Resto Shaman Notes 2.0

0. Update Log
1. Introduction
2. Talent Choices
3. Gear choices
3.1 Trinkets
3.2 Gems
3.3 Enchants
3.4 Relics
4. Healing
4.1 Downranking
4.2 Relic Swapping
5. Totems
6. Macros
7. End Notes

0. Updates

21/07/2008 – Minor clean-up
18/07/2008 – Relic swapping macros removed, new commentary: “3.4 – Relics”, “4.2 – Relic Swapping”.
09/05/2008 – Added some 2.4 trinkets, incorporated some information for transition into T6 raiding.

1. Introduction

This is level 70 Player-vs-Environment (PVE) restoration guide. I suck at PVP, and you should be leveling as enhancement, so those things won’t be in this guide. If you like healing and buffing your group, while at the same time be able to pay 50g and respec into a monster-plowing machine to farm your goods, Shamans are a good choice.

This article is a cleaned-up, updated version of my previous notes. There are some things that I’ve changed and/or omitted in the new version. This article will be updated from time to time when I see the need. I’ll post on the main page when changes are made so you don’t have to go through this article every time I update.

2. Talent Choices

The first 48 points of healing talents are pretty self-explanatory, if not for the reason of “no better place to put your talents”.

Basic 48-point framework

If you want more talent points to put elsewhere, Tidal Mastery and Healing grace are your places to free up points. But you still have 13 talents to spend before you have to start dropping those. You do have choices for these 13 talents, depending on your personal preference.

Nature’s Guardian (5pts) – I’ve never seen the 10% threat reduction work, but the healing component itself is very helpful and may save your life alot, especially when you are taking small but frequent amounts of damage. Note that it has a chance to heal you everytime you take damage while your HP is below 30%.

Ancestral Knowledge (5pts) – 5% mana is, well 5% mana. At Karazhan level gear, you’re talking about maybe 400-600 mana for 5 talent points. Not the best investment, but more mana is more mana.

Guardian Totems (2pts + 5pre-req) – There are end-game boss fights where grounding totem is helpful, and cutting the cooldown from 15 to 13 seconds helps a bit. But not a lot. It’s more useful in heroics where many spells can be absorbed by this totem. The talent will be more helpful after 2.3 changes this totem to be killed by everything that it absorbs.

Totemic Focus (5pts) – You will have to drop totems and making them cheaper also means more mana for you. On the other hand, depending on the team you’re in, you don’t get to drop that many totems to make this investment worth it. If you’re really tied on mana, this might be a way to help you save more.

Focused Mind (3pts) – Reduces all silence/interrupt durations by 15%. I’d say the impact of this talent is not worth the 3 points in a PvE environment, it may have implications in PvP, but in PvE it’s not really that impressive at all, especially if your other healers aren’t slacking and HoTs are running on the tank. I wouldn’t rely on this to save you.

Elemental Warding (3pts + 5pre-req) – Reduces all damage from fire/nature/frost sources by 10%. This is good. You’ll notice substantial increase to your survivability in fights where you take these kinds of splash damage. Lets see: Aran, Opera, Magtheridon, Hydross, Lurker, Tidewalker, Karethess, and so on… The only downside is having to spend 5 points in something that probably does nothing for you to get to the talent.

Improved Reincarnation (2pts) – Makes your ankh cooldown in 40 minutes. More importantly, you res with more HP and more MP. You shouldn’t be dying actually, but if you do and are too lazy to find ways to avoid death and don’t mind extra repair bills, go ahead.

Choose your talents based on your healing style, group build and situation. If you’re lazy, here’s my build: 8/0/53.

3. Gear Choices

There are 4 stats that are useful to the healer shaman: +healing, Mana per 5 sec (mp5), intellect, and stamina. Near the end of the raiding progression spell haste also becomes available.

