Restoration Shaman Healing Easy Mode — The War Within (11.0.5)

This section is intended for players who are new to the game or class, have no intentions of raiding Mythic difficulty or simply want a more straightforward way to play their specialization without being overwhelmed by the numerous priorities and active abilities that need to be taken into consideration for optimal play.

Restoration Shaman is a healing specialization that excels at healing group damage and burst single-target healing. They have a variety of cooldowns to draw on that can suit any situation. In this section, we will be focusing on a setup that minimizes the number of buttons and reactivity necessary while still providing flexible and potent healing at your fingertips.

If you are completely new to Restoration and need more information on the abilities available to you, you can check out our Spell Summary page.

These choices balance ease of use and raw power. Although different talents might offer higher gains when played well, these same talents often result in healing losses when utilized by less experienced players.

The talents recommended below aim to present a setup that has very little punishment for unfamiliarity or mistakes, minimal buttons to press or buffs, and abilities to track, and also includes the most used utility. Shaman is especially reliant on using fight-specific talents for its utility picks, and you should swap talents around when needed, for example, to get Tremor Totem against Fear effects.

Be sure to use the 'Export Talents' button to import our build when playing!

If you are looking for the absolute best talents for Restoration, which do not compromise on performance for ease of use, you can find a more in-depth analysis on our full talents page below.

Currently, you will want to prioritize stats as follows.

1. Item Level
2. Versatility = Critical Strike
3. Haste = Mastery

While we provide stat preference lists, swapping gear to higher item level items — and their higher Intellect / total stats — should, usually, provide a larger upgrade than using lower item-level items with better stats. The exception to this rule are items with important tertiary stats such as Leech, which should still be used ahead of other items without them unless the difference in item level is around 7 or above.

If you want to see the full explanation of the stat priority, as well as the absolute top choices for the priority, head to our full stats page below.

1. Keep Water Shield and Earth Shield active on yourself;
2. Keep Earth Shield active on a tank;
3. Use Healing Stream Totem on cooldown;
4. Use Riptide on an injured target whenever available;
5. Keep Surging Totem active to heal groups of allies and damage enemies;
6. Use Chain Heal to heal groups of allies;
7. Use Healing Surge to provide emergency healing;
8. Use Healing Wave to provide Mana-efficient single-target healing;
9. Use Lightning Bolt for single-target damage and Chain Lightning against multiple enemies.

For a more detailed and optimized version of the priority list, check the full Restoration rotation page linked below.

Healing Cooldowns are meant to allow you to provide a big burst of healing or survivability to your group. In exchange, each of them is typically only usable once every 3 minutes. Below is a short description of each cooldown taken in the above talent build and its basic applicability so that you can form an idea of when it is best to use them.

Healing Tide Totem should be used when incoming group damage is high but spread equally over the whole group. It provides high-spread healing over a period of time and can be used while moving, which allows you to use it while doing fight mechanics or casting other healing spells. It will always do its maximum healing once you are hitting 5 targets or higher.

Ascendance is a healing multiplier that almost duplicates and distributes your healing evenly among allies within 40 yards. It will do high individual healing if you have only a few allies nearby but can be combined with other cooldowns to provide high healing to a large raid group as well.

Ancestral Guidance should also be used when incoming group damage is high, but it notably heals only 3 injured targets at a time for a small amount each, allowing you to use it to counter high-targeted damage or situations where the raid is spread out. Use it with Ascendance to cover especially dangerous damage events, as it will replicate the healing produced by Ascendance as well!

Spirit Link Totem grants 15% damage reduction, high delayed healing with Spouting Spirits, and redistributes the health of members inside the totem every second, keeping everyone inside at equal levels of health percentage. This cooldown is best used when there are allies taking deadly damage near other allies who are healthy and is often combined with damage reduction raid or personal cooldowns and immunities, as the immune player will not take any damage from mechanics but still contribute to stabilizing the group through the totem's effect.

This section will be listing a few of the best trinkets, with a particular focus on passive effects, or which are fine to macro to other spells and use on cooldown.

• Spymaster's Web (Nerub-ar Palace);
• Ara-Kara Sacbrood (Ara-Kara, City of Echoes);
• Gale of Shadows (Grim Batol);
• Unbound Changeling (Mists of Tirna Scithe);
• Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg (Nerub-ar Palace);
• Empowering Crystal of Anub'ikkaj (The Dawnbreaker);
• Scrapsinger's Symphony (The Stonevault);
• Cirral Concoctory (City of Threads);
• Carved Blazikon Wax (Darkflame Cleft);
• Gruesome Syringe (Nerub-ar Palace);
• Unstable Power Suit Core (Delves);
• Algari Alchemist Stone (Alchemy).

You can find more trinket options and other gear, including BiS lists made from dungeon, raiding, and PvP gear below: