World of Warcraft

2. My tools

So assuming you decided you want to join the ranks of Awesome Healing (tm), what do you actually have to make that happen?

Costs all include 3/3 Tidal Focus, so you'd have to add ~6,5% to all manacosts if you were to not have it. That being said you want Tidal Focus, so it makes sense to include it's cost-reduction.

Healing Wave (HW) - 1981 mana
This heal is your bread&butter spell. Small, cheap as dirt, you can spam this all day long. Do exactly that: whenever you got nothing else you need to cast, fill up with Healing Wave. It should be noted that as your gear improves you'll use this less and less, one reason why at high end many switch to a Telluric Currents based spec.

Greater Healing Wave (GHW) - 7267 mana
As slow as Healing Wave but much much costlier and more powerful, this is the heal of choice when a single person has taken a whole lot of beating and needs to be healed up. It is faster than the comparative heals of other classes due to being affected by our Tidal Waves talent, making this a staple for both tank and emergency healing.

Healing Surge (HS, although some still call it LHW from it's old name, Lesser Healing Wave) - 5946 mana
Pricey, somewhere between Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave and fast, this heal is good when you don't have Tidal Waves charges and absolutely positively need a heal now (it is highly inefficient).
It has a secondary use in PvP especially, it gains 30% crit from Tidal Waves and can force crit-based effects quickly, namely Ancestral Healing. Do keep in mind that even with the crit, GHW is always a better output tool.

Earth Shield (ES) - 4183 mana
The signature spell of your Resto line-up, it helps smooth out damage on a single target and increases your healing on it by 18% via a talent. Always use it on someone, ideally a tank.

Riptide (RT) - 2202 mana
Your 31 point talent. Solid heal with a HoT part, it procs Tidal Waves and synergizes with Chain Heal, making it an extremely potent ability for very little mana cost, producing a near-perfect uptime on Ancestral Healing's two effects.

Chain Heal (CH) - 4404 mana
Loses 30% of it's healing every jump, jumps 3 times.
Your answer when a group of clustered characters take damage, this spell is highly efficient if it gets to jump around. It requires a good feel for where to aim it, as it's jumping range from char to char is limited to ~12y. Alternate which target of a group of players you cast this on to smooth out healing, and remember it procs Tidal Waves and can consume Riptide for extra healing, which can actually be unwanted frequently - good raidframe-setups help a lot with managing this.

Healing Rain (HR, or just Rain) - 10130 mana
This is ground-targetted, and then creates a weird-looking light blue ground target with some light rain going on inside it. It has the highest per-casttime healing of all of our spells, assuming groups of players stand in it.
As it's ground targetted, casted and stationary, you want to generally reserve it for when you know the raid will be inside. And then it takes priority from Chain Heal, often replacing it to near-exclusion as you Rain, then spotheal with GHW and Riptide, then fill up the mana with Telluric Currents.

Earthliving Weapon (ELW)
Your weapon enchant of choice grants you a sizeable amount of +spellpower - if limited to healing spells only - but more importantly it gives you a 20% chance to proc a free HoT onto someone you heal, doesn't matter how you did it specifically. Always used in PvE and frequently in PvP.

Unleash Elements / Unleash Life (UE or UL) - 1640 mana
Used with Earthliving on your weapon. this small heal increases your next heal spell by 20%, which is quite the pacemaker for our healing.
Just keep in mind that you don't necessarily want to use it just as it comes off cooldown, it has tactical applications in most fights.

Spirit Link Totem (SLT) - 1803 mana, 3:00 cooldown
Your saving cooldown. It counts as an air totem so it spawns behind you and to the left, then for 6 / 8,4 seconds it not only decreases damage taken slightly (10%), but also moves health around so everyone has the same percentage every second.
While this may seem arbitrary, any time a few people are together and only a part of them are taking damage this totem can work amazing magic. It also facilitates using single as raid heals - and vice versa.