The first and foremost important stat is +healing. If your heals can’t catch up to the mob’s damage, your tank / raid members die. For 5 man instances, you should be aiming for 1000 +healing. Once you get to raid instances, you want to have at least 1500. While mp5 is also vital to your longevity, it’s something that can be resolved by mana pots, mageblood elixirs, or shadow priests. Stack +healing first.

Mana per 5 sec is your second most important stat once you get into raid instances. Before that, in 5 mans where fights don’t tend to last longer than 2-3 minutes, intellect provides you with more bang for the buck. Some people like to stick with a 10+healing : 1mp5 ratio. It’s a good guideline to follow and generally works. I personally got to 1500 +heal then stacked mp5. You could do the opposite for more healing efficiency, I just like saving mana pots. However, remember that mp5 does not scale with gear and is not friendly with down-ranking (unlike +healing), therefore, you can also opt to stack more +healing and downrank further instead as means to improve mana efficiency, which is a better choice as you move further into high-end raiding.

Intellect is useful to make your mana last before your mp5, mana pots, totems, and trinket cooldowns are able to help you last through a fight. It also improves your healing done via talents and makes your Mana-tide totem regenerate more mana for you. Aim for 10,000 mana at all levels of progression.

Stamina is useful to keep yourself alive. There isn’t a necessity to overly stack stamina, but gimping this can result in uneeded deaths. 8000 is a healthy number of HP to have (unbuffed), as you move into T6 (Mount Hyjal/Black Temple) you will want to further push that number to close to 9000.

Spirit works, but is not as efficient for Shamans as it is for other classes. First off, we only get 1 mana every 2 seconds for every 5 spirit (compared to 4 for priests and 4.5 for druids). Furthermore, we don’t have a talent that allows spirit regen to work within the 5-second-rule (5SR) which means that in situations where we are spamming heals, your spirit is completely wasted. Luckily, none of the mail healing gear has spirit on it.

Generally, wearing mail healing pieces will provide you with the stats you need for your healing, and if you stay away from spirit-heavy pieces you should have a healthy amount of healing, mp5, int and sta. PvP/Arena healing gear does work if you don’t have other gear. But note that PvP gear is heavy on stamina and has item points wasted in resilience, and also tend to be mana-regen and intellect light. Good for trash mobs, but in longer fights you will find your mana pool lacking.

Spell haste: this stat starts appearing on expensive BoJ gear, ZA, and MH/BT gear. In a sense you can say that it is equivalent to +healing, but it makes your heal affect more targets in a shorter period of time (via chain heal). On the down side your mana consumption is also accelerated. Stacking haste probably won’t be getting you anywhere, but it is still a good stat to have in your gear. Having a healthy balance of +haste and mp5 will make your healing more smooth. +heal is still the #1 stat to go for.

3.1 Trinkets

There are generally two ways to fill your trinket slots: more healing, or more mana. Note that On Use: Increases your healing done by X generally only benefits you by making your Earth Shields and Healing Stream totems gigantic. My personal preference is to go for more mana in your trinket slots. If you can get both, great. I’m not going to cover T6+ trinkets, you can figure out yourself when you get there.

Really good trinkets:

Fathom Brooch of the Tidewaker – it does have a cooldown but it has a high proc rate. You’ll basically be getting a proc every minute which makes this a 30mp5 trinket. Solid.

Seaspray Albatross – Currently the best mana regen trinket in the game. Passive buff + on use effect totals 43mp5. Only downside is having to level Jewelcrafting, which is pretty expensive; on the bright side, you can drop JC after you make the trinket and still be able to use it. (Lower version – Figurine – Talasite Owl : 29mp5)

Redeemer’s Alchemist Stone – Alchemists only. Makes your pots super-powerful. You have to be potting to get this trinket to work though, but when super mana pots turn from 100mp5 into 140mp5, this is one powerful trinket. Has loads of +healing to boot. One of the best healer trinkets in the game. (Lower version – Alchemist’s Stone : 0 +heal, 15 all stats)

Scarab of the Infinite Cycle – another gem. The proc rate is high and you get super-fast Chain Heals to help top of your raid in record time. +70 healing passive bonus also. Definitely the +healing trinket of choice in situations where mana is not an issue.

