Resto Shamans! Blizzcon has come and gone and the dust has settled. It’s now time to slow down and take a look back at what was revealed. With the new expansion: Warlords of Draenor, comes a new maximum level of 100 and with level 100 comes an extra talent point and 3 new talents for all classes. We’re going to take a look at the early level 100 talents that may or may not be available to Resto Shaman in Warlords of Draenor!
Please note, these are early sneak peek level 100 talents only and they may never become available in-game. This is purely for informational purposes to get a sense of where the Resto Shaman is headed in the new expansion and to see whether it’s right to get excited for Resto Shaman healing! So come with us now as we take a trip to the future! Or the past… I’m confused…
Rainstorm
- Elemental & Enhancement (Storm Armor)
- Passive
- While your Lightning Shield is active, lightning will strike a random enemy within 40 yards that you are in combat with every 3.00 sec for 2000 Nature damage.
- Restoration (Condensation Totem)
- 100 Mana
- Instant
- Summons a Water Totem with 5 health at the feet of the caster for 1 min that collects 25% of all overhealing, and grants it to the Shaman as spell power toward their next Healing Wave, Healing Surge, Greater Healing Wave, Chain Heal, or Riptide.
First up, we’ve got Rainstorm: A new totem for us Resto Shaman! This new talent provides a similar effect to a Resto Druid’s Wild Mushroom in the fact that it stores 25% of all overhealing done by you. However instead of it being stored as a heal to be later unleashed, it is stored as a spell power boost to your next spell as above. It currently doesn’t have a cool down, another trait it shares with Wild Mushroom.
The spell power boost it provides can go towards some of our possibly biggest spells like Greater Healing Wave & Chain Heal. This is great for getting that extra bit of thoroughput on those large heals. It can also provide a significant amount of burst when using Healing Surge or Riptide.
It’s a water totem, so it’s going to conflict with other healing totems like Healing Stream Totem and Mana Tide Totem, which is why we believe they haven’t got a cool down on it at this time.
This is an early stage talent, so there is work to be done. For example, if the totem is up for the whole minute and collects that 25% of overhealing, what kind of spell power number boost are we going to see? When said spells are cast, does the totem remain and continue as is? Or does it need to be re-cast? We’ll see…
Storm Elemental Totem
- 1022 Mana
- Instant, 5 min cooldown
- Summons an Air Totem with 6000 health at the feet of the caster, calling forth a Greater Storm Elemental to hurl gusts of winds on the caster’s enemies. Each gust of wind does damage to the enemy, and then heals all allies within 15% yards for 100% of the damage dealt, split evenly. Lasts until cancelled.
Another totem for us to drop, this time it’s an Air Totem. For us Resto Shaman, this is going to heal allies within 15 yards (probably the tank and melee unless the raid is stacked) for 100% of the damage it causes to enemies. Of course we don’t have comparitive numbers to look at at this stage, but we can see this could be a pretty cool talent.
It will give us the opportunity to heal using other spells while our Greater Storm Elemental does it’s thing. Set and forget is the way of this talent as it lasts until cancelled. Although it probably won’t stay “lasts until cancelled” if it goes live.
We’re sure that the Blizzard developers will build this talent to benefit all specializations equally, but it will be interesting to see how this will exactly work. We’re especially interested in how these gusts of winds are cast, are they melee hits or do they have a cast time? How long is the cast and how many can the Elemental get off in the time that it’s up. All questions that I’m sure will get answers closer to release.
Reach of the Elements
- Elemental & Enhancement (Spew Lava)
- 40 yd range
- Instant, 45 sec cooldown
- Empowers your current Fire totem with the power of lava, causing it to spew globs of lava at a random enemy within 40 yards every 1.00 sec for 15 sec. Each glob of lava deals 2000 Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards.
- Restoration (High Tide)
- Passive
- Your Chain Heal also bounces to all targets affected by your Riptide.
Much like we, the characters, are headed back to the days “before” the burning crusade, with this new talent Reach of the Elements(High Tide) so to is our Chain Heal possibly returning to it’s glory days. Back when Chain Heal was one of the strongest heals in the game, if not the strongest.
This talent causes your Chain Heal to bounce to all targets affected by your Riptide. In the current state of Resto Shaman, this could make things pretty crazy, with beams of healing jumping in all kinds of directions!
With the Glyph of Riptide, which removes the cooldown and therefore allows you to spam Riptide on as many targets as you can in a 13-15 second window, and then cast Chain Heal, theoretically that is, if we can get one Riptide out every global cooldown. It not only bounces to these Riptide targets, but Chain Heal also maintains it’s original bounces as well. This could mean for a lot of Chain Healing, the perfect combination in return to old(new) Outlands.
We’re really excited about the prospects of all of these talents, and probably more excited about these Resto Shaman talents than other classes at the moment. When you’re not sure which talent you’re going to choose, you know it’s a good tier of talents. If it came to the point of choosing right here and now, we’d have to go with Reach of the Elements.
So what do you think of these possible new talents? Are they getting you excited about where Resto Shaman healing is headed in the new expansion: Warlords of Draenor? Why not let us know what you think in the comments below and don’t forget to Share on Facebook or Tweet to Twitter!