Spiritwalker's Grace (SWG)
Fairly unique, this allows you to cast while moving for 15s, on a 2m CD, and can actually be pressed while you're already casting a spell.
The applications where this truly shines are few and far between - however when it helps, it helps a lot by allowing you to say, keep full healing on the tank while the raid moves, or running alongside the raid supplying CHs.

3. Talents & Glyphs

Instead of giving you example specs - as I don't like that conceptually - I'll list you which talents to consider "Necessary" and which to consider "Optional".

You then make a spec so that you have all the required talents, and pick the optional ones you personally like the most. I'll give a short overview of the relevant ones below.

Necessary: Tidal Focus, Spark of Life, Improved Water Shield, Nature's Swiftness, Nature's Blessing, Ancestral Healing, Soothing Rains (after lvl83), Improved Cleanse Spirit, Ancestral Awakening, Mana Tide Totem, Spirit Link Totem, Tidal Waves, Riptide.

Offspec: (Improved Shields) - see below at Telluric Currents, Elemental Weapons, if you can manage Acuity.

PvP: Nature's Guardian, and Cleansing Waters and Ancestral Swiftness become necessary instead of optional.

Optional:
Ancestral Resolve: this can be a very nice nearly passive 10% reduction on all damage you take, since you'll be casting pretty much nonstop. Nothing fancy, but good for it's cost.
Totemic Focus: Only useful for the extended duration for Mana Tide Totem, Spirit Link Totem and Fire Elemental Totem. It's very good for that though, and a staple talent few will want to miss.
Focused Insight: Allows you to shock during a short lull in damage to produce a much strong heal effect a moment later. Interesting, if pricey at 3 points.
Cleansing Waters: Makes you the dispeller of your raids. You do it cheaper, you do it better, the downside is that everyone will want to designate you to do it. Problem is that for PvE it's overpriced at 2 points now that the heal can only trigger every 6 seconds.
Telluric Currents: If there's a lull in stuff to heal, you can not only nuke some but instead of spending mana, you regenerate it. It's pretty cool for what it does, mileage varies heavily with fight ofc. You will probably want to go deep Ele offspec to convert your Spirit to some Hit rating, and skip Improved Shields in Enhancement.
Blessing of the Eternals: Fairly powerful, and many consider it necessary. Does what the tooltip says. Useful, but can be skipped for other talents. Keep in mind it's effect on CH and HR are much smaller, and hence it's value can be largely lost if those spells are the lion share of what you do.
Ancestral Swiftness: Another talent many would consider necessary. It grants you +7% runspeed and some slight stats over what you can get from enchanting (as the enchant is 8%), and more interestingly allows you to instantly Ghost Wolf. If you keybind it well you can very very quickly AEs or run to specific areas, provided ofc you don't have to use RT/UL/ES/Cleanse or Spiritwalker's Grace along the way. Very powerful, however all AEs will be balanced against someone only having the 8% runspeed from enchanting, and hence neither the passive runspeed nor the wolf will ever be required.
Totemic Reach: Only useful if for whatever reason you're the one always supplying the melee totems and you want to have full mobility during the fight, this'd make it much easier to keep totem range on the melee team. Other than that it's not necessary.
Elemental Precision: If you are using Telluric Currents and possible Focused Insight, you may want this. 2/3 makes you hitcapped for all practical purposes, and helps somewhat with the mana returns. The effect is smaller than often hyped though.


As for the glyphs, Prime glyphs are easy, there's no choice involved here. You want Riptide, Earth Shield and Earthliving, and only in really really bad cases of mana-troubles you'd want to exchange the Earth Shield glyph for the Water Shield one.

