Classic Restoration Shaman Healer 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 support Totems, especially Windfury Totem and Strength of Earth 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, but does so at the cost of not improving our support totems, Windfury Totem and Strength of Earth Totem.

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

Feel free to swap points from Improved Reincarnation or Totemic Focus into Healing Grace, to reduce your threat output and make it less likely that you pull aggro from the tanks.

For the cost of losing Totemic Focus and Improved Reincarnation, you can gain Enhancing Totems, which increases the DPS output of your group, 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 can apply your preference points to a larger array of talents. Feel free to swap out Guardian Totems for Improved Lightning Shield for solo farming, or Improved Healing Wave and Healing Way for Improved Reincarnation, Totemic Focus, and Healing Grace if you don't feel the need to use Healing Wave much in your groups.

This build forgoes many of the Restoration tree talents in order to pick up Improved Weapon Totems, which makes Windfury Totem even stronger. While this trade-off is generally not worth taking in a vacuum, you are also able to pick up Flurry and Two-Handed Axes and Maces, which grant you better soloing abilities and, especially, allow you to use Nightfall (or Annihilator, if needed) with great efficiency for your group.

Since you are forced to go deep into the Enhancement tree, there are plenty of preference points available. We opted to make the build as Totem Twisting friendly as possible by maxing out Totemic Focus, but beware of this style's high Mana cost, which will tax your healing if the encounters go long.

All of Healing Wave focused talents were removed as well, allowing you to still cast your main raid heal, Chain Heal with close to maximum efficiency.

The Elemental Tree is mostly useless for a Restoration-focused Shaman in PvE, but it has a lot of PvP power associated with it, that you can consult on our Classic Shaman PvP guide.

The Enhancement Tree has a lot of Totem enhancing talents that are worth using when you are supporting melee groups.

Guardian Totems increases the damage reduction of Stoneskin Totem by up to 20%, which is a small boost to your tanking support capabilities.

Improved Ghost Wolf reduces Ghost Wolf's cast time heavily, which is great for quickly moving around when outdoors.

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 melee players in your group.

Two-Handed Axes and Maces allows you to use its namesake's weapons. Besides the high damage boost it brings to a Shaman, it allows you to use Nightfall, which is one of the best raid boosting tools in WoW Classic.

Flurry increases your attack speed by up to 30% whenever you land a critical strike. This allows you to keep Nightfall's debuff more reliably and is a significant damage increase.

Improved Weapon Totems increases the melee attack power granted by your Windfury Totem, which makes it even stronger at boosting your melee group's damage.

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 significant healing gain, and should always 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 significantly 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's armor, which will increase their survivability significantly.

Totemic Focus reduces the Mana cost of your Totems significantly. This is extremely useful when you are Totem Twisting, but contributes an insignificant amount of Mana, otherwise.

Healing Focus lowers the chance of suffering spell pushback on heals from taking damage. This is extremely useful in any fight where you are damaged often, such as Sapphiron.

Totemic Mastery increases the range of your totems to 30 yards, allowing them to affect targets that are further away. While this talent does not stack with our Tier 1's 3 piece bonus, it is generally a good talent to use, ensuring maximum uptime on your Totem's effects.

Healing Grace reduces the threat caused by your heals. While this is generally a non-issue when playing with good tanks, in certain situations where enemies spawn mid-fight it can be the difference between getting killed or surviving.

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 massive boost to your single-target healing afterwards.

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 group 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 caster's group during a raid.