Good Trinkets:

Vial of the Sunwell – The passive effect is useful especially in 5/10 man instances where healing is limited, and can be relied on as a second crutch over your NS heals. The passive effect of 15mp5 is not good enough to justify the situational effectiveness of this trinket in raids. The good thing to note is that using the trinket doesn’t trigger GCD and therefore you can NS heal and pop this trinket at the same time to fill most people’s health bar in a split second.

Eye of Gruul – The proc rate is pitiful, but the good news is Chain Heal has a chance to proc this baby per jump. It is therefore a really good trinket where you’re spamming Chain Heal and are guaranteed jumps. It would be a good idea to spam Rank4 chain heals to make the proc transform your next Chain Heal into a free spell, allowing you more mana regen from being outside of the 5SR for 1 tick. You also get 44 healing to boot!

Pendant of the Violet Eye – You get 40 int right off the bat. If you know how to use the on-use effect, this trinket becomes a good trinket from a so-so one. Use the trinket, pop totems, renew earth shields, and so forth. If you have 0-cost rank 1 Healing Wave via Totem of the Maelstrom, spam that. It is situational, but is nonetheless a good trinket if you know how to use it.

Fel Reaver’s Piston – The thing to note about this trinket is that it can proc off any Chain Heal jump, but has a 15sec internal CD; which means that at most you’ll have 1 hot somewhere at any time. Which means that when you’re Chain Healing, you can’t control where the HoT will land and is therefore situational. It, on the other hand, is a good trinket for tank healing. Consider it a glorified Shard of the Scale – of course, now that you can kill Onyxia with less than 5 people, you might wanna consider that instead of spending all your DKP on this sub-par trinket.

Tome of Diabolic Remedy – 18mp5 and gigantic Earth Shields. Of course you can also pop this to quickly top off raids with Chain Heals. See also: Warp Scarab Brooch

Rejuvenating Gem – This trinket that was so coveted in vanilla WoW is still a solid healing trinket in TBC. If you have it, it’ll still be your best friend.

Warmth of Forgiveness – 24mp5, see Talasite Owl.

Lower City Prayerbook – more healing, and save mana everytime you use it (it’s a 1minute cooldown!), just remember to use it.

Essence of the Matyr – This is the trinket if you’re lacking on healing or just want gigantic Earth Shields.

Other trinkets can easily be compared to the ones above. If in doubt, buy two Prayerbooks and use them for the time being.

3.2 Gems

You can get away with gemming your blues with green-named gems but you should be going for the rare (blue-named) gems on your epics.

The preferred gems for the slots for where mana is an issue are:

Blue: Royal Nightseye
Red: Royal Nightseye
Yellow: Dazzling Talasite

Reason being that mp5 on rare gems that are hybrid-colors get a free 0.5 mp5 over the blue 3mp5 gem. You’ll therefore want to maximize your gains from gemming. For green-named gems you don’t get this bonus so just socket according to your stat needs.

If you’re a JC you’ll want a Kailee’s Rose in one of your red slots. If you think that your mana is enough to last through your boss fights, then the red +heal and orange +heal/int ones are both good choices.

Later on in the raiding progression you will find that mana regen already comes in healthy amounts on your gear and you will therefore want to boost your base healing. In this case the preferred gems are:

Blue: Royal Nightseye
Red: Teardrop Living Ruby
Yellow: Luminous Noble Topaz or Quick Dawnstone

As for meta gems you have three choices:

Insightful Earthstorm – The logical choice: mana, mana,and more mana. It’s hard to gem for at start but once you get a belt off TK trash you’re set. The proc itself is very unstable and can proc many times in one fight and never in another. Extra mana always helps, so it’s still a good choice for your meta slot.