Major glyphs are tougher. Most of them add utility or interesting semi-healing effects, so the choice is largely personal. Get them all and experiment with swapping them frequently, even per-encounter. For example in a purely physical fight the Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is wasted while in multi-element encounters with blanket AE damage it's probably the strongest one.
Glyphs to consider (and experiment with) are: Chain Heal, Ghost Wolf (assuming you have Ancestral Swiftness), Healing Stream Totem, Healing Wave, Hex and Totemic Recall. For PvP Frost Shock and Stoneclaw Totem add to the pool of useful glyphs, while Totemic Recall is rarely of use there (totems get killed by other people, not yourself).

Minor glyphs are entirely your choice. As nothing here is fight-critical there is no use investing much thought into which is better suited or not, pick whatever sounds cool to you. :)

4. Item Stats

Intellect
The stat which is never wrong. No matter how much better the raw output from Haste or Crit can be, or how much you like Mastery, Intellect-upgrades are never a bad thing.
You gain 15 mana and 1 spellpower per 1 Int, and 1% spellcrit every 650 Int.

Spirit
Only necessary as far as you need more mana. One often overlooked effect is that the more spirit you have the less Healing Wave you want to cast compared to more inefficient but stronger heals so there is a sort-of ripple effect which increases your healing once you gain more spirit.
The ratio is rather complicated and also depends on the square root of your Int, so let's skip that. Use the mod RatingBuster if you're interested in detailed numbers on spirit-regen, much easier.

Haste
Usually your strongest stat for raw throughput, it heavily increases your output and reaction time, but also makes you burn mana faster.
It has an additional benefit in that every once in a while, one of your HoT effects (Riptide, Rain, Earhtliving) gain an additional tick during their duration, making that amount of Haste a very viable "gearing goal".
In short, Haste should provide you with a lot of throughput, but at a questionable cost. Take note of the HoT-synergy though and check whether you are close, then it is always worth pushing to that level. (see below)
To get 1% Haste you need 128 Haste Rating. Important breakpoints are 916 Rating which gives you another tick on Earthliving with the 5% haste from Wrath of Air, and then 2005, which gives you another tick on Riptide. 780/1858 for Goblins, respectively.

Crit
A lot more interesting for Shamans than for other healers. Not only does it increase your healing output, it increases the number of Ancestral Awakening (more and even intelligent healing!) and Resurgence procs (more mana return). It also increases uptime on Ancestral Healing. Very strong stat, but gimmicky.
To get 1% Crit you need ~180 Crit Rating.

Resilience
If PvP is your game, then you need a whole lot of this. A whole lot. For PvP you should seek your priority stats somewhere between Resilience and Mastery as both work extremely well in a PvP environment, adding some Crit to keep the Ancestral Healing buff up on your targets. Did I mention you want a lot of this, yet? Once damage on you goes down enough you are able to keep yourself up despite the extremely high reliance on casted heals, you don't have the luxury of a lot of instants or HoTs like the other healers have.
To get 1 point of Resilience you need 276 Resilience Rating.

Mastery - Deep Healing
The mathmagicians from EJ have more or less agreed it's impossible to fully quantify. If you heal someone low on HP, this is your best healing stat (assuming you got haste to get the heal off in time and spirit/intellect to be able to cast it, ofc). If you heal someone already rather high in HP, it's your worst healing stat.
And that's the entirety of it. It's something you need to personally choose. No one can tell you which amount of Mastery is "best", it's not really mathable. If you feel comfortable with little more than the base amount, more power to you. If you stack it to kingdom come and revel in the lifesaving oomph your heals have, more power to you.
To get 1 point of Mastery and hence 3,0% Deep Healing, you need ~180 Mastery Rating.



If you want some fast&dirty&crude rule, maximize Intellect where you can (Gems, but fulfill socket boni with hybrid gems), get a lot of Spirit until you feel comfortable, then get Haste to 916 rating. Then raise Crit and Mastery equally.

5. Healing Roles & Handling

There are generally 4 different roles you can find yourself in as a healer: You can be the sole healer, such as in a 5man, you could be a tank healer, you could be a raid healer, or you could be a specialized healer.
I'll go over them one after the other in that order, as most of us run into the biggest problems as the sole healer of a heroic 5man team at lvl85.


