10.2 Restoration Shaman Initial Thoughts - Talent Tree Imbalance & Season 3 Playstyle Challenges

The tier bonus was very strong as I stated in this article discussing the tier bonuses, however this is a pretty big nerf to it. Beforehand, it was doing as much as 30% of my healing in Raid testing, and now it's much closer to the 10-15% mark, which is still quite good, but the majority of that is coming only from the 2pc bonus. This tier bonus has some serious problems though, specifically the 4pc, and these changes did nothing to address those issues. The idea is to only try to heal players with Riptide so that the 4pc has a chance of spreading more Riptides around for you. This limits target selection, incentivizes overhealing, and while it's nice that Tidal Reservoir now lasts a bit longer, the gameplay is the exact same - you're chasing HoTs around with single-target healing spells like Healing Wave and Healing Surge and that's it. It's dull, it's not fun, and now isn't even that strong considering the other heavy nerfs to the spec.

A New Playstyle

So comparing to Season 2, we've completely moved away from Chain Heal (unless you take every single talent that buffs Chain Heal), we have much less mana than we had in Season 2, which was already a struggle for us, and we're playing with a tier bonus that incentivizes a very unfun playstyle. To get an idea for what it looks like, here's one of my logs from testing though keep in mind the tier bonus has been roughly halved from this log and Ancestral Awakening has taken a huge hit as well. I was casting Riptide 10 times per minute and casting Healing Wave 15 times per minute, and that's how I foresee the spec playing even with the nerfs to the tier bonus we saw this week.

Our stat priority would also be shifting with this tier bonus, favoring Critical Strike and then Haste for no other reason than to get additional ticks of Riptide for each person with Tidal Reservoir on them. This, paired with the very active healing playstyle of "chase the HoTs" means we're going to lose a good amount of our passive damage that comes from Acid Rain as it does not scale with Haste at all and we won't have enough time to press many DPS buttons otherwise. I promise I'm not trying to sound grim here, I've tried to remain pretty optimistic throughout testing thus far, but Resto Shaman needs a lot of help right now.

For Mythic + I dont foresee things changing all that much as you only have 5 players and are typically flooded with plenty of Riptide as is, so the new 2pc bonus will be a nice bit of healing but the 4pc will be pretty underwhelming there. There's a possibility that you'd even run the new 2pc with the Season 2 2pc as well as it actually provided a good amount of healing in a scenario where you're the only healer (like Mythic +) even with the very large ilvl hit if you really needed more healing.

• Talent Tree

This is the most frustrating part for me personally, as I've been giving feedback on our talent tree since the Beta of Dragonflight and very few of the issues have been resolved since then. I'm not going to cover all of the issues here because it would be far too long, but I did cover nearly every single talent on our talent tree and gave feedback on it on this forum post- if you're looking for any feedback (or a place to share your own) I urge you to leave it on the forums!

One of Resto Shamans biggest issues is the fact that we overspend so many talent points in the topmost section of our talent tree - the section where you need to spend 8 points minimum to move out of. Currently we're going to be spending anywhere from 12 - 14 points in this section of the tree in Season 3.

I went through and looked at all of the other Spec trees on the PTR, and there are only a few specs in the game that rival Resto Shaman here with the number of potential talent points to be spent in this section. Those specs are: Beast Mastery Hunter (16), Marksmanship Hunter (16), Discipline Priest (14), Holy Priest (14), Affliction Warlock (14), and Destruction Warlock (14) - Restoration Shaman currently has 16 potential points here, meanwhile most specs currently have anywhere from 9 - 12 talent points even possible here. This really puts into perspective just how bad it feels to spend so many talent points up at the top when typically all of the good options are down at the bottom of the talent tree, especially when the stuff you're taking isn't even numerically strong.

There's a few things that you could maybe move around, such as getting rid of the Primal Tide Core capstone to instead grab Ascendance, or completely foregoing a capstone entirely to pick up Ancestral Vigor and Ancestral Protection Totem which are both valuable in a progression setting. Alternatively, there's a good chance you just drop Torrent entirely for instead. Like I mentioned earlier, you're most likely going to be completely dodging all of the nodes that involve Chain Heal almost exclusively due to mana constraints, but I've seen a few people successfully pull it off on PTR - granted the Heroic fights we've tested have not been very long at all.

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