Mystical Skyfire – It used to be really good because every chain heal jump will proc it and it had no internal cooldown. With 2.3 it will receive an internal CD which means that you won’t get back to back 1.25 Chain Heals. The good side to this is that it’s the easiest meta to gem for out of the three. Use this meta with the Scarab of the Infinite Cycle.

Bracing Earthstorm – +26 healing and 2% threat is any healer’s wet dream. The bad part to this meta is that its gem requirement is bizarre and just aren’t good choices for your shaman. If you’re bound on stacking as much +heal you can find, then by all means.

3.3 Enchants

Straight foward: Honor hold enchant for head, scryer/aldor enchant for shoulders, Subtlety for Cloak, +35 heal to gloves, tailoring enchant for pants, +heal to rings (if you’re an enchanter).

Chest: 6mp5 or 6stats. 6mp5 is probably the best one, but if you’re lacking in hp/mp 6stat is also a good choice.

Wrist: 6mp5 or 30heal. Your choice of stats; in high end raiding 30healing will scale better.

Shield: 18 sta or 12 int, your choice.

Boots: Boar Speed or Vitality. I value boar speed far more over vitality due to the amount of movement required in end-game raiding. The faster you get to your destination the more time you can spend healing, especially since shamans have no instant cast heals available to us. If you need more regen, then vitality is also a viable alternative.

Weapon: +81 healing. Spellsurge was a good enchant when weapon switching didn’t interrupt spell casting and when mana was actually a problem with healers (with the spirit regen upped to 30% for priests and druids, it became much much less of a problem). But now, stick with 81 healing.

3.4 Relics

Relics are the shaman’s equipment for the ranged weapon slot. They have no active purpose but passively boost your skill (depending on the relic equipped). The shaman version of relics are called totems, but to avoid confusion we’ll use the generic term relics.

Each relic boosts 1 skill and there’s basically one relic for every major skill that the Shaman has. You’ll want to keep a few useful ones in your inventory to improve your efficiency.

Totem of the Healing Rains – This is your bread and butter, adds 88 healing to your chain heal. Easy to get, and easily the best relic available.

Totem of Living Water – Reduces the mana cost of chain heal, but not to a significant amount. To save mana, using healing rains and downranking is probably the better solution.

Totem of Spontaneous Regrowth – Sadly, there is only a handful of epic relics available so these blue name ones will still be useful: save this one for when you need to be healing a tank.

Totem of the Maelstrom – Drops of SSC trash, this trinket drops your rank 1 healing wave to 0 mana costs, meaning you can cast a 1sec heal for 100ish HP for free. It’s probably an insignificant amount of healing, but being able to “heal” outside of the 5 second rule as well as being able to proc things like spellsurge, Karethess trinket, plus armor buff from crit, keep healing way up and be able to actually do some healing during RoS phase 2 after mana hits 0 for zero mana, this will be a totem that’s has to be in your inventory.

Totem of the Plains – Quest reward, your lesser healing wave staple, save for those fights where chain heal sucks and you need to be healing people fast.

Totem of Astral Guidance (or blue trinket from Mech) – Keep one of these lightning bolt boosting relics handy for when you’ve got nothing to do and can help out on damage (RoS phase 1).

4. Healing

You have 4 healing spells at your disposal (5 if you’re Draenei).

Chain Heal – This is the staple spell of Shamans and it’s the spell that makes you shine. Love it and spam it till your fingers hurt. Try to anticipate where damage is heading and also notice where your targets are standing to get the most out of this spell. Anticipate which targets will get heals by other healers and avoid those for over-healing. It’s a great spell to use but a hard spell to master, everyone can spam Chain Heal, but only the best shamans can spam it well.