Sole Healer

For simplicity's sake I'll assume this means a 5man and now a specialized raidfight where the healers can only heal one at a time.
As the sole healer, you obviously need to have everything covered. As you'll usually lack full raidbuffs, and/or might have other obligations like Binding Elementals or interrupting, this requires some heavy triage.

The first really important thing is: Stay cool. People don't need full health, not even the tank. You want to (eventually) top the tank back off, but the rest of the group will be fine with Healing Stream Totem (which can tick for 1100+ easily now, so don't underestimate it).
The second big problem follows directly from it: You cannot safe a group which does not want to safe itself. This is tricky, and can net you negative comments if the people who are taking needless damage also refuse to accept it's their fault. But they have to do it themselves. DPS especially is responsible for their own HP!. Heal them back up with Riptide / Healing Stream Totem, but unless there's a fight-mechanic involving heavy bursted AE damage, you're not there to make them survive. They got Blink / Deterrence / Recuperate, let them use it.

Meanwhile, your priority lies in balance and proactive thinking. Be aware of how much health everyone needs 5s/10s/20s from now, so you know when to cast heals on who. Try to be as far ahead as you can so you can use Healing Wave and Riptide more instead of having to rely on Healing Surge and Greater Healing Wave.
When fights involve big AE damage, ask the group to stack close to the melee (even Hunters can go really close now), so you can fully utility healing rain and continue to heal the tank while it ticks (or help with Chain Heal where necessary).

But remember: Proactive thinking and most importantly independant DPS healing/defense is what wins fights in the role of the sole healer. It can be annoying that you can't it "yourself", but a good group will feel worlds different from a bad one.

One last thing: Timers for Hex/Bind can be very handy if you need to CC while healing. /focus is also very good for that purpose.


Tank Healer

As a pure tank healer - usually in a raid - your priorities lie in steady healing, availability of emergency tools, good contact and solid reaction with heals.

Steady healing means you want to always be spamming Healing Wave when not doing something else, and keeping Earth Shield and Riptide up. Yes I know this usually applies in all circumstances but it's importance is bigger here, you need that steady and dependable income of healing to properly "see" when the tank is actually taking extra damage.

Emergency Tools are few and far between for us, but on-use trinkets and Nature's Swiftness provide us with two good tools to briefly increase our healing output. More importantly, your reflexes with Spiritwalker's Grace can make or break tankhealing. You can freely move while casting, for 10 seconds. Whenever a tank gets tossed around unexpectently, or has to relocate, we Shamans can keep up the healing anyways. Experience is key here, the more you practice when and how to use Spiritwalkers, the better. Use a very easily reachable key- or mousebinding for it, so you can always hit it in the blink of an eye.
(Mine is on Shift+R, and my fingers rest on ESDF with the pinky on the shift-key)

"Good contact" is mostly a single golden rule: Never stand at 40y range! Never. One step of the tank, and you're out of range. In the world of tankhealing this can easily spell death, even if it was a brief moment, your heal aborts, you need to move into range, then recast. Given the current haste levels this lull in healing will cause other healers to see a problem, spike heal your tank, so their targets drop. The cascading effect can easily kill people.
A good rule of thumb is that while tankhealing, you want to stay in Flame Shock range of a target. :)

Lastly, your reaction ability massively impacts how long your mana will last. If you are able to do all "spike" healing reflexively then you are free to cover the tank with HW + RT + ES and save tons and tons of mana. Good examples are bosses which pump out heavy tankdamage on very slow swingtimers (Chimaeron comes to mind). This is mostly practice, but try to play conservatively whenever you get away with it, this gives you practice.

Raid Healer

Raid Healing is potentially the simplest role to understand, but it's usually the toughest to pull off. We got three basic tools which excel at raidhealing, those are Chain Heal, Healing Rain and Riptide. We usually supplement that with some GHWs, and rarely HS.

