What is Coming in 11.0.5
Restoration Shaman is shaping up to be a very popular healer in Season 1 of The War Within, largely thanks to its abundance of utility. While there aren't many changes for the spec coming in 11.0.5, one of them is quite significant and should be a pretty substantial power increase for the spec. There are 2 key class changes coming to Restoration Shaman in 11.0.5, as well as some new
forms coming as Glyphs which is detailed
here.
New Talent: Coalescing Water
is a new talent that connects
and
for 1 talent point. If you've played Restoration Shaman at all throughout Season 1 thus far, you'll know that
is a staple in a lot of our builds. In 11.0.2, taking
had some drawbacks, as neither
or
interacted with
, and neither were super strong talents on their own. This was an okay tradeoff, as
is a super potent capstone talent, so spending 2 talent points on something like
which doesn't give you a lot of throughput was still worthwhile.
Come 11.0.5, Restoration Shamans will no longer need to make that tradeoff and will even free up a talent point in the process.
only costs 1 talent point, which means getting
is now cheaper, and
actually buffs builds that occasionally cast
- unlike
or
. Remember, we still have an extra talent point to spend, but the other change to Restoration Shamans in 11.0.5 is important as well.
How does it work?
If you have
, casting
will buff your next
by 75%, stacking up to 2 times (very similar to
and
). You still gain stacks of
from chain heals cast via
, so this doesn't mean that Totemic Shamans will have to suddenly start casting a bunch of
s on their own. The large buff to
makes weaving between
and
feel quite nice, especially as Farseer, given you have much more mana to work with.
One interesting interaction is with
and
. If you cast a
that's buffed by
and it happens to spread via
, both the casted
and the
spread via
are buffed. It's hard to tell if this is intended or not, but this would make tracking your next proc of
would suddenly become important.
Reactive Warding Update
got a small update, allowing
and
to consume stacks every 2 seconds instead of every 3 seconds. This is effectively a buff to
healing, but it does mean you'll need to recast it more often. That said, recasting
more often is just a buff to
as you'll be able to trigger the healing much more often. While recasting
doesn't feel very good, this is a decent buff to both Mythic+ and Raid healing.
Final Thoughts
Nothing is set in stone just yet, but it seems these two changes will lock down our talent builds quite a bit more than what we had in 11.0.2. There are almost no downsides to always taking
, which means you'll very likely only be playing
builds (especially given the
builds are not very popular at the moment). And now that we probably won't be taking
in every build, it now locks us into either pathing through
and the newly-buffed
to get to
/
, or do we path through
and spend 1 extra talent point elsewhere.
These changes make taking 3 capstones on Restoration Shaman very easy to do and pushes us towards
builds even more. With
still suffering from the success of the Dragonflight Season 2 set bonus and the follow-up nerfs to the ability,
builds are unfortunately not looking great heading into 11.0.5.
