Restoration Shaman Raid Guide

Welcome to the Restoration Shaman Raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.1! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Restoration ShamanRaid

Overall Healing

Average

Cooldown Strength

Excellent

Utility

Strong

Survivability

Strong

Mobility

Average

• Farseer focuses on Single Target healing and provides a significant damage increase compared to Totemic, While Totemic focuses on AoE healing and Cooldown strength.
• In a Raid environment Totemic is the easiest to play and performs better than Farseer if stacking is allowed.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: Your healing spells have a chance to apply Insurance! to their targets that heals them over 15 sec. Insurance! is consumed if an ally drops below 40% health to heal them.
• (4pc): When you cast HR, 1 ally will get Insurance!, when Insurance! is consumed you get 10% bonus healing to your Chain Heal, Healing Surge and Healing Wave.

This set further emphasizes on Tidal Waves and you have to ensure to always have Tidal Waves up before using your affected healing spells.

Priority List

For Damage

1. Maintain Healing Rain on the boss if talented into Acid Rain.
2. Cast Chain Lightning if there are 2+ enemies/bosses.
3. Maintain Flame Shock.
4. Cast Lava Burst.
5. Cast Lightning Bolt.

Cooldowns

Cloudburst Totem / Healing Stream Totem

• Playing with Cloudburst Totem, the totem accumulates a portion of your healing while it's up and should nearly always be used on cooldown unless you need to delay its use for specific timing or a damage event.
• If you instead play with Healing Stream Totem, this totem frequently heals injured allies within 46 yards.
• You can read more about Cloudburst Totem / Healing Stream Totem in the Deep dive section below.

Ascendance

• Use Ascendance when your raid is dying as it's your strongest healing cooldown as there is a strong intial heal, followed up by duplicating all healing you deal by 70% for 15 seconds, split evenly among allies within 40 yards.

Healing Tide Totem

• This totem is one of your baseline throughput cooldowns and it heals all allies within 40 yards. It's a great cooldown to use when your globals are tight and the HPS requirements are high, or during heavy movement.

Spirit Link Totem

• This totem is one of the most unique cooldowns in the game with the power to redistribute your allies' health to have the same percentage of maximum health every second. It also grants your allies a 15% damage reduction for whoever is within the radius.
• Spirit Link Totem is an extremely powerful cooldown to counter overwhelming damage on your raid and also has great synergy with Darkness.

Min maxing Deluge

• Deluge is one of your early Restoration talents and is crucial to consider when you need that extra throughput. Placing a good Healing Rain can save you from spending more globals than necessary while maintaining high uptime of Deluge.
• If it is not possible to stay stacked for Healing Rain, prioritize to use Riptide on range players to fully utilize Deluge.

Min maxing Tidal Waves

• While Tidal Waves is almost always up due to Riptide being a short cooldown spell, it is important to stack up your Tidal Waves before a lethal damage event, allowing you to cast your strong healing spells without having to worry about using Riptide in between.
• It buffs your next Healing Wave, Chain Heal or Healing Surge.

Min maxing Call of the Ancestors

• Your main goal with the Hero Talent Farseer, is to call Ancestors to your side to aid you. As there is constant damage in raids, playing with Undulation is recommended due to the low mana cost of Healing Wave, You become the strongest spothealer in your raid.
• Use Ancestral Swiftness on cooldown, or before a specific damage event when more healing is required.

Min maxing Cloudburst

• Cloudburst is one of your strongest tools. Being able to make full use of Cloudburst is extremely important and helps with any throughput issues you might encounter.
• Before you place Cloudburst, there are a few things you can prepare. Spread out Riptide, placing down Healing Rain right before Cloudburst.
• Your Cloudburst also interacts with Ascendance. Both abilities are extremely powerful when combined, and thanks toFirst Ascendant, they both share the same cooldown of 2 minutes, and is transferred to your Cloudburst.
• If you play with Healing Stream Totem instead of Cloudburst, You don't have to think about this at all and should use Healing Stream Totem when someone in your party is injured.