Two things are important: Riptide and Chain Heal (if it bounces 3 times) are fairly efficient. Healing Rain, Greater Healing Wave and Healing Surge usually ain't.
Healing Rain's strength is that you can do other stuff while it's running, Healing Surge OTOH is lightning-quick and tends to crit a lot with Tidal Waves.

This gives the following setup for covering raiddamage:
Random but light damage? Riptide and Healing Wave.
Random, fast, burst but rare damage? GHW, ideally after Riptide so it crits.
Light and spaced group damage? Let people stand together and CH.
Light but steady group damage? Let people stand together and use Rain, then cover with Healing Wave.
Heavy and bursted AE damage? Let people stand together, Rain while running into the stack (Swiftness or Spiritwalker's), then CH into the group on top of that.

Mind you, options #2 and #5 run you out of mana really really fast.


Specialized Healer

This is basically everything else.
There's a lot of fights which have healers in very specific roles. I can't really give you a good advise here, it depends entirely on the fight. If in doubt, communication is the key.
Remember, when assigning healers, Shamans excel at versatility (so basically we don't excel :P), but our big achilles heel is that both of our multi-heals need proximity. If there's a job of healing 3 people who stand at different ends of a room, that's sooooo not something we should do.

6. Specific stuff for specific fights

This is the section of Resto-Shaman unique "perks" we can employ in certain encounters. Feel free to post whatever you do yourself in this thread, I'll add it in here, then. I'll focus mostly on raidfights here.

Interrupting
This took a dent when they nerfed Wind Shear to a 15s base CD, as few of us will want to invest the talent points to lower it to 10 or 5 seconds. Still, given the range and it's no-GCD nature, we're good interrupters for being a healer. Have something which casts focused, plenty bossfights and all 5mans have casting mobs and bosses - and a spell interrupted is better than any healing you can produce.

Fire Elemental Totem
If you have Totemic Focus (and you probably do), don't underestimate this little thing. He's stupid and tends to stand around looking funny, but he can add quite a bit of DPS for nearly no cost. Find a good bossphase, use it!

Zon'ozz
Try to have your raid stand in such a way that you can - if barely - cover both the melee and the ranged stack with one Healing Rain. It helps a fair bit.

Yor'sahj
Spirit Link Totem makes healing the add-damage from the Black Ooze very smooth. If you got Telluric Currents, let other healers re-heal when the add spawns and help nuking it while refilling your mana, this avoids having to TC during the damage parts.

Ultraxion
This will vary massively with personal preference and setup, but I found the Red buff to be the most comfortable for myself. The Green one generally only seems to affect ~50% of all healing I cause, making it inferior to the Red which simply doubles all healing. Blue is awesome but you'll probably only get it if your raid has no Paladin to use it for Radiance-blanketing.
The key here is: Don't go overboard early because you got the red buff. Allocate a good 50%+ of your mana to the very last minute of the fight, if he gets into that you'll need the raw spam.

Blackhorn
Our mobility between Ghost Wolf and SWG really comes into play here. Keep them ready for Phase 2 so you won't lose too much healing to the shockwave, and in Phase 1 remember both your Frost Shock and your Earthbind Totem can help the raid out on the sappers - the latter is also quite good at decloaking them.



Afterword

Thanks for reading, and if you have any corrections or additions please post so I can edit it. I'll freely admit my PvP experience in Cataclysm is virtually inexistant, which is why I kept the PvP stuff to a bare minimum (what I could extrapolate from lvl80 PvP).

There's probably a lot of spelling mistakes in there, too. ^_^

(reserved for later use)

Well written, though i did not get to read everything thorougly just yet, so expect to hear more of me later! ^_^

There, cut it down a bit and reformatted it to fit into less total posts. Curse you 5000 character cap! But yeah, should be much easier to read now. :)

Sorry if this was a mess if you opened it just as I was moving stuff through the posts.

Lovely guide, well done.

Great guide! However there is an error/confusing wording in your Earthliving section. Blessing of the Eternals doesn't make your EL "more powerful". It makes 100% proc on targets lower than 35% health.

Changed that, was a relic from when the texts were longer in the first pass, anyway. Was supposed to say it gets stronger at saving raidmembers with the auto-proc, bla bla. Anyways, Blessing is rather self-explanatory so I just removed that. ;)

Your heals are extremely well-balanced. You get strong single-target heals with a further strong lifesaving component from your Mastery (you heal more the lower a target's health is), you got a strong spammable Chain Heal and you can drop Healing Rain for more wide-spread group healing. As long as you're healing single targets or clustered groups you'll feel right at home!

Are you kidding or you didnt test shaman in beta?
Our mastery is just horrible, chain heal is spammable but is not strong and healing rain is kinda bad too (without earthliving)

ps. im not trolling, i love my shaman but right now i feel like healing as holy pala is ten times easier and more fun :/

Your heals are extremely well-balanced. You get strong single-target heals with a further strong lifesaving component from your Mastery (you heal more the lower a target's health is), you got a strong spammable Chain Heal and you can drop Healing Rain for more wide-spread group healing. As long as you're healing single targets or clustered groups you'll feel right at home!

Are you kidding or you didnt test shaman in beta?
Our mastery is just horrible, chain heal is spammable but is not strong and healing rain is kinda bad too (without earthliving)

ps. im not trolling, i love my shaman but right now i feel like healing as holy pala is ten times easier and more fun :/

Please do elaborate, What is your definition of "fun" HPS, amount of buttons to push, green numbers over your screen? I'm pretty sure that extra healing when healing is needed is a pretty awesome ability master gives, As such i'm sure resto shamans will shine on these very moments when health drops down and healers start to panick.

I'm sure you have your own definition of "fun" but same can be said for most other people.

Our mastery is just horrible

Wanted to single this out quickly:
Ignoring the reaction-speed bonus of Haste (as then I'd also have to include it's effect on your mana), if your target is below ~45% health Mastery provides more benefit than Haste to your healing output, point per point of rating.

For me healing is fun when i know i can heal everything and holy pala got so many cd's to boost their healing and deal with any situation. Its not fun when im using everything i can and ppl still dying because then i've got %%@# like 'l2p healer!'.
I like idea behind our mastery but it is too weak in beta and i think haste/crit/int are much better than mastery right now.

really nice guide :) love it


got a question about gemming, since currently we stack haste till cap what is about 1400ish.
at 85 will that still be the same, or will it be a balanced around haste and mastery. since mastery is useless on target above 50% ish.

any thoughts about it...

About the cap, the somewhat-softcap remains the same. Once you hit enough Haste (1269 rating at lvl80) your Riptide and Healing Surge cannot be cast more often due to both their cast time and the GCD being 1,0s, and hence the return from Haste is somewhat diminished.
However, it keeps providing the following effects:

• CH / HW / GHW / Rain cast faster.


• Earthliving, Riptide's HoT and Healing Rain heal more per second.


• All spells react faster.

At lvl85 you'll need ~4956 Haste Rating to achieve the same effect.

Basically it still exists as a sort-of softcap, but it's a rather weak one, it only caps the cast-throughput of two specific spells, neither of which is the lion share of our spells cast at lvl85, while it will still benefit everything else. As far as raw output goes, it should stay the overall strongest stat since it also improves reaction speed, with the obvious downsides that it does not increase efficiency and actually makes you use more mana per second (unlike Intellect / Spirit / Crit / Mastery).

Just a general notice, I'd recommend fixing the mana costs.

Firstly, you don't seem to mention the relevant level. Level 80 or level 85? Secondly, it's based on base mana, so it's obviously going to be different for leveling folks like me!

Third, I'm sorry if I sound like I have an attitude. :p