So You Just Specced Resto

I’ve had a few people ask me for a post on just simply how to start out healing as a Shaman. What the rotations are, what spells are good and bad. To some extent, I’ve covered this in a post-Cata spell review, and in the Resto Shaman Primer, which if you’re trying to L2Shaman is a good place to refer to various things.

However, since I am still getting repeated requests for such a “Intro to Shaman Healing” type post, that’s clearly not quite hitting the right spot.

Rotations

Proper rotations, I think, are an important function of DPS specs, even they are all moving much towards a priority system than a set rotation. If you’re just starting out as a healer for the first time, it’s easy to expect there to be a rotation that you’d follow much like when you DPS. However, your fellow players’ health pools don’t play nice like the mob’s health pools do. If there’s nothing that needs healing, suddenly a healing rotation is irrelevant, whereas the mob is there ready to soak up all the damage you can keep doing until it’s dead.

Healing is a lot of “If this situation occurs, then do this as the best way to respond to it.” Once again, this is the new shiny new triage system of things. For some classes, and this applies to Shamans as well, there are spells you can do in certain orders to get a better use of out your talents and abilities. But overall, I think the notion of a rotation isn’t accurate for a healer.

Still, you can get a sense of a priority system with healing, and I’d describe it as follows:

1. Put Earth Shield up on the tank.
2. Put Riptide up on the tank.
3. Keep your totems down in a central location.
4. Put Riptide up on someone’s who’s taken moderate damage.
5. Use Healing Wave to keep tank health up, patch up other players.

When Riptide and Healing Wave aren’t enough

Odds are, especially starting out, that healing is going to be tough, and you’ll have the sense of never being able to keep up. Even if you’re a super smart amazing player, your gear just won’t support being able to coast by on your basic bread and butter spells.

If someone starts taking a lot of damage, you have a few options at your disposal:

1. Nature’s Swiftness + Greater Healing Wave

You may want to save this for when the poop quest has really hit the fan, or for saving a tank, but this is the fastest way to get a chunk of healing out to save someone’s life. It’s a good idea to make a macro for this combination, as time spent fumbling hitting NS then another spell could mean death.

/cast Nature's Swiftness
/cast Greater Healing Wave

Alternately, you can do an NS + Chain Heal combo if you need to grab a few people from the brink of dirtnapping.

/cast Nature's Swiftness
/cast Chain Heal

2. Powered Up Heals

One of the interesting tools that Shaman have is the ability to elect to make their next healing spell more powerful. We may not have rotations, but we certainly have combos. There’s two main ways to do this, either through the Focused Insight talent or through our new level 81 ability Unleash Elements.

Focused Insight is triggered by using one of your shocks. The shock has to actually hit the target, which means it’s not a guaranteed effect, especially on raid bosses, however shocks have a 6 second cooldown, making it something you can weave into your healing spells fairly frequently if necessary.

For ease of hitting something with a spell while being a healer, I use the following macro:

#showtooltip Earth Shock
/cast [harm] Earth Shock; [@targettarget] Earth Shock

If you’re targeting a mob, it’ll shock. If you’re targeting a player, it’ll shock their target. The macro won’t work if you’re targeting yourself, or someone who isn’t targeting a mob. It’s not a perfect solution, but it works 9 times out of 10, and is more elegant in that it does not require any target swaps, nor does it select a random nearby enemy target which might just be someone’s CC.

Focused Insight increases your next heal by 30%. Great for giving Chain Heals a little more oomph, and for making Greater Healing Wave bigger to fix up someone who has gotten dangerously low. It will affect the up-front portion of Riptide, but it has no effect on Healing Rain.

Unleash Elements requires that you have Earthliving Weapon up. It is a small direct heal on a target, but it is mainly used because it increases your next direct heal by 20%. Unlike Focused Insight, it is a guaranteed effect, as it does not require you to successfully hit a mob with damage, but it is like Focused Insight that it is best used with Chain Heal or Greater Healing Wave, only affects the up-front portion of Riptide, and does not affect Healing Rain.

3. Tidal Waves

Tidal Waves, a buff you’ll get after casting Riptide or Chain Heal, will do either of the following: Reduce cast time on Healing Wave/Greater Healing Wave, or increase the crit chance of Healing Surge by 30%.

Being aware of having just cast Riptide or Chain Heal to cast either faster or more critty heals is another “combo” we can use as Shaman. The object lesson in Shaman healing is that it’s usually more effective to throw the kitchen sink at a problem than it is to spam a single spell.

When you have Tidal Waves up, Healing Surge becomes a powerhouse spell. Until 4.0.6 at least, it’ll outpace Greater Healing wave in efficiency and “Healing Per Second”.

4. Healing Rain

Healing Rain, when it hits the right amount of people (6+) under a certain level of health (60%)  is the most efficient spell in the game. Rock on, my weather warriors. The further it falls short of those things, the more it’s just a mana hog.

In 5mans, if everyone’s taken damage, it’s still well worth using, especially if you can get people to stand in it. Closer quarters makes this easier on you.

In raids, use it on a clump of players after an AoE. Melee are usually all in the same place, but often ranged will be collected for ease of healing them. Aim for the 6 under 60 sweet spot. Healing Rain also takes advantage of our mastery on the fly, hitting lower health targets for more.

