6.0.2 has landed, and along with it a world of changes for everyone. Most noticeable of the changes are the changes to classes, and the stat squish. Last night our raid team ran a normal (ex-flex level) run so we could test out the changes. 

Because I’m maining my Shaman in WoD, I took her with me to our raid last night to get my first taste of the new healing changes (how awesome does she look, btw??) So how drastic are the changes to Restoration Shamans? Not really drastic, to be honest.

As other healers are aware, we had quite a few spells taken away from us all i.e. no more small heals/fast small heals/big heals etc.Now it’s just heal, faster heal and a few others that are class specific. As a resto shaman, I didn’t feel much else of a change. Riptide is still instant, and I was already in the habit of casting chain heal off of a riptided target, so that didn’t change.

What I did find myself doing was creating my own “big heals”, though, by using Unleash Life with Healing Surge or Healing Wave to give them a bit of a boost. I need to do it better (i.e. only on Healing Surge) because it ends up being a time consuming thing to cast, and I’m not 100% sure of the payoff yet. Apparently it’s good to use with Chain Heal, too, so I’ll give that go later. 

Healing the raid was… boring. I have to admit. Now that there are fewer spells to choose from, I just found myself casting Healing Wave on everyone all the time, Riptide on CD, Healing Stream Totem on CD and Earth Shielding the tank. Rinse and repeat. There wasn’t anything else to do. And there was SO MUCH MANA!! I couldn’t get it to drop no matter how hard I tried. 

To be fair, for the most part, people weren’t taking a lot of damage – we had Mythic level gear in Normal level fights so this is to be expected. But then the AoE damage started happening, and to be honest, we were stuffed. We (Zeirah – my lovely resto druid friend!) just didn’t have the throughput to deal with the spikey damage that would come out. People would die in miliseconds, without any chance of us being able to do anything about it, and I found myself just standing there watching people die going “crap” but not being able to do anything about it. Healing through the last phase of Galakras was HARD, and at that level it shouldn’t be. 

HOWEVER, as many people have pointed out, we’re not at max level anymore, and all of this is a result of that. The mana will become an issue later, which will make things more interesting. The fights going forward won’t be so spikey, so people won’t just drop after one or two hits, and in addition to that, people won’t be at full health all the time, so there will be something to do. 

I haven’t re-gemmed/enchanted anything at this stage as I haven’t had a chance to read what stats I should be prioritising yet. I did have a go at using Mr Robot to give me a best in bags answer and was completely perplexed with the results… all haste. Which was odd because the guides I’ve been reading say either crit or mastery, so I’m didn’t change anything. I’ll try again on the weekend when I’ve done some more reading.  

Anyway, at the moment my resto shaman is a bit boring, but I am still looking forward to what’s coming up, and getting to experience the new talents!

I also had a chance to play around with the Elemental spec (WHEEEE!!!!!!) but I’ll do that in another post because this has gone on lone enough!

In the meantime – how brilliant is the new ghost wolf form?!!?