Too Much Power in Chain Heal - Restoration Shaman Retrospective

Restoration Shaman is in a strange spot this season — dominant in Mythic+ and struggling in raid at the same time, and a new mana cost reduction buff isn't going to fix why.

The core problem is that the spec's power is almost entirely funneled into Chain Heal. In keys, that's fine — no cooldown, heals the whole group, easy to spam. In raid, it doesn't scale: you're still healing the same number of targets in a 20-person pull, you can't pool resources for dangerous moments, and mana becomes a wall on longer fights. Ascendance papers over these weaknesses for its duration, which just highlights how bad the baseline feels. A 20% buff to Chain Heal earlier this season made things worse by pulling it even further ahead of the rest of the kit.

Mastery: Deep Healing hasn't been rebalanced — including its 3× coefficient — since Cataclysm, and it gets weaker every tier as players spend more time at high health. Both hero talent trees, Farseer and Totemic, end up being Chain Heal buff delivery systems rather than distinct identities: Farseer's ancestor spells are tuned so poorly they're nearly irrelevant, while Totemic's most impactful nodes (Lively Totems, Earthsurge) just increase Chain Heal healing. The ask for Season 2 is straightforward — redistribute power away from Chain Heal and into the rest of the kit before the problem compounds further.