target with Riptide. While the extra healing is very welcomed, it requires jumping through extra hoops and it can be a healing loss if used on the wrong Riptides, so use it with care.
Unleash Life	An extra instant heal and a strong boost to your next heal. The boost depends on the spell, but you will generally use this on Downpour or High Tide-buffed Chain Heals, as those present the highest potential healing gains.
Undulation	Great if you cast a lot of Healing Wave and Healing Surge. If these 2 spells are your main healing sources, such as in Mythic+, then this talent is a great pick. Otherwise, you should probably take a different talent.
Echo of the Elements	Provides an extra Riptide and Lava Burst charge. While the Lava Burst charge is only a small damage increase, the extra Riptide charge allows you to perform your rotation without needing to constantly worry about losing potential Riptide casts, and as Riptide is the centerpiece of all Shaman healing, it also makes this talent next to mandatory unless you already have the Farseer Elemental Reverb talent.
Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem	This talent causes your Healing Tide Totem to significantly reduce the cost and cast time of your 3 next Healing Surges. This effect is unfortunately rarely worth the talent point under current tuning.
Earthen Wall Totem	Good for reducing frequent incoming damage on a stacked group of allies. Since it only absorbs a small, fixed amount of each attack, it is not recommended to use against enemies that deal slow, powerful attacks, but is great in almost all other situations.
Ancestral Protection Totem	The best choice whenever you plan to intentionally have one ally die to bypass encounter mechanics; just be mindful of the 200% maximum Health killing blow limit. It should also be picked whenever your group is consistently struggling to keep everyone alive through a short, specific part of an encounter.
Earthliving Weapon	A 1 hour imbue for your weapon that causes some of your healing spells to have a 20% chance to activate a small heal over time on the target. While Riptide ticks can proc it, Healing Rain ticks will not. While each heal is weak, the overall effect is a decent healing increase.

Ability	Description/Effect
Primal Tide Core	Provides extra free Riptides that have the same initial burst healing of hard-casted ones. While it will not create an additional Riptide if your 4th cast target has no allies nearby, the effect will try to proc in every following cast until it works.
Tidewaters	Causes Healing Rain to also do high healing to players with Riptide active. While this healing does not count towards Cloudburst Totem or Ascendance, it is very significant and well worth the talent point. When used with Totemic Surging Totem it will do double healing to account for the extra cooldown of the totem when compared to regular Rain.
Whispering Waves	Causes Healing Waves from yourself and Ancestors to replicate 15% of their healing on players with Riptide. As a very new talent, time will tell how good it actually is but the lack of cooldown on its effect makes it have to heal for very little and thus force a strict Healing Wave if you want to lean into its effect.
Undercurrent	This talent can be a decent healing increase, especially in periods where you have a high amount of Riptides active but requires 2 talent points, which could otherwise be better applied at the bottom of the talent tree.
Ascendance	Causes a healing burst when used and massively increases your healing while active. Provided you save your strongest healing spells and have multiple heals over time running when used, it can do a huge amount of healing.
First Ascendant	Reduces the cooldown of Ascendance by 1-minute, which is essential when trying to cover big damage events that occur 2-minutes apart.
Preeminence	Increases your Haste during Ascendance and its duration, making it an even stronger cooldown. Great in fights where you cannot get value from a shorter Ascendance cooldown.
Downpour	Post rework, it is a great ability that you can activate after using Healing Rain to do massive healing to targets inside it and increase their Health by 10%, stacking with Ancestral Vigor. When used with Totemic Surging Totem it will do double healing to account for the extra cooldown of the totem when compared to regular Rain.
Tidebringer	This powerful talent drastically increases the cast speed and jump range of your Chain Heals while its buff is active. This buff is automatically obtained every 8 seconds and can stack twice, allowing for back-to-back buffed Chain Heals and lining up perfectly with High Tide.
High Tide	Allows you to bank powerful Chain Heal casts to counter incoming burst damage, or simply passively increase your throughput. It is the strongest Chain Heal talent in the tree, especially in the context of the other support talents, which increase the amount of targets hit and jump distance, and should always be taken if you are planning to use Chain Heal at all.
Ancestral Awakening	Causes your single target heals to have a chance (doubled if you critically hit) to heal another nearby ally for a portion of their effect. Not a very impactful talent on a point-by-point basis but occasionally required for pathing purposes.
Earthen Harmony	Causes your Earth Shield to reduce incoming damage and restore additional health the lower its target is. These are fantastic bonuses to have on a tank, and you can also have it on yourself with Elemental Orbit!
Reactive Warding	This talent will heal your Earth Shield target when you refresh the shield, with the heal being higher the more stacks your target is missing when refreshed. The heal does not count towards Cloudburst Totem, but you will also gain Mana when refreshing Water Shield with the amount being higher if you refresh it at low stacks.
Wellspring	Post buffs, it is now a strong healing ability that you can use for added area healing in between Healing Rain and High Tide-buffed Chain Heals.
Deeply Rooted Elements	This talent can make a large difference in your healing if you get Ascendance procs at the correct times during a fight. This makes it a strong choice in fights where damage is constant, and healing is almost always valuable, and a weak talent in fights where you only care about healing within very narrow periods. Taking Preeminence along with it will grant you the extra Haste on procs, but not the extra duration.
Improved Earthliving Weapon	Increases the healing benefit to Earthliving Weapon from our Mastery and causes Healing Surge to always proc it on the target. While it will often be used for cheap pathing towards Wellspring / Deeply Rooted Elements, its benefit is not very strong on most encounters.