Healing Wave – This is your slow, heavy-duty heal. Use this when you need big heals and/or when you are assigned to keep a tank up. It’s neither efficient (priest/paladin) or huge (druids), but with the healing wave talent it does it’s job. This is also the heal to macro in your Nature’s Swiftness for pinch situations.

Lesser Healing Wave – This is your flash heal. If you need a small heal to keep a squishy alive, this is your salvation. You’ll also want to heal yourself with this if you’re under fire. In fights where people are spread out but a lot of raid healing is needed, this is the tool to top off your raid (though you should swap with a Paladin and do tank healing instead in a situation like this).

Earth Shield – Place on the main tank and keep it refreshed. The healing aggro done by earth shield is counted towards the person who has the shield. It will help with tank aggro generation and provide reactive healing that will help reduce spikes that hit the tank. If you on-use +healing trinkets, pop those before placing your earth shield. For the first earth shield before the fight starts, you might want to switch all your gear into +heal, pop trinkets, place wrath of air, and place a gigantic earth shield on the tank. Not only will it increase the initial aggro the tank generates to allow for DPS to start early, it also helps ease out the initial shuffle as the mobs are pulled.

Some things you’ll need to notice while you’re healing: mana consumption and use of mana-regenerating CDs. Predict how much mana you will need and use CDs earlier so you can use them again later on in the fight.

Water shield provides an active 50mp5 whenever it’s up, so there is no reason not to keep it running, it costs 0 mana too! Just make sure the raid is safe before you spend the GCD to refresh it.

Totemic Recall: It’s extra mana, but it costs you 1.5sec. Use if when your totems are about to run out and you have time. This is where a totem timer mod will help you immensely.

Heroism/Bloodlust: Co-ordinate with other shamans and your raidleader to swap rotate into dps groups to maximize uptime for them (if threat allows). If you’re in a healer group don’t pop it when you hear your raidleader say pop heroism. Also, time it so that the DPS have more dps time with it (ie don’t pop it before a lurker spout, mag blast nova, etc).

4.1 Downranking

Even though blizzard nerfed downranking in 2.0, it is still a valid technique to keep in mind as it will help you save mana and get the required healing done with minimal energy spent. It will take a bit of experience and practice to make downranking decisions on the fly, but it’ll save you mana pots and you’ll be able to last on longer fights.

If you’re interested in math, spell co-efficients are calculated according to this formula.

Chain heal: Use rank 1 when small amounts of HP throughout the raid need to be healed, or if you have alot of time to do the healing. Examples include blast nova damage during Magtheridon. Use rank 4 in place of rank 5 spam if your +healing is good and rank 4 can already top off the raid in time.

Healing Wave: Rank 7/8 for spam healing the tank, or if one person needs topping off and you have time. Rank 1 with Totem of the Maelstrom on the tank when nobody needs healing to proc Ancestral Healing and to keep the Healing Way stack up.

Lesser Healing Wave: Use max rank.

Earth Shield: Use max rank for the initial pull, then after it runs out you can probably get away by using rank 1. Notice that there are no downranking penalties for rank 1, and therefore the only difference is the initial difference in the tooltip, as your +healing grows, you’ll notice the difference shrink between the two ranks.

4.2 Relic Swapping

Since you’ll be keeping a small stash of relics with you, you might as well get the most use out of them by putting them on your hotbar (click-swapping should be sufficient for the most part) and swapping them on the fly to adapt to the situation at hand. Note that equipping a relic will interrupt any spell being cast so that is a bad time to do so.

You’ll want to swap relics when you’re idling, moving, dropping totems, refreshing water shield, etc. For the most part you’ll probably have your chain heal boosting relic equipped, but sometimes you’ll run out of mana and you’ll want your free rank1 healing waves, somtimes you’ll suddenly need to switch to DPS mode and have your lightning bolt boosting relic on, sometimes your tank healers die and you need to switch to tank healing and equip your healing wave boosting relic.