Part using Healing Rain is putting it in a smart place at an effective time. The majority of using Healing Rain is training people to “STAND IN THE PUDDLE”. I’ve got some of my dudes I run with frequently well trained. The other day, I dropped a rain in response to some AoE damage just as a trash pack died. My party, which had just started to run towards the next pull, all came to a screeching halt to stand in my rain. I cackled at my sphere of influence over the actions of others.

An Example

Despite the fact that I’ve told you that there’s no such thing as rotations for healers, I went on to tell you that there are good combos. What keeps healing interesting for me is that it’s always changing in reaction to what’s happening to people. However, if you have a group of people that need a lot of healing, consider this as an example chain of events:

Drop Healing Rain. Riptide someone. Focused Insight Shock + Chain Heal. Cast a couple Healing Surges. Riptide someone else. Unleash Elements + Chain Heal. A couple more Healing Surges.

That’s a whole mess of healing. It’ll chew up mana quickly the more you use Healing Surge in there. A more conservative AoE healing tactic would be to just throw out as many powered up Chain Heals as possible, and regular chains in between cooldowns.

Chain Heal Spam

Remember when that’s all Resto Shaman used to do? No more, my friend. Granted, if you are raid healing, you will still use a lot of chain heal. But we have a lot more tools in our arsenal now, and Chain Heal feels pretty anemic without being used as a combination with our power-ups.

You can make Chain Heal better in three ways:

1. Focused Insight
2. Unleash Elements
3. Riptide

Riptide is an effective HoT, but it can also be consumed by Chain Healing off that target to boost the chain. It’s not the most efficient thing to do to Riptide someone and immediately Chain off of them. It’s great if you can consume a Riptide with a short duration remaining to power up a Chain Heal.

Picking What Totems to Use

There can be a lot of finesse as to what totems to use, depending on who else is in your party or raid, and what buffs they’re bringing, what other Shaman there are… Your default totem set, or when in doubt, use this basic totem set:

Fire: Flametongue Totem
Earth: Strength of Earth Totem
Water: Healing Stream Totem
Air: Windfury Totem

If you’re in a group with no melee at all, you can swap in Stoneskin and Wrath of Air instead. I tend to set up my totems such that one set is my “melee” or default set totems, and another is “caster” totems so I can adjust to my group on the fly without fiddling totem sets all the time. Though, some mods like TotemTimers make this really easy.

Spell by Spell

I’m going to hit each spell in our arsenal with a quick bit on when to use it:

Earth Shield – Reactive heal. Put this up on a tank, and always keep it up. Increases effect of your heals on that target by 15%.

Riptide – Very efficient small direct heal with a long HoT. When glyphed, you can have three of these running at once. Great to keep up on a tank, or to throw at someone who has taken some moderate damage but is in no danger at all. Can consume HoT to increase next Chain Heal by 25%. Provides Tidal Waves buff. Use it, love it.

Healing Wave – Small efficient heal. Use as much as possible to patch up health until you can’t keep up. Great for topping people off, or maintaining tank health.

Greater Healing Wave – Expensive, big direct heal. Will get the largest effect out of powerup abilities like Focused Insight and Unleash Elements. Use when someone has lost a lot of health, or with Nature’s Swiftness.

Healing Surge – Fast, expensive heal that makes great use of Tidal Waves buff. Use when someone is in critical need of healing up to a safer level. As of 4.0.3, outpaces Greater Healing Wave, but will kill mana fast if spammed.

Chain Heal – Direct heal that will jump to additional nearby targets (up to 4) for reduced amounts. Provides Tidal Waves buff. Most efficient when it will heal all 4 targets, but still effective at 3 targets. Roughly breaks even with casting two Healing Waves when it hits two targets. Heals for a relatively small amount, but should be used with powerup spells like Focused Insight, Unleash Elements, and consumed Riptide buffs.

Healing Rain – Ground AoE heal. Extremely efficient when hitting 6 targets below 60%. Use when groups of players need moderate to high amounts of healing, particularly effective in raids. May require some training to get people to stand in it.

The Short Version

Blah blah, wall of words. Read this:

In 5 mans and heroics, keep Earth Shield and Riptide up on the tank, and use Healing Wave as much as possible to heal people up. Use Healing rain when most or all of your group can stand in its radius and are all taking AoE damage. If mana is tight, trust in the HoT portion of Riptide and the steady influx of Healing Stream Totem to patch people up once you can get them to 50-66% health. When it hits two targets Chain Heal is roughly on par with casting 2 Healing Waves instead, but will do it in half the time. On 3+ targets Chain Heal is more efficient, but depending on positioning and damage taken, Chain Heal can be harder to use effectively in 5 man content. Use Unleash Elements and shocks to power up a Chain Heal, or to heal up a large deficit on the tank.

When raid healing, use Healing Rain and powered up Chain Heals while casting Riptide on cooldown. Use Healing Wave when things are calm to top off individual targets, and take advantage of Tidal Waves to cast Healing Surge to heal critical targets. The majority of your healing will come from “Rain, Chain, and Totem.”

If tank healing, keep up Earth Shield and Riptide, and cast Healing Wave as long as you can to keep up with tank health. If there are predictable large hits, prepare for them by casting Unleash Elements and then a Shock to land a large Greater Healing Wave. Take advantage of Tidal Waves with Healing Surge to address spikes.