by Shotbox
Welcome to Healcraft.net’s Restoration Shaman Pre-Patch Survival Guide! This guide will cover the major changes to Resto Shamans in the pre-patch, as well as our recommendations for any changes to talents and playstyle. As always, please comment below or tweet me @ShotBoxID with any questions!
Pre-Patch Changes
The 9.0 Pre-Patch is here and with it came new abilities, talent changes, as well as the removal of to the corruption system. Unlike many other specs, the loss of corruption does not affect Resto Shaman all that much in terms of how our specialization feels. We mostly favored Critical Strike (Severe) amplification corruptions. Therefore, the only game play difference is that we no longer regenerate as much mana via Resurgence.
Base Line Abilities
With the un-pruning of abilities in Shadowlands, we welcome back both Mana Tide Totem and Water Shield. Although they provide rather small amounts of extra mana regen, over the course of a fight these will make up for the reduced resurgence mana regeneration. Additionally, Earth Shield has been made baseline (this was previously a talent). This means we will want to keep this up on a tank at all times, which provides a small bit of gameplay change. The last three newly available abilities to Resto are Lightning Shield, Flametongue Weapon, and Primal Strike. Lightning Shield is only really useful for solo content, with the other two not even being worth adding to your bars.
Talent Changes
While there are a few talent changes, these currently all have very little impact. Both Torrent and High Tide saw 10% nerfs; however, due to Riptide’s significant buff to its initial heal, this nerf is not anything you would notice. As for High Tide, the main strength from this talent comes from its ability to prevent Chain Heal from reducing with each jump, and with the slight buff to Chain Heal‘s spell power scaling, this too is not very noticeable. It is worth noting that this nerf makes Ascendance and Wellspring a bit more of viable options. Last on the list is the addition of a new talent – Surge of Earth. Unfortunately, this is a fairly useless AoE healing ability, which cannot keep up with the other options in its row.
Recommended Talents
Recommended talents remain the same for both Raid and Mythic+ as they did before pre-patch. However both Wellspring and Ascendance are both able to be competitive with High Tide, and as such, are worth playing around with depending on what your raid needs.
Mythic Raid Restoration Shaman
Mythic+ Restoration Shaman
Playstyle Changes
Rather than having any big differences in playstyle, the changes brought in pre-patch renew and reinforce old styles of gameplay for us. Throughout the expansion, the general rule for Unleash Life was to use it on CD in order to buff Chain Heal or Riptide (if Chain Heal is not required). With the buff to Riptide, this doubles down on wanting to use Unleash Life on CD. Riptide is even more efficient of a heal now than it was in the past. As for renewed gameplay, having Earth Shield back means we will be wanting to keep track of our stacks, insuring that we maintain 100% uptime on it. To assist with the tracking of both of these spells, Weak Auras for both can be found below.
Weak Auras
Earth Shield – https://wago.io/LPLRpjBVqV
Unleash Life – https://wago.io/LPLRpjBVqV
Conclusion
Thank you for checking out Healcraft.net’s Restoration Shaman Pre-Patch Survival Guide! Please also check for our other pre-patch class guides coming soon. Additionally, our major Class Guides will be updated for Shadowlands release shortly before the release of the expansion. If you have any questions or commends, please feel free to reply below or tweet us @Healcraft. Happy Healing!
Healcraft 