5. Totems

As a shaman you will be required to drop totems to buff your group. Get a UI that helps you keep track of the time remaining on your totems and remember to refresh. Note that refreshing your totems do take time (1sec per totem) and therefore you will want to refresh them when healing isn’t required. It will take some practice; stagger your drops if you can’t afford to break healing for too long. Also you’ll want to get used to the range of totems and (advanced!) where the totem is dropped in relation to your position. (each element is dropped in a specific corner of your hitbox). It will help you drop totems in the correct places so that your group will get the benefits.

Generally in a raid, your totems choices are determined by the group you’re in and specific raid situations.

Air: Windfury (melee groups/Warrior tank), Grace (Feral tank/hunter groups), Wrath (Caster/healer/pally tanks), grounding (specific boss fights).

Earth: Strength (Tank/Melee Groups/hunter groups), Tremor (Fear fights), Stoneskin (everything else).

Water: Mana Spring (Generally), Healing Stream (melee groups), Cleansing totems

Fire: Frost Resist (when needed), Searing (when it’s safe).

There are, of course specific things you should notice about specific totems.

Searing – This is a gem of a totem to help position bosses that wipe aggro (Leo, Hydross), place it where you want the boss to run to help control the boss. Remember to not place this when there are sheep wandering around.

Healing Stream – With +healing, this thing actually heals for alot. If you’re in a melee group and you’re the only person that needs mana, and you can live without mana spring, then this totem will make a significant impact in your team’s survivability. It’s slow, but for the little mana it costs, it’s probably the most mana efficient healing thing in the game.

Mana Tide – Place it when all your group members are under 70% mana. Also let them know ahead of time that you’ll be doing it so they don’t waste pots and your totem at the same time. Remember to refresh your mana spring after this runs out.

Cleansing Totems – with 5/5 Totemic Focus, they’re cheaper than the respective cleansing spell. They also cleanse your entire party once the instant you drop them, then again every 5 seconds thereafter.

Elemental Totems – Earth is good for tanking stray adds when things get messy in 5-mans. It tends to have too little HP for tanking anything in raids. Fire is good for extra damage on the boss when your mana allows for it.

Windfury – Even after the nerf it’s still a good totem for warriors. For rogues it’s debatable, but stick with this if you have combat rogues or warriors in your group. Remember to let them know you are dropping this so they don’t waste their MH temp enchant on poisons/weapon stones.

Tranquil Air – Secret tech for trash clearing. Har har.

6. Macros

*Relic swapping macros no long work after patch 2.4.3: swapping a relic during casting will interrupt the spell. See the new Relic section under equipment.

You’ll want a NS macro to through in the big heal instantly to save someone’s life.

/stopcasting
/cast Nature’s Switfness
/stopcasting
/cast Healing Wave

Notes on using this macro: it’ll work fine only if you stand still. It will stop whatever you’re casting, use NS then slap the max rank Healing Wave on your target. All in 1 button press. However, if you hit this button while you’re moving, only the NS will fire but not the Healing Wave, you’ll need to press it again to heal the person. The same will happen if you were inside the GCD when you press this button.

If you ever get Earthshock duty (Aran, Karethess)

/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Earth Shock(rank 1)

What it does is sets your current target as focus (which you can do manually by targeting the mob and typing /focus) and then cast Earth Shock on your target. After you already have a focus, it will just cast Earth Shock on your focus.

7. End Notes

I hope that you have a better understanding of the healing aspects of the Shaman Class. IMO, there isn’t a set way to play a healer and therefore I refrain from saying do this here, do that there, because I believe that the core to being a good healer is to have a solid understanding of the mechanics and skillset available to you and to then make the best decisions when healing to fit the ad hoc needs of the encounter. I’m sure every shaman you meet will have a different view of how the class will work but in the end it’s your own playstyle and every guild/raid/party is different in terms of composition and boss strategy. We as healers have to cope alot more than other roles to fit into the specific requirements of the individual group.

Good luck and have fun.