Restoration Shaman PvP Best Covenants, Soulbinds, Conduits, and Legendary Powers (Shadowlands / 9.2.5)

For more information about what Covenants bring you, please refer to our page about Covenant abilities for Shaman.

It is important to choose the correct Covenant, as it has many impacts on your gameplay. Your Covenant will give you both a Covenant ability and a class ability. The next choice you have will be Soulbinds and Conduits. All of these are Covenant-specific and they are different based on which you choose. Here are the best Covenants for Restoration Shaman. In 9.2, we are able to freely change between Covenants which allows you to try multiple Covenants easily.

1. Necrolord is the best Covenant you can choose. This gives you another Riptide and allows you to benefit from Fleshcraft allowing you to avoid crowd control and act as another defensive cooldown.
2. Kyrian is another of the Covenants you can choose. This gives you a large burst with the Vesper Totem ability. When using the Covenant Conduit Elysian Dirge and Skyfury Totem you can deal significant burst, even as a healer.
3. Most Restoration Shaman opt for Necrolord due to more sustained healing and survivability. If you are looking for more offensive pressure, Kyrian can be a fun alternative; especially with Unity, Kyrian becomes even more powerful this patch.

Soulbinds are unlocked as you progress your character with a Covenant. These unlock powerful paths that can be taken to give you powerful spells, important passives, etc. Here is the Soulbind and path you should take if you chose Necrolord.

This Soulbind allows you to use Fleshcraft as an immunity to crowd-control, which will give you an advantage in matches against Mages, Warlocks, and Druids which all have spammable crowd-control abilities.

This Soulbind path is more defensive, which should help you withstand the amount of melee compositions which will be present early in the Shadowlands expansion. Other Soulbind paths may be selected for more Intellect later in the patch.

This Kyrian Soulbind path is the offensive option.

Conduits are passive buffs that you can use to fill empty slots in your Soulbind Trees. There are three types of Conduits: Potency, Endurance, and Finesse. Here are the best Conduits for each of those different types.

1. Swirling Currents provides significant healing throughput even with Riptide, which will make up a significant portion of the Restoration Shaman's healing without casting. Weaving the use of Healing Stream Totem with other heals results in a fun playstyle as well as more throughput. This helps you get into the habit of using Healing Stream Totem more often.
2. Embrace of Earth's viability is enhanced by Earth Shield's strength in Shadowlands. As the expansion progresses and Conduits rank up, this Conduit will become more and more valuable over time.
3. Tumbling Waves gives you the chance to get even more Riptides, which is significant, as this will make up the majority of your healing. It also gives Healing Wave a chance to heal all targets with Riptide more often, leading to more healing throughput.
4. Tumbling Waves gives you the chance to get even more Riptides, which is significant, as this will make up the majority of your healing. It also gives Healing Wave a chance to heal all targets with Riptide more often, leading to more healing throughput.
5. Elysian Dirge will significantly increase the damage of Vesper Totem.

1. Refreshing Waters will significantly improve your self-healing, which is extremely important, especially when combined with the Swelling Waves PvP Talent.
2. Vital Accretion provides a total health point buff which can help temporarily keep you alive through cooldowns. Just remember that this only lasts for 1 minute.

1. Totemic Surge provides the utility from your totems with a reduced cooldown. This allows you to provide more utility to your team faster.
2. Thunderous Paws is decent for a slight burst of movement speed for kiting enemy teams.

Legendaries have many different effects and some can alter how you should use some of your abilities. For more information on Legendaries, check out our general guide on them.

Here are the best Legendaries for a Restoration Shaman. As part of 9.2, double Legendaries will be available using Unity acting as a Covenant Legendary and also a specialization-specific Legendary.

1. Deeptremor Stone gives your Earth Elemental an Earthquake around it and cause it to chase the enemy team members. This is significant damage, and can also micro-crowd-control them by stunning them. The Earth Elemental also does a great job of not allowing Rogues to get re-stealths. This is our recommended Legendary.
2. Earthen Harmony provides significant healing for you or your or teammates since Earth Shield can be applied to your teammates while you usually use Water Shield when not being focused by the other team. The buff to Earth Shield in Shadowlands (increasing healing received by 20% from the Restoration Shaman), makes it even more critical to have the Earth Shield on your teammate taking the most damage.
3. Splintered Elements does not provide much value to the Restoration Shaman, since Haste is such a low priority stat.
4. Raging Vesper Vortex increases the damage of Vesper Totem which adds more pressure the Restoration Shaman can contribute.