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
Ascendance forms coming as Glyphs which is detailed
here.
New Talent: Coalescing Water
Coalescing Water is a new talent that connects
Tidebringer and
High Tide for 1 talent point. If you've played Restoration Shaman at all throughout Season 1 thus far, you'll know that
High Tide is a staple in a lot of our builds. In 11.0.2, taking
High Tide had some drawbacks, as neither
Wavespeaker's Blessing or
Ancestral Awakening interacted with
Chain Heal, and neither were super strong talents on their own. This was an okay tradeoff, as
High Tide is a super potent capstone talent, so spending 2 talent points on something like
Ancestral Awakening 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.
Coalescing Water only costs 1 talent point, which means getting
High Tide is now cheaper, and
Coalescing Water actually buffs builds that occasionally cast
Chain Heal - unlike
Ancestral Awakening or
Wavespeaker's Blessing. 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
Coalescing Water, casting
Chain Heal will buff your next
Riptide by 75%, stacking up to 2 times (very similar to
Master of the Elements and
Healing Surge). You still gain stacks of
Coalescing Water from chain heals cast via
Lively Totems, so this doesn't mean that Totemic Shamans will have to suddenly start casting a bunch of
Chain Heals on their own. The large buff to
Riptide makes weaving between
Chain Heal and
Riptide feel quite nice, especially as Farseer, given you have much more mana to work with.
One interesting interaction is with
Coalescing Water and
Primal Tide Core. If you cast a
Riptide that's buffed by
Coalescing Water and it happens to spread via
Primal Tide Core, both the casted
Riptide and the
Riptide spread via
Primal Tide Core are buffed. It's hard to tell if this is intended or not, but this would make tracking your next proc of
Primal Tide Core would suddenly become important.
Reactive Warding Update
Reactive Warding got a small update, allowing
Earth Shield and
Water Shield to consume stacks every 2 seconds instead of every 3 seconds. This is effectively a buff to
Earth Shield healing, but it does mean you'll need to recast it more often. That said, recasting
Earth Shield more often is just a buff to
Reactive Warding as you'll be able to trigger the healing much more often. While recasting
Earth Shield 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
High Tide, which means you'll very likely only be playing
Chain Heal builds (especially given the
Riptide builds are not very popular at the moment). And now that we probably won't be taking
Ancestral Awakening in every build, it now locks us into either pathing through
Earthen Harmony and the newly-buffed
Reactive Warding to get to
Wellspring /
Deeply Rooted Elements, or do we path through
Improved Earthliving Weapon and spend 1 extra talent point elsewhere.
These changes make taking 3 capstones on Restoration Shaman very easy to do and pushes us towards
Chain Heal builds even more. With
Primordial Wave still suffering from the success of the Dragonflight Season 2 set bonus and the follow-up nerfs to the ability,
Riptide builds are unfortunately not looking great heading into 11.0.5.
