TBC Classic Restoration Shaman Spec, Builds, and Talents

Restoration Shaman talent builds focus on throughput, sustainability and usually involve a trade-off between raw healing talents and improving your survivability or Strength of Earth Totem and Grace of Air Totem.

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Shamans.

This build provides the highest healing potential out of all Shaman talent builds, with a focus on Chain Heal and Healing Wave, as well as the defensive benefits of Elemental Warding, but does so at the cost of not improving the melee support totems: Grace of Air Totem and Strength of Earth Totem.

This makes it the favored build when playing in a caster or healer party, which would not benefit from these totems anyway.

Feel free to swap points from Totemic Focus or Healing Grace into Improved Reincarnation, to allow you to recover from deaths better in a progression environment.

For the cost of losing Elemental Warding and Healing Way, you can gain Enhancing Totems, which increases the DPS output of your party, as long as it has melee or Hunter players that can benefit from the improved totems.

Because more points are spent into the Enhancement tree, you have more options. Feel free to swap out Guardian Totems for Improved Lightning Shield for solo farming, or Healing Grace for Improved Reincarnation, and you can still grab Healing Way if you drop some points elsewhere, such as Totemic Focus.

This is a PvP build that grabs the important Lesser Healing Wave talents and general support talents of the Restoration tree, including the new Focused Mind talent, and also gets Toughness in the Enhancement tree, for a lot of extra mobility in PvP.

What you give up for it is Mana Tide Totem, Improved Healing Wave and the new Nature's Guardian talent, which have their downsides in PvP but can also be important talents, as shown in the next build.

If having Toughness is not your priority due to playing on the 5v5 bracket or having a group composition that can peel well for you, this PvP build gets all of the important healing talents other than Improved Healing Wave, which can be easily picked if you prefer by dropping Tidal Focus, for example.

Nature's Guardian is situational but can be really good when you are being focused, as it has a very short cooldown on its effect, and thus grants you a large amount of survivability as long as you can keep healing yourself or receiving external support when on the brink of death.

The only notable talent in the Elemental tree for healing is Elemental Warding, which is a good survivability increase on many bosses.

The Enhancement Tree has some important PvP talents and melee / physical damage enhancement options for your party.

Guardian Totems increases the damage reduction of Stoneskin Totem by up to 20% and, most importantly, the coolown on Grounding Totem by 2 seconds, allowing you to use it more often in PvP.

Improved Ghost Wolf makes Ghost Wolf instant cast in TBC Classic, which improves its usability greatly and makes it impossible to interrupt in PvP situations.

Enhancing Totems increases the Strength and Agility granted by Strength of Earth Totem and Grace of Air Totem by up to 15%, making them stronger DPS increases for the physical damage DPS in your party.

Toughness reduces the duration of movement slowing effects on you by up to 50%, which improves your mobility drastically in PvP, as enemies will have a hard time keeping you slowed at all times.

The Restoration Tree is your bread and butter as a Shaman healer, allowing you to heal for large amounts efficiently.

Improved Healing Wave decreases your Healing Wave's cast time by up to 0,5 seconds. This is a direct healing gain when spamming this spell, and should be taken whenever you are considering using this spell a lot, typically for dungeons or if you are tank healing in a raid group.

Ancestral Healing increases your target's armor by up to 25% after you land a critical heal. Chain Heal can apply this to multiple targets at once, but its real value is in boosting the tank or PvP target's armor, which will increase their survivability significantly.

Totemic Focus reduces the Mana cost of your Totems significantly. This can be great when you are having to move your totems a lot during a fight, but is minor when you only need to replace them at the end of their duration.

Healing Focus lowers the chance of suffering spell pushback on heals from taking damage. This is extremely useful when being attacked directly, especially if the attacks are fast such as the ones from Rogues or Hunter pets.

Totemic Mastery increases the range of your totems to 30 yards, allowing them to affect targets that are further away. Since having any downtime on totems in your group is a throughput loss, or might even cause a wipe in the case of failed Tremor Totem fear removals, this is a mandatory talent.

Healing Grace reduces the threat caused by your heals and makes your buffs more difficult to dispel. The advantages provided by this talent are usually irrelevant, but even getting aggro once can be a wipe, making it a valuable filler talent for your final points. The dispel protection is quite useful in PvP, as it will allow you to use trash buffs such as Water Breathing and Water Walking to stop your valuable Bloodlust and Earth Shield from being dispelled.

Tidal Mastery increases your Critical Strike chance with heals and lightning spells. This has synergy with Ancestral Healing and also contributes to your damage potential when soloing.

Healing Way causes your Healing Wave spells to increase the healing of subsequent Healing Waves on the target for 15 seconds. This is typically quickly and cheaply stacked on the tank with Rank 1 Healing Wave, serving as a boost to your single-target healing afterwards. It can also be used as a trash buff for dispel protection in PvP.

Nature's Swiftness causes your next Nature spell to become instant. This is great when trying to land an emergency Healing Wave on a struggling tank, or a direct healing increase with Chain Heal.

Mana Tide Totem returns a significant amount of Mana to your party over 12 seconds, but due to its high 5-minute cooldown it has a low impact in the course of a fight, overall. For maximum benefit, try to rotate Mana Tide Totems into the healer or Arcane Mage's party during a raid.

Focused Mind reduces the duration of silences and interrupts on you by up to 30%, making it a great talent in PvP, as almost all of your heals need to be hard casted, and thus are prone to being interrupted.

Nature's Guardian grants you up to 50% chance to be healed by 10% of your maximum health whenever brought below 30%. This is usually negligible in PvE situations, but it can be strong in PvP, especially if you are the main focus target, as it will heal you while you are crowd controlled and can proc multiple times in a short period if you keep going low on health.

Nature's Blessing increases your spell damage and healing by up to 30% of your Intellect. This makes Intellect slightly more valuable and gives you a decent baseline amount of Spell Damage (especially when combined with the 1/3 Spell Damage gained from Spell Healing in TBC) which makes your occasional damage spells hit harder.

Improved Chain Heal increases the healing done by your Chain Heal by up to 20%. This effects increases the baseline healing of Chain Heal, but also the benefit it gains from your Spell Healing, making it a must have when raid healing!

Earth Shield, the new capstone talent of Restoration, puts a shield on its target which heals when the target is hit and provides a small spell pushback reduction. This is a minor healing increase in PvE and a must-have talent in PvP, where it will often be the only heal you can land while being pressured.