Summary

Restoration Shaman call upon the healing properties of water and their iconic totems to keep their group members alive using Mana as the primary resource. We can see far into the distance with Far Sight and have our own separate Hearthstone with Astral Recall.

We have a wide range of spells and tools to do our job, most of them being more effective when the group stacks closely together. We have some supportive Healing over Time spells and decent single-target heals. This is accompanied by strong cooldowns which can get you out of dangerous situations easily, quite a bit of utility, and the ability to restore Mana to ourselves and allies.

We can shift into Ghost Wolf and cover a lot of ground quickly, but are unable to cast spells while transformed. Restoration Shaman received a bit of a revamp heading into The War Within, and rather than covering every single change I'll instead outline the key points here.

• We now have a Party/Raid buff in Skyfury!
• Many 2-point nodes in the top half of our spec tree are now only 1-point, which makes it far easier to get what you want.
• The Class tree had a few major shifts, and some mandatory points for Restoration were removed or had point reductions, resulting in much easier pathing through the tree to get the things you need.
• Many of our cooldowns received additional cooldown reduction or got upgrades to make them even better. For example, Spouting Spirits is an upgrade to Spirit Link Totem, and Ascendance now has some flexible upgrade nodes beneath it.
• Downpour has been redesigned, making it a much more lucrative choice.
• Tidewaters is back as a talent and gives Healing Rain some extra umph that it needed.
• We gained a couple of additional defensives with Stone Bulwark Totem and Primordial Bond, as well as some niche defensiveness with things like Elemental Warding and Seasoned Winds.
• Gust of Wind is now much easier to take, which means we no longer need to be Goblin Goblin!