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

The following tips are mainly applicable to Heroic Bosses. Mythic tips will be released after our progression finishes.

← Scroll for more Bosses →

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Restoration Shaman. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

• Blizzard introduced Stat drs, which you should be aware of. To get to know what those are and why you have to care about them click here to get to our detailed stat DR resource post!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Reduces damage taken from AoE effects.
• Leech - Returns a portion of your damage and healing done as healing to you. (Excludes self healing)
• Speed - increases movement speed. (Does stack with other movement speed abilities)

The only time you should think about picking a lower item level is if it has Leech or Avoidance. Speed is nice to have, but you shouldn't consider this stat when choosing between two items.

• Here is a showcase of how powerful Leech is for a Healer: Breakdown of Mythic Fyrakk

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that some trinkets are better than others depending on the scenario.

Active Trinket alternatives

• Funhouse Lens
  • A delve trinket that is a good on-use alternative at an equal item level.

Passive Trinket alternatives

• Suspicious Energy Drink
  • Strong stat stick that can proc Mastery after casting harmful spells, farmable through Delves.
• Mug's Moxie Jug
  • Strong stat stick as well, gives your spells a chance to grant you some Crit that stacks up but doesn't refresh the duration.
• Reverb Radio
  • Strong stat stick, that gives you a high average of your preferred secondary stat.

Embellishments

• Dawnthread Lining 2x
  • Increases your Crit by a small amount, while above 80% HP
• If you struggle to find a good weapon to drop, you can craft a weapon with Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension.
• Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension 1x
  • Gives you a random secondary stat every 8 seconds when in combat, that stacks up to 10 times.
• Writhing Armor Banding 1x
  • Doubles the effect of your Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension embellishment.

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 675 item level and regular items are 678 at max item level, therefore it is not beneficial to equip crafted items outside of your 2x embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

• Phials
  • Flask of Tempered Aggression
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
• Combat Potion
  • Algari Mana Potion -- Recommended
  • Potion Bomb of Recovery
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion
• Weapon Oil
  • Earthliving Weapon -- Default
  • Algari Mana Oil -- If you play without Earthliving
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Versatile Ruby
  • Culminating Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem colour to enhance your Blasphemite.
    • Deadly Emerald
    • Deadly Onyx
    • Deadly Sapphire

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Restoration Shaman in Mythic Raiding, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Berserking -- Troll
  • Increases your haste by 10% for 12 sec.
• Stoneform -- Dwarf
  • Dispels Magic and Bleed debuffs. Has been useful in the past on some bosses with Bleeds.
• Rocket Jump -- Goblin
  • Small jump in the direction your character is facing, any mobility is always useful in raids.
• Ancestral Call -- Mag'har Orc
  • 2 minute cooldown that gives you a high amount of secondary stats.

Recommendation:

While Rocket Jump offers you a quick way to move your character, it is not as crucial any longer due to our Talents allowing us to get Gust of Wind.

Therefore it is recommended to pick Mag'har Orc for their Ancestral Call racial that gives you a large boost to either of your top 2 secondary stats for 15 sec.

Discover recommended macros for Restoration Shaman during Raid encounters and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Mouseover Macros

All spells in this Restoration Shaman Raid Guide are available as mouseover macros for your convenience!

Chain Heal

/cast [@mouseover, help] Chain Heal; Chain Heal

Riptide

/cast [@mouseover, help] Riptide; Riptide

Healing Wave

/cast [@mouseover, help] Healing Wave; Healing Wave

Healing Surge

/cast [@mouseover, help] Healing Surge; Healing Surge

Unleash Life

/cast [@mouseover, help] Unleash Life; Unleash Life

Recommended Macros

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Restoration Shaman, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

WeakAuras

Patch 11.1

Q: How does Earth Shield and Chain Heal interact?

Credits

Written By: Velo

Reviewed By: Thaner